Sustainable Development:  Book author, Developer, Speaker, Consultant                           Next page >

Latest News:  In January 2025, Roorda's brand new textbook will appear simultaneously in three languages.
The book introduces sustainable development to university & college students. It also offers detailed information & insights to researchers and practitioners; its earlier editions were quoted many times in scientific publications.

The earlier editions of Roorda's book were updates to previous ones, after the first edition was published in 2005. This time, however, the book has been written completely anew,
in order to match with all sensational global scientific, technological, economic, political, educational and sustainability developments over the last decades.

> For a brief description: see below the three book covers.

Two focuses in the new book. Short-term:  the SDGs. Long-term:  Transitions.

Are you familiar with the SDGs, the globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals? They are great, they are hugely important; and of course they play a major role in the new book.

However: they are only short-term related, already ending in 2030, encouraging us to accomplish no more than systemic improvements, of at very best: innovations; while sustainable development is long-term related by definition, requiring fundamental transitions.

Figure 7.1:  Improvements; innovations; and transitions, leading to the realization of a vision, of a dream

So, besides the SDGs, the book focuses on profound systemic change, such as the global energy transition (including the EU Green Deal), and the transition to a circular economy, which is to be firmly embedded within nature as one holistic ecosystem.

Figure 10.8: The Quintuple Helix: the human world, embedded in the biological community, together: the holistic ecosystem

In the final chapters, everything is set within the context of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, after which a route is shown through which we will be able to transcend from the current glued-on sustainability, with its SDGs, to intrinsic sustainability.

For this purpose, a series of Intrinsic Sustainability Goals is proposed: the ISGs. The book introduces an Action Perspective which enables everyone – citizens, consumers and, most of all, professionals and students – to contribute to sustainable development.
> See more of this: a snippet of text in Dutch, German or English.

Finally, the book explains how to be a true Sustainably Competent Professional, based on the RESFIA+D assessment model.

Figure 12.3: Action Perspective, from modest (bottom) to ambitious (top); and from personal (left) to global (right)