Sustainability and Environmental Management: How Can Circular Economy Contribute to Fight Climate Change?

Dear Colleagues,

For millennia, we have used the world’s natural resources to sustain us, but it is only logical that these resources are finite. Scarcity can lead to price rises, hardship, and conflict. It also leads to increased efforts to find new resources, often with further or different consequences. Our increasing and inefficient use of resources has knock-on effects, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, poor health, and poverty. These issues are interlinked and in turn often exacerbate each other.

The scale of the environmental/social challenge is enormous. We need to fundamentally change the ways things are done to achieve sustainable development. This will need to go beyond resource efficiency to changing the way things are used and made, including cradle-to-cradle processes, dematerialization, and moving from products to services.

A circular economy makes use of various strategies, such as reducing, reusing, and recycling that together eliminate waste, lower material and resource consumption, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is a link between the circular economy and climate mitigation, and transitioning to a circular economy can arguably mitigate carbon dioxide emissions that emerge from extractive industries, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and other sectors. 

Through this Special Issue, we aim to collect studies, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as best practices and experience descriptions, which focus on sustainability and environmental management considering all its aspects that can prove the strong linkages between circular economy and climate change.

We aim at providing a 360-degree perspective of sustainability and environmental management considering its nano (product), micro (organizations, consumers), meso (industrial parks, etc.), and macro (cities, countries, etc.) level. In addition to these aspects, we also aim to publish studies connected to climate change and circular economy.

In the framework described above, this Special Issue invites authors to contribute to all the aspects of sustainability and environmental management in order to provide the most comprehensive overview of this important topic.

Dr. Luca Marrucci
Guest Editor

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