Human societies face a threatening future of resource scarcity and environmental damages. This book addresses the challenge of turning these risks into opportunities and policies. It is a collection of high level contributions from experts of sustainable growth and sustainable resource management. Focussing on economics, sustainability, technology and policy, the book highlights system innovation, leapfrogging strategies of emerging economies, possible rebound effects and international market development. It puts natural resources centre stage and will make an important contribution to achieving the goal of a 21st century Green Economy.

This book covers the multi-faceted incentives, trade-offs, and challenges associated with the economics and politics of resource efficiency investments. By contributing a wide range of empirical evidence, practitioners' insights, and policy perspectives, this book carefully examines the role of resource efficiency in reconciling environmental and economic considerations. It also discusses the critical role of resource efficiency investments in mitigating climate change and enabling sustainable development. Featuring expert insights from academia, the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, this book provides a policy oriented guide, reference, and toolbox for unlocking the potential of resource efficiency. To this end, it identifies practical measures for overcoming barriers and creating smart incentives for leveraging resource efficiency investments. Overall, this book brings together evidence to develop innovative ideas and strategies for improving the efficient use of resources and advancing clean and sustainable development. "This book is an important and timely contribution", Angel Gurria, Secretary General, OECD

This volume discusses topics of global sustainability involving sustainability indicators, stakeholders' participation, and technological and strategic advances with the goal of "thinking locally to act globally". Scientists, academics, policymakers, and planners are currently focused on escalating global socioeconomic and ecological issues, such as rising inequality, adverse anthropogenic impacts on the environment, and deficiencies in natural resources. These variables are pushing the earth system's resistance capacity past its breaking point, with additional pressures incurred by a global pandemic. Therefore, this book looks to impart knowledge on participatory learning action research for human and environmental health and well-being. Sustainable development planning and management are needed in these pressing circumstances, and they necessitate an analytical interpretation of ongoing processes, current and future challenges, and an understanding of available tools and technologies. The main sections of the book focus on challenges and management practices for global sustainability, promoting educational values, smart initiatives in urban contexts, and integrating emerging sustainability dimensions in policies and legislation. The primary audience for the work is policy makers, urban planners, social scientists, economists, NGOs, and students, researchers, and educators engaged in environmental social science and sustainability management.

This report presents global projections of materials use and their environmental consequences, providing a quantitative outlook to 2060 at the global, sectoral and regional levels for 61 different materials (biomass resources, fossil fuels, metals and non-metallic minerals). It explains the ...

The efficient use of natural resources is key to a sustainable economy, and yet the complexities of the physical aspects of resource efficiency are poorly understood. In this challenging book, the author proposes a major advance in our understanding of this topic by analysing resource efficiency and efficiency gains from the perspective of common pool resources, applying this idea particularly to water resources and its use in irrigated agriculture. The author proposes a novel concept of "the paracommons", through which the savings of increased resource efficiency can be viewed. In effect he asks; "who gets the gain of an efficiency gain?" By reusing, economising and avoiding losses, wastes and wastages, freed up resources are available for further use by four ‘destinations’; the same user, parties directly connected to that user, the wider economy or returned to the common pool. The paracommons is thus a commons of – and competition for – resources salvaged by changes to the efficiency of natural resource systems. The idea can be applied to a range of resources such as water, energy, forests and high-seas fisheries. Five issues are explored: the complexity of resource use efficiency; the uncertainty of efficiency interventions and outcomes; destinations of freed up losses, wastes and wastages; implications for resource conservation; and the interconnectedness of users and systems brought about by efficiency changes. The book shows how these ideas put efficiency on a par with other dimensions of resource governance and sustainability such as equity, justice, resilience and access.

This monograph provides foundations, methods, guidelines and examples for monitoring and improving resource efficiency during the operation of processing plants and for improving their design. The measures taken to improve their energy and resource efficiency are strongly influenced by regulations and standards which are covered in Part I of this book. Without changing the actual processing equipment, the way how the processes are operated can have a strong influence on the resource efficiency of the plants and this potential can be exploited with much smaller investments than needed for the introduction of new process technologies. This aspect is the focus of Part II. In Part III we discuss physical changes of the process technology such as heat integration, synthesis and realization of optimal processes, and industrial symbiosis. The last part deals with the people that are needed to make these changes possible and discusses the path towards a resource efficiency culture. Written with industrial solutions in mind, this text will benefit practitioners as well as the academic community.