Product Description

The most comprehensive textbook ever written on sustainable development, pilot-tested worldwide. Coverage includes: background to sustainable development and global environmental issues; measurement and sustainability indicators; environmental assessment, management and policy; approaches and linkages to poverty reduction; impacts and infrastructure development; economics, consumption, production and market failures; governance; participation; disaster management; international financial institutions; international environmental agreements and the role of civil society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271573 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"'The conceptual breadth is impressive. The examples and many graphics are appealing... downright useful' Richard Forman, Professor of Landscape Ecology, Harvard School of Design 'Goes deep into the details and presents the available scientific data for explaining the different issues using interdisciplinary approaches... Extremely useful, especially [for] teachers' Alexandre Kiss, President, European Council on Environmental Law"

Review
The conceptual breadth is impressive. The examples and many graphics are appealing. The authors made a hand-waving topic tangible and nearly hard-core./ The book looks downright useful.
--Richard Forman, Professor of Landscape Ecology, Harvard School of Design

About the Author
Peter P. Rogers is Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering and Professor of City Planning, Harvard University.

Kazi F. Jalal is a lecturer at Harvard’s Extension School and Chief of the Office of Environment and Social Development of the Asian Development Bank.

John A. Boyd formerly a lawyer at ADB, served as a Principal Sector Specialist on Sustainable Development at ADB.

Customer Reviews

A biased book
Firstly, I'll start from positive side. This book is very helpful resource for many numbers and events. Moreover, it is organized (divided into subtitles and sentences are bulleted), but I always lost track along with those many bullets. Some chapters are not really bad. At least I thought that if I need some dates or names of organization, events, I learnt where I can find them easily (but Google is much easier, in fact). That's all my positive words.

Now the negative points:
Firstly keep in mind that that's introduction. It'll introduce you a lot of concepts which may familiar to you (mainly you feel that you are reading your old diary). Then it won't suggest any solution. From the reader's point of view, this book is totally written from the economist's view therefore overlooked some points regarding environment and failed to mention that environment is part of the sustainable development. Some information is a bit odd. I mean the mentioned standards in this book are not practiced in real-life. Moreover, most of examples biased towards favor of World Bank and other financial international organizations.

Overall, this book poorly helped me to understand better about sustainable development due to its simplicity and bias, although I should mention that some (comparatively a few) ideas mentioned through the book were worth to read.