Serious, interconnected risks are closing in on the globalised community, from climate change to anarchy. Are we heeding the warnings?
AAP/EPA/Daniel Deme
In that world of peripheral vision, essential for business, social and political leaders, it is surprising that the World Economic Forum’s report, Global Risks 2012 has not received greater publicity or…
Stuck in Botany Bay: Greenpeace activists celebrate the Danish government's decision to halt Orica's plans to ship toxic waste to Denmark.
AAP
Are sustainability-dependent executive bonuses the answer to saving the planet? Research recently conducted by the Centre for Corporate Governance at the University of Technology, Sydney, examined whether…
Perpetually seduced by the coolest, most "efficient" conveniences, we prefer not to see the heat and waste we leave in our wake.
AAP/EPA/STR
By Anthony James, Swinburne University of Technology
The idea that improving efficiency makes sustainability problems worse seems counter-intuitive. But what if aiming to do more with less is actually doing the wrong thing right? If sustainability is our…
How do we get beyond talking about sustainability to actually being sustainable?
Natural Step Online
Everyone loves sustainable development. While we’re building and planning to improve our quality of life, why not balance and integrate the social, economic, and environmental issues? Hard to imagine that…
Difficult austerity: Bangladesh, where on average it takes 130 women to match the carbon footprint of one American woman.
AAP/EPA/Mufty Fire
In any discussion of the world’s environmental problems, someone will always argue that the core problem is that the world has too many people. Cliff Hooker has recently named it “the elephant in the room…
Take the offer: sharing cuts waste and builds communities but we have our reasons for not always being comfortable with it
Flickr/Zervas
Sharing is a good thing right? We are told it is good for the environment by cutting waste and needless consumption; we encourage it in our children for their moral growth; we see it used in advertising…
A simple step towards saving the environment may lead to more environment action … or not.
Department of Energy Solar Decathalon
Many environmental organisations, governments and businesses rely on “positive spillover strategies” to drive pro-environmental behaviour change. These strategies rest on the assumption once someone has…
Questions of planetary power: a mere 0.3% of transnational corporations control 40% of global revenue.
Flickr/paul (dex)
The Planet Under Pressure 2012 Conference was held in London a fortnight back and released the first State of the Planet Declaration. The conference aim was to set out the science (in a broad sense) in…
Fad fashion has never had it so good… but the fast fashion trend comes at a cost.
AAP
By Alice Payne, Queensland University of Technology
There’s a polyester mullet skirt gracing a derrière near you. It’s short at the front, long at the back, and it’s also known as the hi-lo skirt. Like fads that preceded it, the mullet skirt has a short…
Will the UN recommendations pull people out of poverty and reduce pressure on the environment?
The Advocacy Project
A recent cartoon (below) extrapolates the use of the word “sustainable”. It predicts that in 50 years each sentence will on average contain the word at least once.
The cartoon is clever, and “sustainable…
It's time we found a way to make our trucks greener.
gorbould
Truck transport accounts for roughly 25% of energy used in the global transport sector, making it a substantial contributor (2.6%) to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
As concerns about greenhouse gas…
Indigenous Australians systematically burnt grasslands to reduce fuel and stop fires raging out of control.
Flickr/pietroizzo
Aboriginal people worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable.
By distributing plants and associating them in mosaics, then using these to lure and locate animals, Aborigines…
Sir Rod Eddington: unless the rail networks are right, Australia's cities won’t work properly.
Supplied
Welcome to In Conversation; an ongoing series in which leading academics interview prominent public figures.
In today’s instalment, Dr Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University, sits…
The world's population is racing ahead compared to growth in the rest of the world.
AAP/Dean Lewins
SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE: As the global population passed the seven billion mark yesterday (give or take a few months – the data aren’t exact), Australia’s resident population will reach about 22.75 million…
Responses to climate change are becoming a crucial part of business strategy.
AAP/Google
By Paul Brown, University of Technology, Sydney and Suzanne Benn, University of Technology, Sydney
In early September, Google publicly disclosed details of its carbon footprint for the first time, launching the Google Green website in the process.
The search giant revealed a carbon footprint of 1.5…
Developing sustainable energy sources needs some of the country's best and brightest.
x-ray delta one
Project: Develop hydrogen-based sustainable energyCost: $20 millionTimeframe: Seven years
Finding real green energy is a vital area of research. Is there an energy that meets the needs of its users…
Melbourne and Sydney are set to become mega-cities, but there hasn't been a coherent discussion about our population.
AAP/Torsten Blackwood
The national debate about Australia’s population has been hijacked. It has been dominated by fears that we don’t have the infrastructure to cope with an influx of people, and differing views about migrants…
