The theme of this year's International Day for Biological Diversity is Water and Biodiversity. Find out more here.

With a new entry every fortnight, blog posts written by various Earthscan from Routledge authors will be displayed both on the Routledge website and on our Facebook page here. Each post within Facebook will be open to comments so please feel free to voice your thoughts!

Are We ‘Chasing Our Own Tail’ on the Circular Economy?

By Philip Monaghan, author of How Local Resilience Creates Sustainable Societies.

Wow. What a seminal year for sustainable development and corporate responsibility it has been, for bad as well as good.

The corporate scandals came thick and fast – ranging from News Corporation hacking the phones of victims of serious crime through to Barclays manipulating market interest rates at a time of tax-payer funded bank bailouts. Political power brokers also continued to fail to strike a deal when the world needed them most – with the earlier disappointment of Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro being followed by them kicking the can down the road once more at COP18 in Doha. Despite this, some ‘big ticket’ initiatives continued to gain momentum. One notable campaign by the likes of the Aldersgate Group and Ellen Macarthur Foundation is for the business community to step up and fill a leadership void by supporting the switch to a Circular Economy in order to reverse unviable patters of consumption. Another is the ongoing promotion of the Smart Cities concept by likes of The Climate Group and LSE Cities to ensure an age of rapid urbanisation is sustainable. Both have great merit and in fact have a common thread in their focus on stronger resource efficiency being able to save the day.

But, we will look back again in twelve months time and curse another missed opportunity? In short, are we chasing our own tail when it comes to solutions such as the circular economy?

The cold hard truth is that, despite sector growth that bucks the recession trend, not only is the green economy uncompetitive when pitched against the (heavily subsidised) brown economy, it is not a serious rival to other green issues such as street litter. How so? Well, because at the end of the day, there is a marked difference between what is important and what is a priority. Yes, adapting to extreme weather or tackling food supply shortages at some point in the near or distant future is important. But it is not as important as paying your mortgage or ensuring your kids go to the best school and have a better life than yourself. In fact, for many, climate adaptation tomorrow is not as important as a clean street is today.

So what has this got to do with the circular economy and smart cities? Well, their well-intentioned focus on stronger resource efficiency may be seriously misplaced. Yes, avoiding industrial waste through closed loop product engineering or reducing energy demand through smart grid infrastructure makes best use of scarce resources. But so what? Saving money, process innovations or boosting resource security should not be confused as the end goal. These are all important, but only as pathways to the real priority outcome: creating more desirable livelihoods. That is, to succeed these campaigns need to make the connection between stronger resource efficiency an quality housing and sanitation in slums, creating job opportunities for the youth unemployed, boosting neighbourhoods’ capacity for self help, and so on.

By linking the circular economy and smart city concepts to close to home issues like these, then and only then, we will be able to rewire the current flawed economic framework and construct a new, resilient model. For CSR and sustainability practitioners in 2013, be they at Timberland or New York City, this means being able to see the synergies and navigate the connections between the circular economy, sustainable urbanisation and the practical needs and hopes and dreams of everyday people. Failing to do so, means these great ideas will otherwise go the same way as the Sinclair C5 car or Betamax video recorder – relics we point at and giggle about in the museum.
 

Philip Monaghan is founder & CEO of Infrangilis (a consultancy and think-tank on resiliency strategies).
 

Bringing together titles previously published under the Donhead, Butterworth Heinemann and Routledge imprints, we now publish an extensive list of books covering building conservation, preservation and architectural history. In addition, we offer a number of classic reprints on building and construction topics such as lime and plastering, covering the period from 1830 to 1950. This list specialises in publishing original material for professionals, academics, students and historic building owners. 

Below are a few highlights. A a full product catalogue is coming soon!

With a new entry every fortnight, blog posts written by various Earthscan from Routledge authors will be displayed both on the Routledge website and on our Facebook page here. Each post within Facebook will be open to comments so please feel free to voice your thoughts!
 

Has sustainable development run its course? What should we do about it?

By Peter Bartlemus, author of Sustainability Economics

Sustainable development is like the Holy Grail: it appeals to everyone, many believe in its powers, no one has found it. Vague objectives of meeting human needs, increasing well-being or improving the quality of life make sustainable development an alluring notion, for which no one can be held accountable. The question is what should and could realistically be sustained. Is it the environment? The economy? Or is it all-encompassing development?

Sustainability Economics provides some answers. It is organized around three categories of sustainability, which are the backbone of the emerging discipline of sustainability economics. Ecological sustainability deals with the resilience and carrying capacity of natural systems, sustaining people at desirable standards of living. Economic sustainability seeks to maintain the fruits of economic growth, including output, income, consumption, and well-being generated by consumption. The sustainability of development takes the high road of meeting the social, economic and environmental needs and wants of society for the present and future generations.

Implementing sustainability faces the reality test of measurability. What can be measured can be rationally managed; what cannot be measured can be important, but tends to be subject to politics rather than policy. The book explores the use and usefulness of the different sustainability concepts in this regard. Physical indicators seek to assess ecological sustainability and sustainable development. They are difficult to add up and compare and their use for defining and measuring sustainability remains fuzzy. Setting goals and standards helps but reflects the values and judgements of goal setters.

Economics uses money as a common measuring rod for a huge amount of diverse economic activities. In principle, prices reflect the preferences of consumers for scare goods and services. Where markets do not exist or fail, as in the case of some natural resources and sinks for pollutants, different valuation techniques can find their ‘social’ costs and benefits. Some valuations resort to unrealistic models of optimality or the sustainability of human well-being. The greening of the world-wide adopted national accounts and their well-known indicators of output, income and capital is more practical: it defines and measures economic sustainability as the maintenance of produced and natural capital. Other less tangible or ‘irreplaceable’ types of capital are more difficult to measure; they need to be taken into account when pursuing more comprehensive and ‘stronger’ sustainability.

Narrowly defined economic sustainability stands a better chance of success than holistic visions of sustainable development. Sustainability economics and its greened indicators and accounts generate the benchmarks for practical policies that sustain both, the environment and the economy. Much goodwill still rides, however, on sustainable development. It also reminds us that non-countables do count even if the setting of goals and targets introduces subjective norms and values into their assessment and promotion.

If this sounds complex and controversial – it is! But let us not forget: the sustainability of our environment and economies affects vital issues of wealth and health, not only now but also in the future. The book cuts through much of the fog of abstract theories and jargon in a concise non-technical introduction. Numerous illustrations sum up issues that would indeed need a thousand words to do them justice. Annotated further reading guides to these words. Pointed questions invite further review and discussion. Finally, an electronic annex, available as a free download, presents a syllabus for a course on sustainability economics that teachers of economics and life sciences might find useful in complementing their courses.

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The theme of this year's Earth Day is The Face of Climate Change. Find out more here.

QUOTES FROM OUR WORLD RENOWNED AUTHORS

"We can no longer 'let it be'. Letting things be is the thinking that has got us to our present situation. As natural and human systems come under intense pressure to 'let it be' will no longer serve. But what? Here comes the main chance. This is a problem worthy of our species. For humanity to act as one on sustainable agendas towards global renewal. Not a lot to ask? Of course it is but, without an inspired and inspiring goal we are not going to realise our potential and, in that realisation know that our potential is all wrapped up with so much more. Not so much 'let it be' as 'make it happen'." – Simon Bell, co-author of both Resilient Participation and Sustainability Indicators

"Earth Day is particularly important in today's world as it enables a refocusing of attention on the plight of many communities that are facing loss of resilience based on complex processes linked to environmental degradation (caused by both human and natural processes), globalisation that may be both a blessing and a curse for enhancing resilience of communities, and political and economic instability that weakens opportunities for local stakeholders to improve response processes that may help increase community-level resilience. Probably never before has the importance of understanding challenges that affect resilience of vulnerable communities been greater than in a world that is facing ever greater environmental, socio-economic and political threats at different geographical scales." – Geoff Wilson, author of Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions

"The transport sector has made no real effort to decarbonise, and its carbon emissions continue to grow. This growth will continue, as car ownership in cities globally increases substantially over the next 20 years. Radical action is needed now, using technology to reduce the need to travel, innovative urban planning to shorten trip distances, substantial investment in public transport, walking and cycling, and limiting the use of cars through pricing and demand management. The car itself should be redesigned to be small, shared or hired, slow, suitable for short distances and possibly electric. Different combinations of all these opportunities need to be taken in every city to achieve sustainable mobility." – David Banister, co-author of Transport, Climate Change and the City

“The theme of Earth Day 2013 is ‘the face of climate change’. But climate change has many faces; it means different things to different people in different places. Some of these are suggested in my book Exploring Climate Change through Science and In Society which takes a unique look at the recent history of climate change as an idea that has induced fear and hope, conflict and cooperation, apathy and activism.” – Mike Hulme, author of Exploring Climate Change through Science and in Society

'"Recent scientific studies warn of the chasm between our efforts to combat climate change and the internationally proclaimed ambition to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. Current national emissions mitigation policies will lock us into a world transformed by global average warming of 4 degrees or more by the end of this century, with calamitous social, economic and ecological consequences well before then. We must ask our governments whether these outcomes are their aim. Perhaps then the ‘ambition gap’ will be bridged and emissions cut dramatically during this next critical decade." – Peter Christoff, editor of Four Degrees of Global Warming

"Earth Day 2013 is dedicated to climate change. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our times. It is not a distant vision of a troubled future, but very much a reality of today that requires urgent action. It is therefore essential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions now to tackle climate change. In addition, enabling development in a carbon constrained world requires a new development model, which focuses less on economic growth and exploiting finite fossil fuel resources and instead focuses more on fair and equitable human development within the limits of our planet. Low carbon development is urgently needed as a new development model, which aims to mitigate climate change and achieve development simultaneously." – Frauke Urban and Johan Nordensvärd, editors of Low Carbon Development

"In 1965, ecologist Rachel Carson asked us to nurture a child's sense of wonder about their natural world. This year on Earth Day I suggest we also need to nurture a child's sense of wonder about their democratic world and the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary people acting together to effect change for a more just and sustainable, common future." – Bronwyn Hayward, author of Children, Citizenship and Environment

“The theme of Earth Day this year is ‘The Face of Climate Change’. It’s a face we claim to know: a warming planet, rising sea levels, displaced peoples, endangered species, violent storms, drought-stricken crops. But is this the real face of climate change, or are these just the symptoms of a deeper problem – our pursuit of economic growth at all costs? If we’re serious about tackling climate change and the other big environmental problems then we need a new economic model, one where the central goal is enough, not more. The good news is that hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on the changes that would be needed to achieve such an economy. The bad news is that there are many vested interests aligned against achieving it. So let’s make this the Earth Day where we put an end to the madness of more, and embrace the wisdom of enough.” – Dan O’Neill and Rob Dietz, authors of Enough Is Enough

"Over 40 years after the original Earth Day, we are still grappling with key questions related to how to manage water, land, and other resources to better serve equity and sustainability goals—concerns that are even more important with emergent realities such as those associated with climate change. For water in particular, international consensus has increasingly emphasized the sense that water is scarce, and that markets and participation are necessary for improved governance. Yet, we often know very little about how these ‘realities’ came to be, or how they play out in diverse contexts." – Leila Harris, co-editor of Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South

"On Earth Day, let's face the future with confidence. Look towards a clean, green, low-carbon world. We already have the tools - renewable energy, sustainable farming, recycling, energy efficiency, forest conservation programmes. Now we need to inspire behaviour change: stop over-consumption; learn that less can be more. Work to share that vision, and there is no limit to what we can achieve." – Alison Smith, author of The Climate Bonus

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Those of you who received our April newsletter will have a discount code for 20% off when you buy online. If you are not already registered you can sign up for future newsletters here.
 

With a new entry every fortnight, blog posts written by various Earthscan from Routledge authors will be displayed both on the Routledge website and on our Facebook page here. Each post within Facebook will be open to comments so please feel free to voice your thoughts!

Cities on the Prowl

By Tim Campbell, author of Beyond Smart Cities

Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past — communicating, trading, competing. But there are two differences: Today it’s nation states, not city-states, that occasionally go to war. And unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in Medieval Europe, today there are literally thousands of cities on the rise, and looking outward in search not of silk and spices, but rather sources of finance, global talent, and most of all, good ideas.
But the search for knowledge isn’t always easy.

A major finding is that the 500 largest cities on the planet are sending delegations to visit each other, repeatedly and consistently, on the order of thousands of study trips annually. The cities are selected carefully, so that visitors may acquire valuable knowledge to speed improvements back home.

The pattern became crystal clear to me conducting research, including detailed responses from more than 50 world cities for my book Beyond Smart Cities. The cities indicated they visit often and continuously, often more than 10 times per year. They tend to choose their visit partners that are their like themselves. The rich tend to visit the rich — for example, Stockholm visits London, London visits New York. But the “poor”–cities like Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; and Tabriz, Iran–visit rich and poor in equal shares. And though visitors often select similar sized hosts, even the mega cities more frequently visit their cousins in the one to five million range than their sister mega-cities. Perhaps something about that moderate city size enables newcomers to get their arms around the whole thing in a short time.

So why do the cities go to all this effort, and what do they learn? They go because in a globalized economy, cities need to work harder to make a living. They no longer have the protections of trade regimes and the comforts of regional isolation. In today’s world, money moves fast, even faster than trade deals. And cities have learned that they must keep up with their principal competitors — other cities. If they want those incoming investments, they must strive to be on top of their game. They have to make themselves an attractive place for global talent, with well-connected and efficiently functioning infrastructure.

But also, city leaders spread out around the world because they have short terms of office and know that learning from others is cheaper and less risky than pursing untested ideas and ending up in false starts. Good practices in successful cities offer short-cuts. The experience of the Olympics games in Salt Lake and Barcelona in the 1990s were of enormous assistance to Turin and Vancouver this decade. In turn, Barcelona and Turin have both studied venture capital practices in Silicon Valley. And Charlotte and Denver have both studied Portland’s transit system. City-to-city exchange was ranked by survey takers by far as the most effective way to learn. Visitors see things work.

But acquiring new knowledge is only half the battle. How the knowledge is validated and applied to problems back home is a whole other drama. My research has also discovered individual styles in the way cities handle new knowledge.

Trust and a learning environment seem to be the main ingredients in the alchemy of internal processing needed in a city to adapt knowledge successfully to local circumstances. Seattle’s Trade Development Alliance has internalized this notion in its study tours. A range of business, government, and independent leaders is involved in each and every mission. Over more than 20 years of missions, with many repeat participants, the process has produced significant bonding among its top civic leaders.

And it’s that type of trust and bonding that helps set the stage for adapting “imported” knowledge to solve problems. Even though they may not know it, smart cities create comfort zones of informal, internal networks of trust.

One management guru calls this zone the “ba,” a climate conducive to exchange of shared values. With the right climate, civic leaders are able to reach consensus, and their reactions and policy initiatives have greater coherence and are achieved more speedily.

The research I’ve worked on shows the prowling of cities is not just continuous. It’s growing. The arrangements for visits are becoming more sophisticated. Intermediary organizations are popping up to help match cities, much like a dating service matches couples.

The bottom line: a wise policy environment and enlightened public support could help cities create the conditions, for innovation, even while they are on the prowl.

Those of you who received our March newsletter will have a discount code for 20% off when you buy online. If you are not already registered you can sign up for future newsletters here.

Massive Misuse of Fresh Water: Why isn’t the Problem Being Addressed?

By Arjen Y. Hoekstra, author of The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society

Water pollution is normal. In China and Bangladesh it happens that the colour of the river shows which dye is being used in the clothes manufacturing industry. In the US, atrazine concentrations in groundwater reach beyond acceptable levels due to overuse of the pesticide in agriculture. Overconsumption of water is normal as well. In several places on Earth, groundwater levels drop at alarming levels, in some cases, like in Yemen, by one metre per year. Several rivers run dry before they flow into the sea; think of the Yellow River in China or the Colorado in the US.

For many of us, freshwater scarcity is something that occurs ‘elsewhere’. The problems, however, are closer to us than we may think. Our daily consumer goods are often imported from water-scarce places. The water consumption and pollution in remote places is ours. Take the UK, for instance. About 75% of the water footprint of UK consumers lies abroad. It’s in our own interest to make water use sustainable, not only nearby, but also elsewhere, because we depend on it.

The problems are not of today. Nevertheless, we haven’t found ways yet to properly address them. In my new book The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society, I propose three principles of wise water use and allocation. First, it will be vital that governments agree on water footprint caps for all river basins in the world, in order to ensure sustainable water use within each basin. A water footprint cap sets a maximum to the water volume that can be allocated to the various human purposes, accounting for environmental water needs. It also sets a maximum to pollution given the assimilation capacity of the basin. The total volume of ‘water footprint permits’ to specific users in a basin should remain below the maximum sustainable level. Water use in itself is not the problem, but not returning the water or not returning it clean is the problem. The water footprint measures exactly that: the consumptive water use and the volume of water polluted.

Second, we need to establish water footprint benchmarks for the most important water-intensive products, for example for food and beverage products, cotton, flowers and biofuels. The benchmark for a product will depend on the maximum reasonable water consumption in each step of the product’s supply chain. In this way, producers that use water, governments that allocate water and manufacturers, retailers and final consumers in the lower end of the supply chain, share information about what are ‘reasonable water footprints’ for various process steps and end products. When granting certain water footprint permits to specific users, it makes sense for governments to take into account the relevant water footprint benchmarks for the different users. Furthermore, governments should force companies to create greater product transparency, so that we will know what’s on our plate.

Third, we need to ensure equitable water use across communities. We need some common understanding of what makes the water footprint of a community of consumers fair or reasonably acceptable, given the limited maximum sustainable water footprint per global citizen. Consumers in the US and Southern Europe use nearly two times more water than the global average. We need a political debate at the international level about fair sharing of the world’s freshwater resources. Given UN population projections, the average water footprint per capita will have to decrease from 1,385 cubic metres in 2000 to 835 cubic metres in 2100 if we want to make sure that the water footprint of humanity as a whole will not increase over the coming century. If we assume an equal water footprint share for all global citizens, the challenge for countries like China and India is to reduce the current water footprint per capita level by about 22.5 per cent over the coming century. For a country like the USA, it means a reduction of the average water footprint per capita by about 70 per cent. Improved technologies alone will not be sufficient to reach this goal. We need to reconsider our consumption pattern as well. Taking a shorter shower will not be sufficient. Eating less meat, one of the big water users in our diet, will be a more effective step.

Summarizing, there are many river basins in the world in which our water footprint needs to be reduced substantially. That can be achieved by setting a water footprint cap per river basin, setting water footprint reductions targets for specific products and by changing consumption patterns so that they become less water intensive.

The SIngapore Water Story, by Cecilia Tortajada, Yugal Joshi and Asit K. Biswas, is being launched at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore on World Water Day (22nd March 2013). For more information on this title please refer here.

Arjen Y. Hoekstra, author of new book The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society has written a special blog post for World Water Day. Read it now on Facebook or here on the Routledge website.

You can also access our journal articles along the themes of Water Education; Water Equality; Water Innovation; Water Policies and schemes; Water Quality; and Water Use FREE until the 31st March 2013 here.

For more information on World Water Day and information on how to take part please refer here.

Ecobuild Confernece Booklist Catalogue 2013

Every year in the January issue, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. Routledge would like to extend our congratulations to both Erich Hoyt, author of Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises and to John Roff and Mark Zacharias, authors of Marine Conservation Ecology. Please click here for the Choice review of Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises and here for the review of Marine Conservation Ecology.

For more information on Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles, please click here.