This report reviews currently available information on the success of Member country initiatives in influencing consumption patterns.

This report reviews currently available information on the success of Member country initiatives in influencing consumption patterns.

Environment and Development is a component of Encyclopedia of Development and Economic Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The pressing need to combine protecting the environment with sustaining development has become increasingly recognized. This theme deals with environmental and ecological sustainable development. Environmental damage has not only created obstacles to sustainable economic development, but is also posing great threats, to human health and life, to ecological systems and the natural world, and to the socio-cultural environments in which human beings lead their daily lives. The content of the theme on Environment and Development is organized with state-of-the-art presentations covering the following aspects of the subject: Approaching Sustainable Development from Different Angles; Hazard and Risk Assessment, and Risk Management; Current Views of Global Carrying Capacity; Social and Economic Disparities; Responses to the Challenges of Disparities and Unsustainable Use of Natural Resources; Environmental Economics and Ecobusiness; Environmental Values and Ethics; Other Important Future Environmental Issues. These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.

Economic Growth and Sustainable Housing: An Uneasy Relationship critically discusses the possibilities of decoupling environmental degradation from economic growth. The author refutes the belief in combining perpetual economic growth with long-term environmental sustainability based on the premise that economic growth can be fully decoupled from negative environmental impacts. This proposition is underpinned by intensive study in the housing sector from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Xue employs critical realism to inform the investigation and organize the argumentation throughout the book. The book is organised into four parts: the first discusses the relevance of critical realism to the research field of housing and urban sustainable development in terms of ontology and methodology. The second makes a transcendental refutation of the possibilities of decoupling economic growth from housing-related environmental impacts by describing transfactual conditions of full decoupling. The third part presents two case studies to show whether and to what extents decoupling between economic growth and housing-related environmental impacts have historically taken place. Inspired by critical realist ontology, generalization of abstract concept from the case studies are made to cast light on the implausibility of maintaining perpetual economic growth through decoupling. The final part explains why and how the belief in full decoupling and economic growth is generated and sustained despite its implausibility and non-necessity, which constitutes an explanatory critique of the growth and decoupling ideology and paves the way for the paradigm shift to socially sustainable de-growth. This book will be of interest to students of housing and urban studies, to students of environmental sustainability and also for those students and academics with a general interest in critical realism.

This document considers product certification and ecolabelling schemes used for fish and fishery products. It discusses the characteristics and theoretical foundations of these programmes, the links to international trade law; and other institutional aspects.

This report presents the findings of an UNEP and Consumers International global governmental survey of the status of implementation of the sustainable consumption section of the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection. The Sustainable Consumption section was added to the Guidelines in 1999 and represents a framework for governments to use in formulating and strengthening consumer protection policies and legislation.