Urgent action needed for a sustainable future

A new book edited by a leading Cardiff University academic aims to stimulate debate about some of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.

Professor Terry Marsden, of the Sustainable Places Research Institute, has launched the SAGE Handbook of Nature, which offers an ambitious retrospective and prospective overview of the field that aims to position nature, the environment and natural processes at the heart of interdisciplinary social sciences.

The work has contributions from around 100 authors – scientists who are working on different aspects of the social science of the environment – and brings together 14 different clusters of scholarly work, collated in a “Sustainability Science Web”. It is hoped the Handbook will become a key critical research resource for researchers and practitioners.

Professor Marsden’s research includes wide-ranging work on the socio-economic restructuring of agriculture; theorisations and empirical investigations of rural development; analysis of agri-food chains and networks; and critical commentaries in the emerging fields of environmental sociology and environmental planning.

The Sustainable Places Research Institute has an international reputation for delivering relevant, robust, research that is used by policymakers across Wales, the UK and further afield to support evidence-based policy making.

Professor Marsden added: “The impending problems of climate change and sustainability have made research in this field much more urgent. This is no longer something we can ignore, and we have to deal with it practically. Over the next twenty years it will be critical for academics to become more proactive than just scholarly terms, by engaging with stakeholders and contributing fully to the debate. There is already a lot of action going on and I hope the handbook can be a guide and stimulus to advance this field for the benefit of future generations.”

Find out more about The SAGE Handbook of Nature.