Sustainable development helps undo the havoc that has been created by human beings in the last few years in the name of development and growth. It helps to promote a more social, environmental, and economical way of living. There are many ways in which we all can practice sustainable development in our daily lives and further study is required. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Sustainable Human Development focuses on all agendas of sustainable development goals and offers approaches to develop a transdisciplinary perspective that encompasses the natural, social, and human sciences in the search for a sustainable society. Covering topics such as green economy, social innovation, and climate change, this premier reference work is ideal for environmentalists, government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

The challenge of improving the daily lives of people in developing communities calls for a new generation of global engineers who can operate in environments vastly different from those in the developed world. Engineers must become creative and innovative as they contend with uncertainty, complexity, and constraints in unfamiliar cultural settings. They must also deal with a multitude of technical and nontechnical issues beyond their accustomed practice. In this book, Bernard Amadei addresses the role of engineering in poverty reduction and human development. He introduces a framework to help engineers conduct small-scale projects in communities vulnerable to the consequences of a wide range of adverse events. His framework combines concepts and tools traditionally used by development agencies with techniques from engineering project management and systems thinking. When blended, these tools and techniques from seemingly unrelated fields offer engineers better methods to manage the difficulties inherent in community development projects.Engineering for Sustainable Human Development is about the delivery of projects that are done right from a performance (technical) point of view and are also the right projects from a social, environmental, and economic (context) point of view. This multidisciplinary approach to sustainable engineering will be valuable to practitioners and students, as well as people associated with development organizations and aid agencies.

As a concept, sustainable development is in conflict with traditional development based upon economic growth. Sustainable development is an attempt to formulate a programme that integrates different aspects (ecological, social, and economical) which were usually considered as separate from each other. Sustainable Development as a Civilizationa

"Sustainable development is a highly integrated concept that encompasses many disciplines such as economics, social sciences, culture, technologies, natural resources, and environmental domains, while achieving sustainable development is a comprehensive multidisciplinary process involving coordination and function. Through research and teaching, the transdisciplinary science of sustainability is a fundamental part of this approach. This book offers approaches to develop a transdisciplinary perspective that encompasses the natural, social, and human sciences in the search for a sustainable society"--

This is the first book dedicated exclusively to the question of the relationships between sustainability and the capability approach. It is rather astonishing that the issue of sustainability first posed by the Brundtland commission in 1987 has gained so little attention from capability scholars despite the approach’s focus on human well-being. This book starts with a seminal contribution by Sen on the "Ends and Means of Sustainability" delivered as a keynote in 2000. All contributions to the book focus on the difficulties that arise from a freedom-oriented view of sustainability: they argue for taking note of the impact of human life on nature, they question the meaning of intergenerational justice when measured in the currency of "substantive freedoms" (capabilities), they raise the issue of collective responsibility and suggest ways to model and operationalize the capability approach to sustainable development. The book presents the state of the art concerning "The capability approach and sustainability" while admitting that it is only a first contribution to a growing field that deserves our attention: Defining what is to be sustained and asking how it can be sustained. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.

Hideaki Shiroyama is Professor at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo, Japan. --