The Biosphere Reserve (BR) concept aims at encouraging sustainable development (SD) towards sustainability on the ground by promoting three core functions: conservation, development, and logistic support. Sweden and Ukraine exemplify the diverse governance contexts that BRs need to cope with. We assessed how the BR concept and its core functions are captured in national legislations. The result...

corporate social responsibility is a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business activities and interactions  with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis. in this global context, voluntary social and environmental practices of business which go beyond companies’ existing legal obligations play a major role in filling the governance gap in an innovati...

Research and innovation are vital to promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe in line with Europe 2020 and should continue to receive a high – and ideally increased – proportion of the 2014-2020 EU Budget which is re-prioritised to focus on sustainable growth. Both challenge “pull” and technology/knowledge “push” research will be needed to deliver the twin objectives of susta...

This aim of this paper is to help explain the differences between the terms “sustainable development” and “green growth”. The concept of “sustainable development” was developed during the 80s and was based on three pillars: economy, environment and society. The concept of “green growth” is a more recent one. The two concepts have several differences. The first difference is that, from sustainab...

Rural Development is a priority in Europe and it is supported by specific, financial programmes. At the same time, sustainability is the key word for the European Union to construct programmes and policies for all human activities. However, measuring sustainability of rural areas is not easy, due to their particular features. The improvement of knowledge on sustainability in rural areas is impo...

this paper examines the application of a gis based planning support system, what if? tm, to evaluate alternative growth policies for sustainable urban growth in a rapidly growing city of iran. the paper describes the study area, dorood city, and the what if? model. it then explains the procedures that were used to obtain the required data and to run the model to dorood city. the paper concludes...

Sustainable energy utilization and environmental protection are important to sustainable economic growth. In this paper, we develop an endogenous economic growth model and discuss the optimal path of sustainable economic growth with the constraints of energy and environment. We find that sustainable economic growth can be achieved only when the relative contribution rate of environment protecti...

The challenges of how to respond to climate change and ensure sustainable development are currently high on the political agenda among the world’s leading nations. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is part of the global carbon market developing rapidly as part of the Kyoto response towards mitigation of global warming. One of the aims of the CDM is to achieve sustainable development in deve...

Global mental health (GMH) is a growing domain with an increasing capacity to positively impact the world community's efforts for sustainable development and wellbeing. Sharing and synthesizing GMH and multi-sectoral knowledge, the focus of this paper, is an important way to support these global efforts. This paper consolidates some of the most recent and relevant 'context resources' [global mu...