Routledge International Handbook of Sustainable Development

The Handbook of Sustainable Development comprehensively explores our understanding of ‘sustainable development’ in a holistic and multidisciplinary approach. It goes back to earlier sustainability notions to current diverse theories while accounting by over more than 25 years of debate influenced by sustainability research and the political agenda. Based on these theories of sustainable development, the Handbook provides some insights on the possible paths to achieve it, by moving from these theories to concrete actions in the form of sustainable development goals. This handbook contains 35 chapters organised into seven parts. The Part I of the handbook, ‘Fundamentals of sustainable development’, introduces the concepts and theories about sustainable development focusing on the debate whether development should be weakly sustainable or strongly sustainable. In Chapter 2, ‘Comprehensive wealth accounting and sustainable development’, sustainable development is operationalised from a weakly sustainable perspective by introducing the capital or wealth based approach. Chapter 3, ‘Sustainable development in ecological economics’, offers a different view on sustainability from the ecological economics discipline, closely related to a strongly sustainable perspective. This Chapter brings together elements from different disciplines such as economics, ecology, geography, ethics, etc. and involves issues of trade, and spatial sustainability, as the building blocks to understand the interaction economy-environment. In Chapter 4, ‘Strong sustainability and critical natural capital’, the strong sustainability perspective is further developed by including the concept of critical natural capital. Along the Chapter, the methods to identify those critical forms of capital and the implications for policy decision-making are introduced. In Chapter 5, ‘Ecosystems as assets’, the author explains the function of ecosystems to provide multiple good and services for current and future generations. This link between ecosystem functions and ecosystem good and service provision is crucial to define ecosystem as capital assets. Issues such as valuation of ecosystem services and concepts of risk, uncertainty and ecosystem collapse are introduced. The last chapter of this part, ‘Ecological and social resilience’, builds the concept of ecosystem and social resilience as central elements for sustainable development.