Search Results (7,204)

Large-scale tropical forest conversion to plantations or cropland severely impacts soil health. However, most studies have relied on pairwise designs, single-type chronosequences, or multi-type comparisons that are often confounded by environmental heterogeneity, thereby overlooking the complexity of successive land-use transitions on a common land-use background. Here, we investigated the responses of soil physicochemical properties and microbial communities to two conversion pathways (NSF → ORF → YRF; NSF → ORF → URF → AL) within a single farm, where shared soil parent material and climate allowed for a direct comparison of land-use types with different conversion pathways. Soil properties and microbial diversity were analyzed using physicochemical methods and high-throughput sequencing, with samples collected from five land-use types (six biological replicates per type). Results showed NSF had the highest soil properties. Along NSF → ORF → YRF, TOC, DOC, TN, IN and C/N declined gradually. In contrast, URF exhibited severe degradation, with AL showing partial recovery. Bacterial diversity remained relatively stable, whereas fungal communities were highly sensitive, with diversity decreasing progressively and dominant phyla shifting with intensified disturbance. DOC, EC and SM were most strongly associated with microbial community ordination, with pH showing no significant association. URF had the highest predicted abundance of C/N/S cycling genes, while NSF maintained a balanced fungal trophic structure. This study provides a comparative assessment of soil properties and microbial communities along two tropical land-use conversion pathways, contributing empirical evidence for sustainable land-use management in tropical regions. Full article

Rye landraces (Secale cereale L.) are an important source of genetic diversity and continue to offer valuable opportunities for the development of productive and well-adapted cultivars. Despite their breeding potential, relatively little is known about the field performance and yield stability of elite genotypes selected from heterogeneous landraces under Mediterranean growing conditions. In this study, fifteen elite rye half-sib families selected under nil-competition from the traditional Greek landrace “Vevi” were evaluated together with the original population and the commercial cultivar ‘Dukato’ across three contrasting Mediterranean environments. The objectives were to assess their agronomic performance, investigate genotype × environment interaction, and identify promising germplasm combining high yield with broad adaptation using AMMI and GGE biplot analyses, complemented by sixteen parametric and non-parametric stability indices. Grain yield, seed protein content, plant height, and days to ear emergence were recorded. Broad-sense heritability was consistently high (H² = 0.95–0.99), whereas environmental conditions explained most of the observed phenotypic variation. Grain yield showed a positive association with plant height (r = 0.651, p < 0.01) and a negative association with days to ear emergence (r = –0.703, p < 0.01). Among the evaluated genetic materials, G9 and G11 combined high productivity with stable performance across environments, while G6 produced the highest grain yield but was better suited to favourable environments. The close agreement among the different stability analyses increased confidence in family ranking and selection. Overall, the results highlight the considerable breeding value of the traditional Greek rye landrace “Vevi” and demonstrate that combining multi-environment testing with complementary stability analyses provides an effective framework for identifying elite rye genotypes with high yield potential and broad adaptation to Mediterranean environments. Full article

Why do some urban environmental paradigms become globally dominant while others remain marginal despite substantial convergence in their environmental foundations? This question captures a central paradox in contemporary urban environmental planning: sustainable, resilient, low-carbon, circular, regenerative, and related formulations continue to proliferate, yet their institutional trajectories differ markedly. This study addresses that paradox by developing a theory explaining how urban environmental paradigms are defined, institutionally produced, legitimated, diffused, and operationalized across planning, policy, certification, and development systems. Rather than treating environmental labels as equivalent to paradigms, the study conceptualizes urban environmental paradigms as institutionally recognized organizing frames that structure problem interpretations, normative priorities, legitimate interventions, and evaluative expectations. Drawing on institutional theory, legitimacy theory, diffusion of innovations, policy mobility, market signaling, experimental governance, and bounded rationality, the analysis integrates scholarly and institutional evidence to develop a four-pillar institutional ecosystem operating through six cross-cutting mechanisms and self-reinforcing diffusion architectures. It further identifies configurational conditions associated with institutional dominance and advances the proposition that paradigms converge upstream in shared environmental logic families while diverging downstream through heterogeneous governance, implementation, and operational conditions. The resulting theory explains why conceptually convergent paradigms follow markedly different institutional and operational trajectories across contexts. Full article

Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease driven by complex interactions between genetic, hormonal, metabolic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Among environmental exposures, agricultural pesticides represent potential contributors to breast carcinogenesis through endocrine-disrupting, oxidative, genotoxic, and epigenetic mechanisms. Utilizing a structured search strategy across PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, this review provides a critical synthesis of current evidence linking major pesticide classes with breast cancer dynamics, strictly distinguishing preclinical mechanistic findings from human epidemiological data. Special attention is given to endocrine-disrupting pathways involving estrogen receptors and aromatase hyper-induction, alongside oxidative stress, matrix metalloproteinase activation, epithelial–mesenchymal transition, cancer stemness expansion, and therapeutic resistance. We further evaluate the cytoprotective potential and severe bioavailability bottlenecks of dietary phytochemicals in mitigating pesticide-induced damage. Finally, we address critical methodological limitations, such as exposure misclassification, confounding factors, and the gap between micromolar in vitro doses and realistic nanomolar human exposures, stressing that preclinical mechanisms cannot prove direct clinical causality Therefore, integrating prospective multi-omics biomonitoring with cumulative cocktail risk assessments is essential for evidence-based primary prevention. Full article

Agricultural green transformation is important for achieving economic growth and environmental sustainability. Geographical indication agricultural products (GIAPs) have become a useful tool for improving agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP). However, the mechanisms through which GIAPs affect AGTFP and their spatial differences are not yet fully understood. This study uses a balanced panel of 290 Chinese cities from 2008 to 2024 and combines Double Machine Learning (DML), Geographically Weighted Random Forest (GWRF), and Shapley Additive explanations (SHAP) to examine the effects of GIAPs on AGTFP. The results show that GIAPs significantly enhance AGTFP, primarily through agricultural industry agglomeration and the downstream penetration of leading agricultural enterprises. The effects exhibit substantial spatial and category heterogeneity. GWRF-SHAP results further reveal a clear geographical gradient, with GIAPs exhibiting greater predictive importance and contribution in inland than coastal regions. These findings highlight the need for region- and product-specific strategies to leverage GIAPs for agricultural green transformation. This study provides new evidence on the green development effects of geographical indications and offers policy insights for promoting sustainable agricultural development. Full article

Green technological innovation is important to the sustainable development of manufacturing. As a core driver of transition toward sustainable production patterns, green innovation helps firms reduce environmental externalities while maintaining economic competitiveness. Drawing on the Resource-Based View and the Knowledge-Based View, this study examines the association between digital-transformation disclosure and green technological innovation using 16,231 firm-year observations for Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2015 to 2022. Green technological innovation is measured by green patent applications, and the baseline specifications use negative binomial models with year and industry fixed effects, province-clustered standard errors, and a full control set that includes firm size. Digital-transformation disclosure is positively associated with green patent applications. Parallel-mediation estimates and province-clustered Bootstrap confidence intervals identify significant indirect effects through inter-organizational knowledge flow, R&D expenditure intensity, and the R&D personnel share. In terms of point estimates, the R&D personnel indirect effect is the largest of the three, followed by knowledge flow and R&D expenditure; however, only the R&D personnel versus R&D expenditure difference is statistically significant, and the three channels are better characterized as complementary. The difference between the knowledge-flow and R&D-expenditure effects is marginally significant. The hypothesized inverted-U moderating pattern of market competition is not statistically significant in the preferred specification with industry and year fixed effects. Split-sample estimates show directional heterogeneity across region, ownership, and firm size, but formal interaction tests do not reject equality of the digital transformation disclosure coefficients across groups. These results document robust associations rather than definitive causal effects and highlight the complementary roles of knowledge recombination, R&D expenditure, and technical personnel in green patenting. These findings carry implications for sustainability-oriented research and management practice by documenting channels through which digital-transformation disclosure is associated with green patent activity in the manufacturing sector. Full article

Herein, value-added iron oxide nanostructures are successfully synthesized directly from industrial steel mill scale via a simple precursor-free planetary ball milling technique for sustainable hydrogen production and environmental remediation. Comprehensive XRD analysis confirms heterogeneous crystalline phases comprising wüstite, magnetite, and hematite. The waste-derived catalysts demonstrate robust bifunctional electrocatalytic activity toward HER and OER in alkaline media, achieving low overpotentials of 342 and 356 millivolts at ten milliamperes per square centimeter for the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions, respectively, alongside favorable Tafel slopes and exceptional long-term operational stability. Furthermore, under natural sunlight, the nanostructures achieve efficient photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue, attaining 86.4 and 89.7 percent degradation efficiencies for 15 and 30 milligrams of catalyst. This comprehensive study successfully converts secondary metallurgy industrial byproducts into highly cost-effective multifunctional nanomaterials, thus presenting an exceptionally promising dual-purpose pathway for green hydrogen generation coupled with advanced industrial wastewater purification and environmental pollution control. Full article

This study examines the association between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure and corporate financial outcomes among 437 firms listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand from 2014 to 2024, comprising 4807 firm-year observations across eight industries. The analysis examines the levels of dividend payout and earnings per share (EPS), temporal dependence in their underlying disturbance processes, and conditional-volatility dynamics. Industry-specific fixed-effects models, ARIMA specifications, and selective EGARCH models are employed, with supplementary system GMM analysis addressing potential endogeneity. The results reveal heterogeneous level associations. ESG disclosure is positively associated with dividend payout in three industries, negatively associated in one, and insignificant in four. For EPS, the association is significant in all eight industries but positive in three and negative in five. Dynamic analysis identifies positive temporal persistence and short-run adjustment in the aggregate industry-level disturbance processes. Significant residual conditional heteroskedasticity remains for selected industry-outcome combinations. EGARCH estimates for these cases reveal significant shock responses, asymmetric volatility dynamics, and differing degrees of volatility persistence across industries, with estimated shock half-lives generally below one year. ESG disclosure is included in the conditional mean rather than the conditional-variance equation of these models and is therefore not interpreted as a direct determinant of volatility. Overall, the findings highlight substantial industry heterogeneity in ESG–financial associations and demonstrate the value of distinguishing financial-outcome levels from their temporal and volatility dynamics in an emerging capital market. Full article

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings aggregate heterogeneous corporate activities whose valuation and risk associations may vary by industry and dimension. This study examines a balanced panel of 556 non-financial KOSPI-listed firms in Korea from 2012 to 2025 (7784 firm-year observations), partitioned into 24 maritime and fishery firms (336 observations) and 532 non-focal comparison firms (7448 observations). Firm value is measured by Tobin’s Q and market risk by the annual standard deviation of daily stock returns. Separate firm and year fixed-effects regressions describe within-group associations, while pooled sector-by-ESG interaction models formally test slope differences. In the focal sample, the overall ESG, social, and governance scores are negatively associated with firm value, whereas in the joint risk model, the environmental pillar is positively associated with volatility and the social pillar is negatively associated. Formal interaction tests indicate a significant sector difference for the environmental-value association and for the environmental and social risk associations; joint tests reject the null that the E-S-G sector-interaction terms are jointly zero for both outcomes (p = 0.037 for value and p < 0.001 for risk). The sector differences are more stable for market risk than for firm value: environmental and social risk interactions remain statistically detectable under richer and more flexible pooled specifications, whereas the joint value interaction weakens when nuisance slopes are allowed to vary by sector. Leave-one-firm-out and leave-one-subsector-out diagnostics preserve the main environmentally positive and socially negative risk signs, although statistical strength varies with subsector composition. Wild Cluster Bootstrap checks further support the environmental and social risk patterns, while lagged and post-2022 analyses narrow the temporal and valuation claims. Detailed-component results are treated as hypothesis-generating and evaluated using false-discovery-rate adjustment. The results support a differentiated, sector-sensitive interpretation of ESG ratings but remain associational rather than causal. Full article

Old vines represent long-lived viticultural systems in which genetic resources, environmental adaptation, traditional management, territorial identity, and cultural heritage have developed over time. Old vineyards preserve historical germplasm and traditional production systems and may provide valuable material for future climate adaptation. However, their viticultural and enological value cannot be attributed directly to chronological age because vineyard history, site, genotype, vine health, rooting conditions, and management frequently interact. This review evaluates old-vine systems across the Southern Hemisphere. Scientific evidence on genetic diversity, epigenetics, physiology, water relations, vine longevity, grape and wine composition, sensory identity, heritage, and conservation was reviewed. Current evidence is insufficient to attribute greater stress resilience or superior wine quality to vine age alone. Reliable comparisons between young and old vines require accounting for vineyard heterogeneity, vine replacement, pruning history, and uncertainty in planting dates. Resolution OIV-VITI 703-2024 provides a useful framework for classification and traceability. The value of old vines value is multidimensional and emerges from the interaction between biological longevity, terroir, genetic resources, and human management. Conservation should therefore integrate heritage recognition with rigorous characterization of age-related, environmental, genetic, and management effects. Full article

The integration of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as structured data within Building Information Modelling (BIM) workflows for Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and design and maintenance decision-making remains constrained. Key barriers include data heterogeneity among EPD programme operators and persistent interoperability gaps between BIM environments and dedicated LCA tools. Consequently, environmental evidence is often disconnected from the decision-making workflow. This study proposes a BIM-integrated framework for evaluating maintenance and replacement strategies for building components against environmental and economic criteria. EPD data retrieved from ECO Platform and ÖKOBAUDAT are normalised to canonical reference units, mapped onto a Data Template compliant with ISO 22057:2022, and written automatically into the information model as explicit, traceable parameters. Operational demand is obtained through dynamic energy simulation. The results are represented through cumulative impact trajectories and element-level colour coding. Six maintenance and retrofit scenarios for the building envelope were compared over a 60-year period for an existing office building in Lugano, Switzerland. The global retrofit achieves the greatest reduction in total life-cycle carbon 26.7%, while the combination of external wall insulation and window replacement reaches 18.7%. External wall insulation alone provides the most favourable balance between carbon savings and cost, with a 16.6% reduction and a 6-year carbon payback. Full article

Enhancing corporate green innovation persistence plays a vital role in shifting economic and social development toward greener, low-carbon models. This study treats the environmental protection tax (EPT) as an external institutional shock to the corporate green innovation system. Using data on Chinese A-share firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2014 to 2023, this study uses a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to estimate the impact of the EPT on corporate green innovation persistence and explore its underlying mechanisms. Corporate green innovation persistence is measured by combining the dynamic change in firms’ green innovation output with the current scale of their green innovation activities. The findings show that the EPT significantly enhances corporate green innovation persistence. Mechanism tests further show that the EPT significantly reduces firm uncertainty, eases financing constraints, and increases R&D investment, providing evidence consistent with the proposed expectation-stabilization, resource-access, and resource-allocation mechanisms. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the positive effect is more pronounced among firms facing lower industry competition, firms with greater institutional investor ownership, state-owned enterprises, firms with higher information transparency, non-high-tech firms, and firms whose executives exhibit a stronger risk-taking propensity. These results provide empirical evidence for strengthening the long-term innovation-guiding role of the EPT and offer policy insights into corporate sustainable development from a coordinated perspective of institutions, resources, and firm behavior. Full article

Pediatric asthma is a heterogeneous disease characterized by complex interactions among airway inflammation, nutritional status, metabolic health, environmental exposures, and immune regulation. This narrative review summarizes current evidence linking dietary patterns, adiposity, metabolic dysfunction, systemic inflammation, and microbiome-related mechanisms with pediatric asthma outcomes while distinguishing evidence on asthma development from that concerning control of the established disease. Healthier dietary patterns have generally been associated with lower asthma or wheezing prevalence, but pediatric dietary intervention trials in established asthma remain few and have produced heterogeneous results across asthma control, exacerbations, lung function, inflammatory markers, and medication use. Obesity and metabolic dysfunction are more directly associated with morbidity and treatment response in children with established asthma. The gut–lung axis provides a biologically plausible framework connecting diet, microbial metabolites, epithelial barrier function, and immune regulation. However, early-life microbiome findings primarily inform asthma susceptibility and immune development rather than disease control. Therefore, current care should remain focused on guideline-based asthma management, complemented by an appropriate assessment of diet, obesity, physical activity, and metabolic health. Further pediatric intervention studies are needed to determine whether targeted nutritional, metabolic, or microbiome-based strategies can reproducibly improve asthma control. Full article

Drought poses substantial threats to terrestrial ecosystems, yet whether vegetation vulnerability patterns systematically diverge between soil moisture and meteorological droughts—and how long-term hydrological adaptation governs ecosystem susceptibility to rare extreme droughts—remains poorly understood. Here, we systematically quantify vegetation responses to soil moisture drought (Standardized Soil Moisture Index, SSI) and meteorological drought (3-month Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, SPEI-3) across the Yellow River Basin from 1982 to 2022, examining resistance, resilience, and peak loss alongside their spatial differentiation and temporal lags. SSI and SPEI-3 identified droughts exhibit distinct event characteristics: meteorological droughts occur more frequently with shorter durations, whereas soil moisture droughts persist 2–3 times longer once initiated, consistent with the buffering and memory effects of soil water storage. Vegetation response patterns diverge substantially between drought definitions, with SSI-derived resistance showing stronger associations with drought duration, whereas SPEI-3 conditions elevate the importance of drought-period climate. Wetter regions and deciduous-mixed forests exhibit the highest standardized peak losses despite comparable or higher resistance, consistent with the hypothesis that vegetation adapted to long-term water-abundant conditions may be more susceptible to rare extremes. Random Forest and SHapley Additive exPlanations analyses demonstrate that resistance is associated with drought attributes and drought-period climatic conditions, resilience is strongly associated with drought-period temperature and post-drought climate conditions, and peak loss shows the strongest background environmental dependence. Temporal lags between peak vegetation loss and drought intensity vary spatially, with stronger heterogeneity under SSI than SPEI-3. Our findings demonstrate that comprehensive vulnerability assessment requires integrating complementary drought metrics and multidimensional response frameworks, providing critical insights for improving drought monitoring, ecological risk assessment, and sustainable ecosystem management under climate change. Full article

This study examines whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure reduces firm risk among 73 non-financial Tadawul-listed companies in Saudi Arabia over 2015–2024, with particular attention to the moderating role of board independence. Firm risk is measured as the annualized standard deviation of daily stock returns, and ESG disclosure is captured by the LSEG (Refinitiv) ESG score. A two-way (firm and year) fixed-effects model with Windmeijer-consistent inference is used as the primary specification to identify the within-firm association between ESG disclosure and firm risk, while a two-step dynamic System Generalized Method of Moments (System GMM) estimator is reported as a robustness approach to address dynamic persistence, reverse causality, and unobserved heterogeneity. The findings indicate that the effect of ESG disclosure on firm risk is conditional rather than uniform. In the fixed-effects baseline, ESG disclosure is associated with lower firm risk, and this conditional pattern is confirmed under System GMM: once the interaction with board independence is introduced, the direct effect is no longer risk-reducing; instead, the negative and highly significant interaction term shows that ESG disclosure lowers firm risk mainly when board independence is high. Leverage consistently raises firm risk, while profitability reduces it in the moderation model. The study recommends that regulators pair ESG reporting requirements with stricter board-independence enforcement, that firms treat governance reform as a complement to sustainability reporting rather than a substitute, and that investors interpret ESG disclosure jointly with board structure when assessing firm risk. The study contributes to stakeholder, signaling, and agency theory by showing that ESG disclosure operates as a governance-dependent risk-management mechanism rather than an unconditional one. Full article