This book deals with exergy and its applications to various energy systems and applications as a potential tool for design, analysis and optimization, and its role in minimizing and/or eliminating environmental impacts and providing sustainable development. In this regard, several key topics ranging from the basics of the thermodynamic concepts to advanced exergy analysis techniques in a wide range of applications are covered as outlined in the contents.

Green Taxation and Environmental Sustainability explores the critical issue of how taxes can be applied across relevant environmental areas – including transport, nuclear power, and water and waste management – to achieve sustainability.

Forty years after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the goal of sustainable development continues via the Rio+20 conference in 2012. This book will enable a broad readership to understand what has been achieved in the past forty years and what hasn’t.

How will we meet rising energy demands? What are our options? Are there viable long-term solutions for the future? Learn the fundamental physical, chemical and materials science at the heart of: • Renewable/non-renewable energy sources • Future transportation systems • Energy efficiency • Energy storage Whether you are a student taking an energy course or a newcomer to the field, this book will help you understand critical relationships between the environment, energy and sustainability.

The over-exploitation of the Earth’s resources has brought about an unsustainable situation where biodiversity and ecological balance are under dire threat. But the most immediate concern is global warming, caused by high anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability challenges the assumed harmony between human rights norms and the demands of environmental sustainability, by addressing conceptual, normative, and political questions surrounding the interaction between the two.

This report adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today’s urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urban areas and their development processes.