ISSUE ADDRESSED Reports of the degeneration of Earth's natural life-support systems have focused the minds of those in the scientific, political and general communities on how to avert a collapse. For many health promotion practitioners the effective unit of social change is the community, the interconnected web of people and place that makes up a human living system. The challenge lies in dete...

The need for sustainable development has been widely recognized and sustainable development has become a hot topic of various disciplines even though the role of ergonomics in it is seldom reported or considered. This study conducts a systematic survey of research publications in the fields of ergonomics and sustainable development over the past two decades (1992-2011), in order to identify the...

The Biosphere Reserve (BR) concept aims at encouraging sustainable development (SD) towards sustainability on the ground by promoting three core functions: conservation, development, and logistic support. Sweden and Ukraine exemplify the diverse governance contexts that BRs need to cope with. We assessed how the BR concept and its core functions are captured in national legislations. The result...

Rapid growth of urbanization and its complications in recent decades has absorbed urban planners' attention to stability and stable development issues. In this regard community which is the core stone of urban development stayed away from formal system of spatial planning, and established communities are in contrast with preserving stable development rules and principals, therefore this researc...

Issue For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in non‐ timber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work...

Rural Development is a priority in Europe and it is supported by specific, financial programmes. At the same time, sustainability is the key word for the European Union to construct programmes and policies for all human activities. However, measuring sustainability of rural areas is not easy, due to their particular features. The improvement of knowledge on sustainability in rural areas is impo...

Global population and environmental pressures are challenging multinational companies to develop new business strategies founded upon the principles of sustainability— assuring that they can meet the needs of both present and future generations of customers and stakeholders. Corporate sustainability requires understanding the “triple bottom line”, which includes economic, societal, and ecologic...

We believe that intelligent information agents will represent their users interest in electronic marketplaces and other forums to trade, exchange, share, identify, and locate goods and services. Such information worlds will present unforeseen opportunities as well as challenges that can be best addressed by robust, self-sustaining agent communities. An agent community is a stable, adaptive grou...