Today, cities worldwide are engaged in urban projects and activities in a concerted drive towards sustainable development. However, the concept of “sustainable urban projects” is inherently normative, subjective and ambiguous. Furthermore, the popularity of sustainable urban initiatives does not guarantee that increased pressure on dominant unsustainable urban systems will occur. In this articl...

Synthetic measurement of regional sustainable development has been one of the key issues in the research field of sustainability. In this paper, Qingyang City located in the Loess Plateau ecologically fragile area of Northwest China is used for a case study, and the present study aims to investigate the degree of sustainable development by conducting temporaland spatial-scale based analysis, wi...

Surrounded by the ocean, Taiwan has been increasingly developing coastal tourism projects. Concerns that negative impacts might be brought about by prosperous tourism have resulted in a recent focus on sustainable tourism. Sustainable tourism involves policies that acknowledge the interdependences among the environment, the community, and the economy. The goal of sustainable tourism is to enhan...

We consider models of the interactions between human population dynamics and cultural evolution, asking whether they predict sustainable or unsustainable patterns of growth. Phenomenological models predict either unsustainable population growth or stabilization in the near future. The latter prediction, however, is based on extrapolation of current demographic trends and does not take into acco...

What is sustainable development? Since its inception at the 1992 Earth Summit, “sustainable development” has been woven into the language of development and global change. Recognising that past development paradigms have been fixated on economic growth, marginalising social and environmental dimensions of progress, the concept of “sustainable development” has attempted to reconcile all three de...

One of the fundamental lessons learned through the past half century of agricultural research is that there are no “one size fits all” best management practices. The interaction of different soils with different cultures in different climates results in the need for unique approaches to sustainable agricultural systems in each situation. The transition to systems that are both sustainable and s...

The ecological footprint is a quantitative biophysical method commonly used to evaluate the status of regional ecological environment and the degree of sustainable development. In this paper, the concept and calculation process of the ecological footprint are introduced by taking a county located in central China as example. Computational analysis and empirical research of the region’s ecologic...