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Points out that sustainability as such does not provide a clearcut guide to policy. First one has to decide what is to be sustained. If this is agreed, it must be in an operational from. However, difficulties may still emerge since opinions may differ about how to achieve. This is illustrated by differences in the views of economists about how sustainable development is to be achieved. Orthodox economists stress the importance of the accumulation of man-made capital to achieve this end whereas neo-Malthusians stress the importance of conserving natural resource and environmental capital. Both take an anthropocentric point of view. For political reasons the neo-Malthusian has had little support but it may eventually turn out to be correct. Economics is concerned with reducing economic scarcity and economists have traditionally suggested four main ways of doing this of which economic growth is one. However, neo-Malthusian economists believe that this may not be a sustainable strategy – it may result in future poverty. It should be noted that economic systems are embedded in social and natural systems and depend on these. Economic sustainability depends on the sustainability of these other systems. So from this point of view, it is just one of several bottom lines. Values must be considered in relation to sustainability. Economics is completely anthropocentric in its approach. Therefore, economic approaches to conservation and sustainability can be at odds with the values of deep ecologists or those willing to accord rights to other sentient beings or ecosystems independent of human wishes, or those who want to make use of value judgments other than those based on the measuring rod of money. Consequently economics evaluation is sometimes ineffective in resolving social conflict, including conflict about what should be sustained. As a rule economics alone should not be the final arbiter of social decisions. It is a part (often an important part) of the social evaluation process but not the bottom line, or just one of many lines.

The search for energy security is one of the key dynamics that is re-shaping politics and governance in the twenty-first century, particularly throughout Asia and the emerging economies of the global South. With extraordinary growth rates of energy consumption predicted for many regions there is a need to critically re-assess the concept of energy security and its central focus on the needs of nation-states. Although theoretical approaches to human and environmental security have lifted the referent object away from the state the importance of energy to the military and economic power of modern industrialised states has ensured that the concept of energy security has remained almost exclusively state-centric. As with other aspects of security, however, the state is often not the best means of pursuing energy security for marginalised individuals or communities, particularly in non-democratic states. This paper therefore reviews the existing security literature and argues that a more critical approach, as one component of a critical environmental security framework, is needed to challenge the injustices that confront marginalised communities throughout the global South. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Over the past decade human understanding of the potential variety and range of climate change impacts has expanded. For example, besides physical and environmental impacts it is clear that climate change is a driver of social change. This is particularly apparent through the creation of a new social community of "climate migrants". In 1995 there were about 25 million environmental refugees around the world but this number is anticipated to rise to 200 million by 2050, many of them as a result of climate change. One of the countries most severely affected by climate induced migration is Bangladesh. This paper analyses how consideration of this growing body of climate migrants fits with traditional migration theory. Using a case study approach drawing on empirical research amongst migrants in Bangladesh, it examines the drivers of migration, the impacts on individual and family livelihoods of the explosion of climate migrants and the subsequent effects on urbanisation of major cities in Bangladesh. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

An integrated Cyber-Physical System (CPS) system realizes the two-way communication between end-users and power generation in which customers are able to actively re-shaped their consumption profiles to facilitate the energy efficiency of the grid. However, large-scale implementations of distributed assets and advanced communication infrastructures also increase the risks of grid operation. This thesis aims to enhance the robustness of the entire demand-side system in a cyber-physical environment and develop comprehensive strategies about outage energy management (i.e., community-level scheduling and appliance-level energy management), communications infrastructure development, and cybersecurity controls that encounter virus attacks. All these aspects facilitate the demand-side system’s self-serve capability and operational robustness under extreme conditions and dangerous scenarios. The research that contributes to this thesis is grouped around and builds a general scheme to enhance the robustness of CPS demand-side energy system with outage considerations, communication network layouts, and virus intrusions. Under system outage, there are two layers for maximizing the duration of self-power supply duration in extreme conditions. The study first proposed a resilient energy management system for residential communities (CEMS), by scheduling and coordinating the battery energy storage system and energy consumption of houses/units. Moreover, it also proposed a hierarchical resilient energy management system (EMS) by fully considering the appliance-level local scheduling. The method also takes into account customer satisfaction and lifestyle preferences in order to form the optimal outcome. To further enhance the robustness of the CPS system, a complex multi-hop wireless remote metering network model for communication layout on the CPS demand side was proposed. This decreased the number and locations of data centers on the demand side and reduced the security risk of communication and the infrastructure cost of the smart grid for residential energy management. A novel evolutionary aggregation algorithm (EAA) was proposed to obtain the minimum number and locations of the local data centers required to fulfill the connectivity of the smart meters. Finally, the potential for virus attacks has also been studied as well. A trade-off strategy to confront viruses in the system with numerous network nodes is proposed. The allocation of antivirus programs and schemes are studied to avoid system crashes and achieve the minimum potential damages. A DOWNHILL-TRADE OFF algorithm is proposed to address an appropriate allocation strategy under the time evolution of the expected state of the network. Simulations are conducted using the data from the Smart Grid, Smart City national demonstration project trials.

{"references": ["Ilmarinen. J, Tuomi. K, Eskelinen. L, Nygard. C-H, Huuhtanen. P & Klockars., Background and objectives of the finish research project on\naging workers in municipal occupations, Second. J. Work Environ. Health, Vol.17, Supplement 1, 1981, pp.7-11.", "Kawakami. M & Kajihara. Y (2001), A model for activating the elderly in the production system, Proc. of NES2001, 2001, pp.359-363.", "Seisamo. J & Ilmarinen. J (1997), Life-Style aging and work ability\namong active finish workers in 1981-1992, Second. J. Work Environ.\nHealth, Vol.23, Supplement 1, 1997, pp.20-26.", "Nygard. C-H, Huuhtanen. P, Tuomi. K & Martikainen. R, Perceived work\nchanges between 1981 and 1992 among aging workers in finland, Second.\nJ. Work Environ. Health, Vol.23, Supplement 1, 1997, pp.12-19.", "Haermae. M & Ilmarinen. J, Towards the 24-hour Society-New\nApproaches for Aging Shift Workers?, Second. J. Work Environ. Health, Vol. 25, No.6, 1999, pp.610-615.", "Huuhtanen. P, The aging worker in a changing work environment, Second.\nJ. Work Environ. Health, Vol.14, Supplement 1, 1998, pp.21-23.", "Ilmarinen. J, Aging workers, Occupational & Environmental Medicine,\nVol.58, Issue 8, 2001, pp.546-552.", "Kondo. M, Working-hours management for prevention of heat disorders\nin workplaces at high temperature, Journal of working environment,\nVol.29, No.4, 2008, pp. 62-70.", "Shishime. T, Promoting countermeasures on urban heat island towards\nlow carbon society, Environmental & sanitary engineering research,\nVol.22, No.3, 2008, pp. 195-198.\n[10] FY 2008 Annual Energy Report (outline) (2009, Aug). Agency for\nNatural Resources and Energy (ANRE) (Online). Available:\nhttp://www.enecho.meti.go.jp/english/report/outline.pdf.\n[11] Global Environment Global Environment News Headline. The FY 2008\nAnnual Report on Ozone Layer Monitoring (2009, Sep 14). Ministry of\nthe Environment Government (Online). Available:\nhttp://www.env.go.jp/en/headline/headline.php."]} The top-heavy demographic of low birth-rate and longer lifespan is a growing social problem, and one of its expected effects will be a shortage of young workers and a growing reliance on a workforce of middle-aged and older people. However, the environment of today's industrial workplace is not particularly suited to middle-aged and older workers, one notable problem being temperature control. Higher temperatures can cause health problems such as heat stroke, and the number of cases increases sharply in people over 65. Moreover, in conditions above 33°C, older people can develop circulatory system disorders, and also have a higher chance of suffering a fatal heart attack. We therefore propose a new method for controlling temperature in the indoor workplace. In this study two different verification experiments were conducted, with the proposed temperature control method being tested in cargo containers and conventional houses. The method's effectiveness was apparent in measurements of temperature and electricity consumption

Designing for Zero Waste is a timely, topical and necessary publication. Materials and resources are being depleted at an accelerating speed and rising consumption trends across the globe have placed material efficiency, waste reduction and recycling at the centre of many government policy agendas, giving them an unprecedented urgency. While there has been a considerable literature addressing consumption and waste reduction from different disciplinary perspectives, the complex nature of the problem requires an increasing degree of interdisciplinarity. Resource recovery and the optimisation of material flow can only be achieved alongside and through behaviour change to reduce the creation of material waste and wasteful consumption. This book aims to develop a more robust understanding of the links between lifestyle, consumption, technologies and urban development.

In 2000, household heads of three villages located in or near forests in the south of West Bengal, India, were interviewed using a structured questionnaire1. The questionnaire is attached as an Appendix to this paper. The questions asked were designed to provide information about the extent of the dependence of households on state forests for their livelihood (cash income and subsistence needs), any differences in the degree of their forest dependence according to gender, threats to the sustainability of forest resources, the expected sustainability of the income of villagers from forest resources, as well as to provide data about forest management practices, such as a joint forest management. The latter involves cooperation between villagers and the West Bengal Forest Department. The villagers undertake to protect trees in their nearby state forest from pilfering in return for a quarter of the net income from sales of commercial timber by the Forest Department. An overview and assessment and general results of the surveys can be found in Clem Tisdell, Kartik Roy and Ananda Ghose, “Villagers and the Use of Conservation of Indian Forests: The Role of Joint Forest Management”, Social Economics, Policy and Development, Working Paper No.17, June 2001. The purpose of this present paper is to provide more detailed data summaries. The data are provided firstly for the three villages combined then for each individual village (Atabanda, Barabugpichla and Chandmura). All the villagers surveyed belonged to the Santal scheduled tribe. These three villages are located in the north Midnapore region north of Salbani, with Chandrakona Road being the nearest township. The general location of the survey area is indicated in Figure 1.1. The total sample consisted of 96 household heads, representing virtually all families in the villages of Atabanda (32 household heads). Barabugpichla (29) and Chandmura (35). The particular location of these villages is shown in Figure 1.2. Of these villages, Chandmura was most closely associated with the Arabari forest that, as mentioned earlier, was the scene of the earliest experiments with joint forest management in India.

Decentralised urban growth has been pursued as a policy aim for sometime as a means to reduce travel demand and improve sustainability. A great deal of emphasis has been on developing work places in outer and middle suburbs in Australian cities aimed at reducing the mono-centric nature of cities. Given the concerns over sustainability, adaptation to climate change, urban development and transport systems are crucial issues in modern Australian metropolitan planning. Most current planning strategies argue for mixed land uses promoting housing and employment in cities at higher densities. Empirical evidence of employment distributions in Australian cities suggests that the in nercity, in particular the central business district, continued to grow in size and diversity of employment. Middle and outer regions of cities mainly consist of residential developments with negligible employment thus accentuating the need for commuting to the inner city. This trend has to be halted if not reversed if our cities are to become more sustainable with decreasing reliance on private transport. This paper will present the empirical evidence of employment distribution in the Adelaide metropolitan region based on analysis of the‘Working Population Profile’ published for the first time by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as part of Census 2006. This paper will present the existing pattern of employment distribution and outline possible opportunities for achieving decentralised urban development and sustainability. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Plasma amino acid abnormalities in rats treated with large doses of sake and whisky for 3 days were investigated under adequate nutritional conditions. A significant decrease in plasma branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) levels was observed in sake- but not whisky-treated rats. However, known factors affecting BCAA levels, such as serum insulin and plasma glucagon levels ahd BCAA-metabolizing enzyme (BCAA transaminase and branched chain alpha-ketoacid dehydrogenase) activities in the liver and skeletal muscle, were not significantly altered in the sake group. Furthermore, ethanol-metabolizing enzyme (alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases and the microsomal ethanol-oxidizing system) activities in the liver were not altered in the sake group. Other mechanisms need to be considered for explaining the diminished levels of plasma BCAA in sake-treated rats.