Publisher's Synopsis
Sustainable development presents important challenges to environmental research, such as developing perspectives and methods that clarify the links between societal activities, resource use, and pollution. With this challenge in mind, this book presents examples of the industrial metabolism approach to analyzing regional environmental change and discusses the problems of combining economic restructuring with environmental cleanup. The book is based on the work of two IIASA projects focused on environmental development in two regions of Central Europe: the Rhine Basin and the Black Triangle-Upper Silesia region. Among the most important contributions from these research efforts are the analysis of flows and pollution from both a historical and a geographical perspective, and the combination of these studies with analyses of the regions' social and institutional development.
