Urban and river flooding: Comparison of flood risk management approaches in the UK and China and an assessment of future knowledge needs

Increased urbanisation, economic growth, and long-term climate variability have made both the UK and China more susceptible to urban and river flooding, putting people and property at increased risk. This paper presents a review of the current flooding challenges that are affecting the UK and China and the actions that each country is undertaking to tackle these problems. Particular emphases in this paper are laid on (1) learning from previous flooding events in the UK and China, and (2) which management methodologies are commonly used to reduce flood risk. The paper concludes with a strategic research plan suggested by the authors, together with proposed ways to overcome identified knowledge gaps in flood management. Recommendations briefly comprise the engagement of all stakeholders to ensure a proactive approach to land use planning, early warning systems, and water-sensitive urban design or redesign through more effective policy, multi-level flood models, and data driven models of water quantity and quality

Industrial transformation and sustainable development in developing countries

We examined the relationship between industrial transformation and the positive and negative impacts of industry on sustainable development in developing countries. We started by assigning developing countries to five groups based on the extent to which they have transformed and reoriented their manufacturing sectors. We then compared the changes in economic, social and environmental variables that occurred in these groups between the years 1990 and 2004. We found that those groups that experienced the greatest industrial transformation were the ones with the greater positive impacts in terms of per capita industrial output and employment and greater reductions in impacts in terms of energy intensity. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.sustainable development , manufacturing , developing countries , carbon dioxide emissions , industrial transformation ,

What is climate change policy now trying to achieve?

Almost all advocates of international climate change policy hope and expect that the Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in November–December 2015 will reach an agreement to reduce global anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet more than 25 years of international climate change policy has failed to reach such an agreement: emissions, far from having been reduced, have greatly increased. In the author’s view, no agreement is likely to be reached in Paris. Anticipating this, Lord Stern, a highly influential figure in international climate change policy, has restated the case for continuing with this policy while relinquishing the objective of reaching such an agreement, argued in 2009 to be essential to ‘save the world’. Advocating the continuation of climate change policy while abandoning an acknowledged condition of its success seems to represent a further stage in the abandonment of rationality in climate change policy formulation

Where is developing country industry in sustainable development planning?

In its preparatory activities for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, UNIDO requested national experts in 18 developing and transition economies to report on sustainable development planning efforts during the 1990s in terms of (1) generation of statistical information about the economic, social and environmental impacts of the manufacturing sector, (2) involvement of the manufacturing sector in the preparation of sustainable development strategies and (3) enactment of new policies and programmes. The experts found little information about the impacts of industry on environmental quality in the more explicit environmental frameworks, such as national environmental action plans, and next to nothing in these documents on the positive impacts of industry. Furthermore, the experts found little change in institutional arrangements regarding generation of information, involvement of industry and new policies and programmes, with a few notable exceptions in terms of new information generation and integrated policy innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

An alternative definition of sustainable development using stability and chaos theories

This paper is an endeavour to give an alternative definition for sustainable development (SD). It reviews the previous works in this area, and finds common grounds of these works, namely dynamism and quantification of the system. The paper then discusses dynamic stability and relates it to the concept of sustainability. It constructs an analogy between sustainability objectives and dynamic stability. The discussion continues to introduce chaos as one inherent characteristic of socio-economic systems because of their nonlinear behaviour. A new definition of SD is then proposed. It is applied to the dynamic models that describe the inter-relationships of environmental, economic and social variables. Finally, an example system has been employed to show the applicability of the definition. Policy-related parameters have been chosen to show the conditions in which the system is sustainable. This exercise shows that the presented method of identifying the conditions of sustainability could be usefully exploited in making decisions at macro levels. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.