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In this chapter globalisation at the end of the twentieth century and the role of nation-states in its processes are presented. Environmental globalisation and the effects of globalisation on environmental and nature protection together with the relationship between environmental problems and social conflicts are focused. The relationship and role of global and national institutions controlling the society on influencing the overall operation of the global Earth system are analysed. The relationship of multinational companies and nation-states is also discussed together with the relationship between authoritarian systems and the natural environment. The typical features of the global civil society and its role in sustainable development are presented in a separate subchapter. In another subchapter the effects of wars ruining the society and nature are discussed. Then the new ways of globalisation, digital globalisation are analysed. Finally, processes connecting the global society acting for or against sustainable development are presented, and related to this the “layered” structure of the society is illustrated by superposing different world maps.

The prevailing patterns of consumption and production are not sustainable because they are based on increasing extraction of non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels or scarce metals) from the Earth’s crust and overuse of life-sustaining ecosystem services (such as CO2 assimilation or the water cycle). One strategy to direct consumption to a sustainable pathway is the circular economy. The goal of the circular economy is to slow down the flow of material resources through the anthroposphere and to return them back to nature in a form that is as compatible as possible with the ecosystem processes. We focus on the first aspect, which means that each unit of material resource that enters the economic system should satisfy as much human needs as possible until it is considered waste. We ask the question if and how the emerging “sharing economy” can contribute to this specific goal. We see the phenomenon of sharing economy as a transformation of sharing practices with means of digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The resulting Digital Sharing Economy (DSE) can therefore be considered an important special case of ICT impact on sustainable development. We open up an argument on how sharing in the DSE can be either supportive or counter-productive with regard to the circular economy goals. We present a first framework that provides a guideline for the qualitative assessment of new sharing practices with regard to their potential contribution to a circular economy.

For his settlements homo sapiens has developed, over thousands of years, technical equipment to support and ensure sustenance of water, energy, biomass and construction materials, to maintain the flows and stocks of these goods and to manage the disposal of waste. This technical equipment, a prosthetic outer envelope of the biological skin of humans, evolved in urbanization to a complex artificial physiological system of densely settled and highly mobile human societies. The byproduct of globalization is a net of urban systems embracing Planet Earth. It is the anthroposphere with its own technical metabolism (Baccini and Brunner in Metabolism of the Anthroposphere. MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2012a).

Global warming has caused an unprecedented rise in sea levels as well as increased storm intensity. Both phenomena are responsible for an increase in flooding and erosion of many archaeological sites located on the coast, which constitute a weak interface between the hydrosphere, atmosphere, anthroposphere, and lithosphere. The present research project aims to develop a sustainable model for safeguarding archaeological sites from the adverse effects of climate change and environmental degradation. In addition, by implementing site-specific planning and design based on ecological, bioclimatic, and energy-efficient strategies and techniques, sustainable preservation and enhancement of cultural heritage sites can be achieved to increase sitings and accessibility to sites.

With the seriously polluted environment due to social development, the sustainability of net primary production (NPP), which is used to feed most lives on the earth, has become one of the biggest concerns that we have to consider for the sake of food shortage. There have been many researches analyzing one or two potential impact factors of NPP based on field observation data, which brings about many uncertainties for further calculation. Moreover, the frequently used process-based models heavily depend on the understandings of researchers about the NPP process. The premises of such models hinder the impact factor analysis from being objective and confident. To overcome such shortages, we collected 27 potential impact factors of global NPP in terms of eight land cover types. The feature variables include atmosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere and lithosphere parameters, which can be obtained from public available remote sensed products. The experiment shows that latitude, irradiance ultraviolet and normalized difference vegetation index are dominant factors impacting global NPP. Anthropogenic activities, precipitation and surface emissivity are influencing NPP calculation largely. However, some commonly used biosphere parameters in process-based models are actually not playing that important roles in NPP estimation. This work provides a new insight in analyzing NPP impact factors, being more objective and comprehensive compared with frequently used process-based models.

So-called phenomenological approaches to the understanding of social and spatial relations usually deal with these in terms of ‘mental space’, ‘existential space’, ‘social space’ and so on. These modes of space are regarded as ‘subjective’, ‘soft’ and short on the ‘hard’ mathematical, geometric or objective properties that give spatial analysis a rigorous analytical capability. I argue here that this misrepresents and misunderstands a central principle of phenomenology and overlooks phenomenology’s potential to objectively map us in our world. In its essence phenomenology is founded on the relation of intentionality. It is not necessarily about an interior mentality at all but about a subject-object relation in the world. The model that says there is an interior subjective or imaginative realm on the one hand and an exterior objective, physical or real one on the other, between which relations must be established for human knowledge or action to be produced, is replaced by one in which a perfectly real subject at one end of an intentional relation is connected to a perfectly real object at the other. A different phenomenology of places would be about how these relations between subjects and objects are structured and intentional knowledge and action mediated in the world. It would be about the environmental relation where the notion of ‘environment’ is captured in the relations between intentional subjects and the objects of those subjects’ attention and intention. I argue that this is eventually about how we order and construct human ‘worlds’ technologically and spatially so that we may effectively inhabit and use them. These ‘worlds’ exist as whole networks of subjects and objects, in part-whole, mutually constitutive, relations with ‘worlds’. The translation of the intentional relation into geography and urbanism involves us in an historical process of the construction of metageographical structures through which subjects establish and order their knowledge of and practices in the world. Enclosures, divisions and connections made by us in the world have shaped these structures and established the geographical and urban frames of our lives. This requires us to understand the human world as an historical construction, an anthroposphere, of regions and places, as equipment for framing our knowledge of the world and our local and translocal actions in it. I start by looking critically at social relations as these are imagined today, finding their origins in an Enlightenment metaphysics which bifurcates nature into mental and corporeal realms, and suggest an alternative founded in this reassessment of phenomenology. This alternative centres our attention on the anthroposphere as a construction, and a topological ‘structure of places’, organised as a layering of places and infrastructural ‘grids’ into a set of normative ‘levels’ which have a metageographical, intelligibility-giving and practice-defining character. ‘Structures of places’, ‘grids’ and ‘levels’ are perfectly objective and mappable and are proposed as the foundation of a new phenomenological urban and geographical model.