Sustainability Science - 9780444627094

Sustainability Science: Managing Risk and Resilience for Sustainable Development examines this holistic discipline’s key concepts, models and findings regarding the most pressing sustainability issues: climate change, population growth and poverty, energy, public policy, economic growth, and resource systems. The natural and social sciences are woven together throughout the book to provide a more inclusive and accurate understanding of relevant trends and events.

Emerging as a new discipline at the turn of the 21st century, sustainability science and sustainable development are becoming guiding principles across the geosciences, ecology, environmental science, economics, and social science. Scientists continue to wrestle with its complexity and interwoven concepts and how they impact one another, but because of the subject’s indigenous challenges and necessary multidisciplinary focus, it’s difficult to find authoritative content in a single source. Authored by a scientist with multiple degrees in geosciences, environmental science, political science, and engineering, the book helps galvanize the science’s multidisciplinary nature by focusing on the guiding principles of sustainability science’s past, present, and future and how it is shaping how we manage the critical challenge of human-environment interaction.

• Examines our vulnerability to natural and human-induced hazards and disasters and how the management of the human-environment relationship impacts and shapes public policy and global economic health
• Introduces new approaches to our understanding of how the reduction of poverty while striving toward a more viable use of natural resources is vital to making future development more sustainable
• Features more than 150 figures, full-color photographs, diagrams, and illustrations to highlight major themes and aid in the retention of key concepts
• Presents a holistic approach to advances in the inter-relationships across the geosciences, ecology, environmental science, economics, and engineering and provides conceptual and practical tools for making the link between safety and sustainability