Technoscientific innovation has played a central role in UK biofuel policy. When the government was proposing mandatory targets in 2007–08, public controversy over ‘unsustainable biofuels’ was channelled into prospects for future biofuels to avoid environmental harm and land-use conflicts. This vision serves as an imaginary—a feasible, desirable future. Societal benefits have been envisaged acc...

During the latter half of the twentieth century philosophers of science have devoted considerable attention to the incommensurability of competing scientific theories. This paper applies elements of these discussions to the question, "When Are Technologies Sustainable?" It identifies an incommensurability issue accompanying the topic of sustainable technological practices and locates it within ...

The quest for sustainable energy, one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, calls for more input from academics than ‘simply’ producing good science. Geographical imaginations are as old as storytelling and mapmaking, but this essay is neither about ‘long ago and far away’, nor about utopian energy futures. This is a call to geographers to engage with ‘alternative present’ energy scen...

Fisheries catches represent a net export of mass and energy that can no longer be used by trophic levels higher than those fished. Thus, exploitation implies a depletion of secondary production of higher trophic levels (here the production of mass and energy by herbivores and carnivores in the ecosystem) due to the removal of prey. The depletion of secondary production due to the export of biom...

Overexploitation is one of the principal threats to coral reef diversity, structure, function, and resilience [1, 2]. Although it is generally held that coral reef fisheries are unsustainable [3-5], little is known of the overall scale of exploitation or which reefs are overfished [6]. Here, on the basis of ecological footprints and a review of exploitation status [7, 8], we report widespread u...

In this paper, we review the concept of forest sector industrialisation and technology adoption with the goal of identifying reasons that have shaped the technological development, or lack thereof, in the Brazilian forest sector. The image of the timber industry in the Amazon has been one of excessive harvest, deforestation, and arguable misuse of a renewable resource. In this paper, we use the...

According to several researches sustainable development is based on three different dimensions of sustainability social and economical dimensions and ecological or environmental sustainability. These dimensions are recognized as basic elements of sustainable development. This research tries to evaluate social sustainability at some neighborhoods in Karaj. Considering the fact that urban neighbo...

PVC has been under intense and hostile attack for a number of years, primarily because of its association with chlorine chemistry. It has been argued by some that because of this association it is inherently unsustainable, although much of this argument has been emotionally driven rather than based upon scientific scrutiny. Yet the presence of chlorine imparts a range of unique technical featur...

Water Resource Sustainable Utilization (WRSU) is becoming increasingly important, given growing water resource shortages and widening gaps between water supply and demand. Most existing studies have focused on WRSU levels without a dedicated strategy-oriented framework. In addition, uncertainties occur in the process of indicator quantification and grading, leading to a lack of accuracy in the ...