ALBERT

Description: The recognition of soils and their functions by the public and, in particular, the planning community isgenerally poor. However, conversion of soils to urban uses is occurring at an unprecedented rate dueto an increasing share of the population living in urban areas and changing lifestyles. Urban planners,developers and planning agencies allocate urban lands to varying uses but land use decisions aregenerally not based on soil information as urban growth is managed predominantly for economicdevelopment. However, urban areas must also deal with challenges such as demographic change,urban densification, climate change and infrastructure provision. Thus, managing urban sustainabilityhas to include ecological aside economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Urban developmentneeds to be managed to minimize negative impacts and maximize environmental quality. Policydecisions towards maximizing short-term economic benefits must be balanced by decisions towardssustainable use and management of urban soils as urban land use has long-term consequences. Therecognition of soils by the planning community can particularly be improved by highlighting the valueof urban soil functions for the well-being of urban dwellers. This approach was recommended at thedialogue session ’Urbanization: Challenges to Soil Management‘ during the first Global Soil Week2012 in Berlin, Germany. Further suggestions how to raise the awareness about urban soils and howto deal with challenges regarding their management will be presented.

Description: Sustainable development is all over the place. The concept is broad and vague. The vagueness of the concept has a Janus face. It has been called a unifying concept because its vagueness breeds a consensus that might be utilised later on. Vagueness is an asset if it triggers action. On the other hand, if sustainable development is everything, maybe it is nothing… Although – or maybe because – the concept is vague, it has overwhelming appeal on political agendas, programmes and dialogues. The precautionary principle is the nucleus of a powerful moral imperative. The multidimensional nature of the concept, covering ecological, economic and social aspects of change relates to our needs for integration. Sustainable development as a concept bears a persuasive character. Actors of all kinds may contribute to it, citizens, enterprises, NGOs, governments et cetera. Thinking about the governance of sustainable development leads us to the recognition of a multi-level, multi-scale, multi-disciplinary character of the problematique. Moreover, the term development refers to change, to transitions and transformations. Governance of sustainable development therefore has to cope with complex dynamics. This chapter deals with the specific consequences of sustainability governance inside knowledge democracies. The concept of knowledge democracy sheds new light on the emerging relationships between politics, media and science. It shows how the emergence of participatory democracy besides representative democracy, the revolutionary rise of social media besides corporate media, the emergence of transdisciplinary trajectories besides classical disciplinary science lead to explosions of complex interactions. We will digress upon the variety of possible future variants of knowledge democracies, quiet and turbulent ones, in relation to the quest for sustainable development. Our main conclusion will be that strategies for sustainability may vary with the types of knowledge democracies around.

Description: STORY HIGHLIGHTSA little bit more than a year ago, delegates of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or Rio+20) agreed that they would “strive to achieve a land-degradation-neutral world in the context of sustainable development.”

Description: Solar radiation management(SRM), a subset of approaches to climate engineering, aims to manipulate the global climate on a large scale. It includes techniques like spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere or brightening marine clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space. In an attempt to examine the socio-political context of SRM, research frequently starts from model projections of physi cal changes in the environment. But assessing socio-political matters is complex, and while model projections may help, experiences from research on CO2-induced climate change reveal many blind spots and some unique challenges.

Description: The urban ecosystem and its ecosystem services (ESs) are managed for the wellbeing of urbandwellers. Thus, sustainable urban development depends on ESs aside economic, cultural and politicaldimensions. Soils play a central role in the urban ecosystem as they fulfill various functions andprovide several ESs. In urban areas, they are usually built to perform specific functions and providespecific ESs, e.g., (i) supporting buildings, roads and infrastructure; (ii) waste adsorption; (iii)supporting biomass production for green infrastructure and urban agriculture; (iv) filter, buffer andtransformation of contaminants; (v) regulating air and water quality; (vi) supporting nutrient cycling.In urban areas, some soils may be strongly modified by human activities, which changes theircomposition and functions, and, therefore, their ability to provide ESs. Urban soils and, moregenerally, SUITMAs (soils in urban, industrial, traffic, mining and military areas) may fulfill individuallya smaller number of ESs, smaller than those of natural soils outside of urban areas. Secondary andincidental ESs, if not disservices, may also be performed by SUITMAs.In this paper, we attempt to rank SUITMAs, according to the ESs they provide. Focus is made onthe nature of services, their importance and the number of services provided by each soil type. Workis also assigned to assess the extent to which urban soils can be deliberately altered to enhance ESs.After the tentative classification of soils, two examples will be given, i) sealed soil deemed tocomplete only few functions and provide specific services, and ii) soils of green-roofs designed toprovide a wide range of ESs, including particularly the control of the quality of air and water, thetemperature control, and the moderation of biodiversity loss.In conclusion, focus is to turn the attention towards the recognition of SUITMAs and theirmanagement as basis for the sustainable development of the urban ecosystem.

Description: The concerns about tax haven activity shown by leading nations originate not only from a sense of injustice caused by the fact that tax havens allow multi-billion dollar firms such as Google, Starbucks and Apple to pay only a few pennies in taxes but the notion that tax haven activity fuels international financial instability through various avenues. This contribution evaluates the risk of financial collapse or liquidity crisis to tax havens in general. It shows that tax havens are more exposed to the risk of a financial collapse than non-tax havens and that this risk positively depends on the amount of profits shifted to them. We find that the risk of a tax haven collapse is positively related to the corporate tax rate and MNCs are willing to make more daring investments in tax havens the higher corporate tax rates. However, MNCs take the risk of losing their investments due to a financial collapse into account and hence invest only a fraction of their profits in tax havens.

Description: In the 20 years since the United Nations summit on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the world has become more diverse, turbulent, fast and multi-polar. Tensions between old and new forms of politics, science and media, representing the emergence of what has been framed as the knowledge democracy, have brought about new challenges for sustainability governance. However, the existing governance frameworks seem to deny this social complexity and uncertainty. They also favour centralised negotiations and institutions, view governments as exclusive decision makers, and imply hegemony of Western economic, political and cultural principles. This is also reflected in the language of sustainability governance: it is centralist and is referring to monolithic concepts (the economy, the climate, the Earth System) rather than embracing diversity and complexity. This chapter sheds light on the problematic relations between cultural diversity, sustainable development and governance. These three concepts share a normative character, which is always a good predictor of trouble if interaction takes place. It is argued that the implementation deficit of sustainable development can be traced back to three problems: a neglect of the opportunities which cultural diversity offers, an implicit preference for central top-down political solutions, and an underestimation of the ‘wickedness’ of many sustainability challenges. It is concluded that sustainability governance should be more culturally sensitive, reflexive and dynamic. This requires institutions, instruments, processes, and actor involvement based on compatibility of values and traditions rather than on commonality or integration. It also calls for situationally effective combinations of ideas from hierarchical, network and market governance. This implies an approach beyond traditional forms of governance, towards a culturally sensitive metagovernance for sustainable development, beyond disciplinary scientific research, beyond states and other existing institutional borders, beyond existing ways to measure progress, beyond linear forms of innovation, and beyond cultural integration or assimilation, towards looking for compatibility. Governance for sustainable transformations requires what we have framed in this volume as transgovernance.