Fourteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability
January 17-19, 2018
The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia
The 2019 Conference will be in Vancouver B.C.!
The International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability attendees include leaders in the field, as well as emerging scholars, who travel to the conference from all corners of the globe and represent a broad range of disciplines and perspectives. A variety of presentation options and session types offer opportunities for attendees to share their work, discuss key issues in the field, and build relationships with attendees.
Theme 1: Environmental Sustainability
Studies of sustainability with a focus on environmental analyses
- The science and technology of environmental sustainability
- Ecosystemics
- Sustainable agriculture
- Urbanization and its consequences
- Ecological footprints and ecospaces
- Atmosphere and biosphere: global warming, the ozone layer, pollution
- Energy: renewable and not
- Water: sources and uses
- Land and sea, mountain and savannah, desert and wet zones, forests and coasts: variable impacts on varied environments
- Biological diversity: its past and prospects
- Biotechnology and its critics
- Danger signs: rising sea levels, desertification, soil degradation
Theme 2: Sustainability in Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
Studies of sustainability with a focus on sociocultural and economic analyses
- One, two, three, four, how many “bottom lines”?
- The meaning of cultural sustainability and sustainable heritage development
- Belonging and identity: their environmental, economic, and social significance
- Changing patterns and cultures of consumption
- Cosmopolis: local cultures, globalization, diaspora
- Women and men, children and the elderly, families and sustainability
- Cultural dimensions of childbearing and population growth
- Cultural tourism
- Indigenous peoples: self-government, self management, and cultural autonomy.
- Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices of sustainability: broadening the scope of valid knowledge
- The economics of environment, culture, and society
- What is economic value?
- Cultural, social, and environmental capital
- The economics of sustainability
- Needs, wants, and demand: reconfiguring the economic equation
- Business cases: the cost and value of sustainability
- Risks and risk management: where economy meets environment, culture, and society
- Free trade and fair trade
- Global flows: finance, trade, technology transfer, and debt
- Sustainable aid and aid for sustainability
- The dynamics of production and consumption
- Accountability: beyond financial years and bottom lines
- Measuring performance and reporting sustainability
- Organizations and corporations: defining the stakeholders and meeting their interests
- Development, underdevelopment, and sustainability
- Tourism and its impacts
- Sustainable and unsustainable transportation
- Wellbeing and quality of life: sources and strategies
- Gender and sustainability
- Poverty and its eradication
- Health in its environmental, cultural, economic, and social contexts
- Population growth and its consequences
- Wastes and waste management
- Urbanization and the sustainability of human settlement
Theme 3: Sustainability Policy and Practice
Addressing sustainability agendas and the practices flowing from these in government, corporate, and community sectors
- The politics of sustainability
- Global sustainability policies
- National sustainability policies and initiatives
- Sustainability in local government
- Corporate sustainability initiatives
- Community and NGO sustainability initiatives
- Measuring impacts: environmental assessment
- Bioethics
- Nature as intellectual and physical property
- Civic pluralism: multiculturalism and cultural sustainability
- Cultural and political liberalization: challenges and dangers
- The arts and creativity as a resource for sustainability
- Structures of ownership: private property, public property, and the commons
- Good citizenship in fragile environments, cultures, economies, societies
- Levels of governance: interactions of sustainability initiatives at local, regional, national, and international levels
- Domains of responsibility: NGOs, corporations, persons
- The sources of sustainable innovation
- Planning for sustainability
- Capacity building in theory and practice
- Sustainability and community participation
- Managing “human resources”
Theme 4: Sustainability Education
On teaching and learning about human relations to the environment and raising community awareness of sustainability
- Environmental education in a time of ecosystemic crisis
- Teaching and learning sustainability: schools, universities, communities
- The media, public awareness, and community education on sustainability
- Education sustaining language and culture
- Public knowledge: the role of the media and government
- Natural and social sciences: taking a holistic view
- Researching sustainability
- Knowledge capacities: developing sustainability science and technology locally