Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
notes that it is the developing world and especially China which will soon account
for more than half of the annual increases of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Despite the progress in individual countries there is a depressing lack of internation-
al action and the continued build-up of greenhouse gases which on current progress
means the attempt to limit the climate increase to an average 2 ﾰC increase seems
unlikely.
Despite the paucity of enforceable practical outcomes on this part of the sus-
tainability debate at an international level from the Rio conference, it did help to
promote the general concept of sustainability and led to increasing public concern
about the issues that built upon the alarms raided by previous researchers. More-
over, of specific relevance to urban issues is that it led to the Local Agenda 21
report(U.N.
1993
), which was designed to show how sustainable policies could be
created at the local, urban level. The report argued that municipalities were closest
to the people and could involve them to create more effective practices. These ideas
certainly led to a flurry of policy initiatives in many cities. For example, 2 years
after the report was published an informal network of cities in Europe was estab-
lished by the European Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign and held an inau-
gural meeting in Aalborg in 1994 and now has regular meetings and by 2013 2,700
communities were participants in the programme (EU
2013a
). More generally The
United Nations Centre for Human Settlements based in Nairobi created a Sustain-
able Cities programme with its first newsletter in September 1995 (UNHABITAT).
In addition, a group of large world cities was created in 2005, calling themselves the
C40 Climate Leadership Group (C40). This is a network committed to addressing
climate change through municipal policies and which have implemented a series of
pioneering policies.
Although these urban networks and parallel developments elsewhere, have been
useful, progress in defining sustainability is still limited and is not helped by the
complexity of the concept. It has moved a long way from its environmental origins,
for it now include ideas of community participation as well as social justice and
economic needs, meaning that it has become a multi-dimensional concept. Unfor-
tunately, there is no general agreement on the individual elements that comprise
sustainability. Hence the literature consists of varied, yet often overlapping descrip-
tions of sustainability, lists of different dimensions and variables that are considered
part of the sustainability concept by various international organizations, nations and
citizen groups. The result is a confusing literature with many different ways of iden-
tifying and measuring sustainability.
Figure
5.1
tries to clarify the scope of the term by inter-relating the sustainabil-
ity concepts used in four of the major and generally used schemes that have been
suggested as summarizing sustainability. The resultant domains and dimensions of
sustainability, are divided into two major categories. There are six general catego-
ries or Basic Domains, each of which can be subdivided into a series of subsidiary
categories or dimensions, which are often identified as specific indicators. The first
group of the Basic Domains, the most general category of all, is based on one of
the most succinct summaries of sustainability ideas, that provided by the Natural
Step Foundation, created by the Swedish oncologist Karl-Henrik Robert and his
