Modelling Sustainable Development - Transitions to a Sustainable Future (Electronic book text)

'...the book is interesting for those who would like to know more about the economic energy and climate change models used in the EU and for those who are specialist builders and/or users of such models...[it] contains some interesting discussions on highly relevant issues in the modelling of environment-energy-economy systems...' - Erik Mathijs, European Review of Agricultural Economics . 'This book offers valuable analysis, insights and pragmatic guidelines from a group of leading researchers who have ample experience with sustainability indicators and their use in applied economic models. It is an important contribution to the growing literature on making development more sustainable, and nicely complements recent work on the sustainomics framework that focuses on balancing the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.' - Mohan Munasinghe, University of Manchester, UK, Munasinghe Institute for Development (MIND), Sri Lanka and Co-winner, 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace (Vice Chair, IPCC-AR4). This insightful book explores the issue of sustainable development in its more operative and applied sense. Although a great deal of research has addressed potential interpretations and definitions of sustainable development, much of this work is too abstract to offer policy-makers and researchers the feasible and effective guidelines they require. This book redresses the balance. The authors highlight how various indicators and aggregate measures can be included in models that are used for decision-making support and sustainability assessment. They also demonstrate the importance of identifying practical means to assess whether policy proposals, specific decisions or targeted scenarios are sustainable. With discussions of basic concepts relevant to understanding applied sustainability analysis, such as definitions of costs and revenue recycling, this book provides policy-makers, researchers and graduate students with feasible and effective principles for measuring sustainable development.