Environmental Sustainability Archives

Travel Behaviour Reconsidered in an Era of Decarbonisation

The transport system is central to our lives as our means to travel, but also has major impact on our environment. This has become most salient in recent years through its contribution to climate change. However, this perspective has only had a minor impact on the conventional economic analysis and modelling of transport investments, creating a dissonance between the traditional objectives of investment and the strategic need to reduce carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2050.

Travel Behaviour Reconsidered in an Era of Decarbonisation argues that our transport networks are mature, and the objective should be to improve operational efficiency. Over the past half century, large public expenditures in roads and railways were justified by an analytic approach to the benefits of investment, primarily the value of the time saved through faster travel, to both business and non-business users of the networks. However, average travel time has not changed over this period. People have taken the benefit of faster travel as better access to people, places, activities and services, with the ensuing enhanced opportunities and choices. This book argues that the basis of orthodox transport economic analysis has been misconceived and a fresh perspective on economic analysis is now needed.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 have influenced the actions of international and intergovernmental organisations and governments around the world, and have dictated priorities for international aid spending. Culture, including heritage, is often presented as fundamental to addressing the SDGs: since 2010, the United Nations has adopted no fewer than five major policy recommendations that assert its importance as a driver and enabler of development. Yet, heritage is marginalized from the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development constitutes a substantial and original assessment of whether and how heritage has contributed to three key dimensions of sustainable development (namely poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalisation from the Sustainable Development Goals and from previous international development agendas.
Sophia Labadi adopts a novel, inclusive, large-scale and systematic approach, providing the first comprehensive history of the international approaches on culture (including heritage) for development, from 1970 to the present day. This book is also the first to assess the negative and positive impacts of all the international projects implemented in sub-Saharan Africa by a consortium of UN organisations that aimed to provide evidence for the contribution of heritage for development in time for the negotiation of the SDGs. The book’s conclusions provide recommendations for rethinking heritage for development, while reflecting on the major shortcomings of the selected projects.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions

Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste.

Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power.