The Textbook
It provides an integrated, system-oriented introduction to the concepts, theories and issues surrounding the quest for a sustainable future for Planet Earth.Research & Education Tools
In this section we are collecting interactive tools that can be used for research and teaching.Look at a few projects by us and other people.
Featured Content
The idea of ‘waste’
What is waste? A friend once took me to the urban waste treatment plant in Kolkata and I had the strange experience of looking into the stomach and intestines of a huge organism. Across an enormous field, human beings were processing from the right to the left the urban garbage stream in a kind of digestive process. It looked more organized than the thousands of people searching for recyclable material in the huge landfills and municipal waste dumps in Lagos, Rio [...]
Other Educational Material, Narratives and Relevant Content
Guar gum: Indian farmers and USA gas fracking
Angkur Pailiwal and Jyotika Sood tell an interesting story about the rapidly increasing demand for guar gum for use in the exploitation of shale gas (‘frackgas’) […]
What are ‘needs’?
Needs is a broad category. It overlaps with wants and desires. It covers a broad array of items, from basic needs for food and shelter to spiritual aspirations. How needs are perceived and actualized is […]
Ancient settlements and resource depletion
Resource overexploitation may have been around from the earliest times. There is evidence that early 9th millennium BP villages collapsed around 8500 BP, while new settlements were founded in quite variable landscapes in the same […]
Sustainable development and the financial system
“If… the ‘services’ of a landlord or hedge fund manager are treated as productive, they magically become part of GDP.” (Mazzucato 2018:97).
SDG10 and the Financial System
One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is […]
Chinese Worldviews
In the book Sustainability Science, I have argued that the location of sustainability is in the center of worldview space, where the balance is found between individual and collective and between material and immaterial (§6.3). […]
Book and Website Reviews
A simple introduction to system dynamics for sustainability – a report by Hördur Haraldson
We humans make mental ‘maps’ of processes around us in order to live and survive. Many of those maps are simplified, based on a limited set of acquired habits and experienced events. The maps also [...]
System dynamics for real-world complexity: two book reviews
There are quite some book on system dynamics which make a connection with sustainable development problems and solutions. Based on personal contacts, I choose two for a brief intrduction. The first one is the book [...]
Games for sustainability education, research and policy
One way to explore integration of the natural and the social sciences is the construction and use of simulation games and policy exercises (cf. Chapter 10 and 12). Since 2013 several websites have come online [...]