Students:Alena Křivánková

I am undergraduate student of development studies at Mendel university in Brno. As I am studying development studies, I would like to hear the opinions if it is possible to have sustainable development is possible at all and on which level of development - local, global? I would like to see some functional projects that can be transferred to other regions.

I dont know the project from my region in Brno but I visited Embercombe - peaceful place of very enthusiastic people in England. It is community that is trying to live in sustainable way - having garden, sharing knowledge, cooperate with neighboroughing villages... Tim McCarney - the founder and leader of this community is well known for his speeches about sustainability. He is trying to teach about how everyone can participate in this kind of development. In Embercombe they offer many activities, courses also about personal develepment that leads to taking responsibility for our lives. I am looking forward to see you in 3 days.

FINAL ASSESMENT Whole seminar was very interesting and well organized. Particularly the discussions with experts and tutors were really enriching. As I am studying Development Studies I had already known many topics of sustainable development like environment protection, energy usage and so on. But even though, there were many new ideas for every topic and it was interesting to hear opinions of people who are not directly from my field of study. For me the newest and most interesting thing was the idea of „decoupling“. I went through macroeconomics and microeconomics at my university and I studied economics for development but the decoupling was not mentioned at all. Although this concept is really fundamental for development in my point of view. It is great idea of evaluation development in different way. It can be used also for creation new projects that should be considered sustainable. Main idea of sustainable development is to keep the economic growth with the minimum environmental impact. And exactly this can be monitored in the decoupling concept. In reality there can be some problems implementing evaluation of decoupling. I can imagine that the concept as it is now can be misused when introducing inappropriate indicators. But anyway by providing this model we can clearly see if the commitments of protection of environment were met on the project level as well as on the global level. We learnt that decoupling of economic growth from environmental impact is really important for sustainable development. There are two types of decoupling – partial one and absolute one. The partial one is when the impact on environmental is steady or growing in the lower pace than economic growth, absolute decoupling means that impact on environment is even decreasing. Concept of decoupling is important for my study because than I can look on achievements in development from the different point of view. Not every time the lowering of environmental impact means that it was done in appropriate way. And that is when decoupling can make it clear. In my further studies I will try to introduce this topic to my lecturers and discuss the implementation of decoupling to curricula of some subject – preferably development economics.