With increasing worldwide population and predictions that 75% of the world population will be living in cities by the year 2050, building towards the sky can be unavoidable necessity. That would require more durable constructions and materials with appropriate building and architecture solutions. Future  Cities would require management policies with balanced policies consumption/waste versus protection/conservation of nature in accepted social context. Http://sustain-earth.com

Among the consequences of economy driven policies in ASEAN countries is the increasing economic gaps between countries in the region. For sustainable large-scale and long-term socio-economic developments it is vital to promote less developed countries as well. Shift from commercially driven agriculture to new technologies where the regional natural resources are not only used sufficiently but, also, sustainably managed in a manner that respect traditional systems of the rural areas. 

Commercialization always has some draw-backs as well, e.g. depletion soil fertility, and excessive use of chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides with long-term impacts and threats on ecosystems in different ways. Strategies need to be implemented to create sustainable and profitable farming systems that realize the existence of vital rural societies in tact with the natural functioning and metabolism of natural eco-systems and in harmony with existing biodiversity.
https://www.jircas.affrc.go.jp/english/program/proC_1.html

Sustainability has been part of the human awareness since the birth of the ancient man on planet Earth. The instinct for survival and wellbeing has never been crystallized in well-structured components for building up webs of instrumental coordinated solutions until the 1980s with the introduction of the most widely quoted and used definition of sustainability. An imperative and collective need put forward by the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations in 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 

The Earth is a unique planet in our universe with complex functioning structure of systems that support the evolution of complex webs of metabolic processes for sustaining all living forms on Earth.

 The man has always struggled for his survival on earth and in particular to get access to and to secure affordable food resources not only for himself but for the new comers as well.

After and during the industrial revolutions, the focus of humans was directed mostly on technical issues to free mankind from manual work, to find resources and technology for  basic necessities through mechanical and machinery work. The Man realized the role of science and technology for his wellbeing and since the nineteen and twenty centuries the advances in science and technology emerged more and more to be the only inevitable route for improving the living conditions. This didn’t come for free and price and costs for humans started to be huge with clear finger-print on the accelerating divergence of the three basic drivering wheels of sustainability: economy, environment and social drivers. 

Economic interests resulted in increasing consumption of natural resources with severe impacts on degradation of the environment because of increasing waste and pollution, and piling up of social defects in particular the remarkable failure in erasing global poverty. These along with enormous indicators of the declining natural resources as being defined by the so-called resource “peaks”.
 

The divergence and fragmentation of these drivers and spheres brought considerable, and yet, accelerating threat for the survival of humans.  The net result of what humans achieved in science, technology, policies and politics were in direct conflict with not only the search for wellbeing but also the very basic needs for survival.

The major spheres of the functioning and metabolism of all life forms on earth were  brought out of their natural equilibrium, e.g. the atmosphere with an increasing temperature because of global warming.

Global warming and accelerating production of waste and pollution have caused enormous damage on the hydrophere with irreversible effects on the ecological resources where humans are dependent on, e.g. fish.

The growing human population still induces additional challenges for achieving the goals for global sustainability developments.

The era of sustainable developments has already started but it is still in its infancy and the needs of the necessary knowledge are enormous in particular what regards building the underlying science and technology as well as the associated management policies in all sectors and on all levels.

For more information on sustainability visit: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

Http://sustain-earth.com” is an integrated coherent platform for Applied sustainability. Interests and efforts put by its coordinator and manager of started already through a simple experiment at the age of fourteen. As a young student, at Abo-Tyg/Assiut secondary school, starting to learn chemistry I bought a small amount of hydrochloric acid from my pocket money. I added the acid to a soil sample from the garden, it was a violent reaction in the test tube with evolution of gases. An exciting experiment where drew my attention with the conclusion that there must be geochemical reactions taking place in the environment. This in addition to continuous observations from summer holidays that I spent at the village of my grandfather, Cairo’s Waraa. Some local industries, farmers and poor people of the village, as is the case for many other villages on the Nile, used or you may say “abused” the water of the Nile to do their household needs, e.g. cleaning, washing animal and the removal of waste in general. These events and my experience of the continuous lack of water in the very arid environments prevailing in southern parts of Egypt as it rains one per decade etched an enormous early interest that caused gearing my early geology, chemistry and physics university education towards research on environmental waste, pollution and their impacts on global aquatic systems.

This resulted in an academic career in Environmental Physics a discipline that I created myself with further created further work in Applied Sustainability.

Water and nutrients are essentials for the evolution and sustainability of life on earth. The magic, secrets and drivers of life on earth are not human inventions. Human innovation is merely restricted to accelerating the natural metabolic processes on earth, e.g. production of food in agriculture, animal husbandry and fisheries, beyond natural rates and limits. The growing global population and the underlying industrial and economic systems continue to fuel the so-called human innovation towards a never ending spiral for more and more unsustainable consumption of the natural resources.

Humans can not servive on earth without clean water, healthy environment and sustainable food production. However, these requirements can only be fulfilled through sustained production and consumption of energy and natural resources for supporting the basic needs for humans, e.g. housing, education, health, transport and communication. What originally started for the benefits of human developments turned out to major threats for human survival because of increasing waste and pollution from use and abuse of the natural resources.
Humans have interfered in the natural functioning and metabolism of all life forms on earth with negative impacts on essential and global biogeochemical cycles. Examples are: global warming as resulted from malfunctioning of the global carbon-cycle. Degradation in O-cycle (oxygen cycle) is also remarkable because of unfit and polluted air in urbanized living areas, in particular cities as result of expansion of traffic and transport systems and random industrial activities; poor access to oxygen in aquatic systems because of eutrophication in aquatic systems and excessive use of fertilizers on land; enhanced photo-reactions in the atmosphere with the associated negative impacts of tropospheric production of ozone.

Declining reserves of natural phosphorous, are among emerging threats, because of increasing production and use of this limited natural resource with irreversible impacts on P-cycle. Agricultural and industrial nitrogen inputs to the environment currently exceed inputs from natural N fixation. The impacts of anthropogenic N-inputs have significantly altered the global N-cycle over the past century. Global atmospheric N₂O have increased from pre-industrial levels where most of which are due to the agricultural sector.

Human activities have major effects on the global S-cycle. The burning of coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels has greatly increased the amounts of sulphur in the atmosphere,?ocean and depleted the sedimentary rock sink, i.e. instead of being burned at steadily rates. Over most polluted areas there has been a 30-fold increase in sulfate deposition. The enhanced sulphur and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere is causing negative impacts through acidification of aquatic systems with global negative feedback effects on aquatic life and vegetation.

All in all quality of global land-water resources are under accelerating threats from pollution  and waste.

http://www.flatheadwatershed.org/natural_history/natcycles.shtml 

The emerging economies are like express trains, if you don’t catch one of these trains you will left behind with an old ticket worth nothing.

All of the so-called emerging economies suffer from increasing poverty. The fast developing economies in these countries and regions do not leave enough time for coordinating all the necessary instruments and tools to provide sustainable social-economic infra-structures.

http://www.poverties.org/urban-poverty-in-india.html#gallery[pageGallery]/2/

One out of every three children never sets foot in a classroom. Two major questions need to answered in this context:

(1) what shall we do with one third of the world population lacking education;

(2) can we naive enough that we will have global SECURITY under such conditions.

With what is happening around the world we can not run away from answering these two strategic questions. As a result of these two questions many other questions are currently facing us with merely no sustainable answers. “Sustain-earth.com” will continue to address the emerging global threats facing the future of our planet.

Apart from the importance of light for visualization and making objectives and images of things to be seen. Light itself is involved in the very production of living organisms, plants and animals, through what is known as “photosynthesis” where water, carbon dioxide and nutrients are fundamental raw materials. This is in addition of being essential for the production of electricity by modern solar panels through what is known as the “photo-electric effect” originally explaied by Einstein.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustration

People around the well have insufficient access to clean water because they do not have the energy resources to get it up, to or at home and to have it clean!

Follow “sustain-earth.com” to be informed and inform on the importance of understanding what water-energy nexus means for giving life to humans.

Edible Insects as a Food Source 

Nutrient food is what we need and in the era of sustainability where the global population keeps growing while the natural resources on the planet Earth are declining more and more it becomes IMPERATIVE to have accessible and affordable nutrient food. Edible insects are emerging more and more as a food sources adding more insects to the Menu. 

The idea of eating insects is not new, in China, edible wasp collecting and cooking techniques were documented in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).  Also in Europe, Aristoteles (384-322BC) wrote about the best taste of a Cicada nymph and in early 20th century, the taste of chafer beetle soup (“Maikafersuppe”), was described as comparable to lobster soup, a highly appreciated dish in Germany and France. This culture expanded enormously, today about 1,900 edible insects are being consumed worldwide, mainly in Africa, Mexico and Asia, e.g. silk worm and crickets (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/06/will-eating-insects-ever-be-mainstream).

“Why not eat insects?” asked American pamphleteer Vincent Holt already in 1885, proof that selling the idea is nothing new. Two billion people worldwide routinely eat bugs an already appreciated food. Insects have also invaded foodie moments in the western world being a novelty in the European food scene as subversive garnishes for salads or cocktails, or on the menus of experimental pop-up (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/06/will-eating-insects-ever-be-mainstream).

Scientific American already supports high quality popular science. In this case describing the approach of biologists Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown by being unique to present biological concepts “fun, Informative and Extremely Successful”. They provide informative explanations, on topics people really want and need to know, in clear simple and colorful diagrams with pedagogic presentations (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/12/12/asap-science-fun-informative-and-extremely-successful/).

Here is how Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown use the scientific approach to inform on the relevance of insects in the exoanding food market (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iM8s1ch5TRw).

What is Poverty? Why do we have poverty or more importantly why poverty is much abundant in the so-called developing countries? Are the people there different, if yes how, why and since when? If no, why then they became poor and what are the reasons? What instruments do we have to monitor poverty? Since when we realized that we have poverty? Did poverty happen over-night? What are the differences between absolute poverty and relative poverty? Why economic models, including the ones that won the Nobel Prize were successful to solve poverty only in limited parts of the world? So, many questions to be asked and even with proper answers on these questions we will continue to have poverty unless we have sincere and serious sustainable solutions.

Though United Nations was founded 1945 (http://www.un.org/en/about-un/index.html) it was not until recently when UN observed that there is poverty and started to set ambitious goals in 2000 to reduce global poverty and inequality by 2015. Yet much of the poverty is still left and more seriously many impacts and threats from poverty are expanding and deepening on several scales. While the UN claims that it successfully cut extreme poverty in half, the multinational groups are conflicted about how much developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa can improve by 2030 (http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/12/31/un-wants-to-end-poverty-hunger-by-2030). 

GDP, which is used in economic models, by the World Bank and by politicians to monitor the economic growth around the world, fails enormously to bring about sustainable socio-economic developments around the world. It has even brought severe negative impacts in the developing countries and created new threats for the whole planet Earth and on the global scale. What regards the developing countries GDP can very well be used not as “Growth Domestic Product” but as “Growth Domestic Poverty”, as least for some if not for many developing countries. Major solutions need to be taken to switch over to more realistic indicators other than GDP that keeps pushing the developing world down hell the poverty spiral.

http://youtu.be/7M3WJQbnHKc

Many rural areas in the developing countries, in particular Africa and Asia, suffer from lack of clean water and sanitation. Poverty makes the situation extremely severe for large population what regards accessibility but also affordability. There exist simple, economic and Effective systems for water purification, e.g. biosand, that can remove the solid particulates and disease-causing micro-organisms from contaminated water. Slow sand filters contain very fine sand and usually function without pre-treatment and chemical additives such as flocculation and chlorination.

Harmful bacteria, parasites and other micro-organisms are greatly reduced through the so-called “bio-film”, a biologically active layer in top layers of the sand that gets created and destroys most pathogens “disease-causing organisms” as they can not survive there. The pathogens get consumed by micro-organisms in the bio-film as they are trapped in and on the sand surface; other filtration mechanisms support the quality improvement.

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/well/resources/fact-sheets/fact-sheets-htm/Household%20WT.htm

Recent research tells that our immune system is mainly located in out digestive system. About 80% of the immune system lives in the gastrointestinal tract and probiotics can help. Probiotics, unlike antibiotics, can replenish the microflora in intestinal tract and promote a number of health-enhancing functions, including digestive function. They are found in unfermented and fermented milk, yogurts, miso, tempeh, soy drinks and some juices (http://instituteofhealthsciences.com/probiotics-help-immune-system-in-your-gi-tract/).

Our digestive systems get astonishing amount of solid foods and liquids from the entire meals of our lifetimes. Making right choices of these individual meals help our digestive systems to extract healthy compounds, process waste and to fend off nasty microbes. These are prerequisites to be healthy, feel well, make stomach lean, soothed, keep diseases away and be cancer-free.

Here are key advices on what you need to eat and why: http://www.besthealthmag.ca/best-eats/digestion/the-foods-to-eat-for-a-healthy-gut#YSkr4oW2RWdxDzIA.97

For small kids lego, by being a pedagogic educational instrument, means develoging free imagination and creative thinking to innovation in problem solving. Lego provides means to translate abstract ideas to concrete reality, a play for more play with unknowns in brains that can not be translated or described in words to known touchable physical realities (http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-year-of-the-lego).

What is interesting is our process of innovation is how anstract ideas in science being transferred to innovative technological solutions for real daily life applications. In the ICT world innovations have not limit and still expands and brings to us an amazing and an ever expanding magnitude of applications.

The first stage of the ICT “Information and Communication Technology” revolution brought to us infinite capabilities for connecting peaple “human-to-human” communication which involves data-transfer. It has allowed the global community to be interactive on-line and in real-time with enormous new possibilties for education to share classrooms, lectures and to provide professionals with unlimited access to “Career-Development-Plans” opportunities. See for example SANDHAN visions to promote Distant Education and technology by making ICT more acceptable to Academic Fraternity.

The second stage of ICT revolution will allow humans to communicate with their bodies and their surrounding environments (http://youtu.be/b3Baz-F36Ck). The second stage of the ICT revolution is “human-to-life” communication through “Biosensors” where these sensors can tell us the status of our living conditions within us, i.e. In our bodies, and in our environments. In real-time and on-life they even give us unique information on different types of threats. An example of “Biosensors” is the use of DNA to detect toxic in environmental systems, e.g. lead and uranium and bacteria in water, and to give us information on food quality and health status in our bodies, e.g. through analysis of blood and urine (http://youtu.be/8A4Op2HzdQ8).

The global water cycle is an essential machinery for atmospheric cleaning of the air we breath. Planet Earth has, generally, a wide-range of natural processes, e.g. sedimentation and filteration, that continuously scavenging and remove hazardous compounds from surface- and groundwater. Human activities have posed and still posing continuous and increasing threats to air and water qualities through production of waste and pollution both In the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. The water we drink and the air we breath needs to be fresh and free from pollution. Waste and pollution are causing accelerating costs for counteracting the degradation of air and water resources.

Production of acceptable water quality, for example, requires constant implementation of management policies on different scales, i.e. instruments, approaches and regulations for affordable, accessible and continuous supply of drinking water. Yet, under the increasing pressures and competition on water resources.

Nano-technologies have wide-spectra of real-time and on-line solutions with huge range of applications what regards not only monitoring of water resources but also of improving their qualities by various purification solutions and waste/pollution treatments processes. Nano-technology based sensors can be produced for real-time and on-line applications with unique advantages for contiuous remote, effective and economic operation, control and monitoring of many processes. As with all other technologies, there are some unknown side-effects; in this case slow-rates of leakage of nano-particles and compounds (especially with aging) to the environment (air and water).

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