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This paper profiles Australian universities’ website communications about sustainability initiatives, especially relating to Talloires Declaration signification and the ten recommended actions. The research involves a content study of Talloires signatories’ websites and their semiotic and signaling theory aspects across time. The source is publicly available information (time period 2014 and 2015 respectively) in context with education for sustainable development (ESD) in society and the transaction model in communication theory. It is found that some of the signatory universities in Australia exemplify a few of the Talloires ten agreed actions in their public communications, but each point is not emphasised with equal priority. The variance may be due to divergent underlying objectives; such as public communication of Talloires toward genuine benefit for the environment, or to create a strategic positioning tool to signal the university as an environmental champion within the broader society. Focusing upon secondary data from signatory university websites in Australia, the paper provides a study of higher education signification of Talloires. It assists the initial understanding of signaling theory in the public communication transactions that promote Talloires action and implementation. The findings encourage further studies of related communication issues in universities in other countries. The paper also deepens local and global understanding of perceptions of sustainability and contributes to the body of comparative literature of sustainability in higher education as a development component of strategic management of ESD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If engineers are to provide sustainable innovations for future societies, engineers should be able to think and act beyond pure technical competence. This is stressed in political and accreditation frameworks all over the world, and universities are trying to respond to this demand. However, in many cases, sustainability practices seem fragmented and there is a lack of knowledge of strategies and few clear examples of good practice. In this paper, activities to integrate sustainability in two engineering institutions, one in Denmark and one in Australia, are systematically compared to provide an understanding of different kinds of activities and their internal as well as external enablers. A conceptual framework to provide overview of education for sustainability activities and their enablers has been proposed, where activities are related to actors and resources at both university and national levels. The conceptual framework has been developed iteratively – moving back and forth trying to find a suitable structure to capture the contextual pillars of the activities in the two cases, using state-of-art within the research field of education for sustainable development to fill out potential blind spots in the case-material and, finally, continuously shaping the storylines in the two cases to provide the needed overview and understanding of the similarities and differences of the approaches. The interplay between the framework and the case-stories provides a platform for change, as the framework does not only create an overview of activities, it also points out potential routes not taken, and the case studies provide examples of activities, which can be transferred with careful consideration to the internal as well as external context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Today''s global society is economically, socially and culturally dependent on minerals and metals. While metals are recyclable, terrestrial mineral deposits are by definition ‘non-renewable’ over human timescales and their stocks are thus finite. This raises the spectre of ‘peak minerals’ – the time at which production from terrestrial ores can no longer rise to meet demand and where a maximum (peak) production occurs. Peak minerals prompts a focus on the way minerals can be sustainably used in the future to ensure the services they provide to global society can be maintained. As peak minerals approaches (and is passed in some cases), understanding and monitoring the dynamics of primary mineral production, recycling and dematerialisation, in the context of national and global discussions about mineral resources demand and the money earned from their sale, will become essential for informing and establishing mechanisms for sustainable mineral governance and use efficiency into the future. Taking a cross-scale approach, this paper explores the economic and productivity impacts of peak minerals, and how changes in the mineral production profile are influenced not only by technological and scarcity factors, but also by environmental and social constraints. Specifically we examine the impacts of peak minerals in Australia, a major global minerals supplier, and the consequences for the Asia-Pacific region, a major destination for Australia''s minerals. This research has profound implications for local and regional/global sustainability of mineral and metal use. The focus on services is useful for encouraging discussion of transitions in how such services can be provided in a future more sustainable economy, when mineral availability is constrained. The research also begins to address the question of how we approach the development of strategies to maximise returns from mineral wealth over generations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper responds to challenges made by Castree [Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79–90] and Sneddon [Sneddon, C., 2000. ‘Sustainability’ in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521–549] for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the ‘new ecology’. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geography’s place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]