The modern southwestern cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and El Paso occupy lands that once supported rich desert ecosystems. Typical development activities often resulted in scraping these desert lands of an ancient living landscape, to be replaced with one that is human-made and dependent on a large consumption of energy and natural resources.

This timely volume provides fascinating insights into emerging developments in the field of legal governance of the environment at a time when environmental governance is increasingly concerned with far more than legal doctrine.

This insightful book deals with governance of the environment and sustainable development.

The contributors explore the difficulties developed countries are experiencing in coming to terms with environmental limits and the resultant challenges to the democratic polity. They engage with different dimensions of the governance challenge including norms, public attitudes, citizen engagement, political conflict, policy design, and implementation, and with a range of environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity/nature protection, and water management.

In the near future the appearance and spatial organization of urban and rural landscapes will be strongly influenced by the generation of renewable energy. One of the critical tasks will be the re-integration of these sustainable energy landscapes into the existing environment—which people value and want to preserve—in a socially fair, environmentally sound, and economically feasible manner.

The provision of sustainable energy supplies for an expanding and increasingly productive world is one of the major issues facing civilisation today. Renewable Energy examines both the practical and economic potential of the renewable energy sources to meet this challenge.

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.

This volume is both opportune and important. The issue of the links between globalization, agriculture and development need urgently to be emphasised in a world economy transfixed by issues of energy, industry and finance, the problems of the triad states, and the rise of the BRICs. The chapters in this volume begin this task through studies of agricultural change in Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the ASEAN nations, India and China. They show the uneven impacts of liberalization, contracting, and modernization that bring social change in their wake.

This Handbook will make a timely and important contribution to the study of energy, climate change and climate economics, and will prove essential reading for international researchers in the fields of natural resources, climate change and energy.

Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development highlights the opportunities and risks of nature-based tourism for economic development and explores selected strategies for sustainability.   The prospect of tourism growth is a potential source of major challenges and considerable threats on a number of levels.

Can a dialogue between these two communities contribute to mitigating degradation of natural and human environments in developed and developing countries; help avoid the economic marginalization of developing countries facing digital exclusion from global markets; and help maintain and promote cultural diversity and traditional knowledge? Internet Governance and Sustainable Development contemplates such questions, and stimulates further dialogue. (Includes a CD with 10 draft background papers.)

This provocative book examines the broad and complex conceptual issues that must be addressed in order to achieve sustainable development. It begins with several case studies that reflect innovative policy and strategic initiatives within the corporate and public sectors, followed by a sector-by-sector analysis of specific opportunities and challenges within the critical resource domains of energy and global climate, human health, fisheries, agriculture, biodiversity, and forestry.