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Sustainable urban development implies a process by which sustainability can be attained, emphasizing improvement, progress and positive change, incorporating both environmental and social dimensions. Thus, sustainable urban development highlights the need to reform the market mechanism to achieve environmental goals with the attainment of a balance with social and economic considerations. The large and emerging economies of BRICS have experienced fast-paced urbanization process in recent decades. Along with it the problem of environmental degradation occurs as fast urbanization requires more and more energy consumption as well as carbon emission. Here comes the problem of sustainable urbanization which is a matter of serious concern to deal with. In this chapter, five BRICS nations have taken up to see their respective progress in the fields of per capita energy consumption and carbon emission in their urban areas. To show this it investigates the relationship between urbanization, energy consumption, and CO₂ emissions over the period 1992–2014, using a panel data model. The relative potentials of the countries to reduce respective CO₂ emissions are also analyzed. The results indicate that per capita CO₂ emissions are characterized by conspicuous regional imbalances during the study period. Nations are found to present a long run bidirectional positive relationship, the importance of which is found to vary between the respective regions of the countries.

The US–China conflicts surrounding the imposition of tariffs have caused a stir in the global markets. Various attempts have been made to understand the rationale and causes as well as its impact on the various ­aspects of the international market. There are many unanswered questions pertaining to China’s emergence as a global superpower and the ­possible threats that it poses to the Western dominated market. Based on this background, the chapter is an attempt to investigate the impacts of the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) of the United States and China on three most important global markets, namely, crude oil, credit market, and commodity ­market. To attain the objectives of the chapter, the study has utilized Vector Auto Regressive model and has analyzed the results. The study concludes that China’s EPU has lesser impact on the global market as compared to the US EPU. On the basis of the results obtained, few policy implications have been proposed.