Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The challenges associated with achieving sustainable development goals and stabilizing the world’s climate cannot be solved without significant efforts by developing and newly-emerging countries. With respect to climate change mitigation, the main challenge for developing countries lies in avoiding future emissions and lock-ins into emission-intensive technologies, rather than reducing today’s emissions. While first best policy instruments like carbon prices could prevent increasing carbonization, those policies are often rejected by developing countries out of a concern for negative repercussions on development and long-term growth. In addition, policy environments in developing countries impose particular challenges for regulatory policy aiming to incentivize climate change mitigation and sustainable development. This chapter first discusses how climate policy could potentially interact with sustainable development and economic growth. It focuses, in particular, on the role of industrial sector development. The chapter then continues by discussing how effective policy could be designed, specifically taking developing country circumstances into account.

This chapter provides a generalized reflection to understand the need to upgrade our understanding of economics and society within a harmonic and responsible relationship with our environment. We need to accept that the mother of all real economies and harmonic evolution is the creative ability to introduce innovative, adaptive change. We argue, through an historical overview of political and economic choices, how we deviated from this basic understanding up to a dramatic point of bankrupting our natural environment and interhuman relationships. It can be perceived as a potentially unnecessary, unprecedented and manipulated human tragedy. Or we can address it as powerful evolutionary awareness impulse to modify and innovate our societies and economies into a new era, including our common functioning around core universal values and responsibilities. The latter became the transformative research of this sustainocratic venture.

The way we build our human complex societies, their rise and collapse, can be related to the amazing working of our individual and collective consciousness and the (lack of) willingness to address fundamental change. Using the personal path finding and determination of our founder as an example we reveal the coming about of the ideology behind Sustainocracy, the initiation of the STIR Foundation, the forming and growth of the AiREAS cooperative association and finally this publication about the completion of a first phase, making visible the invisible. We relate, through backward interpretation and forward evolution, the scientific insights of Pythagoras, Socrates, Dabrowski, Maslov, Lieberman, Scharmer and Senge, after having put it all into practice and value the results we have achieved so far.

This chapter gives a comprehensive overview of the urban ILM (Innovatief Lucht Meetsysteem, English: Innovative Air Measurement System) that has been installed to monitor air quality in the Dutch City of Eindhoven under the AiREAS initiative. The intention is to provide the necessary scientific and technical details so that a user can understand the provenance of the data. The social rationale for such a system was outlined elsewhere in the book. Technically, the use of modern, low-cost sensors offers the possibility of obtaining new scientific insights by measuring several air quality variables at a finer temporal and spatial resolution than previously possible. Specifically particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5, PM1), ultra-fine particles, nitrogen dioxide (NO) and ozone (O) are measured

With the ILM available to make visible the invisible we have been able to look into the patterns of air pollution in our city at the level. We could build up cases and relate our exposure to pollutants to our own behavior and responsibilities. But our purpose driven and multidisciplinary interaction around the core values of health and air quality revealed many more, previously invisible issues to our awareness. When something becomes visible it starts forming part of our reality and hence also of our choices. The next phases of AiREAS and other sustainocratic initiatives will determine what we do with our new insights on building a society and real economy around our real core values. This first phase is not an end but the beginning of a whole new era.