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Genuine Savings (GS), also known as ‘net adjusted savings’, is a composite indicator of the sustainability of economic development. Genuine Savings reflects year-on-year changes in the total wealth or capital of a country, including net investment in produced capita, investment in human capital, depletion of natural resources, and damage caused by pollution. A negative Genuine Savings rate suggests that the stock of national wealth is declining and that future utility must be less than current utility, indicating that economic development is non-sustainable (Hamilton and Clemens, 1999). We make use of data over a 150 year period to examine the relationship between Genuine Savings and a number of indicators of well-being over time, and compare the relative changes in human, produced, and components of natural capital over the period. Overall, we find that the magnitude of genuine savings is positively related to changes in future consumption, with some evidence of a cointegrating relationship. However, the relationships between genuine savings and infant mortality or average heights are less clear.

From the British debate on the depletion of coal in 1865 to the First World Power Conference held in London in 1924, scientists, engineers, industrialists, and politicians produced new interpretations of the past, present, and future in terms of the mobilisation of energy resources. This thesis identifies an emerging ‘energy developmentalism’, which called for maximising energy use to maintain or improve a nation’s place in international competition. Energy developmentalism was not a marginal worldview confined to ‘energeticists’, but a coherent set of claims, measurements, and arguments that informed energy governance on an international scale. Rather than focusing on a single resource, energy developmentalism applied a unified schema to all energy sources, including those like solar and tidal energy that were still mostly theoretical. Drawing on sources from across Europe, while staying grounded in political changes in Britain and France, makes it possible to understand how a general formula for transforming raw materials with maximum efficiency was applied differently depending on specific political contexts. This period saw the articulation of problems like the depletion of resources, the difference between renewable and nonrenewable energy, the intermittency of renewables, the overreliance on a single source of energy, and the centrality of energy to modern economies – problems that are often associated with later periods. Scientific measurements of efficiency, horsepower, and kilowatts became operators in political debates centred on questions of national standing and progress. Even as oil became increasingly important in the world economy, the delegates at the First World Power Conference transformed a vision of a renewable energy future into one of a general expansion of energy consumption as the basis of progress. In so doing, they downplayed the continued importance of fossil fuels and equated ‘conservation’ with the fullest possible use of all energy sources, renewable or not.

This timely book critically examines the role played by international, regional and national legal frameworks in holding corporations operating in the natural resource sector accountable for human rights violations in the Global South, probing the effectiveness of the mechanisms available to aggrieved communities in pursuit of effective remedies and socio-ecological justice. The book brings together influential scholars from across the world addressing topical and relevant themes concerning the integration of business & human rights standards for better governance of natural resources and the transition towards net zero societies, especially in the context of extractive and multinational companies operating in the Global South. It also considers the application and implementation of transnational and domestic legal remedies for holding corporations accountable with references to case studies in natural resources governance in selected countries and regions, in particular Africa, Asia and Latin America. The book reviews proposals for an enforceable legal framework on the liability of corporations for human rights abuses and environmental damage, taking account of the existing initiatives such as the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, UN’s Draft Business & Human Rights Treaty and the European Commission’s 2022 proposal for a Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence. The book is essential reading for academics and students working or researching in the fields of business law, human rights and natural resources law; as well as corporate and human rights lawyers and practitioners litigating in the energy and natural resources sectors.

Attempts by governments and NGOs to provide modern solutions to the management of local water resources, and to alleviate the hazards of flooding, often create unforeseen problems adversely affecting future water resources and leading to increased vulnerability to crises. The book outlines the need to develop an integrative approach. The Hydro-hazardscape concept draws upon the landscape school within cultural geography to make a case for awarding centrality to hazards in social life, that parallels the esthetic view in the landscape tradition. The approach furthermore, makes a case for apprehending power differentials inherent in social life by being attentive to the dissonance and conflict between the analytical view of hazardous environments by the powerful and technocrats and lived experience of those environments by the vulnerable populations. It is argued that by adopting the approach that is attentive to the multiple values of water in the communities affected, can one hope for any measure of success. Examples from South Asia, Central America, the Caucasus and the USA, illustrate how the approach will help achieve long-term sustainability in a future filled with climate change.

Wind turbines are a proven source of clean energy with wind power energy harvesting technologies supplying about 3% of global electricity consumption. However there is an increasing demand on maintenance and operational improvements since turbines have been plagued with downtime problems of major components e.g. gearboxes and generators, especially with offshore turbines which are difficult to access. Reliability Centric Maintenance (RCM) is a way of capturing the potential causes of downtime and poor performance by preventing failures and having a proactive approach to operations and maintenance (O&M). However, for a large fleet of turbines, adopting the RCM approach becomes difficult due to the complexities that arise as a result of the interactions between individual elements that make up the system in the product lifecycle. This paper discusses how a systems thinking approach can be used to identify the relevant aspects and possible interactions between the RCM approach and wind turbine gearboxes and also how the gaps that exist within the system can be closed so as to add value to business. The outcome of the paper is a proposal for applying a systems approach to wind turbine gearbox operation and maintenance, optimising the asset value adding contribution at minimal total cost to the operator.

This article will address a number of issues of law and policy. First, each option requires to be analysed in terms of the wider debate on relative sustainability in waste management, in order to determine which is most effective and attainable. Secondly, the solid waste route presents a number of particular problems. The term 'domestic sanitary solids' is not a term of art and its meaning must be compared to relevant statutory definitions. Consequential issues arise in relation to the lawfulness of current methods of disposal, particularly whether special provision is required under rules for the management of clinical waste. Finally, an assessment is made of the effects of new EU legislation, in particular the Landfill Directive, and conclusions are drawn as to the Best Practicable Environmental Options for policymakers and other stakeholders in waste and wastewater management. It should be noted that whilst most waste management legislation is uniform throughout Great Britain, legislation relating to the supply of sewerage services is not. Unless otherwise stated, the applicable law is that of Scotland. However, the analysis will be applicable wherever the WC is used as a disposal route for domestic waste.

There is a need to better understand the dynamic interactions between people, organisation, and physical infrastructure when working to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) emissions and utility bills in organisations. This paper presents a Systems Dynamics approach to the problem that combines both the social and the technical factors affecting a building’s carbon emissions over time in a single model. Through assigning variables to represent both the soft aspects of the building system – organisational culture, roles and responsibilities, energy management attitudes, etc.; and the physical infrastructure – rated power of plug load equipment, building services equipment, building fabric, etc. – a SD model can indicate which factors are most important. We anticipate there will be several long-term benefits from the use of this model, namely: 1) helping to bring clarity to a very messy problem, 2) providing a picture of how carbon and energy issues change over time, 3) getting people within an organisation to incorporate carbon management into their everyday work life. GHG emissions are often overlooked in organisations but we believe that proactive, ongoing carbon management should be as important as meeting legal or health and safety requirements and that it is essential for an organisation’s long-term resilience.

Climate change has been widely recognised as one of the most urgent and growing threats to natural and cultural heritage in the twenty-first century, and the indelible impact of humanity has led to the definition of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by natural and human-induced changes to the environment. Their vulnerability is exacerbated by centuries of cultural and territorial disenfranchisement within settler-colonial nations. This dissertation aims at understanding Indigenous perceptions of heritage in the face of climate change and its intersection with the impacts of settler- colonialism. It analyses how these on-the-ground perceptions can, in turn, inform heritage organisations and contribute to safeguarding the many facets of tangible and intangible Indigenous heritage for future generations in the Anthropocene. This is accomplished through a comparative, transnational case study of two communities each from the Dehcho First Nations in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and the Aymara and Quechua peoples in northern Chile. I use a multi-method approach consisting of semi-structured interviews, oral histories and participant observation. The data is complemented by environmental and heritage legislation and grey literature at multiple organisational scales for both case studies. Three lines of enquiry are explored through an applied comparative thematic analysis: i) the perceptions of climate change and associated land loss/change among Indigenous groups and how this impacts each group’s notions of challenges to its cultural identity; ii) the intersection of the effects of post- colonialism, ongoing industrial activities and climate change on the intergenerational transmission of ancestral knowledge and notions of place attachment; and iii) how international, national and regional political and sociocultural rhetoric on environmental and heritage conservation affect local, grassroots considerations for safeguarding heritage. The similarities and contrasts of the Dehcho First Nations, Aymara and Quechua experiences of climate change across the North-South divide are related from the grassroots to arrive at redefining heritage practices in the Anthropocene. The results demonstrate that decolonising heritage is not only necessary, but that this decolonisation depends on building and actively engaging in intercultural empathy through the global threat of climate change. In order to understand how Indigenous practices, places, and items are valorised—attributed value—as heritage in the face of climate change, one must empathise with the cultural loss that exists in the temporal and cognitive spaces between Indigenous individuals’ moments of nostalgic reference and today.