Environmental Conservation

What is Environment?

Environment literally means surrounding and everything that affect an organism during its lifetime is collectively known as its environment. In another words “Environment is sum total of water, air and land interrelationships among themselves and also with the human being, other living organisms and property”.

What about Conservation?

The protection, preservation, management, or restoration of natural environments and the ecological communities that inhabit them. Conservation is generally held to include the management of human use of natural resources for current public benefit and sustainable social and economic utilization.

Environmental conservation refers to a practice of protecting the environment, on individual, organizational or governmental levels, for the benefit of the natural environment and (or) humans.

Demographic Trends

Demography is the study of human populations – their size, composition and distribution across place – and the process through which populations change. Births, deaths and migration are the ‘big three’ of demography, jointly producing population stability or change. A population’s composition may be described in terms of basic demographic features – age, sex, family and household status – and by features of the population’s social and economic context – ethnicity, religion, language, education, occupation, income and wealth. The distribution of populations can be defined at multiple levels (local, regional, national, global) and with different types of boundaries (political, economic, geographic). Demography is a central component of societal contexts and social change. 

Global Trends in Natural Population Increase

A “natural population increase” occurs when the birth rate is higher than the death rate. While a country’s population growth rate depends on the natural increase and on migration, world population growth is determined exclusively by the natural increase.

Population Growth Rates

City Development Strategies (CDS)

What is CDS?

City development strategies (CDS) refer to a strategic planning approach in preparing plans for cities so that they can cope well with urban challenges. This approach has been adopted by more than 200 cities worldwide. CDS is a participatory approach in which local stakeholders are involved in setting a vision based on an analysis of their city‟s perspectives and in implementing such vision for their city through partnership-based approaches. CDS emphasizes on strategic formulation, implementation, and evaluation (Kim, 2002, Rasoolimanesh et al., 2011).

City Development Strategies (CDS) in developing countries was started in 1998 in East Asia based on the World Bank’s draft urban strategy paper (UN-Habitat, 2002). It focused on four common themes, namely; 

• livability,
• competitiveness,
• good governance,
• bankability

to achieve sustainability in cities (The World Bank, 2000). —CDSs were initially implemented in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and China.

Sustainable Development

What is sustainable development? 

The 1987 report Our Common Future from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) set forth the most widely used definition of the concept: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (p. 8). The concept of sustainable development can be interpreted in many different ways, but at its core is an approach to development that looks to balance different, and often competing, needs against an awareness of the environmental, social and economic limitations we face as a society. All too often, development is driven by one particular need, without fully considering the wider or future impacts. We are already seeing the damage this kind of approach can cause, from large-scale financial crises caused by irresponsible banking, to changes in global climate resulting from our dependence on fossil fuel-based energy sources. The longer we pursue unsustainable development, the more frequent and severe its consequences are likely to become, which is why we need to take action now. 

Sustainable development also known as a dynamic process in which communities anticipate and accommodate the needs of current and future generations in ways that reproduce and balance local social, economic, and ecological systems, and link local actions to global concerns.

source: Google image