**Acknowledgements**

*Sustainability Concept in Developing Countries*

region and the consequences arising from it.

**countries**

bodies such as universities (e.g., UNAN-Managua) in collaboration with their international scientific and educational partners (e.g., Mid Sweden University, University of Brasilia, Monaco's International Atomic Energy Agency, Technical University of Lisbon, Danish Aarhus University, Norwegian Institute for Water Research, etc.) have promoted scientific investigations on historical and current sources of contamination affecting soil, waters, crops, and human health. Although such research projects have increased the awareness within the scientific community, to date, this knowledge has not efficiently reached the local communities, nor

Locally active NGOs (such as Proleña and Chinantlan) together with academia are therefore important drivers of change with great potential to influence public policy-making in terms of creating awareness of soil pollution problems and poten-

pollution by local governments together with the predominantly private tenure of the land places a major responsibility for the remediation on the individual landowners [17, 65, 66]. NGOs and academia have a more direct impact by stimulating landowners to adopt multifunctional land-use strategies that address many of the regions sustainability problems simultaneously. Productive systems can be designed in a way that, in addition to remediating the soil, also provide a source of income or address other scopes of the common agenda and deliver perceivable, direct economic incentives for the landowners [17, 18]. Multifunctional land-use production systems (of food or biomass for energy) with capacity for phytoremediation are low-cost solutions compared to conventional physicochemical soil treatments. Such low-cost systems could potentially produce high outputs in terms of socio-ecological and economic benefits (e.g., more resilient agricultural systems, provision of societal goods and services, soil and water quality enhancement, biodiversity conservation, and reduction of poverty). In the case of Chinandega, a marginalized region with high dependence on agricultural production, these motivations are significant when it comes to the screening of alternatives to solve the soil contamination issue of the

**5. Prospects for sustainable remediation of polluted soil in developing** 

Sustainable remediation of polluted soils in developing countries must meet and surmount many challenges. Important challenges identified in this chapter relates to technology transitions and soil governance. Technologies for soil remediation in developing countries need to meet a different set of criteria than in industrialized countries and should be designed to meet the immediate socio-economic, cultural, and environment contexts in which they are introduced. Sustainable technology transitions must be aligned with the development and application of suitable legislation, policies, and standards. Improvements or development of new soil legislation and policies need to be locally adapted, match the latest scientific progress, and be flexible enough to allow innovative solutions. The DPSIR case study of the region Chinandega, Nicaragua demonstrates a number of drivers that lead to unsustainable production and consumption patterns that in turn adds pressure to both agricultural and natural systems in the region. Past pressures (e.g., excessive use of persistent pesticides) and external pressures due to climate change complicate the situation and aggravate the effects of misuse of natural resources and land. The result is toxic and degraded land (state) that is detrimental to the ecosystems, people's health and to opportunities for value-creation from agriculture production. The responses are currently insufficient to promote sustainable land

has it brought forth responses by means of remediation projects.

tial solutions. The low economic capacities and low priority given to soil

**78**

We thank Dr. Martha Lacayo, Marta Jarquín Pascua, Maybis López Hernández, and the other members of the team at the Biotechnology Laboratory of UNAN-Managua, for their great support with the field research in Chinandega. We also thank Ajax Fonseca and Francisco Javier Espinoza (project leader and General Coordinator, respectively) from the Chinantlan Cooperative Association for their assistance during the study visits at different farms.
