Drawdown


Book Description

• New York Times bestseller • The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world “At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.




Good Health, Quality Education, Sustainable Communities, Human Rights


Book Description

The publication collects the contributions presented during the International Symposium of the Italian UNESCO Chairs (CONIUS) entitled Human Rights and Sustainable Development Goals 2030, which took place on 16 November 2018 at the University of Florence. The contributions of national and international experts address the Global Aims for Sustainable Development of the UNESCO including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) n. 3 Improvement of the 'Global Health', n. 4 'Quality Education', n. 11 'Cities and Inclusive Human Sett lements' and n. 16 'Peace and Justice', using transdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and implemented through theoretical studies and good practices.










Just Sustainabilities


Book Description

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.




Sustainable Development Goals and Human Rights


Book Description

This open access book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows comparisons between the different approaches but also seeks to close gaps which would remain if only one perspective would be at the center of the discussions. Specifically, the book shows the strong connections between human rights and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Already the preamble of this document explicitly states that "the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ... seek to realise the human rights of all". Moreover, several goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda correspond to already existing individual human rights obligations. The contributions of this volume therefore also address how the implementation of human rights and SDGs can reinforce each other, but also point to critical shortcomings of the different approaches.




Communities in Action


Book Description

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.




Building Sustainable Communities


Book Description

The book aims to explore South Asian third sector – the nonprofit organizations as provider of social services. The book defines social welfare and describe its relationship to social service programmes and individual well-being; understands the social policy development from the problem identification to policy implementation; describes the range of organization of social service agencies that are responsible for providing social welfare programmes; explores the various roles that professional and non- professional helpers provide in the delivery of social welfare and their influence in promoting change in policy development; and understands the umbrella concept of Child welfare, welfare of people with disability and elderly welfare in welfare policy.




Interculturality in Institutions


Book Description

This book provides qualitative analyses of intercultural sense making in a variety of institutional contexts. It relies on the assumption that in an increasingly culturally diverse world, individuals often enter contexts that have communal, historically determined and stable sets of values, norms and expected identities, with little cultural compass to find their bearings in them. The book goes beyond interpreting differences in people’s ethnic or linguistic roots and discusses instead people’s interpretive efforts to navigate different sociocultural situations. The contributors examine such situations in educational, organizational, medical and community settings and look at how participants with different levels of sociocultural competences (such as, migrant patients, migrant adult learners, children) try to cope with institutional constraints and expectations, how they understand symbols, practices and identities in institutional contexts, and how their creative adjustments come to light. This book provides insights from the fields of psychology, education, anthropology and linguistics, and is for a wide readership interested in cultural meaning-making.




Advancing the Global Agenda for Human Rights, Vulnerable Populations, and Environmental Sustainability


Book Description

For over 70 years, the United Nations has worked to advance human conditions globally through its historic agenda for a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world. Through the work of the General Assembly and other programs like the UNESCO World Conferences on Adult Education, the organization has taken a leading role in bringing world leaders together to dialogue on world issues and to set agendas for advancing social and economic justice among and within the regions of the world. The underlying themes of the United Nations’ agenda over the years have been world peace, economic justice, addressing the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations, and protecting the environment. We draw from the two last two declarations from which the Millennium Development Goals (September 2000) and the Sustainable Development Goals (September 2015) were adopted by world leaders with a focus on addressing the needs of the most vulnerable populations. In this declaration, world leaders committed to uphold the long-standing principles of the organization and to combat extreme poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination and violence against women. The overall objective of the book is to highlight the conditions of vulnerable populations from various contexts globally, and the role adult and higher education can play (and is playing) in advancing the United Nations agenda of social and economic justice and environmental sustainability. Adult education, through research, teaching, and service engagements is contributing to this ongoing effort but as many scholars have noted, our work remains invisible and undocumented. Therefore, this book highlights adult education’s critical partnership in addressing these global issues. It will also begin to fill the void that exists in adult education literature on internationalization of the field.