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...

An 'Environmental Diamond' for the Levant is proposed, similar to the World Bank's 'Development Diamond'. It would serve as a framework for evaluating ecosystem risk for the countries in the Jordan Basin that are currently facing a sustainability crisis. The approach followed by this paper was...

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...

This paper presents six studies made on the economic costs of desertification and land degradation in 11 African countries. It presents the main methods used for these macro valuations and their limits. It gives the results obtained and discuss on the concrete implications, for example, in terms...

The Motueka Catchment is located at the north-western tip of the South Island of New Zealand. After decades of productive intensification, the ecological and social identity of this catchment is still largely intact. To keep things this way, local residents, scientists and planners have been...

In 1996, the Danish government launched an ambitious energy plan, Energy 21, describing a way to develop the energy sector in a more sustainable direction. Wind power plays an important role in the plan, and as a consequence there will be a very high penetration of wind energy in the electricity...

This paper documents the results of a participatory modelling trial involving an influence matrix with a group of researchers and community members in the Motueka Catchment of New Zealand. In this trail, the influence matrix was used to calculate whole-of-system sustainability-values used to:...

In the face of the changes in the planet's natural resources and of their unequal distribution, it is becoming more urgent that contemporary societies oversee environmental assets in a global manner. Although international directives, when they are transposed into national laws, may set specific...

The implementation of activities aimed at mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions is more cost-efficient in developing countries than in most of the industrialised world. Nevertheless, efficient mitigation may have adverse effects on equity. A Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is therefore to...

This paper discusses some of the new challenges that the quest for sustainable development poses to scientific research and the interface between science and policy. One of the issues fundamental to both science and policy is that of integration. Integration of scientific research requires a...