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Social Engagement Aspects of Sustainability

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Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education

Introduction

The concept of sustainable development was first introduced in the United Nations’ “Brundtland” Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (1987), reported as the ability to achieve economic growth meeting the present generation’s needs without compromising the future generations’ capacity to fulfill their own needs. This concept is based on principals of effective resource management aligned with social organization, with the purpose to mitigate the negative effects of human activities on the biosphere. Social engagement plays an important role in pursuing this goal, once some of the key motivators towards environmental preservation are mediated mainly by the extent of human connection with nature, built through communication, knowledge, and behavior (Thomsen 2015). Those are important components of Social-Ecological Systems (SES), which refer to the relationship of humans and the environment within a scope where social and...

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Correspondence to Luana Dandara Barreto Torres .

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Barreto Torres, L.D., Asmus, G.F., da Cal Seixas, S.R. (2019). Social Engagement Aspects of Sustainability. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_31

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