This festschrift honours Prof. Rana P.B. Singh who has dedicated his life to teaching and conducting research on cultural geography with a ‘dweller Indian perspective’. The book focuses on the cultural geographies of India, and to an extent that of South Asia. It is a rich collection of 23 essays on the themes apprised by him, covering landscapes, religion, heritage, pilgrimage and tourism, and human settlements.

This book contains detailed information about the traditional rainwater structures. Harvesting rainwater is becoming as a practical adaptation strategy for urban areas that are vulnerable to climate alteration. In the past, rainwater harvesting was more significant than it is today. Studies show that a variety of traditional and age-old rainwater gathering techniques were created or put into use in reaction to earlier climate change incidents. According to history, both floods and droughts were frequent occurrences in ancient India. Perhaps this explains why each region of the nation has its own traditional water gathering practices that are representative of the local physical and cultural diversity. All of these methods can be seen as a concept of harvesting rain whenever and wherever it falls. Water makes up 70.9 % of the Earth's surface, mainly in the form of oceans and seas. Water is found in modest proportions as 1.7 % groundwater, 1.7 % glaciers and ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland, vapour, clouds (ice and liquid water suspended in air), and 0.001% precipitation in the air. Evaporation, transpiration, evapo-transpiration, condensation, precipitation, root absorption, percolation, infiltration, base flow and runoff are processes that water goes through on its way to the sea.

This book describes the potential contributions of emerging technologies in different fields as well as the opportunities and challenges related to the integration of these technologies in the socio-economic sector. In this book, many latest technologies are addressed, particularly in the fields of computer science and engineering. The expected scientific papers covered state-of-the-art technologies, theoretical concepts, standards, product implementation, ongoing research projects, and innovative applications of Sustainable Development. This new technology highlights, the guiding principle of innovation for harnessing frontier technologies and taking full profit from the current technological revolution to reduce gaps that hold back truly inclusive and sustainable development. The fundamental and specific topics are Big Data Analytics, Wireless sensors, IoT, Geospatial technology, Engineering and Mechanization, Modeling Tools, Risk analytics, and preventive systems.

This book describes the potential contributions of emerging technologies in different fields as well as the opportunities and challenges related to the integration of these technologies in the socio-economic sector. In this book, many latest technologies are addressed, particularly in the fields of computer science and engineering. The expected scientific papers covered state-of-the-art technologies, theoretical concepts, standards, product implementation, ongoing research projects, and innovative applications of Sustainable Development. This new technology highlights, the guiding principle of innovation for harnessing frontier technologies and taking full profit from the current technological revolution to reduce gaps that hold back truly inclusive and sustainable development. The fundamental and specific topics are Big Data Analytics, Wireless sensors, IoT, Geospatial technology, Engineering and Mechanization, Modeling Tools, Risk analytics, and preventive systems.

This book will provide a space for new and emergent research in environmental migration, particularly in the context of a world beginning to emerge from the grip of a debilitating public health crisis that kept many firmly rooted in place while displacing others internationally. With famines, vast wildfires, droughts, and record heatwaves uprooting human settlements internationally, research on migration in the face of emerging risks is all the more urgent. As Balsari, Dresser, & Leaning point out, “the wall-building, xenophobic, and insular” platforms of some global powers in their immigration and asylum policies, and the ever-increasing stresses placed on the natural world that continue to make sites of human settlement less and less hospitable, make research on this topic both very timely and much needed. This book will include numerous case studies, historical analyses, projections, models, and recommendations for both policy and future research directions. Contributions are drawn from academics and practitioners in this fertile interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry, and each one focuses on the intersection of population and environment studies, history, geography, law, diaspora studies, economics, public health, and sociology.

The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation shows that we have unwittingly fallen into an existential crisis of our own making. We have allowed large corporations, the military and other vested interests to capture governments and influence public opinion excessively. We have created a god called ‘the market’ and allowed our most important decisions to be made by this imaginary entity, which is in fact a human system controlled by vested interests. The result has been the exploitation of our life support system, our planet, and most of its inhabitants, to the point of collapse.

This book examines the pathways to decarbonising African cities, structured around strategies and applications in renewable energy, waste management, healthcare, telecommunication, education and governance reconfigurations for Petro-cities.

This book provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary naturecultural world by exploring infrastructures through the dwelling approach. The notion of naturecultures has been utilized in environmental humanities and social sciences to emphasize the inherent messiness of the lived world and the inseparability of social and biophysical elements. Concept of naturecultures stresses that seemingly “natural” is always simultaneously “cultural” and vice versa. This approach allows fleshing out the messy engagements with infrastructures, which in this book is conceptualized as infrastructural being.

This book publishes the best papers accepted and presented at the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development Applied to Agriculture, Energy, Health, Environment, Industry, Education, Economy, and Security (AI2SD’2020).

This book explores water service provisions of the urban poor in the cities of Africa with particular emphasis on Kenya and its capital city of Nairobi. In particular the book addresses the insecurity of tenure, and how the colonial segregation of land continues to shape water access and service provision even today in Nairobi. The book seeks to understand how urban water management entails the “production of thirst” among the urban poor and documents how cultural norms, political commitments and seemingly mundane practices of water managers combine to exclude the poor from accessing water. Supporters of privatization argue that private companies may succeed where governments have failed in supplying water to the urban poor. The author takes a closer look at this argument, demonstrating the limitations of some of the current reforms whilst also exploring alternatives and solutions. This book will be an invaluable reference for students, researchers and practitioners working in this field.

This book analyses how the environmental movement has developed three overarching narratives that co-exist and compete within it. The first is the narrative of green progress, which has been prominent from the start in environmentalist thought and which is today expressed in the idea of sustainable development and in eco-modernism. The second is the apocalyptic narrative, which urges us to act in order to avert a future catastrophe and which rose to prominence with Rachel Carson and other classics of post-war environmentalism and experienced a renaissance with the climate activism of the 2000s. The third is the postapocalyptic narrative according to which catastrophe is already an unavoidable fact. The centrepiece of the book is its discussion of the postapocalyptic narrative, which has become influential in the recent decade, especially in the wake of the disillusionment following the failed climate summit in Copenhagen 2009.

The book goes beyond mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) to a holistic approach centered on healing. The book lays at the intersection of peacebuilding, global mental health, and development. In many parts of the world, entire generations live in chronic violence—just surviving. The exposure to violence has long-lasting effects which are not well accounted for in conflict analysis, stabilization efforts, peacebuilding, and governance initiatives. Extreme exposure to violence, abuse, neglect, and marginalization negatively affects levels of resilience and the ability of affecting the transition from violence to peace.

By analyzing the interactions between China’s central government and its local governments and enterprises, this book constructs an analytical framework of government-enterprise collusion, analyzing the impact of collusion within the China model on Chinese society. Against the background of decentralization and under information asymmetry, this text argues that Chinese local governments connive at enterprises’ adoption of a low-cost ‘bad’ mode of production — a ‘stimulus’ for quick growth at the cost of safer working conditions — so as to obtain fiscal or political capital for further promotion.

This edited collection focuses on tourism development, sustainability and local change in southern Africa. The book offers a range of both conceptual and applied perspectives that address various changes in southern African tourism and community development relations. The key drivers of change that include climate change and globalization form the context for the diverse and interesting set of case studies from the region.

This book discusses sustainable waste management technologies for managing end-of-life (EoL) post-consumer and packaging plastic solid waste (PSW) from domestic and commercial waste streams. It does so particularly in the context of providing a way forward for developing economies.