"Sustainability and the Civil Commons" moves beyond rural roots to build a comprehensive understanding of sustainability that combines global reach with local focus.

Sustainability and the Civil Commons moves beyond rural roots to build a comprehensive understanding of sustainability that combines global reach with local focus.

Engineering for Sustainable Communities: Principles and Practices defines and outlines sustainable engineering methods for real-world engineering projects.

This book provides a foundation to understand the development of sustainability in civil engineering, and tools to address the three pillars of sustainability: economics, environment, and society. It includes case studies in the five major areas of civil engineering: environmental, structural, geotechnical, transportation, and construction management. This second edition is updated throughout and adds new chapters on construction engineering as well as an overview of the most common certification programs that revolve around environmental sustainability. Features: Updated throughout and adds two entirely new chapters Presents a review of the most common certification programs in sustainability Offers a blend of numerical and writing-based problems, as well as numerous application-based examples that utilize concepts found on the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam Includes several practical case studies Offers a solution manual for instructors Fundamentals of Sustainability in Civil Engineering is intended for upper-level civil engineering sustainability courses. A unique feature is that concepts found in the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam were targeted to help senior-level students refresh and prepare.

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.

The "commons" has come to mean many things to many people, and the term is often used inconsistently. The study of the commons has expanded dramatically since Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) popularized the dilemma faced by users of common pool resources. This comprehensive Handbook serves as a unique synthesis and resource for understanding how analytical frameworks developed within the literature assist in understanding the nature and management of commons resources. Such frameworks include those related to Institutional Analysis and Development, Social-Ecological Systems, and Polycentricity, among others. The book aggregates and analyses these frameworks to lay a foundation for exploring how they apply according to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. It includes an exploration of the unique problems arising in different disciplines of commons study, including natural resources (forests, oceans, water, energy, ecosystems, etc), economics, law, governance, the humanities, and intellectual property. It shows how the analytical frameworks discussed early in the book facilitate interdisciplinarity within commons scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach within the context of analytical frameworks helps facilitate a more complete understanding of the similarities and differences faced by commons resource users and managers, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies aimed at addressing such problems.

The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues. This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation. It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes. Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.