Introduction
Dimensions of Sustainable Development is the component of Encyclopedia of Development and Economic Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias.
The Theme on Dimensions of Sustainable Development, in two volumes, deals with the diversity of points of view on this complex subject.
The chapters in these volumes are organized into five groups. The first starts with chapters introducing the general concepts underlying sustainable development. The second treats current and emerging understandings of the general biophysical limits of economic growth and development. The third focuses on the human and social capital requirements for sustainability. The fourth deals with a particular aspect of the organization of human economic and technological activity. The final group discusses something of the diversity of possible approaches to the management of sustainability.
These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.
Editor(s) Biography
Reinmar Seidler is a graduate student in the Department of Environmental Biology of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has published articles on tropical forest management and sustainable development issues in Conservation Biology journal (1998), the Academic Press Encyclopedia of Biodiversity (2000), and Island Press (forthcoming). His research interests include land use change and environmental education, and he has co-led Earthwatch research groups studying Neotropical butterfly migration.
Kamaljit S. Bawa is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has worked in conservation biology for the last thirty years in Central America and South Asia. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers in professional journals and has edited several monographs and books. He has been a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment. He is the editor in chief of Conservation and Society, a recently launched interdisciplinary journal on conservation; he also serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is, or has been, a member of several national and international advisory panels, and is Past President of the Association for Tropical Biology. He is a member of the board of several foundations, and also the founder-trustee of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). ATREE is a non-governmental organisation devoted to research, action, and education, with units in Bangalore and Bagdogra, India, that respectively focus on two global hotspots of biodiversity: the Western Ghats and the Eastern Himalayas.
