The energy demand in building sectors for summer air-conditioning is growing exponentially due to global warming, increased living standards and occupant comfort demands throughout the last decades. Concerns over these environmental changes have begun shifting the emphasis from current cooling...

This paper discusses the policy uses, and limits, of three key concepts for defining 'environmentally adjusted' macro-economic indicators for a national economy. The first is change in the system boundary, an enlargement of the scope of national economic accounting to include natural assets;...

Fundamental to policies of sustainable development is the assumption that values will not depreciate through time. This assumption is inconsistent with the economic approach to policy-making. Economic analysis, by interpreting social values in terms of money, necessarily discounts values in the...

Large areas of Oaxaca, southern Mexico, exhibit high biodiversity in the absence of official protected areas. This paper discusses some of the key mechanisms and practices employed by local communities to help conserve their forest resources. The findings suggest that learning from local...

The Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC) hypothesis suggests that the environmental impacts of a population increase in the early stages of its development, and decline once a certain level of income is attained. After examining different criticisms that can be addressed to studies that validate...

This paper reports on research empirically focused on the Brittany region in France, its agricultural sector and the impacts of agricultural activity on water quality. Our goal was to define and estimate indicators that illustrate the confrontation between environmental performance and economic...

As part of a broader commitment to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development, major minerals companies are developing and implementing a management systems approach to community relations. While the application of management systems to community relations represents an advance...

Citizen participation has become a commonly used term in political speeches in the last two decades, especially in relation to sustainable development and the environment. Indeed, several documents related to environmental management propose that the best alternative is through all citizens'...