What is Sustainable Technology? Perceptions ...

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Economic-Environmental Accounts, by ... ships between economic and environmental systems. ... income [SNI]) to integrated environmental and economic ac-.
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Book Reviews Hybrid Economic-Environmental Accounts, by Valeria Costantini, Massimiliano Mazzanti and Anna Montini. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2011, 256 pp., ISBN 0415594219, 9780415594219, $150.00, hardback. Awareness of the environment as a determining factor affecting growth has steadily grown since the 1960s. It is becoming increasingly obvious that human activities in the economic sphere are responsible for environmental problems such as climate change that in turn are affecting economic growth. Thus there are important but often neglected interrelationships between economic and environmental systems. In the late 1980s the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Netherlands began development of a system for describing environmental aspects in conjunction with the National Accounts. The system, known as the National Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts (NAMEA), creates a link between the National Accounts and environmental statistics. This book is a significant contribution toward understanding these relationships. NAMEA tables can be used to examine the relationship between environmental pressure and consumption and production patterns. The editors’ backgrounds cover a variety of economic fields: innovation, trade, agriculture, labor, economics, and climate change. As such they offer a gamut of fields of experience and application. The book is organized into two parts. The first part provides historical background and empirical issues related to NAMEA, with definitions followed by some applications and analyses mainly applied to the local and subnational level. In the first chapter, Tudini and Vetrella provide definitions and the methodological fundamentals of NAMEA. Its weaknesses offer room for improving analysis and a rationale for integration with other sources. In chapter 2, Stauvermann presents a historical perspective on the two most representative approaches (NAMEA and [environmentally] sustainable national income [SNI]) to integrated environmental and economic accounts, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The remaining chapters of part 1 focus on the Italian context, with the book’s editors and contributors presenting applications and analyses with insights into advancements made to regional NAMEA. In chapter 3, Costantini and colleagues present a new hybrid environmental–economic accounting matrix that adds a geographical dimension to its sectoral one, which already exists. Moreover, they explore how environmen©2013 by Yale University Volume 17, Number 3

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tal efficiency is distributed among regions and sectors. Bonazzi and Sansoni (chapter 4) attempt to show RAMEA (a regional NAMEA) as a policy tool to support sustainable regional policies and possibly environmental assessments of regional plans and programs in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. In chapter 5, La Notte and Dalmazzone show how to apply NAMEA at different scales, identifying criticalities and possible solutions, and checking to what extent the obtained results prove to be useful. The approaches presented in this chapter allow us to highlight crucial differences at the local government level between regions that may appear, from aggregate data, substantially similar. Marra Campanale and Femia (chapter 6) applied a decomposition analysis to find, in the Italian context, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions displaced abroad to the rest of the world due to the growing economic share of imports in the final demand for products from the manufacturing industries and in the intermediate demand of these industries. The second part of the book draws attention to international case studies for certain European countries and studies with methodological insight. In chapter 7, Rueda-Cantuche formalizes a multiregional input-output framework with the calculation of carbon footprints for two regions. The following chapter, by Marin and colleagues, integrates NAMEA with input-output tables to analyze the determinates of the income–environment relationships in international settings. Tarancon and del Rio (chapter 9) highlight the role of input-output analyses as a tool for exploiting information provided by the NAMEA methodology. In chapter 10, Basina and colleagues provide calculations related to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in Greece. In the last chapter of part two, Scasny and Tsuchimoto apply decomposition analyses to examine which factors are active in changing the emissions level of the Czech economy. The book is a little restricted to the editors’ own geographic backgrounds. For example, four chapters discuss the Italian context. Some, such as chapter six, concentrate on the national level while others, such as chapter four, discuss only the local and regional levels. While the material presented is informative and well researched, the book would have gained considerably from a more global perspective. Furthermore, there is a lack in data sources, for example, in chapter three. In other words, conclusions of some chapters were based on a small period of time. A chapter presenting a historical overview of input-output frameworks and applications would also have been a welcome addition. Nevertheless, this book fills an important need in the field of hybrid economic–environmental accounts and the editors and contributors highlight the importance of this interrelationship. Moreover, it guides us toward new research achievements and ideas in an even brighter future for environmental and ecological economic studies. This book will be useful to environmental

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and ecological economics students and researchers, as well as those studying the more general field of environmental studies.

Ali Alsamawi and Joy Murray University of Sydney Sydney, New South Wales, Australia



What is Sustainable Technology? Perceptions, Paradoxes and Possibilities, edited by Karel Mulder, Didac Ferrer, and Harro van Lente. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2011, 258 pp., ISBN 9781906093501, £32.00. Technologies are a blessing and curse at the same time, partly creating the problems humankind faces and also offering certain solutions. The design of a technology has a major influence on its impacts, as it shapes resource consumption in production and in the usage phase, its lifetime, its repairability/refurbishability, and its final disposal at the end of life. In consequence, the designers’ work has both short- and long-term effects. And the designers are the main target group of Karel Mulder, Didac Ferrer, and Harro van Lente with their edited volume entitled What is Sustainable Technology? Perceptions, Paradoxes and Possibilities. It is the intent of the editors of this book to show how differently sustainable development is defined in conjunction with specific cases and how these—what the editors call “articulations”—sometimes compete or even create dilemmas with regard to sustainable development. But the editors also aim to illustrate contributions from these challenges through the design process. The edited volume presents 11 cases authored by scientists of universities and research institutes based in the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, and Mexico and is separated into four parts focusing on materials and energy, urban technologies, transport technologies, and water technologies. A fifth part draws final conclusions. The individual authors argue that, for example, in the case of nanocoating technologies there is a tendency to articulate sustainability in combination with other aspects such as lower costs, which therefore become important vehicles for sustainability. They also introduce the case of a new urban neighborhood in Sweden where people can live in a more sustainable way, though sustainability was not even mentioned when the apartments were sold. Another chapter

looks at material use in passenger car production, concluding that the replacement of conventional steel is the greatest option for reducing energy use, which the authors put forward as outweighing waste issues. And the various articulations of sustainability in conjunction with water resource management are the focus of a research summary concluding that sustainable water management requires a holistic approach. To the great surprise of the reader, the editors do not give any definition of sustainable technologies. On the contrary, they conclude from the different cases presented that there is no such thing as an inherently sustainable technology. The simplified reason they give for this assessment is also in a way surprising, because in their eyes technologies can only be judged as part of a social process rather than as simply products. But does such an assessment not result from misdefining of both technologies, in contrast to techniques, and sustainability? With respect to the latter, sustainability should always reflect in an integrative way the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of human endeavors. And in contrast to the definition of techniques, technologies imply the know-how required to develop and apply techniques. Therefore, to deploy technologies, their integration into social contexts and operations should be taken into consideration. This book provides a lot of detailed and valuable information on topics such as chlorofluorocarbons and sustainable transport systems, wind power development in the Netherlands, municipal solid waste treatment, and dilemmas in water system development, making it worth reading and a valuable contribution to the discussions on technological approaches toward sustainability. But it would have gained from an attempt by the editors to define sustainable technology at least on the meta level as one would expect from the book’s title. Drawing conclusions out of the different articulations of sustainable technologies would have helped to unmask pretended sustainable technologies. This is why the different articulations of sustainability are happily coexisting, but also why progress since the Rio Conference in 1992 and Rio +20 in 2012 was substantially less than all had hoped for. A comprehensive analysis of the effects of what is called sustainable technology often fails in at least one dimension of sustainability, setting back the chance to reach that goal as defined in its purest sense by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Ruediger Kuehr United Nations University Bonn, Germany

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