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This topical and engaging Research Handbook illustrates the variety of research approaches in the field of climate change adaptation policy in order to provide a guide to its social and institutional complexity.

The understanding of global environmental management problems is best achieved through transdisciplinary research lenses that combine scientific and other sector (industry, government, etc.) tools and perspectives. However, developing effective research teams that cross such boundaries is difficult. This book demonstrates the importance of transdisciplinarity, describes challenges to such teamwork, and provides solutions for overcoming these challenges. It includes case studies of transdisciplinary teamwork, showing how these solutions have helped groups to develop better understandings of environmental problems and potential responses.

Increasingly, water-stressed cities are looking to the oceans to fix unreliable, contested and over-burdened water supply systems. Desalination technologies are, however, also becoming the focus of intense political disagreements about the sustainable and just provision of urban water. Through a series of cutting-edge case studies and multi-subject approaches, this book explores the political and ecological debates facing water desalination on a broad geographical scale.

The triple bottom line is an accounting framework with social, environmental and financial factors. This Handbook examines the nexus between these areas by scrutinising aspects of socially responsible investment, finance and sustainable development, corporate socially responsible banking firms, the stock returns of sustainable firms, green bonds and sustainable financial instruments.

This book offers a collection of methods and approaches aimed at resolving some of humanity’s most pressing problems on a local and global level. Many of the methods are practical, with straightforward application and demonstrated positive outcomes whilst others are more visionary. Important for transitioning to a more sustainable world, these methods allow for the constructive challenging of existing western development and governance.

The process of firm-level adaptation and survival have historically been of great interest to researchers of firms. However, these researchers have previously been denied an ecological framework within which to study the processes through which individual firms respond to and indeed, modify their individual environments. This book remedies this situation, providing the first comprehensive introduction to organisational autecology, or, the study of individual firms and the environments they interact with and typically modify to ensure their survival. In addition to establishing the theoretical and philosophical foundations of organisational autecology, the empirical application of this new approach is demonstrated and its future application to the domain of organisational studies is contemplated.

The trans-disciplinary thematic areas of oceans management and policy require stocktaking of the state of knowledge on ecosystem services being derived from coastal and marine areas. Recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) especially Goals 14 and 15 explicitly focus on this. This Handbook brings together a carefully chosen set of world-class contributions from ecology, economics, and other development science and attempts to provide policy relevant scientific information on ecosystem services from marine and coastal ecosystems, nuances of economic valuation, relevant legal and sociological response policies for effective management of marine areas for enhanced human well being. The contributors focus on the possible nexus of science-society and science-policy with the objective of informing on decision makers of the governmental agencies, business and industry and civil society in general with respect to sustainable management of Oceans.

The rapid growth of shale gas development has led to an intense and polarizing debate about its merit. At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, countries around the world concluded that the transition to sustainability must be accelerated. This book asks and suggests answers to the question that has not yet been systematically analysed: what laws and policies are needed to ensure that shale gas development helps to accelerate the transition to sustainability?