Globalisation is facilitating faster growth of industrialisation in developing countries for the last few decades. Businesses from developed countries either setting up factories or outsourcing manufactured products from developing countries. Foreign investment creates job opportunities and boost economic growth, however, as a long-term effect of industrialisation, unplanned urban growth is occurring in and around industrial zones in the developing countries. Observing unplanned urban growth around Dhaka Export Processing Zone of Bangladesh for the last three decades from satellite images, we argue that developing countries are setting up special industrial areas for foreign investors by developing road and power infrastructures. Over time, secondary industries and supporting businesses start to appear around the planned industrial area. People also start to build houses and live in nearby areas and eventually create unplanned residential areas. Therefore, it is evident that planned industrialisation is causing unplanned urban growth in developing countries and creating challenges for environmental sustainability.

To satisfy future food demand, agricultural land tenure is increasingly legislated, along a land-sparing (land reserved exclusively for agriculture) to land sharing (multipurpose spaces featuring agriculture) continuum. A mosaic of land sparing/sharing arrangements will be required to balance conservation and social interests, yet little attention has been paid to soil resilience under such land management regimes. We considered soil resilience under three land management scenarios. In scenario one, legislative instruments spare only arable land. Consequently, soil function is maintained. However, market proximity, urban encroachment and declining farmland value, compromise long-term feasibility of this approach. Scenario two spares land around existing peri-urban development trajectories and supply chains. Whilst socially this is a desirable land tenure arrangement, soil futures are compromised and vulnerability to disease and erosion increases. In Scenario three, land is shared between conservation and farming. This outcome has only moderate social benefits due to diminished yields and the proximity of agriculture to urban living. Soil futures are variable and spatially-contingent on local disturbance. Only intensively-used arable land is likely to retain soil function and support ongoing global food security. When balanced against social, ecological and economic interests, legislating arable land-sparing for soil conservation will demand trans-disciplinary planning approaches.

As efforts towards sustainability continue to elude us, it is easy to conclude that the sustainability argument is failing. The term is increasingly hijacked to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. However, around water there has been an ongoing focus on sustainability, even if it is not always given that name. At a technocratic level, integrated water management, the need to consider the whole of water cycle, has become mainstream. Perhaps more crucially, it has also begun to highlight the need to connect people to water. At the same time water has also become the focal point of environmental campaigns (e.g. CSG protests), unusual alliances (e.g. farmers and the Greens) and new governance (e.g. rights for rivers). This presentation argues that a common aspect to all this has been adding of the social and cultural into the usual environmental and economic view of water. I suggest that where people are connected to their water, they care about it; and where they care about water, they begin to care about sustainability. Making use of the hydrosocial cycle as a conceptual tool, this talk will discuss this idea and see what lessons can be learned for sustainability.

Sustainable development, as an aspiration, embraced a tension: embracing welcome change, while conserving precious stabilities in socio-ecological dynamics. In local arenas, over modest timeframes, and on specific measures, and occasionally at larger scales, for longer periods, and on wider issue sets, something akin to sustainability has been achieved. For the most part, though, if one cares about large places over the long term, longings for sustainability invite grief. Socio-ecological systems analysis and environmental history demonstrate the challenges: exponential growth in either population or per capita consumption, in many locations, speaks to our de facto commitments. Lessons from action research, in projects in regional NSW and Queensland, show how provisional pursuit of sustainability is, at finer resolutions. Political instabilities loom large. Interdependence and vulnerability are a modus vivendi. What then can we do as geographers? One way to respond is to focus on developing adaptive capacity in the communities of emerging professionals we teach, and the professional networks we engage through action research. Fostering reflective practice, creative thinking, triangulating technically, politically and managerially, and embedding innovations through capacity building processes, show ways transformation - both thrust upon us and and arising from new forms of hope - can be embraced.