Sustainability applied to networking is about treating professional support and assistance like a resource, and creating more of it than you take. Written for an international STEM audience, Sustainable Networking for Scientists and Engineers discusses how to create success and mutually beneficial professional relationships.
"Companies with a stake in the technology industry or that have staked on the Internet (ala Google or Amazon or any of the thousands of small ecommerce companies around the world) are likely to pluck multiple nuggets of wisdom from her book." -- Heather Clancy, business journalist What technologies do we need to solve the complex environmental, economic, social, and political challenges facing us today? As this thought-provoking book reveals, one tool for enacting change is already at our fingertips: the global network. Consider the private domains of companies, governments, and institutions along with the public Internet: we have an immense communications network that connects billions of people in ways we never thought possible. In this book, author Sarah Sorensen clearly demonstrates why this network is the best sustainable technology available to help us tackle a wide range of problems. If each of us represents a node on this network, then it's time we realize the potential we hold. The Sustainable Network is a call to action, urging individuals, governments, markets, and organizations to put the power of this network to good use. Discover how the sustainable network connects us all, with examples of how it's already effecting change Understand how this network magnifies the impact of even the smallest change and newest idea Explore the role that various market and political forces play Learn how the network can be improved to better address environmental, economic, and social conditions Get practical advice that you or your business can follow now
This work considers whether transportation networks are sustainable, asking if they can last, given the growing demands on networks, and the need to alleviate the associated negative impacts. The author offers a foundation for formulation, analysis and computation of possible solutions.
Businesses around the world are increasingly turning to an exciting new branch of management known as corporate sustainability management (CSM) to help them better understand and manage their non-financial performance. Indeed, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the birth of a new management function. The main pillar of CSM is the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), which has been successful as an organizing principle but a disappointment in practice. This is largely due to the absence of 'sustainability context' in related measurement, management and reporting efforts, when for example the monitoring of a company's use of freshwater resources fails to take into account the size of related supplies. This book is the first to introduce a systematic means of including context in sustainability management and doing effective CSM. After making the case for why context matters, the book explains how to do context-based CSM by providing a stepwise, cyclical blueprint for how to practice it in any organization. This includes a template for context-based metrics compatible with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), as well as specific examples of metrics for each of the triple bottom lines. Practical examples of best practices are presented throughout, while simultaneously addressing key issues, such as how organizations can measure performance against context-based standards when consensus for such standards does not yet exist. Appendices include tools for developing and applying context-based metrics, as well as case studies taken from the practice of context-based CSM at two companies in the United States. This guide is the essential tool for business and organizational leaders in all sectors committed to improving their sustainability performance, with a particular emphasis on measurement, management and reporting.
With "Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation," first and second-year college students are introduced to this expanding new field, comprehensively exploring the essential concepts from every branch of knowldege - including engineering and the applied arts, natural and social sciences, and the humanities. As sustainability is a multi-disciplinary area of study, the text is the product of multiple authors drawn from the diverse faculty of the University of Illinois: each chapter is written by a recognized expert in the field.
This book includes novel and state-of-the-art research discussions that articulate and report all research aspects, including theoretical and experimental prototypes and applications that incorporate sustainability into emerging applications. In recent years, sustainability and information and communication technologies (ICT) are highly intertwined, where sustainability resources and its management has attracted various researchers, stakeholders, and industrialists. The energy-efficient communication technologies have revolutionized the various smart applications like smart cities, healthcare, entertainment, and business. The book discusses and articulates emerging challenges in significantly reducing the energy consumption of communication systems and also explains development of a sustainable and energy-efficient mobile and wireless communication network. It includes best selected high-quality conference papers in different fields such as internet of things, cloud computing, data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems, deep learning, neural networks, renewable energy sources, sustainable wireless communication networks, QoS, network sustainability, and many other related areas.
This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.
The book Green, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Networks provides insights and solutions for a range of problems in the field of obtaining greener, energy-efficient, and sustainable networks. The book contains the outcomes of the Special Issue on “Green, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Networks” of the Sensors journal. Seventeen high-quality papers published in the Special Issue have been collected and reproduced in this book, demonstrating significant achievements in the field. Among the published papers, one paper is an editorial and one is a review, while the remaining 15 works are research articles. The published papers are self-contained peer-reviewed scientific works that are authored by more than 75 different contributors with both academic and industry backgrounds. The editorial paper gives an introduction to the problem of information and communication technology (ICT) energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, presenting the state of the art and future trends in terms of improving the energy-efficiency of wireless networks and data centers, as the major energy consumers in the ICT sector. In addition, the published articles aim to improve energy efficiency in the fields of software-defined networking, Internet of things, machine learning, authentication, energy harvesting, wireless relay systems, routing metrics, wireless sensor networks, device-to-device communications, heterogeneous wireless networks, and image sensing. The last paper is a review that gives a detailed overview of energy-efficiency improvements and methods for the implementation of fifth-generation networks and beyond. This book can serve as a source of information in industrial, teaching, and/or research and development activities. The book is a valuable source of information, since it presents recent advances in different fields related to greening and improving the energy-efficiency and sustainability of those ICTs particularly addressed in this book
Sustainability is a word that means different things depending on who is using it, thus underlining the potential problems involved in experts from different fields teaming up to tackle sustainability problems. In this book, Janne Hukkinen argues for a reflexive approach to sustainability as a means of coming to grips with the threatening challenges arising out of human-environment interaction. The author illustrates his argument with a case study of natural resource management in Lapland, showing how sustainability is understood holistically by academics and professionals alike. This book reflects an emerging cognitive turn in sustainability sciences, conceptualizing environmental challenges during action on our social and material environments, rather than in isolation. Hukkinen argues that this conceptual blending enables sustainability experts to hybridize themselves: to immerse themselves in the fields of other experts and imagine the other's work - both prerequisites of trans-disciplinary knowledge integration. This book shows how sustainability experts can reveal their intellectual engagements when designing scenarios and indicators and presents a rigorous framework for organizing expert collaboration.
'Organizations and the Sustainability Mosaic is an inspired collection of papers by a distinguished group of scholars who have been thinking about these issues for many years. The editors have done an outstanding job of framing and focusing the discussion on a group of issues that will matter most as all businesses engage their sustainability challenges. Your thinking will be challenged, and rewarded, by the chapters of this book.' - James E. Post, Boston University, US The contributors to this book present research on crafting long-term ecological and societal solutions in order to achieve sustainability. The in-depth analyses explore the interactions among social, environmental, and development impacts of organizations at community, regional, national and global levels. In doing so they shed light on the way forward amidst the complexity of issues involved, referred to here as the sustainability mosaic.
