Chapter 9 covers THE ROLE OF SAMPLING IN INFERENTIAL STATISTICS and includes the following specific topics, among others: Samples and Populations, Random Samples, Simple Random Sampling, Sampling with and without Replacement, Sampling Distributions, the Sampling Distribution of Means, The Central Limit Theorem,Estimators and Bias.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to numerous languages that belong to several language families. To get a sense of just how linguistically diverse sub-Saharan Africa is, consider the following figures from Ethnologue. The nearly 1 billion people living in sub-Saharan Africa speak over 2,040 languages. On a national level, there are 16 countries in this region with 50 or more languages spoken. For comparison, in Europe the only country with more than 50 languages is the Russian Federation, most of whose languages are spoken in Siberia rather than in European Russia. In Asia, 12 countries with more than 50 languages are listed.

Humans are part of Nature. Although the mind often separates them, the two were never apart. The nearest experience of Nature is land: land use and land cover (LULC). Various classifications have been proposed, based on averages and patterns of precipitation, sunshine, soils and others. Human activity has changed the land on earth significantly, which has in combination with natural processes often negatively affected its ecological and agricultural functions (degredation in the form of erosion, desertification, salinization). Ecology is the prime science of Nature: (models of) ecosystem dynamics, foodwebs, biodiversity, ecosystem services (ES) and their evaluation, and (ecological) resilience are at the heart of sustainability science. Ecosystem models provide insights into land restoration and preservation of biodiversity, in particular regarding impacts of and adaptation to climate change. Which actions are undertaken, individually and collectively, depends greatly on the perspective on Nature - they diverge and so do the policies and prospects.

In this chapter we focus on languages spoken on the numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean, as well as one big island in the Indian Ocean: Madagascar. Most of these languages belong to the Austronesian language family, and it will be our primary concern here; other languages in this region belong to the geographical (but not familial!) grouping of Papuan languages, which will be considered in detail in Chapter 10.

Chapter 3 covers MEASURES OF LOCATION, SPREAD, AND SKEWNESS and includes the following specific topics, among others:Mode, Median, Mean, Weighted Mean,Range, Interquartile Range, Variance, Standard Deviation, and Skewness.

Because languages of New Guinea and Australia are considered in the same chapter of this book, one might expect them to be related. Because of the geographical proximity between the two areas, the idea that the languages spoken there constitute one family has been explored by several linguists; however, the question remains open. Until recently, no plausible link had been found, in part because researchers looked in the wrong place: the south coast of New Guinea, immediately above the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea. It is a logical place to look, for sure, as it is the area closest to Australia, but unfortunately, no languages spoken there today show any evidence of a link to languages of Australia. More recent studies suggest that a possible link between languages of Australia and New Guinea may be found in an unexpected location: in the highlands of New Guinea (see Foley 1986: 271–275).

Agro-food systems have evolved in the last two centuries from mostly local, extensive production and habits to intensive crop and livestock cultivation in large farms, with processing, trade, technology and finance in the hands of large global corporations. This made it possible to feed the ever growing human population, but with significant drawbacks: overexploitation of soils, widespread emission of pollutants, animal suffering, decay of local communities and mixed impacts on dependencies and resilience. These advances coincide with continuing hunger and undernourishment on a large scale; at the same time, obesity is rising as unhealthy food gets commercialized worldwide. The road towards sustainable agro-food systems demands regulating the corporations and their innovative and marketing powers, protecting and restoring local and regional food diets and practices, a new look at the merits of trade and, last but not least, renewed ethical reflections on land ownership and on the relation between humans and other living beings.

Chapter 19 covers ACCESSING DATA FROM PUBLIC USE SOURCES and includes the following specific topics, among others: Good Research Questions, Desirable Features of Public Use Data, and Accessing Publicly Available Datasets.

Nature provides the resources for human life and activity. Different categories are distinguished: renewable when the resource renews itself within certain domains of use, and non-renewable when this happens not at all or very slowly. Two key renewable resources are fish and forests. Simple, generic models have been developed for their exploitation. Fish supply from world fisheries has declined since the end of the twentieth century; marine fisheries have reached their limits, with a large fraction of fishing ground overexploited. Further growth in fish supply is from aquafarming. Technology is a major driver of productivity increase; supply and trade are increasingly in the hands of a few global corporations. Governments tend to support these trends, and the livelihood of local fishermen communities is often at stake. Similar developments did and do happen in forests. For both resources, proper stock assessments and modelling are difficult and should incorporate humans as key actors. Here, too, the future depends on which values, beliefs and interests will dominate in designing, implementing and enforcing regulations, in balancing large-scale versus small-scale, and in protection of ecosystems and their biodiversity.

In Parts I–III, I have discussed how sustainability and sustainable development have become prominent in public discourse and proposed a framework to engage with the values and beliefs surrounding them. In Part IV, an introduction is given on epistemological questions and on various methods which are being developed and applied in sustainability science. In Part V, I use the previous reflections, concepts and methods to explore themes of health, biodiversity, food and water provision, and use of energy and materials from the perspective of (the quest for) sustainable development.

This chapter is an introductory chapter on the subsequent nine thematic chapters. Some schemes have been constructed to put various themes (food, water, energy, etc.) in a larger integrating context. Most widely known are the PSIR-framework, the planetary boundaries and the doughnut scheme. Another issue in thematic chapters is proper understanding and methods of data collection, processing and assessment (MFA, LCA, CBA, I-O). To link data and assessments to communication and decision-making requires formulation and use of indicators. Some well-known indicators (HDI, GPI, EF) have found their way in sustainability science and policy-making. A last connection to the thematic chapters are consumer expenditures, because, after all, that represents an indicator of the ultimate driver of anthropogenic change.

The word development has a long history. The word sustainable is of more recent coinage. Nowadays, it is used in many different contexts and in, sometimes, bewildering ways: sustainable water, sustainable livelihoods, sustainable technology, sustainable cities, sustainable traffic, sustainable banking – and even sustainable growth. Derivatives like sustainability and sustainable development have undergone the same fate, often in unison with words like green, bio and eco. Yet, despite scepticism, criticism and proposals for alternatives, such as resilience and viability, the word sustainability seems to endure (although in sometimes unbearably diluted or perverted forms). I therefore use sustainable development in this book as the core term and, in Chapter 1, explore (the ideals of) development and sustainability.