Related papers: Physical basis of sustainable development
Once carbon emission neutrality and other sustainability goals have been achieved, a widespread assumption is that economic growth at current rates can be sustained beyond the 21st century. However, even if we achieve these goals, this…
The transition from a fossil-based energy economy to one based on renewable energy is driven by the double challenge of climate change and resource depletion. Building a renewable energy infrastructure requires an upfront energy investment…
The current climate change is calling for drastic reduction of energy demand as well as of greenhouse gases. Besides this, cities also need to adapt to face the challenges related to climate change. Cities, with their complex urban texture…
In this paper, I discuss my personal journey through one research tradition, that of the resources framework, and how it has evolved over time. In my present work, understanding learners' reasoning in physics in terms of the construction of…
Land use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called frontiers, defined here as places experiencing marked…
All economies require physical resource consumption to grow and maintain their structure. The modern economy is additionally characterized by private debt. The Human and Resources with MONEY (HARMONEY) economic growth model links these…
Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers who have profoundly transformed the world's landscapes in order to enhance their survival. Somewhat paradoxically, however, sometimes the unforeseen effect of this ecosystem engineering is the…
Halfway between the experiment and the focus group, between the quiz and a game, we have experienced a new format to "focus" on sustainability and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and its principles. Concepts as reversibility,…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
All physical process are subject to some laws which determine with math accurately its time-space evolution. These laws are described, in the last analysis for the principle of causality. The physical space can be homogeneous or…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
In a previous paper (Ref. [1]) the presence of dark energy in our universe was explained as the fingerprint of a comprehensive, much older and expanding multiverse with positive spatial curvature, whose space-time is spanned by this energy,…
Human activity has an enormous impact on Earth, changing organisms, environments and landscapes, leading to the decline of original ecosystems and irreversible changes that create new combinations of living beings and materials. As a…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Sustainable development is an imperative worldwide but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress. Nowhere is this challenge…
Sustainability has been defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But what are the needs of the present? And are they met? From the poor performance of the…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Evolution of a universe with homogeneous extra dimensions is studied with the benefit of a well-chosen parameter space that provides a systematic, useful, and convenient way for analysis. In this model we find a natural evolution pattern…
A holistic view of the cosmological appearance and development of space is obtained by studying space as a spherically closed surface of a 4-sphere in a zero energy balance between motion and gravitation. Such an approach re-establishes…