Editorial

This year marks the end of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development which was first proposed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg. At the end of 2014 UNESCO hosted the World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Nagoya, Japan. To mark this occasion Professor Rob O’Donoghue produced a reflective Think Piece that traces the emergence of education for sustainable development (ESD) from its educational roots in the Modernist project, to thediversity of practices that currently frame ESD as a transgressive process of cultural change. O’Donoghue interrogates tensions around knowledge and participation in the ESD terrain and proposes that knowledge-led and ethics-led learning in relation to valued purposes might create educational possibilities for expansive, transgressive and reflexive learning processes towards a more sustainable future. This Think Piece opens the Journal; many of the strengths, tensions and generative opportunities in environment and sustainability education referred to by O’Donoghue are reflected in this edition of the journal

Network correlated data gathering with explicit communication: NP-completeness and algorithms

We consider the problem of correlated data gathering by a network with a sink node and a tree-based communication structure, where the goal is to minimize the total transmission cost of transporting the information collected by the nodes, to the sink node. For source coding of correlated data, we consider a joint entropy-based coding model with explicit communication where coding is simple and the transmission structure optimization is difficult. We first formulate the optimization problem definition in the general case and then we study further a network setting where the entropy conditioning at nodes does not depend on the amount of side information, but only on its availability. We prove that even in this simple case, the optimization problem is NP-hard. We propose some efficient, scalable, and distributed heuristic approximation algorithms for solving this problem and show by numerical simulations that the total transmission cost can be significantly improved over direct transmission or the shortest path tree. We also present an approximation algorithm that provides a tree transmission structure with total cost within a constant factor from the optimal

Optimal quantization for compressive sensing under message passing reconstruction

Abstract—We consider the optimal quantization of compressive sensing measurements along with estimation from quantized samples using generalized approximate message passing (GAMP). GAMP is an iterative reconstruction scheme inspired by the belief propagation algorithm on bipartite graphs which generalizes approximate message passing (AMP) for arbitrary measurement channels. Its asymptotic error performance can be accurately predicted and tracked through the state evolution formalism. We utilize these results to design mean-square optimal scalar quantizers for GAMP signal reconstruction and empirically demonstrate the superior error performance of the resulting quantizers. I

Payment for environmental service, fair value and market value: a typological study of paper segment industry / Pagamento por serviço ambiental, valor justo e valor de mercado: um estudo tipológico da indústria do segmento de papel

Payment for Environmental Services became law in Brazil in 2021 (14,119/21). Thus, a milestone is installed in the treatment of relevant environmental aspects. In this context, the quality of environmental information must be seen as a business language at the international level. Therefore, this research seeks to investigate it seeks to understand the typological alignment applied in the texts of Law 14.119/21 in relation to the theoretical framework on the IFRS standard that deals with fair value: Fair value CPC 46 - Fair Value Measurements (financial instruments); IFRS 13 Fair Value Measurement and Biological Assets (Plants and Animals) CPC 29 - IAS 41. For methodology, case studies were used with Klabin SA as the object and an analysis of the document type was also carried out in the text of the Payment Law environmental services (PSA) and the quarterly report of a potentially polluting company in the pulp and paper segment. Through the discussions and the results, it was possible to verify that some aspects related to financial information (fair value and market value) were not taken into account in the wording of the aforementioned Law. It was also observed that the PES Law outlines more environmental issues than those observed by the company in question

Deciding and doing what's right for people and planet : an investigation of the ethics-oriented learning of novice environmental educators

This study probes the ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations of three novice environmental education practitioners in South Africa. Two of the cases examined work in a local government context, and the third in an environmental non-governmental organisation context. All three practitioners are studying a one-year professional development course in environmental education. The research asks how their ethical deliberations ‘come to be what they are’, at the interface of their workplace and course-based learning processes. Working within a relational, social realist ontology, the study takes a sociocultural-historical approach to learning, development and social change. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) provides theoretical tools and a descriptive language to approach the rich, qualitative data derived from workplace and course observations, extensive interviews, and document review. Critical discourse analysis was used as a secondary analytical tool to probe ethical and environmental discourses that were found to be influential in the course and workplace activity systems. Data from the three case studies was analysed in stages. In the first stage, CHAT provided a theoretical perspective and language of description to analyse the interacting activity systems in which each learner-practitioner’s ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations occurred. This provided a platform for the second stage of analysis which was framed by Margaret Archer’s (1995) social realist theory of morphogenesis/ morphostasis, followed by a summative retroductive analysis, to give an account of the interplay of historically-emergent social and cultural structures and individual reflexivity in relation to the ethical dimensions of environmental education practice. The study traces how ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations occur at the untidy, unpredictable intersection of workplace, course and personal contexts, and are strongest when they are situated in authentic contexts that resonate with learner-practitioners’ ‘ultimate concerns’ (after Archer, 2003; 2007). In this study, the learner-practitioners’ ‘ultimate concerns’ included family, personal well-being, social justice, cultural identity and religious commitments. The scope and depth of learner-practitioners’ social-ecological knowledge was also identified as a key factor influencing ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations, although the mediation of such knowledge can be hindered by language and conceptual ii barriers, amongst others. The study also noted how ethical positions circulating in the workplace, course and personal contexts were diverse, uneven and dynamic. Some ethical positions were found to be more explicitly differentiated than others, either resonating with or being overlooked by the learner-practitioners as they deliberated the ethical dimensions of their environmental education practice. In situations where there was limited depth, conceptual clarity and/ or confidence to engage directly with ethical concerns, there was a tendency towards (inadvertent) ethical relativism. Insights derived from the study suggest that these factors have limiting effects on the ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations of novice environmental educators. These insights point to the need for ethical deliberations to be re-personalised in context and underpinned by depth knowledge. A relational and pragmatic approach to environmental ethics (that recognises the validity of judgemental rationality – which can be fallible – and which seeks out practical adequacy) is put forward as appropriate and potentially generative in environmental education and training processes. This would need to be supported by careful attention to the influence of environmental discourses and practices in shaping ethical deliberations, and may also be helpful in developing a much-needed accessible, everyday language of ethical engagement. This study’s contribution to new knowledge in the field of environmental education is through its account of ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations emerging (in the Archerian morphogenetic sense) in complex, indeterminate ways at the interface of sociocultural and social-ecological contexts. The ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations of novice environmental educators occur in relation to their ‘ultimate concerns’ and are advanced or hindered by the historically-emergent practices, discourses and material realities of their workplace, personal and educational contexts. These insights require that the complex interplay of intersecting contexts and concerns that shape ethics-oriented reflexive deliberations be acknowledged and carefully mediated in both workplace-based and coursebased professional development processes

Editorial: Understanding Collective Learning and Human Agency in Diverse Social, Cultural and Material Settings

The significance of environment and sustainability education research and practice, and its potential contribution to a sustainable future for humanity, is conveyed by the International Social Science Council (n.d.), which explains:People everywhere will need to learn how to create new forms of human activity and new social systems that are more sustainable and socially just. However, we have limited knowledge about the type of learning that creates such change, how such learning emerges, or how it can be scaled-up to create transformations at many levels.Here, the important shift is towards considering what social systems, forms of knowledge, learning processes and questions of justice are associated with perpetuating or halting the decline of Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems. This edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education contributes three research papers and a themed Think Piece collection to these international deliberations about the role of education in enabling transformations to sustainability. Collectively, the articles highlight how relationality and the formation of human agency in socio-cultural and material settings in past–present–future configurations underpin all environment-oriented learning processes. The three research papers constituting the first part of this volume offer glimpses into how current unsustainable socio-cultural and material configurations might be transformed to address social inequalities and damaged people–nature relations. The Think Piece collection, introduced by Lotz-Sisitka, Læssøe and Jørgensen later in this editorial, focuses on how learning can foster and contribute to the development of change agents and collective agency for climate-resilient development

Revised Schools and Sustainability Pack offers Curriculum Support

Since the mid 1990s, the School Environmental Policy and Management Plan (SEP) Pack has supported educators in developing a whole-school environmental policy. This year, Share-Net has updated the pack in line with the South African revised National Curriculum and the National Environmental Education Programme (NEEP)

The adaptive development and use of learning support materials in response to the 1st principle of the revised national curriculum statement : the case of Hadeda Island

This case study describes the development and trial use of the Hadeda Island Big Book. Developed within a transforming South African curriculum framework, the study recognises that current educational practices are shaped and steered by historical, cultural, political and economic realities. This perspective guides the research design, which considers each of the three participating schools as contextually unique. The Hadeda Island Big Book was developed in response to the 1st Principle of the Revised National Curriculum Statement (RNCS). This calls for all curriculum activities to develop learners' understandings of the relationship between social justice, a healthy environment, human rights and inclusivity. The study probes ways in which learning support materials might respond in line with the vision of the RNCS 1st Principle. Associated challenges, tensions and opportunities are discussed in relation to schools' interactions with the Hadeda Island Big Book. The diverse and creative responses to the book lead this study to foreground generative approaches to curriculum work. Emphasis is thus redirected from hierarchical, stipulative views of curriculum to more dynamic, responsive views of curriculum as a guiding framework. This is regarded as a valuable orientation to the development of future learning support materials. The study comments on the challenge of supporting teachers to develop curriculum activities that reflect a view of 'environment' as socially shaped and multi-dimensional. Tendencies to focus on either the 'ecological' or the 'social' dimensions of environmental issues rather than on the interacting socio-ecological dimensions are recognised as limiting the material's potential to strengthen environmental learning in schools. The study recommends that greater attention be paid to the environmentally-oriented Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards of all Learning Areas in the RNCS. In so doing, socio-ecological learning processes may be strengthened through curriculum work