Sustainable Development offers a vision of progress that integrates policy-making at international, regional, national and local levels, immediate and longer-term objectives and regards social, economic and environmental issues as inseparable and interdependent components of progress. Sustainable development must be taken up by society at large as a principle guiding the many choices each citizen and each company makes every day, as well as the big political and economic decisions that have. This requires profound changes in thinking, in economic and social structures and in consumption and production patterns.
The course introduces sustainable development showing the system of flows which characterises the global geo-economy and focusing on interrelated processes among different geographical scales, from the local through to the global scale. A complete picture also allows to develop future policies and strategies.
PART I - SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A NEW CONCEPT
1) Course description
2) Why a course on sustainable development?
3) The debate on sustainable development
4) The substitutability between the economy and the environment
5) Ecosystem services
PART II - FROM BUSINESS AS USUAL TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
6) Resource Accounting
7) The European Union Sustainable Development Strategy
8) Sustainable development from the global to the local geographical scale
9) Environmental Accounting Systems
- Ecological Footprint Analysis and GDP
- European strategies: comparisons
- Ecological Footprint Analysis
10) Environment - Economy relationships
- Import-export of sustainability
- Environmental Kuznets Curves
11) Policies to promote sustainable development
12) Common-pool resources
13) Corporate Mobility Management
14) Sustainable Tourism
15) Industrial Ecology