This paper argues that some determinants of environmental sustainability may be illuminated by examining temporal and geographic variation across lake systems. Typically, lakes respond to both transient and more permanent environmental changes, natural or anthropogenic, and the results of these...

Increasingly, ecotourism is advocated not only as a form of sustainable tourism, but also for the contribution that it can make towards sustainable development. Donor agencies such as DFID and USAID now recognise the contribution that ecotourism can make towards sustainable livelihoods, and it...

After a period during which MPAs were instrumentalised as a palliative against the inadequacy of a fisheries management conventional approach, the multi-use character of these areas prevailed, conflicts were pacified by instilling a participative process and a plurality of goals is now fully...

The Belgian parliament has decided to phase out the existing nuclear power plants as part of the government's strategy to achieve sustainable development. According to the authors, this nuclear phaseout can be regarded as belonging to a class of unstructured problems in science for...

This paper examines the causes of the failure by the Region of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) to meet its objectives on sustainability. The analysis shows that in such macro matters as sustainability, scale does indeed matter, as do numerous other factors including the degree of trust in...

This article approaches sustainability study via geospatial analysis. By mapping two sustainability datasets (Ecological Footprint, 2003 and Environmental Sustainability Index, 2005) the article first assesses the current state of sustainable development world wide. The incompatible pictures...

The first part of the paper briefly reviews the study of the indicators of sustainable development, including the significance of the study, its recent progress, and common problems, and introduces the concept of genuine saving. The second part analyses the theoretical background and calculation...

Canadian researchers and policy makers dealing with climate change adaptation in the agriculture field frequently point to an apparent lack of interest from producers when the topic is raised. This attitude may be the result of several conditions, including the fact that adaptation, as a term,...

This paper summarises some of the challenges to science that are posed by the search for sustainability. These challenges are not only technical ones, such as more affordable or reliable equipment for health care, water quality control and refrigeration. There are also fundamental empirical and...

This introductory article presents the general theme studied in this special issue of the IJSD, concerning the relations between proximity economics and sustainable environmental management at local level. Interest in this research theme has grown significantly in recent years because of the...