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This CIGRE Green Book describes the state-of-the-art of power Systems asset management dealing with all aspects asset management practice. The major focus of the book is on documenting practical methods  that bridge the gap between just satisfying an asset management process and achieving real asset management results in the form of smarter investment decisions.  The book facilitates collaboration and blending of the engineering and technical aspects of asset management and the financial considerations needed to support asset investment decisions using risk-based business case analysis. Detailed case studies are included to illustrate generic and specific or customized methods and to demonstrate the application of such methods from the technology perspectives of several CIGRE study committees. This practical guide is suitable for working asset managers and decision-makers (both engineering and financial) dealing with all aspects of the practice of asset management.

Everyone has heard of environmentalism, but what is it? Is it ideology or religion? Like socialism, environmentalism is a political program, but even more diffuse. Environmentalists hold diverse opinions, from wanting to take care of nature in human interest to putting nature above man. The latter is religious environmentalism, with nature taking the place of the supernatural. This book is a critique of this type of environmentalism, appropriately named ecofundamentalism. This may be a minority or even marginal opinion, but it seems to shape people's thinking to an unwarranted degree. In the worst of cases, it would bring the end of civilization as we know it.Without massive monocultures, supported by pesticides and fertilizer, we could never feed ourselves. Almost 90 percent of our primary energy comes from fossil fuels, without which there would be no air travel, cars and trucks, reliable electricity, and even much of our food supply. Putting a premium on biodiversity and getting serious about greenhouse gas emissions would force us to go without these things, putting us back in the Middle Ages.Fortunately, there is no need to heed any of these environmentalist prescriptions. Contrary to the notion that economic growth is unsustainable and our core problem, it is actually the core solution. Economic growth and technology has made it possible for food production to outpace population growth since the industrial revolution. Economic growth is one reason why population growth worldwide has fallen so that the ';population bomb' may never explode. It has also made us largely independent of the weather except for growing our crops. Meanwhile, ecofundamentalism would cause more harm than good.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation's forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.

This book sheds light on the mega-city region development in China as a new form of urbanization which plays a crucial role in the economic development of the country. It examines the challenges faced by the mega-city regions and opens up avenues for debates and further research.Economic reform of 1978 has led to an unprecedented growth in the population and economic development of China. A large portion of this increased urban population and the corresponding economic growth has been concentrated in the mega-city regions, such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD). These three mega-city regions have less land but more people and thus higher economy, resulting in various issues and challenges faced by these regions. These challenges pertain to the socio-economic development, transport, environment, governance and development strategy, which this book explores through case studies of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Wuhan. This book also explains and analyses the economy, migration processes, transport development, environmental conditions and governance of the mega-city regions of China.With an overview of China's rapid urbanisation and the consequent economic growth, this book provides an essential understanding of related issues in order to establish appropriate strategies and policies to sustain the process of mega-city region development.

This edited volume portrays marketplaces from a mobility perspective as dynamic and open entities consisting of flows of people, goods and ideas.There is a renewed interest in research and policy arenas in marketplaces as the core of cities' spatial and economic development and sociocultural life, as incubators of urban renewal and platforms of alternative consumption models and as source of livelihood for many people worldwide. Contributions of this book draw on notions of movements, representations and practices to illustrate that markets have physical reality but are also culturally and socially encoded, and experienced through practice. It brings together empirically evidenced scholarly and practice-based works from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, South Africa and India.This book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students of urban geography, urban design and planning, sociology, anthropology, who are interested in the relation between place and mobility in general, and markets as 'knots' in the city, in particular. It also informs policy-makers how urban planning policies and design interventions for marketplaces may foster more socially inclusive and environmentally just cities.Chapters 1, 12, and 13 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book examines our understanding of technology and suggests that machines are counterfeit organisms that seem to replace human bodies but are ultimately means of displacing workloads and environmental loads beyond our horizon.

The informal economy - broadly defined as economic activity that is not subject to government regulation or taxation - sustains a large part of the world's workforce. It is a diverse, complex and growing area of activity. However, being largely unregulated, its impact on the environment has not been closely scrutinised or analysed.This edited volume demonstrates that the informal sector is a major source of environmental pollution and a major reason behind the environmental degradation accompanying the expansion of economic activity in developing countries. Environmental regulation and economic incentive policies are difficult to implement in this sector because economic units are unregistered, geographically dispersed and difficult to identify. Moreover, given their limited capital base, they cannot afford to pay pollution fees or install pollution abating equipment. Informal manufacturing units often operate under unscientific and unhealthy conditions, further contributing to polluting the environment. The book emphasizes and examines these challenges, and their solutions, encountered in various sectors of the informal economy, including urban waste pickers, small-scale farmers, informal workers, home-based workers, street vendors, and more. If the informal sector is to "Leave no one behind" (as the Sustainable Development Goals promise) and contribute to "inclusive growth" (an objective of the green economy), then its impact on the economy as well as the environment has to be carefully considered.This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on both the informal economy and sustainable development, and will be of great interest to readers in economics, geography, politics, environment studies and public policy more broadly.Chapter 4 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

The book studies the relationship between economic agglomeration and environmental pollution from a spatial perspective through theoretical analyses and empirical discussions.At both microscopic and macroscopic levels, the author first explores the impact mechanism of the agglomeration of economic activities on environmental pollution and proposes research frameworks based on spatial economic theory and output density theory. Drawing on descriptive statistics and explorative spatial data from 283 cities in China, the book investigates the current development, spatial characteristics, influence path, and environmental efficiency of urban economic agglomeration and pollution in the People's Republic. The following empirical sections study spatial spillover effects, simultaneous bias and spatial interaction between agglomeration and pollution. The research findings give insight into interregional economic development, joint pollution control across regions, and the coordination of the two, especially in the context of developing countries.The title will appeal to researchers, students, government officials and policymakers interested in development economics, regional economics, urban economics, and environmental economics.

This book explores a series of connected themes focused on the role economics and other influential forms of theory and thinking have played in creating the current predicament and the scope for alternatives and how they might be framed.Thirty years have passed since the inception of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the beginning of policy on climate change. Thirty wasted years. To most politicians, long-term collective interest has been denominated in meaningless units of time, a never and forever that has continually delayed action. From complacency has come potential disaster, and we are now living in a time of climate emergency and ecological breakdown. The next decade is a pivotal period requiring fundamental change. But numerous impediments remain. Continual material, energy and economic growth on a planetary scale are manifestly impossible, and yet economic theory takes these as a given and political leadership and policy seem unwilling to accept brute reality. Instead, they offer a series of implausible commitments and pledges rooted in technofixes, without addressing the fundamental drivers of the problems the world faces.The edited volume explores the issues and offers a variety of ways to think through the problems at hand, from postgrowth, degrowth and social ecological economics to policy assemblage and transversalism.The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.

This book demonstrates that a holistic approach to the bioeconomy is essential if it is to achieve its full potential in driving economic growth while simultaneously providing ecological, social and technological benefits.Definitions of the 'bioeconomy' vary but in general it incorporates the ways in which societies manage and distribute their primary or secondary biological resources for further use in everyday life (e.g. food, materials, and energy). The classical sectors related to the bioeconomy have therefore been agriculture, forestry and aquaculture, now extended to include bioenergy, biofuels, biochemicals, and other processing and service industries. There are also related new concepts such us the blue economy, the green economy, and the circular economy. This book integrates these definitions, sectoral analyses and new concepts into a fully rounded study of the bioeconomy. It is argued that the key aims in the coming years have to be the harmonization of public policies between different sectors, regulation of legislative framework for the bioeconomy, and clear communication of these issues. In particular, the book argues that a strengthening of the monitoring and evaluation of the impacts of the bioeconomy on society is an essential starting point. For this to be effective, appropriate indicators need to be established and defined for the monitoring of the effects of these resilient policies related to bioeconomy and their impact on local and regional development and quality of life.This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the bioeconomy including students and scholars of ecological economics, environmental economics, sustainability, innovation, and regional development.

Deliberative Governance for Sustainable Development argues that governance has become the core problem of sustainable development and identifies deliberative democracy and governance as a path forward for Western societies.In this book the author puts forward three messages. Firstly, while sustainable development theoretically is a common good of all people, it is in practice constantly associated with a multitude of smaller and larger conflicts. These conflicts arise repeatedly because, in practice, the benefits, costs and risks of sustainable development are unequally distributed and therefore form a massive barrier to sustainable development. As a result, sustainable development depends on the ability of the social and political institutions of societies to accommodate these conflicts. Second, within the framework of their established institutional structures, Western societies do not have the sufficient tools for conflict resolution that are adequate to the conditions of modern diversified societies and the complex challenges of sustainable development. They need to implement institutional reforms that switch institutional structures towards deliberation. Third, by switching to deliberation, Western societies can reach the high level of governance that enables them to achieve environmentally sustainable development that will bring them significant economic and social benefits and, as a result, may reach far beyond their borders.This volume offers a novel, transdisciplinary approach to sustainable development and governance in Western societies. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociology, economics, politics, environmental studies and philosophy, as well as professionals and policymakers working in the area of sustainable development.

This edited volume presents a compendium of emerging and innovative studies on the proliferation of new working spaces (NeWSps), both formal and informal (such as coworking spaces, maker spaces, fab labs, public libraries, and coffee shops), and their role during and following the COVID-19 pandemic in urban and regional development and planning. This book presents an original, interdisciplinary approach to NeWSps through three features: (i) situating the debate in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has transformed NeWSp business models and the everyday work life of their owners and users; (ii) repositioning and rethinking the debate on NeWSps in the context of socioeconomics and planning and comparing conditions between before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (iii) providing new directions for urban and regional development and resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic, considering new ways of working and living. The 17 chapters are co-authored by both leading international scholars who have studied the proliferation of NeWSps in the last decade and young, talented researchers, resulting in a total of 55 co-authors from different disciplines (48 of whom are currently involved in the COST Action CA18214 'The Geography of New Working Spaces and Impact on the Periphery' 2019-2023: www.new-working-spaces.eu). Selected comparative studies among several European countries (Western and Eastern Europe) and from the US and Lebanon are presented. The book contributes to the understanding of multi-disciplinary theoretical and practical implications of NeWSps for our society, economy, and urban/regional planning in conditions following the COVID-19 pandemic. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In this edited volume, the leading scholars in the field engage with consumers, marketers, corporations and policymakers as well as space dynamics and network formation to provide an in-depth examination of anti-consumption: a voluntary behavioural inclination to minimise rather than grow, to decelerate and simplify and to reduce the unnecessary exploitation of resources fuelled by consumer culture. This book does not place anti-consumption on the high moral ground but rather demonstrates its complexity to spur innovative and critical thinking on how people, organisations, businesses and governments can treat consumption more as a necessity for survival than as a tool for self-expression, pleasure and economic growth.The first part of this book looks at anti-consumption from a diversity of perspectives. It analyses voluntary simplicity, a self-motivated engagement in consumption reduction, and boycotting, a politically-motivated reaction against unacceptable corporate practices, as distinct manifestations of anti-consumption that nonetheless remain rooted in the logic of the market. Paving the way to critical perspectives on the interface between anti-consumption, people and the environment, the second part of the book projects anti-consumption to issues of waste production and provides possible answers to global challenges of resources depletion, social inequalities and global warming. In this section, anti-consumption is critically assessed as an actor of change, both in terms of social change and paradigm change. To move the field forward, the third part of this book presents several theoretical frameworks that help set a roadmap for future research.Anti-Consumption will be of direct interest to scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing, consumer research, business studies, environmental studies and sustainability. It will also be of value to those researching the economics and/or sociology of markets.

Der globale Wettbewerb zwingt Unternehmen innovative Produkte und Dienstleistungen in immer kürzeren Innovationszyklen zu liefern. Um diese Performance leisten zu können müssen Zukunftstrends und Szenarien zahlreicher Branchen antizipiert und frühzeitig in Projekte und Zielsetzungen integriert werden, dabei können Experimente auch eine Rolle spielen.In diesem Buch stellen verschiedene Autoren aus Wissenschaft und Praxis unterschiedliche Entwicklungen, Zukunftstrends und Szenarien aus verschiedenen Bereichen der Industrien, dem Hochschuldbildungssektor und dem Gesundheitswesen dar. Leserinnen und Leser aus der Praxis erhalten Denkanstöße und Handlungsempfehlungen für Aktivitäten, im Rahmen der Gestaltung von Innovationskonzepten für die Zukunft, in ihrem Unternehmen oder Arbeitsfeld umsetzen können.

Die Beitrage in diesem Fachbuch stellen die volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung des Gesundheitswesens fur eine Gesellschaft aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln dar. Dabei werden wirtschaftliche, sozialwissenschaftliche, medizinische und rechtliche Perspektiven eroffnet. Nach einem Uberblick uber die Komplexitat und einer Einordnung der Vielfalt des Gesundheitswesens folgen Einblicke in die Sichtweisen der jeweiligen Stakeholder im Gesundheitssystem. Aber auch auf aktuelle methodische, prozessuale und technologische Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen wie z.B. digitale Gesundheitstechnologien wird, teils aus theoretischer und teils aus Praxissicht, eingegangen. Diese Interdisziplinaritat ermoglicht es dem Leser, den eigenen Fokus zu erweitern und eine ganzheitlichere und zugleich diversifiziertere Sicht auf ein zentrales Funktionalsystem moderner Gesellschaften zu fordern. Neben der wenig uberraschenden Bestatigung, dass das Gesundheitswesen eine signifikante wirtschaftliche Bedeutung fur eine Volkswirtschaft hat, zeigen die Einzelbeitrage auch dessen Komplexitat und Vielschichtigkeit sowie die Notwendigkeit immer wieder neu auszuhandelnder Kompromisse teils widerstreitender Interessen und Zielsetzungen.

This in-depth book addresses a key void in the literature surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) and health. By systematically evaluating the benefits of mobile, wireless, and sensor-based IoT technologies when used in health and wellness contexts, the book sheds light on the next frontier for healthcare delivery. These technologies generate data with significant potential to enable superior care delivery, self-empowerment, and wellness management. Collecting valuable insights and recommendations in one accessible volume, chapter authors identify key areas in health and wellness where IoT can be used, highlighting the benefits, barriers, and facilitators of these technologies as well as suggesting areas for improvement in current policy and regulations.Four overarching themes provide a suitable setting to examine the critical insights presented in the 31 chapters:Mobile- and sensor-based solutionsOpportunities to incorporate critical aspects of analytics to provide superior insights and thus support better decision-makingCritical issues around aspects of IoT in healthcare contextsApplications of portals in healthcare contextsA comprehensive overview that introduces the critical issues regarding the role of IoT technologies for health, Delivering Superior Health and Wellness Management with IoT and Analytics paves the way for scholars, practitioners, students, and other stakeholders to understand how to substantially improve health and wellness management on a global scale.

Health Services Planning provides the reader with an understanding of the key concepts related to the planning process and offers step-by-step guidelines for developing any type of plan for a community, a health system or an organization. The author addresses the challenge of health planning at both the community level and within the healthcare organization. In addition, the book provides detailed guidance on the development of strategic plans, business plans, and marketing plans. The book provides background on the sociocultural context for health planning and the nature of the demand for health services. Resource material is provided on the research process necessary to support planning activities and sources of data for health planning. Illustrative material is provided through boxes and exhibits throughout the text. An extensive appendix provides examples of various types of plans drawn from the experiences of the author. A glossary provides the reader with definitions of key terms. Readers will gain an appreciation of the importance of planning for the orderly development of health services at the community or organization level. The necessary skills will be learned to allow the reader to formulate plans or, at the least, be able to intelligently discuss the planning process with other health professionals. Health Services Planning is a useful textbook in health administration programs, as well as a resource to health professionals in both public and private sector healthcare organizations who need to have an understanding of the planning process.

This book provides a novel and holistic perspective on the deployment of prepaid electricity meter technology among energy impoverished (vulnerable) households based in developing or under-developed communities of Sub-Saharan Africa. It explores and reviews the nexus between the technology and socio-economic development, technology acceptance and rejection in low-income households, and ultimately proposes a contextual model to avert or assuage energy poverty in the region using the technology. Science is applied as a convenient, valid, and reliable model to generate bespoke, contextual, and relevant knowledge for policy makers on the development of prepaid meter market in the region. The knowledge shared contributes to extant discourse and debates around the effectiveness of the technology within indigent household settings. The book is intended for energy/electricity utilities, prepaid electricity businesses, policy developers, and other interested parties whose work is related to prepaid electricity meters.