On global sustainability and regional environmentally oriented foresights

Abstract

The main hypothesis of this study is that the recent technology and economic development of a specific region and a certain style of ecological policy, planning and protection can partially affect also regional environmental sustainability. This paper provides a comprehensive insight into environmental foresight projects all over the world based on the specific analysis of the main global environmental hotspots. This analysis helped to discover more than 40 regional hotspots in view of the global environmental sustainability. Approximately 33% of these hotspots are in Asia; 26% in the USA and Africa, and 7% in Oceania and Europe. The key objective of this study is to highlight global environmental sustainability problems, based on the criteria such as biodiversity, standard of living, CO2 emissions, or GDP per capita, and identify regional foresight projects. The data from the UN Statistics Division, UN National Human Development Report Unit, UN Environment Programme, IMF Statistics, and others were used for the analysis of environmental hotspots. While human development index and GDP per capita were used as the measures of social standard of living, biodiversity and amount of produced CO2 emissions were used as the measures of certain environmental quality and sustainability.