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Sustainability, Volume 8, Issue 2

2016 February - 91 articles

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Articles (91)

  • Article
  • Open Access
33 Citations
8,438 Views
11 Pages

Why Companies Do Not Renew Their EMAS Registration? An Exploratory Research

  • Michele Preziosi,
  • Roberto Merli and
  • Mara D’Amico

22 February 2016

The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) is the official Environmental Management System (EMS) issued by the European Union (EU). Italy is the country where EMAS is most widespread, accounting for over 1000 registered organizations. Since entry int...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue 5th World Sustainability Forum - Selected Papers)
  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
9,310 Views
19 Pages

22 February 2016

Optimizing international oil exploration projects is one of the main challenges for oil companies in obtaining investment benefits. This paper establishes an integrated evaluation model to maximize investment benefits within the constraints of techni...

(This article belongs to the Section Energy Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
107 Citations
16,743 Views
16 Pages

22 February 2016

Construction waste management (CWM) has received worldwide attention for some time. As a result, a plethora of research, investigating a wide array of CWM issues such as their profiles, practices, and performance, has been reported in individual econ...

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
7,514 Views
19 Pages

22 February 2016

The target date in 2015 for the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was reached, and a new period of global goals for the post-2015 is dawning. To assess whether and how regional progress towards achieving the MDGs has contributed to...

(This article belongs to the Section Environmental Sustainability and Applications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
21 Citations
5,640 Views
20 Pages

22 February 2016

Up till now, the high penetration of intermittent distributed generation (DG) has posed great challenges to the planning and operation of the grid. To achieve the best balance between economic cost and acceptable capacity of DG, this paper proposes a...

(This article belongs to the Section Energy Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
21 Citations
9,054 Views
17 Pages

Revealing Social Values by 3D City Visualization in City Transformations

  • Tim Johansson,
  • Eugenia Segerstedt,
  • Thomas Olofsson and
  • Mats Jakobsson

22 February 2016

Social sustainability is a widely used concept in urban planning research and practice. However, knowledge of spatial distributions of social values and aspects of social sustainability is required. Visualization of these distributions is also highly...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Earth Observation and Geoinformation Technologies for Sustainable Development)
  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
6,475 Views
19 Pages

22 February 2016

Congestion pricing strategy has been recognized as an effective countermeasure in the practical field of urban traffic congestion mitigation. Despite the positive effects of congestion pricing, its implementation has faced problems. This paper invest...

  • Review
  • Open Access
61 Citations
16,114 Views
34 Pages

Multifaceted Impacts of Sustainable Land Management in Drylands: A Review

  • Maria Jose Marques,
  • Gudrun Schwilch,
  • Nina Lauterburg,
  • Stephen Crittenden,
  • Mehreteab Tesfai,
  • Jannes Stolte,
  • Pandi Zdruli,
  • Claudio Zucca,
  • Thorunn Petursdottir and
  • Adrian Doko
  • + 8 authors

20 February 2016

Biophysical restoration or rehabilitation measures of land have demonstrated to be effective in many scientific projects and small-scale environmental experiments. However circumstances such as poverty, weak policies, or inefficient scientific knowle...

(This article belongs to the Section Environmental Sustainability and Applications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
37 Citations
7,637 Views
12 Pages

20 February 2016

China’s urbanization has resulted in significant changes in agricultural land use. However, understanding of the linkages between urbanization and fertilizer use intensity is limited. Using county-level panel data for Henan Province, 1995–2008 and pa...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Development of Sustainable Rural Regions in the Face of Increasing Globalization and Urbanization)
  • Article
  • Open Access
30 Citations
8,679 Views
15 Pages

Economic Valuation of Mining Heritage from a Recreational Approach: Application to the Case of El Soplao Cave in Spain (Geosite UR004)

  • Rubén Pérez-Álvarez,
  • Saúl Torres-Ortega,
  • Pedro Díaz-Simal,
  • Raúl Husillos-Rodríguez and
  • Julio Manuel De Luis-Ruiz

20 February 2016

Heritage tourism can increase incomes and stimulate the economy in former mining areas. Recreational tourism is one of the main sources of value of heritage. People from urban areas are willing to pay for access to these tourism options. The measurem...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Management in Tourism and Hospitality)
  • Article
  • Open Access
20 Citations
7,634 Views
15 Pages

Have Changes to Unused Land in China Improved or Exacerbated Its Environmental Quality in the Past Three Decades?

  • Ling Yi,
  • Zengxiang Zhang,
  • Xiaoli Zhao,
  • Bin Liu,
  • Xiao Wang,
  • Qingke Wen,
  • Lijun Zuo,
  • Fang Liu,
  • Jingyong Xu and
  • Shunguang Hu

20 February 2016

Inappropriate land use has caused a series of environmental disasters such as floods and sand storms, and some of them involved unused land changes with highly localized distributions in arid and semi-arid regions with fragile ecosystems. As the thir...

  • Article
  • Open Access
54 Citations
12,315 Views
21 Pages

20 February 2016

Heat loss and gain through windows has a very high impact on the thermal comfort of offices. This paper analyzes a standard low energy consumption university office that has a standard envelope. Dynamic thermal simulations with EDSL Tas software, a p...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Passive House Development and High Energy Efficiency Sustainable Buildings)
  • Article
  • Open Access
129 Citations
16,223 Views
16 Pages

Sustainable Local Development and Environmental Governance: A Strategic Planning Experience

  • Giuseppe Ioppolo,
  • Stefano Cucurachi,
  • Roberta Salomone,
  • Giuseppe Saija and
  • Lei Shi

19 February 2016

The emphasis on learning and adaptation among different actors at various political administrative levels and on various geographic scales has become a precondition for the emergence of sustainable development. It is possible to find the essential fo...

  • Article
  • Open Access
33 Citations
11,945 Views
26 Pages

19 February 2016

A company’s core competitiveness depends on the strategic allocation of its human resources in alignment with employee capabilities. Competency models can identify the range of capabilities at a company’s disposal, and this information can be used to...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Better Decision-Making Helps to Improve Sustainability - Part II)
  • Article
  • Open Access
4,902 Views
18 Pages

19 February 2016

Understanding the system of connections between societal contexts and policy outcomes in municipal governments provides important insights into how community sustainability happens, and why it happens differently in various communities. A growing bod...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
8,596 Views
19 Pages

18 February 2016

Western industrial cluster literature pays little attention to specialized markets (SMs) and the geographical agglomeration of distributors or sale agencies (SAs). This paper takes Linyin, Shandong, a famous commodity city in Northeastern China, as a...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Governance in Northeast Asia: Challenges for Innovation Frontier)
  • Article
  • Open Access
27 Citations
11,108 Views
19 Pages

Does Land Tenure Security Promote Manure Use by Farm Households in Vietnam?

  • Trung Thanh Nguyen,
  • Siegfried Bauer and
  • Ulrike Grote

18 February 2016

Facing widespread poverty and land degradation, Vietnam started a land reform in 1993 as part of its renovation policy package known as “Doi Moi”. This paper examines the impacts of improved land tenure security, via this land reform, on manure use b...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Issues on Soil Management and Conservation)
  • Article
  • Open Access
20 Citations
7,560 Views
15 Pages

The Effect of the Internal Side of Social Responsibility on Firm Competitive Success in the Business Services Industry

  • M. Isabel Sánchez-Hernández,
  • Dolores Gallardo-Vázquez,
  • Agnieszka Barcik and
  • Piotr Dziwiński

18 February 2016

This work focuses on the internal side of social responsibility of organizations in a regional context. Through a survey of 590 managers in classical business services (human-capital intensive) and representative of the productive economy of the Regi...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Business Models)
  • Review
  • Open Access
52 Citations
17,025 Views
19 Pages

17 February 2016

To date, international processes associated with sustainable development have not led to an internationally legally binding framework that adequately addresses the challenges we face. Human influence on the planet has led to the adoption, although no...

  • Article
  • Open Access
38 Citations
14,578 Views
18 Pages

17 February 2016

Finding the right strategic alliance partner is a critical success factor for many enterprises. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose an effective approach based on grey theory and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for selecting better par...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Business Models)
  • Article
  • Open Access
150 Citations
26,031 Views
30 Pages

16 February 2016

The green supply chain is an innovation that extends traditional sustainability initiatives to environmental activities in the supply chain and aims to minimize a product’s environmental impact throughout its life cycle. The adoption of a green suppl...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Better Decision-Making Helps to Improve Sustainability - Part II)
  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
6,387 Views
26 Pages

16 February 2016

Regional competition may play an important role in the balance of environmental protection and economic growth. However, it is a pending issue of whether the competition among Chinese local governments leads to a race to black development or green de...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from 6th Annual Conference of Energy Economics and Management)
  • Article
  • Open Access
22 Citations
6,514 Views
14 Pages

Emission Laws and Influence Factors of Greenhouse Gases in Saline-Alkali Paddy Fields

  • Jie Tang,
  • Shuang Liang,
  • Zhaoyang Li,
  • Hao Zhang,
  • Sining Wang and
  • Nan Zhang

16 February 2016

The study of greenhouse gas emissions has become a global focus, but few studies have considered saline-alkali paddy fields. Gas samples and saline-alkali soil samples were collected during the green, tillering, booting, heading and grain filling sta...

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Agriculture)
  • Article
  • Open Access
71 Citations
9,991 Views
14 Pages

16 February 2016

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) not only affects the economic growth but also affects the environmental protection of the host country. With China’s background of pursuing green growth, we need to consider the performance of FDI from the economic and...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Governance in Northeast Asia: Challenges for Innovation Frontier)
  • Article
  • Open Access
40 Citations
11,143 Views
24 Pages

Recent Trends in the World Gas Market: Economical, Geopolitical and Environmental Aspects

  • Alessandro Toscano,
  • Filiberto Bilotti,
  • Francesco Asdrubali,
  • Claudia Guattari,
  • Luca Evangelisti and
  • Carmine Basilicata

16 February 2016

Natural gas is considered by energy experts to be the most promising fossil fuel for the 21st century, and as a matter of fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) introduced for the first time in the 2011 World Energy Outlook a high gas use scenar...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue 15th CIRIAF National Congress – Environmental Footprint and Sustainable Development)
  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
6,013 Views
10 Pages

16 February 2016

There are a great amount of brownfield in Chinese mining cities. In order to promote mining cities sustainable development, it is necessary to redevelop brownfield. There is a great deal of uncertainty in the process of brownfield redevelopment owing...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Governance in Northeast Asia: Challenges for Innovation Frontier)
  • Article
  • Open Access
49 Citations
8,625 Views
16 Pages

16 February 2016

The famous “world’s factory” city, Dongguan, like many other places in China, is a typical beneficiary of China’s Reform and Opening-up Policy. However, rapid urban sprawl and economic growth are at the expense of the destruction of the local environ...

(This article belongs to the Section Environmental Sustainability and Applications)
  • Article
  • Open Access
10 Citations
8,754 Views
20 Pages

15 February 2016

The study explores links between types of business models used by companies and their involvement in CSR. As the main part of our conceptual framework we used a business model taxonomy developed by Dudzik and Witek-Hajduk, which identifies five types...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Business Models)
  • Article
  • Open Access
76 Citations
8,945 Views
20 Pages

14 February 2016

Nowadays, with the green economy becoming mainstream in the world, an industrial revolution as the core of green development has emerged. Based on the empirical evidence from China’s 30 provinces, this study establishes an evaluation index system of...

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
69 Citations
15,124 Views
10 Pages

Biochar Based Microbial Fuel Cell for Enhanced Wastewater Treatment and Nutrient Recovery

  • Tyler M. Huggins,
  • Albert Latorre,
  • Justin C. Biffinger and
  • Zhiyong Jason Ren

14 February 2016

Waste-wood derived biochar was evaluated for the first time as both an anode and cathode material, simultaneously, in an overflow style microbial fuel cell (MFC) using actual industrial wastewater. Results show that the average chemical oxygen demand...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Biochar)
  • Article
  • Open Access
278 Citations
33,948 Views
12 Pages

11 February 2016

Several individual scholars and international organizations have attempted to conceptualize “culture” in its different meanings in sustainability. Despite those efforts, a tangle of different approaches are being used, reflecting the various discipli...

(This article belongs to the Section Tourism, Culture, and Heritage)
  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
6,452 Views
16 Pages

9 February 2016

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) does not explicitly refer to sustainable development despite the fact that other United Nations (UN) disarmament documents prescribe that international environmental law principles and sustainable development...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
5,235 Views
11 Pages

8 February 2016

Parking is a key component of urban transportation managements and has become a severe problem at many tourist attractions during holidays in China. This paper presents a novel scheme to relieve the holiday parking pressure. Based on the perspectives...

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Urban and Rural Development)
  • Article
  • Open Access
14 Citations
7,489 Views
15 Pages

8 February 2016

Facing sharp competition in the market for shipping companies, it is necessary to make reasonable and efficient decisions to optimize the container shipping line network so as to improve the shipping efficiency and reduce the transportation cost, as...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Better Decision-Making Helps to Improve Sustainability - Part II)
  • Article
  • Open Access
49 Citations
28,682 Views
26 Pages

6 February 2016

This paper highlights the need for a more inclusive and sustainable development of social housing in rapidly developing countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. At the example of the Philippines, a multi-perspective development process for a bam...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Towards True Smart and Green Cities?)
  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
6,222 Views
26 Pages

6 February 2016

Project interventions are important vehicles for development globally. However, while there is often allocation of resources for new and innovative (pilot) projects—with varying levels of success—there is seemingly less focus on consolidating and/or...

  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
6,043 Views
16 Pages

Agricultural Tractor Selection: A Hybrid and Multi-Attribute Approach

  • Jorge L. García-Alcaraz,
  • Aidé A. Maldonado-Macías,
  • Juan L. Hernández-Arellano,
  • Julio Blanco-Fernández,
  • Emilio Jiménez-Macías and
  • Juan C. Sáenz-Díez Muro

6 February 2016

Usually, agricultural tractor investments are assessed using traditional economic techniques that only involve financial attributes, resulting in reductionist evaluations. However, tractors have qualitative and quantitative attributes that must be si...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainability and Competitiveness of Farms)
  • Article
  • Open Access
64 Citations
14,226 Views
30 Pages

6 February 2016

There is a growing consensus that the adoption of performance measurement tools are of particular interest for social enterprises in order to support internal decision‐making and to answer the demands of accountability toward their stakeholders. As a...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Entrepreneurship, Finance and Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
35 Citations
6,894 Views
13 Pages

Landsat Imagery-Based Above Ground Biomass Estimation and Change Investigation Related to Human Activities

  • Chaofan Wu,
  • Huanhuan Shen,
  • Ke Wang,
  • Aihua Shen,
  • Jinsong Deng and
  • Muye Gan

6 February 2016

Forest biomass is a significant indicator for substance accumulation and forest succession, and a spatiotemporal biomass map would provide valuable information for forest management and scientific planning. In this study, Landsat imagery and field da...

  • Article
  • Open Access
32 Citations
8,460 Views
12 Pages

6 February 2016

Inter‐basin water transfer projects (IBWTPs) offer one of the most important means to solve the mismatch between supply and demand of regional water resources. IBWTPs have impacts on the complex ecosystems of the areas from which water is diverted an...

  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
8,170 Views
18 Pages

6 February 2016

Water resource and environment capacity have become two of the most important restrictions for sustainable development in resource-based cities whose leading industries are the exploitation and processing of resources. Taking Ordos in China as an exa...

  • Article
  • Open Access
21 Citations
11,071 Views
19 Pages

5 February 2016

This study examines and explores the contribution of an energy-optimized urban planning approach to efficient resource use in the context of Dhaka city, Bangladesh. A conceptual energy optimization model called the “EnUp” model has been developed and...

  • Article
  • Open Access
26 Citations
7,221 Views
14 Pages

5 February 2016

Municipal household solid waste (MHSW) has become a serious problem in China over the course of the last two decades, resulting in significant side effects to the environment. Therefore, effective management of MHSW has attracted wide attention from...

  • Article
  • Open Access
25 Citations
8,639 Views
16 Pages

5 February 2016

The city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has established, by municipal law, a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions of the transport system by 20% until 2020 compared to 2005. In order to reach this goal, the city’s public transport has been restructu...

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Urban and Rural Development)
  • Article
  • Open Access
58 Citations
9,079 Views
12 Pages

5 February 2016

Studying the influencing factors of carbon dioxide emissions is not only practically but also theoretically crucial for establishing regional carbon-reduction policies, developing low-carbon economy and solving the climate problems. Therefore, we use...

  • Article
  • Open Access
121 Citations
11,273 Views
20 Pages

5 February 2016

Nowadays, scholars exploring the relationship between proactive environmental strategy and firm competitiveness do not focus on the question of whether it pays to be green but rather investigate when, for whom or how it does so. This paper analyzes t...

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
6,321 Views
18 Pages

4 February 2016

Retail enterprises are organizations that sell goods in small quantities to consumers for personal consumption. In distributed retail enterprises, data is administered per branch. It is important for retail enterprises to make use of data generated w...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Business Models)
  • Article
  • Open Access
32 Citations
10,127 Views
27 Pages

4 February 2016

Most innovation activities that are inevitable for sustainable growth are coordinated via research and development (R&D) projects, which can differ widely in terms of both project and open innovation characteristics, even when conducted within th...

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
36 Citations
20,899 Views
15 Pages

4 February 2016

An anonymous transaction environment and the advantage of virtual property have resulted in trust playing an important role in the rapid growth of online shopping in China. To satisfy this trust issue, Alibaba (China) Co., Ltd. (Hangzhou, China) inve...

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)
  • Article
  • Open Access
41 Citations
8,974 Views
15 Pages

4 February 2016

In recent decades, the majority of cities in developing countries have grown rapidly and have experienced increasing environmental problems. These changes have generated a broad discussion on urban sustainability and development. In this discussion,...

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Urban and Rural Development)

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Sustainability - ISSN 2071-1050