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This chapter presents an overview of positive motivators for students, lecturers, and educational managers to prioritize Sustainable Development in education. Very often, we implicitly assume that students and colleagues should all be motivated by the great challenges that the world faces. And if they appear not to react sufficiently to these challenges, we sometimes tend to give these challenges an apocalyptic character. But is this the right motivator for students and colleagues to work on Sustainable Development? We all know that if you only use a stick and no carrot… So why don’t we use more carrots? The bureaucracy that comes with tools for checking/auditing/evaluating the (SD content of) programs/curricula is not particularly a strong motivator for university lecturers. And building courses that add another subject to the erudition of the graduate might not be the right motivators for students that want to make a difference. We are often still in the process of convincing university managers to add SD to the curriculum, convincing colleagues to address SD, and convincing students to pick SD electives and address SD in their projects. How to motivate them to do this when this gives them no direct personal reward and even might increase their workload? The paper will explore options to develop motivating educating by reviewing case studies on educational renewal in four universities. It concludes that there are various options for more motivating education. However, to fully utilize these options, more priority should be given to education. Peer Reviewed

AbstractRising atmospheric [CO2] and associated climate change are expected to modify primary productivity across a range of ecosystems globally. Increasing aridity is predicted to reduce grassland productivity, although rising [CO2] and associated increases in plant water use efficiency may partially offset the effect of drying on growth. Difficulties arise in predicting the direction and magnitude of future changes in ecosystem productivity, due to limited field experimentation investigating climate and CO2 interactions. We use repeat near‐surface digital photography to quantify the effects of water availability and experimentally manipulated elevated [CO2] (eCO2) on understorey live foliage cover and biomass over three growing seasons in a temperate grassy woodland in south‐eastern Australia. We hypothesised that (i) understorey herbaceous productivity is dependent upon soil water availability, and (ii) that eCO2 will increase productivity, with greatest stimulation occurring under conditions of low water availability. Soil volumetric water content (VWC) determined foliage cover and growth rates over the length of the growing season (August to March), with low VWC (<0.1 m3 m−3) reducing productivity. However, eCO2 did not increase herbaceous cover and biomass over the duration of the experiment, or mitigate the effects of low water availability on understorey growth rates and cover. Our findings suggest that projected increases in aridity in temperate woodlands are likely to lead to reduced understorey productivity, with little scope for eCO2 to offset these changes.

This paper proposes a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) consisting of photovoltaic (PV), wind and forest wood biomass power for cogeneration, and applies a multi-objective optimization methodology to study the trade-offs between life-cycle cost and environmental impact (EI) of such a system. The optimization is achieved by applying an operation strategy that maximizes the efficiency of the biomass power subsystem coupled with an optimization model based on the use of genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain the optimal system sizing. The system is designed to supply the electricity demand of a rural township and the thermal demand – both heating and sanitary hot water (SHW) – of a neighborhood in a district heating (DH) scheme. Indigenously available renewable energy sources (RES) are used, taking special care in the case of biomass to not exceed the self-growth rate of local tree species. Results show that by taking advantage of the thermal energy produced, the payback time of the investment required to install the system is significantly reduced, being profitable after 9 years. Furthermore, it is also observed that layouts with low costs have greater EI and vice versa. However, it is shown that moderate cost increases have great returns on EI reduction.

This paper provides an overview of the last 40 years of use, and in many cases abuse, of the natural resources in Catalonia, a country that is representative of European countries in general, and especially those in the Mediterranean region. It analyses the use of natural resources made by mining, agriculture, livestock, logging, fishing, nature tourism, and energy production and consumption. This use results in an ecological footprint, i.e., the productive land and sea surface required to generate the consumed resources and absorb the resulting waste, which is about seven times the amount available, a very high number but very similar to other European countries. This overexploitation of natural resources has a huge impact on land and its different forms of cover, air, and water. For the last 25 years, forests and urban areas have each gained almost 3% more of the territory at the expense of agricultural land; those municipalities bordering the sea have increased their number of inhabitants and activity, and although they only occupy 6.7% of the total surface area, they account for 43.3% of the population; air quality has stabilized since the turn of the century, and there has been some improvement in the state of aquatic ecosystems, but still only 36% are in good condition, while the remainder have suffered morphological changes and different forms of nonpoint source pollution; meanwhile the biodiversity of flora and fauna remains still under threat. Environmental policies do not go far enough so there is a need for revision of the legislation related to environmental impact and the protection of natural areas, flora, and fauna. The promotion of environmental research must be accompanied by environmental education to foster a society which is more knowledgeable, has more control and influence over the decisions that deeply affect it. Indeed, nature conservation goes hand in hand with other social and economic challenges that require a more sustainable vision. Today’s problems with nature derive from the current economic model, which is environmentally unsustainable in that it does not take into account environmental impacts. Lastly, we propose a series of reasonable and feasible priority measures and actions related to each use made of the country’s natural resources, to the impacts they have had, and to their management, in the hope that these can contribute to improving the conservation and management of the environment and biodiversity and move towards sustainability.