In the time it takes to read this sentence, about 15 people will be added to the world’s population. Read the sentence again, and there will be 30. Tomorrow, each of these people will be demanding greater prosperity. Production and consumption are increasing fast but will have to grow even faster in the future to keep up with population growth and a world increasingly divided by inequality. How should we react to these trends? Certainly, many use growth figures to forecast disaster. But there is an alternative vision: one of a sustainable future, in which growth is seen not as a threat, but as the driving force behind innovation. This is the scenario worked out in The Netherlands by Sustainable Technology Development (STD), a five‐year programme of research and “learning‐by‐doing” based on setting up new innovation networks and working with new methods to search for sustainable technological solutions.
In order to make sustainability tangible, STD made a leap in time. What human needs will have to be satisfied 50 years from now? Taking a sustainable future vision as a starting point, STD demonstrated what steps we should take today for new technologies and systems to be in place in time. These results are now available for the first time in a comprehensive, specifically written English‐language book, together with a description of the unique working method of STD and the results and key lessons from a set of the programme’s illustrative case studies.
This book serves as a manual for industry, governments and social leaders wanting to prepare themselves for a sustainable future.
To find out more about this title or to view the Introduction on‐line, please visit the Greenleaf Web site at http://www.greenleaf‐publishing.com
