by ben@growthstudios.com.au | Jul 12, 2024 |
Delve into the history of energy resource conflicts, their present status, and the potential effects of today’s energy production decisions on the future of humanity.
This book examines international and sometimes intranational conflicts over energy resources, including ancient empires, 20th-century wars over oil, and the explosive growth of renewable energy. The volume begins with a series of chapters tracing the evolution and future implications of energy production and clashes over these vital resources. Next, readers will discover a collection of essays addressing fascinating yet sometimes contentious facets of the subject, including the current limits of renewable energy sources and the role nuclear power should play. A collection of 50 encyclopedic entries round out the book, providing readers with concise explanations of key concepts and terms.
Energy resource conflicts have shaped the world we live in. After humans settled across the planet, growing empires began to compete for resources. First, they competed for wood, then steel and coal. The ability to mine these resources and turn them into trains, ships, and weapons decided which countries would dominate the world. Oil became the most important international resource by the turn of the 20th century and has remained so until the present day. But, as the authors argue, humans have the technology to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for the vast majority of their energy needs, despite corporate fossil fuel interests. Using advanced statistics on the use and growth of all major energy sources, this book is an excellent source of information on the predicted growth of various forms of energy as well as the inevitable yet not necessarily peaceful transition toward renewable and carbon-free energy sources.
Adrah N. Parafiniuk teaches at Northern Arizona University, USA. He is the author of 108 Steps to Fix the Planet- A Guide to a Healthier, Happier, and More Joyous Life (2013). He has published work on energy and green gilding as well as on motivations for sustainable behaviors and pro-environmental behaviors.
Zachary A. Smith was Regents’ Professor at Northern Arizona University, USA. Smith was widely published, including such works as The Environmental Policy Paradox, 8th Edition (2022), Globalization (2008) (with Justin Ervin) and Protecting Our Environment- Lessons from the European Union (2005) (with Janet R. Hunter).
by ben@growthstudios.com.au | Jul 12, 2024 |
In Future Finance, Sabine Doerry offers a systematic rethinking of financialization. She explores how finance – especially the asset management industry – is repositioning, how the locus of power has shifted from public to private authority, and how its consequences have defined finance’s societal purpose. This is shown to have significant implications for the future design of financial and economic systems, specifically their ability to respond to the imperatives of future finance. Particular challenges include justice and sustainability, whose principles oppose the principles of contemporary global finance. Doerry’s analysis draws on a strong spatial dimension and offers insights into the transformation processes of complex socio-economic systems.
Doerry’s approach is interdisciplinary, combining financial and economic geography with political economy, economic sociology, management studies and economic history, and insights from other social sciences.
by ben@growthstudios.com.au | Jul 12, 2024 |
This book discusses smart city implementation in 11 smart cities — Auckland, Boston, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Melbourne, Milan, Seoul, Tokyo, and Vancouver. The cities encompass a range of smart city development on selected critical issues in economic prosperity (future digital economy, smart retail, smart tourism), social inclusion (digital inclusion, digital placemaking, smart health service, smart youth empowerment), and environmental sustainability (climate resilience action, circular economy, smart climate action). The focus is on their challenges and course of action in and around the socio-technical systems and processes of sustainability transition. The chapters focus on emerging issues, enabling technologies, practical approaches, policies and case studies. The analysis recognises that smart city development takes place in a social context that, to some degree, will influence the adoption and effectiveness of technologies and ultimately, determine whether they meet end-user satisfaction. Smart city development is pivoted on technological changes, connectivity, and data, but also on people and government involvement and the transformation of urban living practices and conditions. This book aims to deepen dialogues on possible smart city strategies from the perspective of how people, organisations (e.g., processes, communication networks), and technologies interact to achieve individual, organisational, or societal goals.
by ben@growthstudios.com.au | Jul 12, 2024 |
Placemaking: People, Properties, Planning, delivers a cross-disciplinary critique of “placemaking”, an approach to the design and creation of new urban places, and the reshaping of old ones, that has become so pervasive that it forms the ‘strapline’ for the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute. Developing principally from planning and urban design, placemaking has swiftly become a new orthodoxy, a dominant paradigm. It seems to be all-encompassing, particularly at a time when towns and cities face new and large-scale challenges relating to climate change, sustainability, population movement and intensive capital regeneration.
Higgins and Larkham alongside an expert team of contributors examine the experiences of placemaking, the quality of the places produced, and the experiences of those living and working in them?
Placemaking: People, Properties, Planning contains a series of short, sharp chapters exploring a broad range of placemaking concepts and experiences. It is designed to be critical, but easily comprehensible to both university-level students in built environment academic disciplines and to practitioners in related professions.
by ben@growthstudios.com.au | Jul 12, 2024 |
In the decade since the UN SDG agenda was established, how much progress how we really made? What can we be doing to ensure that we’re on the right track? Is it too late to meet the 2030 Agenda?
Written by John Ure, an economist and academic turned consultant for UN agencies such as the World Bank, the IFC, the ITU, UNDP, UNESCAP, and more, Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is an accessible contemporary account of a fast-developing field of literature, evidence, and science around the SDG challenges. Dividing the SDGs into four core themes – poverty, environment, civil society, and global partnerships – Ure delves into the current status of each, identifying the main challenges to be overcome and examining what we can be doing to get there. With policy implications and practical guidelines for building momentum both at an individual and collective level, Ure provides a balanced yet a definitive and compelling assessment of the SDGs.
Cutting through the huge volume of literature for each of the SDGs as 2030 closes in, this immensely readable primer makes sense of the state of play for some of the most pressing existential questions of our time. It calls on policymakers, business professionals, educators, NGOs, media professionals, and the public to reevaluate policies and their role in the sustainable development agenda.
