Environmental Science: Sustainability Development, Literature Review

This homework assignment delves into the core concepts of sustainable development, exploring its definition, context, and various interpretations. It examines planetary boundaries as a framework for achieving sustainable development, focusing on climate change and biosphere integrity. The assignment includes a literature review on planetary boundaries, analyzing how anthropogenic pressures impact Earth's systems. It also presents a case study on the sustainable development indicators of water resources in Taiwan, providing a practical application of the concepts discussed. The assignment emphasizes the interconnectedness of environmental and socioeconomic issues and highlights the importance of balancing human needs with the protection of natural resources. It concludes by summarizing key findings and emphasizing the need for transformative changes to address global environmental challenges. The student has provided an in-depth analysis of the subject matter and the different perspectives on the topic.

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Ecology and Sustainability

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Contents
Assignment 2: What is Sustainability Development?..................................................................................3
Assignment 3: a Literature review on Planetary Boundaries.......................................................................9
Assignment 4: Case study: A Case Study on the Sustainable Development Indicators of Water Resources
in Taiwan...................................................................................................................................................17

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Assignment 2: What is Sustainability Development?
Introduction
Sustainability development is an expansion that helps in gathering the requirement of today,
exclusive of negotiating the capability of further generations to assemble their desires. The
notion of sustainable development can be understood in a number of ways, but at its core is a
strategy to improvement that demonstrates to balance various and frequently challenging,
requires against an consciousness of the social, economic boundaries and environmental issue
that the organization face as a society. Sustainable development is handling a subtle balance
between the human desires to get better lifestyles and feeling of well-being on one hand, and
protecting natural resources and ecosystem, on which the current population and future
generation depend. By taking consideration of above discussion, it can be stated that the right
description of Sustainable development is the approach that has a main focus on gathering the
requirements of the present without conciliating aptitude of further generations to meet their
needs. There are believed of some people that the notion of sustainable development must
involve preserving the environment for other species along for people.
Context Setting – Problem Statement
For most of the last couple of 100 years, the environment has been mainly observed as external
to humanity, with little specific areas. Environmental problems were seen majorly as local. On
the huge, the bonding between people and the environment was visualized as a triumph of
humanity over nature. The notion of sustainable expansion is the result of developing an
awareness of the worldwide associations between increasing environmental issues and socio-
economic issues to do with inequality and poverty. It firmly connects with issues of

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environmental and socio-economic. The problems related to the environment threat to the health
and lives of people (Hopwood, Mellor and O'Brien, 2005). The questions arise by sustainable
development regarding the post-war claim, that controls mainstream economic policy, that the
worldwide prosperity can be attained by developed global trade and industry. Along with with
that the lack of clarity regarding the concept of sustainability comprises a number of issues for
researchers as it can hamper handling the procedure of the concept, develop contradictory
discourses on the subject, and can influence the validity of the studies.
Question: what is the meaning of sustainable development as a set of social environmental
criteria or qualities in human action?
Explore the various understandings or development of the notion of sustainable
development
According to Mebratu, (1998), sustainability is the term that helps entities to make the aim for
further growth. There are so many scholars and professionals claim that a system is sustainable
since it has a number of aims. However, in such case, an ordinary feature is their suggestion to
social, environmental and economic aims that definite human actions intended to reach. For a
specific reason, sustainability is considered as an idealization of the bonding between society and
nature inside systems of references. It was apparent from these statements that sustainability is
related to the human actions that directly derive from determined purposes. For such reason, it
shall be noted that this utilization shows a teleological sense of the notion of sustainability.
According to Hopwood, Mellor and O'Brien, (2005), sustainable development is confusing
concept because it has different interpretations and for getting an effective knowledge regarding
the same, it is vital to take a note of sense with mapping methodology on the basis of combining

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environmental and socioeconomic issues. In his broadly utilized arrangement of natural
perspectives, from solid ecocentric to solid technocentric, called attention to that these frequently
join with financial perspectives so that eccentric tend towards social and monetary value and
redistribution while technocentrics are bound to help the monetary and political the present state
of affairs. Much of the time the connecting of natural and social concerns depends on an ethical
or thoughtful standpoint as opposed to seeing the two as tangibly and socially related and
indivisible. Others have additionally sketched out helpful methods for dissecting natural
concerns; in any case, there has been less effort in mapping the plentiful point of view on
reasonable improvement. To provide a perspective on the patterns inside the sustainable
development, unique mapping can be extended by thinking about ecological and financial
perspectives on two separate axes (Salas‐Zapata and Ortiz‐Muñoz, 2019).
On the other hand, there are many people that claim that sustainable development confronts the
enhanced integration of the globe in an industrialist economy controlled by multinationals. The
ambiguity permits governments and business to be in the context of sustainability without any
basic confronts to their present course. By taking consideration of Brundtland’s support for
instant development, it allows business and government to be in favour of sustainability without
any basic confronts to their present course. Reformers perceive that the legislature has a key job
in moving towards maintainable improvement as a business will require pushing, and now and
again controlling, assessments and endowments changing, focusing of research and scattering of
data. Most reformers additionally accept that there will be a change of the political framework to
expand the majority rules system and interest (Murray and King, 2012).

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Source: (Hopwood, Mellor and O'Brien, 2005).
Those who receive a transformative loom that grabs both ecological and social investigations
spread range of a variety of viewpoint although all share the sight that the increasing
emergencies in the world and society are unified and that the social and ecological frameworks
chance breakdown on the off chance that extreme change does not happen. A few, for example,
grassroots natural equity and indigenous ecological developments, may not make the most of a
similar vocabulary of economic improvement as utilized in official and scholastic circles yet are
tending to the issues of how to live inside the earth without extraordinary disparity or destitution.
The point of view of transformations towards the issues is different from other as they find out
the root cause of problems that help out them to figure out the reason behind raising the issue.
Conclusion
It can be concluded from the above discussion that the point of view of many researchers on
sustainability development is different but all researchers of sustainable development agree for
demanding the change in the society, although there is a number of debates as to the
characteristics of sustainable development, the amendments necessary and the actors for these

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amendments. There is no single united philosophy of sustainable development. It has been
concluded with the help of the various researchers on the selected topic that the sustainable
development raises confusion as people use the similar kind of words to mean a huge deviation
of perceptions of the aims, as in a number of political issues, the perception of one member is to
be different for another. Reformers perceive that the legislature has a major job in affecting
towards sustainable development as commerce will require approaching motivation for attaining
the sustainable development within the entity.

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Reference list
Hopwood, B., Mellor, M. and O'Brien, G., (2005) Sustainable development: mapping different
approaches. Sustainable development, 13(1), pp.38-52.
Mebratu, D., (1998) Sustainability and sustainable development: historical and conceptual
review. Environmental impact assessment review, 18(6), pp.493-520.
Murray, J. and King, D., (2012) Climate policy: Oil's tipping point has
passed. Nature, 481(7382), p.433.
Salas‐Zapata, W.A. and Ortiz‐Muñoz, S.M., (2019) Analysis of meanings of the concept of
sustainability. Sustainable Developm
ent, 27(1), pp.153-161.

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Assignment 3: a Literature review on Planetary Boundaries
Introduction
The framework of planetary boundaries elaborates a secure functioning space for humankind
relied on the inherent biophysical procedures that handle the steadiness of the Earth System. The
main aim of this assignment is to highlight the factors that impact of a sustainable environment
for which, the focal point on the reinforcement biophysical science, based on targeted input from
specific research communities and on specific technical go forward over past 5 years (Whiteman,
Walker and Perego, 2013). There are a number of boundaries that have a two-tier approach,
demonstrating the significance of cross-scale interactions and the upper-level heterogeneity of
the procedures that highlight the boundaries. The discussion will be made two major boundaries
such as climate change and biosphere integrity. Both have the impending on its own to force the
system of the earth into a new state in which they can be persistently and substantially
transgressed. A preventive principle defines that human societies would be risky to drive the
system of earth substantially away from a Holocene-like condition. A progressing route away
from the Holocene could guide, with a disturbingly lofty possibility, one that is likely to be much
fewer generous to the growth of human societies (Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and
Ludwig, 2015).
Context and problem
As a notion, sustainable development materialized in response to developing evidence of
detrimental human impact on ecological systems. Towards the ending of the 20th century, it has
become gradually clearer that conventional development and economic growth happens in
performance with the destruction of ecological and global social inequality. As consequences,

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sustainable forms of development are required for an economically balanced planet to convert
into reality. There is a problem with the situation in which ecological system can be seen as
under stress on the earth. Humanity depends on the removal and utilization of huge quantities of
resources and ever developing quantities to handle current ways of life.
Question 1: How chosen model of planetary boundaries can be helpful in attaining sustainable
development?
Framework or model
It has been found that anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have attained a extent where
unexpected worldwide ecological amendment can no longer be disqualified. The organization
proposes a new approach to worldwide sustainability in which the sustainable organization
expected from people to operate safely. Planetary boundaries can be harmful because of the risk
of crossing thresholds that will be generated non-linear to planetary-scale systems. It has been
estimated that humanity has transgressed three planetary boundaries such as biodiversity loss,
climate change and amendments to the global nitrogen cycle (Biermann, 2012). The nature of
planetary boundaries are co-dependent, as misbehaving one can both shift the position of, or
outcome in transgressing, another boundary (Rockström, et. al., 2009).
With the help of the selected framework, it would be easy to understand the great knowledge
regarding planetary boundaries as this approach has three branches of scientific inquiry. The first
addresses the level of individual achievement in the term of the capacity of the Earth to sustain it,
a noteworthy feature of the ecological economies agenda of research. The second one is the way
of understanding required Earth System processes, involving human actions. The last is the

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framework of resilience and its associations to complex dynamics and self-governance of living
systems that highlight basins of attraction and its effect (Steffen et. al., 2015).
Source: (Steffen, et. al., 2015).
Humanity can resemble the boundaries for worldwide freshwater use, ocean acidification,
modify in land use and intervention with the worldwide phosphorus cycle. The examination
proposed a suggestion that three systems like climate change, interference with the nitrogen
cycle and rate of biodiversity loss (ScHleSinger, 2009). It is necessary to keep focus on the
sustainable development and with the support of this framework, the organize variables are the
extent of specific loss and the rate on which nitrogen can be removed from the atmosphere and
diverted to regenerate nitrogen for the human use (Murphy and Hall, 2011). It has been found
that the modern agriculture is a main reason of environmental pollution, involving large-extent

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nitrogen and phosphorus –induced environmental change. At the planetary scale, the
supplementary amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus generated by humans are now so huge that
they deliberately bother the worldwide cycles of these two vital elements.
For the support of the definitions of sustainable development, it has been cleared that the role of
the planetary boundaries is huge in developing outline a safe operating space for humanity that
handles a small likelihood of haring the life support system on Earth to such as level that they no
longer are effective to sustain economic development and human improvement (Maslin and
Lewis, 2015). However, it has cleared from the paper that planetary boundaries do not cover a
cap on human development. Despite the fact, they offer a safe space for growth, innovation and
development in the chase of human prosperity in a developing populated and wealthy world. The
sustainable development trajectory defines the planetary boundaries in a new manner: not
through an open issue for resource, nor by reduction of the high level of incomes (Lövbrand, et.
al., 2015). It has been discussed that the sustainable development is necessary for the better
living system and the role of planetary boundaries is huge in providing a right track for the
business (Rockström, et. al., 2009). It has been found that the world must live within the
planetary boundaries by the arrangement of new sustainable technologies and the latest
worldwide rules of the game. Most important, the organization need a quick technological
overhaul in all areas of the global to make sure that all countries can involve in the benefit for
21st-century technology without hampering the planet at the same time (Steffen et. al., 2015).
Along with that, there are number of advantages for humans that in a straight manner in the
context of biodiversity, involving hygiene food and water. On the other hand, it has been found
that the biodiversity loss comes with a price (Malm and Hornborg, 2014).
Conclusion