While technological advancement leads to societal benefits in terms of economic growth, it also brings with it challenges in its impact on the environment or human health. Sustainable development seeks a uniform means of comparing the economic benefits with the environmental and health costs associated with the implementation of a new technology.This revised encyclopedia investigates sustainability initiatives across a range of industries, providing insight into future opportunities for technological development. A broad spectrum of human challenges have only become more intense since publication of the first edition. For example, climate change is now observed across the globe as a contributor to large scale weather events, including extreme drought in Australia, intense wildfires in California, and flooding along the great rivers of Africa, North and South America. Land in the Amazon rain forest is destroyed to provide increased cropland, contributing to climate change. Expansion of the use of biomass as a raw material in chemical processing leads to food shortages. In many cases, these challenges have the greatest impact on the poorest nations, and the most polluting manufacturing facilities are located in the poorest communities, demonstrating social justice challenges.Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies, Four Volume Set provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges of modern technology, and the innovations that are leading to better use of limited resources and improved resiliency as we learn to adapt to a changing world. Each chapter examines in depth a technological solution to support a specific human need, evaluates it relative to its impacts on the environment and human health, and considers the social justice issues underlying its development.The new edition provides a stronger link between manufacturing and climate change, updates on new technologies for the generation, distribution and storage of energy, new concepts in resiliency and modularity that have changed manufacturing and chemical processes, and emphasizes the trade-offs required to obtain desired products while minimizing environmental impact.
Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies, Eight Volume Set provides an authoritative assessment of the sustainable technologies that are currently available or in development. Sustainable technology includes the scientific understanding, development and application of a wide range of technologies and processes and their environmental implications. Systems and lifecycle analyses of energy systems, environmental management, agriculture, manufacturing and digital technologies provide a comprehensive method for understanding the full sustainability of processes. In addition, the development of clean processes through green chemistry and engineering techniques are also described. The book is the first multi-volume reference work to employ both Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approaches to assessing the wide range of technologies available and their impact upon the world. Both approaches are long established and widely recognized, playing a key role in the organizing principles of this valuable work.
Satellite Soil Moisture Retrieval: Techniques and Applications offers readers a better understanding of the scientific underpinnings, development, and application of soil moisture retrieval techniques and their applications for environmental modeling and management, bringing together a collection of recent developments and rigorous applications of soil moisture retrieval techniques from optical and infrared datasets, such as the universal triangle method, vegetation indices based approaches, empirical models, and microwave techniques, particularly by utilizing earth observation datasets such as IRS III, MODIS, Landsat7, Landsat8, SMOS, AMSR-e, AMSR2 and the upcoming SMAP. Through its coverage of a wide variety of soil moisture retrieval applications, including drought, flood, irrigation scheduling, weather forecasting, climate change, precipitation forecasting, and several others, this is the first book to promote synergistic and multidisciplinary activities among scientists and users working in the hydrometeorological sciences.
The United States accounts for 25% of the Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. To keep pace with growing electricity demands, the U.S and developing countries are turning more to coal-fired generation with correspondingly greater GHG emissions and other forms of pollution. Therefore, it is imperative to focus on what can be done to reverse this trend. At the same time, technologies for renewable energy generation and energy efficiency are available, and increasingly, these are being deployed on a cost-competitive basis. Environmental financial trading and the markets offer a solution and a way forward through Green Trading!Environmental financial trading began in the U.S in 1995 and has since spread to many countries. Green Trading Markets provides valuable information on continued U.S innovations in the context of the global development of green commodity markets.
Carbon Isotope Techniques is a hands-on introduction to using carbon isotope tracers in experimental biology and ecology. It provides an easy bench-top reference with many simple-to-follow protocols for studying plants, animals, and soils. The 11C, 12C, 13C, and 14C carbon isotopes are considered and standard techniques are described by established authors. This is a synthetic compilation of well-established techniques.Researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines spanning plant and soil science, agricultural chemistry, forestry, ecology, oceanography, limnology, biogeochemistry, anthropology, and archaeology will find Carbon Isotope Techniques a valuable resource.