The People's Republic of China occupies a little more than six percent of the Earth's land surface, but is home to nearly twenty percent of its human population. According to an analysis undertaken by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China surpassed the United States as the world's largest CO2 emitter in 2006, although its per capita emissions remain far below those of the West. Its economy is expected to overtake that of the United States as the world's largest by as early as 2020. For millennia, the Chinese have excelled at using certain types of resources efficiently, especially in agriculture, but also have a centuries-old tradition of undertaking epic public works projects with equally epic environmental impacts. A half century of rapid industrialization has left China reeling from a precipitous decline in environmental quality, which has sparked sometimes violent citizen protests throughout the country in recent years. According to the World Bank, sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities are in China.
This special issue will be devoted to how best to prepare students in environmental degree programs to engage in the holistic, adaptive management of the health and resilience of the systems at the human-natural interface necessary to support stewardship of the natural environment and long term improvement in the human condition. In that spirit, this issue seeks to explore the history and current status of these systems in China, and the prospects for managing them holistically and adaptively so as to achieve both ecological stewardship and human quality of life goals for the Chinese people and the world. As the century unfolds, the prospects for achieving sustainability in China promise to have increasingly palpable impacts on the futures of us all.
The list of suitable topics includes but is not limited to the following, as long as the approach is interdisciplinary and the focus invokes both sustainability and China:
- Agricultural, aquacultural, and silvicultural systems
- Atmospheric and climatic systems
- Business administration and organizational leadership systems
- Ecological systems
- Economic and socioeconomic systems
- Energy systems
- Hydrological systems
- Ideological and cultural systems
- Industrial and manufacturing systems
- Natural resource extraction systems
- Political, legal, public administration, and other public governance systems
- Social systems
- Technological systems
- Transportation systems
- Waste management systems
Deadline for submissions: 1 October, 2010
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