The 1992 Rio Summit and subsequent literature and debate has focused on 'green' issues such as biodiversity, climate change and marine pollution. Much less has been written concerning the 'brown' agenda: factors such as poor sanitation and water quality, air pollution and housing problems which are particularly prevalent in Third World cities. Sustainability, the Environment and Urbanisation provides a comprehensive overview of the brown agenda, with case studies and examples from a number of Southern countries. It looks at the broad economic context behind the problems and covers the conceptual issues of sustainability, infrastructure and health programmes, as well as assessing environmental appraisal methods. Clearly written, with contributions from some of the leading experts in the field, the book will appeal to students on environmental and developmental courses, researchers, and all those concerned with the 'healthy cities' movement.

Think globally, act locally emphasizes the importance of scale in dealing with environmental challenges, but not how to factor it in. This major new book focuses on the spatial dimensions of urban environmental burdens, showing how important it is to take these into account when pursuing environmental justice and good governance - whether in the context of the sanitary risks of slum living, the pollution of uncontrolled industrialization and motorization, or the enormous ecological footprints of affluent urban lifestyles. Written by leading experts in the fields of urban development and environmental planning, the book reviews the urban environmental shifts that have shaped todays challenges, and examines conditions and problems in the urban centres of low-, middle- and high-income countries. Case studies address such economically diverse cities as Accra, New Delhi, Mexico City and Manchester, while thematic chapters explore issues including water, sanitation and transportation. The book concludes by exploring and analysing different scales of governance. The editors argue that we should not rely solely on local governance to address local burdens like poor sanitation, nor depend only on global governance for global challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, but that scale is crucial in both understanding the problems and devising successful responses. Published with UNU-IAS and IIED.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the interactions and feedbacks between urbanization and global environmental change. A key focus is the examination of how urbanization influences global environmental change, and how global environmental change in turn influences urbanization processes. It has four thematic foci: Theme 1 addresses the pathways through which urbanization drives global environmental change. Theme 2 addresses the pathways through which global environmental change affects the urban system. Theme 3 addresses the interactions and responses within the urban system in response to global environmental change. Theme 4 centers on critical emerging research.

There is very little argument that the world is facing severe environmental challenges. Ongoing air and water pollution, increasing energy consumption, and the depletion of natural resources have all placed considerable stress on the capacity of our environment to support the present quality of human life in a sustainable manner. Ensuring a Sustainable Future does what few previous works have: it examines these trends' disproportionate impact on the poor and the economically viable solutions that can serve to remedy them -- solutions that simultaneously address environmental and economic problems. This gap in previous research, evidence, and writing has left low-income countries often unwilling to take on major environmental problems and many poor communities believing they faced impossible choices between improving the environment in which they live and increasing the jobs and income available. Bringing together evidence-based recommendations and in-depth case studies of successful policies and programs around the world, Ensuring a Sustainable Future examines innovative solutions to this crucial challenge. In doing so, it addresses a comprehensive range of environmental sustainability challenges affecting low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

The reduction of inequalities within and between countries stands as a policy goal, and deserves to take centre stage in the design of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed during the Rio+20 Summit in 2012.The 2013 edition of A Planet for Life represents a unique international initiative grounded on conceptual and strategic thinking, and – most importantly – empirical experiments, conducted on five continents and touching on multiple realities. This unprecedented collection of works proposes a solid empirical approach, rather than an ideological one, to inform future debate.The case studies collected in this volume demonstrate the complexity of the new systems required to accommodate each country's specific economic, political and cultural realities. These systems combine technical, financial, legal, fiscal and organizational elements with a great deal of applied expertise, and are articulated within a clear, well-understood, growth- and job-generating development strategy.Inequality reduction does not occur by decree; neither does it automatically arise through economic growth, nor through policies that equalize incomes downward via ill conceived fiscal policies. Inequality reduction involves a collaborative effort that must motivate all concerned parties, one that constitutes a genuine political and social innovation, and one that often runs counter to prevailing political and economic forces.

Haldia situated at Midnapore District of West Bengal, India.

This text addresses the difficulties of balancing the imperatives of sustainability with the pressing challenges facing some of the world's most underdeveloped areas. Various perspectives are brought to bear on issues from economics and theories of health through to the foundations of sustainability. All the key contemporary developments are dealt with; the growth in international law and agreements on controlling greenhouse gases; the effect of reforms in finance, governance and methods of appraisal on the areas of waste management; and the theoretical advances in the community development aspects of health and the neighbourhood environment guided by the experiences of the World Bank, WHO and UNEP. The text is intended as a guidebook for those responsible for re-shaping cities in the 21st century.

Half of the world's people live in urban areas, and roughly a third of these live in desperate poverty without access to basic amenities. Taking on the themes of UN-HABITAT's Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities (2003), this new volume focuses on the deficiencies in the provision of water and sanitation where most of the populations of the developing world live: in towns and small cities. Drawing on extensive unpublished research and 15 commissioned papers from experts involved in designing and implementing innovative projects around the world, this is the first major study of the problems facing the smaller urban centres that are recognized to be of enormous importance by governments, international agencies, NGOs and service providers. Tackling these problems is a crucial part of development and of good governance, and critical to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. The volume will be essential reading for all professionals and researchers in the relevant fields and a valuable resource for teachers and students of urban development.