The links between climate issues and sustainable development are manifold. Given these interconnections, the lack of close integration of the sustainable development and climate change literatures is puzzling; part of the reason for this lack of connectivity may be the very different research...

Since its genesis (Bertanlanffy, 1968), the concept 'system' became an essential tool used by many disciplines, such as Economy and Ecology. Nowadays it can be considered a central concept in sustainable development analysis. However, science and sustainable development analysis has mainly...

The notion of common good is not clearly defined. Globalisation as well as sustainable development refers to it. This paper recalls four main objections to globalisation, namely institutional contextualisation, experience from economic history, equity issues, and other normative assessments. It...

The purpose of this article is to test whether the monetary valuation of environmental assets is sufficient to define a sustainable management of natural resources. This discussion is based on a one-year field experience in East Cameroon, one of the aims of which was to question the validity of...

It is possible today, to construct a house of comparable cost to a conventional one that will gain all of its energy from renewable energy sources. However, there are very few examples of such houses. This paper argues that the slow take up of these ideas has a parallel with the development and...

This paper discusses a key aspect of a sustainable pharmaceutical use of biodiversity: the increased demand of the pharmaceutical industry for biogenetic resources does not result in an increase of the market value of biodiversity. The increasing interest in biogenetic resources by the...

This paper describes a process-oriented construction of sustainability. The main argument is that sustainability is not a fixed ideal, but an evolutionary process of attempting to improve the management of systems, through improved understanding and knowledge. The process is not deterministic:...

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between Environmental Quality (EQ) and per capita NSDP (i.e., Environmental Kuznets Curve, EKC) of 14 major Indian States, in the light of their high economic growth in the post-liberalisation period. The analysis involves first ranking the...

As sustainable development has to support an adaptive and flexible process towards inevitable changes in environmental as well as in socioeconomic systems, the notion of innovations must be a key issue of sustainability. While there is an increasing awareness that sustainable change is...

Six years after the UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, an effort to give a new boost to its implementation in the field of science was made during the Sixth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD6, held in New York in April 1998). This paper recalls the context...