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Help us to keep this up to date:
Please contact Clive at depman.gn.apc.org if you
can think of any terms that you would like us to explain or add to the
Sustainable Cities Glossary:
Tool Tips:
Abbreviations used on the Sustainable Cities website
are underlined with a black dotted line. If you move the mouse to hover
over the phrase, you will see the what the abbreviation stands for.
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Sustainable Cities Glossary
A | B | C | D
| E | F | G | H
| I | J | K | L | M
| N | O | P | Q | R | S
| T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
This glossary explains in plain English many of the terms and abbreviations
used within the content on the Sustainable Cities project site. If there
are any other terms used on our website, please let us know at info@dep.org.uk and we can then add them to the website.
A
- Action Research
- The collecting of information to bring about social change, eg. to get
data to expose environmental dangers and recommend actions for change
- Anthropocentric
- Interpreting reality in terms of human values and experience
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B
- Biodiversity
- The variety of plants and animals that exist in nature
- Biosphere
- Regions of the earth’s surface and atmosphere occupied by living
organisms
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C
- Carrying capacity
- The number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within
natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural, social, cultural
and economic environment for present and future generations
- Citizenship education
- A national curriculum subject in England aiming for pupils to develop
the knowledge, skills and attitudes to become informed, active and responsible
members of their community.
- Climate change
- A significant change in the average weather conditions for a place taken
over a period of time
- Community Plan
- A plan which is developed at local authority level involving local communities
to promote and put sustainable development into practice in the locality.
- Constructivist theory
- The idea that we construct our own knowledge, learning being an active
process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their
own current/past knowledge.
- Consumerism
- A process of increasing the consumption of goods and services that undermines
the environment and exacerbates inequalities
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D
- Development
- The ways in which countries gain more wealth. It is usually measured in
terms of material wealth.
- Development Education
- Concerned with exploring North-South relationships and issues from the
local to the global, and devising active, person-centred approaches and
methods to do this.
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E
- Earth Summit
- The first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
- Eco-centric
- Being centred on the natural environment as a starting point for understanding
reality
- Ecological footprint
- This is how much land it takes to provide the resources used, and dispose
of the waste produced, for individuals or groups of people.
- Ecology
- The study of how living things affect each other, and how they are affected
by their environment
- Eco-taxation
- A tax on pollution, eg. the Swedish Carbon Tax on the use of fossil fuels
to help reduce carbon emissions
- Education for Sustainable Development
- enables people to develop the knowledge, values and skills to participate
in decisions about the way we do things individually and collectively,
both locally and globally, that will improve the quality of life now without
damaging the planet for the future.
(Education for Sustainable Development in the Schools Sector – Report
to DfEE/QCA)
- Environmental Education
- The process of recognising values and clarifying concepts in order to
develop the skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate
the inter-relatedness among people, their culture and biological and physical
surroundings.
- Extended producer responsibility
- An approach to reconcile economic growth with greater business responsibility
for conserving resources and energy, and reducing pollution and waste
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F
- Factor Four
- The idea that resource productivity should be quadrupled so that wealth
is doubled, and resource use is halved
- Factor Ten
- The idea that per capita material flows from rich countries need to be
reduced by 90% to hit the Factor Four target because they are responsible
for five times as much resource use as Southern countries
- Fair Trade
- Occurs when manufacturers agree to ‘fair’ return to raw material
producers – a return above that which the market would normally
impose, and above poverty levels.
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G
- Genetically modified organisms
- Created by technologically combining genes from different organisms
- Genuine Progress Indicator
- This measure real personal consumption spending, adjusts for income distribution,
then adds or subtracts to reflect ecological and social benefites or costs.
- Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
- A measure of the total amount of material wealth produced by a country
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H
- Holistic education
- Education that seeks to develop the whole person and which promotes active
global citizenship and environmental responsibility
- Human Development Index
- This is a summary composite index that measures a country’s average
achievements in three basic aspects of human development – longevity,
knowledge and a decent standard of living.
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I
- Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
- The most advanced alternative indicator to GDP to measure economic welfare.
This is a measure of the economic activity that increases our quality
of life, eg. it subtracts air pollution caused by economic activity but
adds unpaid household labour such as childminding.
- Industrial Revolution
- Occurred in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries
in Europe and North America when new machinery and the use of fossil fuels
to generate energy led to the start of modern industry.
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L
- Local Agenda 21
- Action plans which are developed at local authority level to promote and
put sustainable development into practice
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M
- Materialism
- A social value emphasising having and consuming the material things of
life.
- Millennium Development Goals
- An agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives that world leaders
agreed on at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. 15 United Nations
development goals to be reached by 2015, they are designed to satisfy
basic needs globally.
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P
- Participatory budgeting
- Budgeting which involves communities and citizens in meetings with local
councilors to discuss priorities and enter them in the local budget. An
assessment done in Brazil shows grassroots input helps channel resources
to the poor and promotes social inclusion.
- PSHE
- Personal Social and Health Education
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Q
- Quality of life
- A broad concept including the quality of health, housing, educational
attainment, employment and public services, etc., which may be measured
to help inform social policy.
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S
- Sound Mapping
- An outdoor activity whereby pupils attach things they find like leaves,
bird feathers and seeds to a ‘journey stick’ and talk/write
about what they found and where they found it when they get back to
school.
- South
- Used as a preferred term to refer to developing or poor non-industrialised
countries. North refers to developed, rich industrial countries
- Spiritual
- Of the spirit as opposed to matter; experience of awe and wonder at
creation; related to sacred or religious things.
- Standard of living
- The measure of consumption and welfare of a country, community or
individual, usually shown as GDP per capita
- Sustainability
- A process whereby we continually adapt to reduce waste and increase
the quality of human life everywhere
- Sustainability Indicators
- Ways of measuring how well a community is meeting the needs and expectations
of its present and future members
- Sustainable
- A way of using resources that does not threaten their long term survival,
or the survival of the plants, animals and people that depend on them
- Sustainable development
- Meeting the needs of today while not compromising the capacity of
future generations to meet their needs
- Systems thinking
- Looks at interconnections, impacts and interdependence in relation
to natural and human systems
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V
- Values
- A set of standards or principles; those qualities regarded by a person
or group as important and desirable.
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W
- World Summit on Sustainable Development
- Held in Johannesburg in 2002, 10 years after the Earth Summit in Rio.
It reviewed progress on Agenda 21 and agreed to promote the link between
education and sustainable development.
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