Evacuation shelters are the most important means for safeguarding people in hazardous areas and situations, and thus minimizing losses, particularly those due to a disaster. Therefore, evacuation shelter assignment and evacuation planning are some of the critical factors for reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience in disaster risk reduction. However, an imbalance of shelter distribution and spatial heterogeneity of a population are the critical issues limiting the accessibility of evacuation shelters in real situations. In this study, we propose a methodology for spatial assessment to reduce vulnerability and evaluate the spatial distribution of both shelter demand and resources, considering spatial accessibility. The method was applied to the case study of Mabi, in the context of a disaster caused by the 2018 flooding. We applied this approach to evaluate the area and identified the vulnerability of the evacuation shelters and the residents. The proposed method revealed that 54.55% of the designated evacuation shelters and 59% of the total population were physically vulnerable to the flood. The results highlight, using GIS maps, that the total shelter capacity was significantly decreased to 43.86%. The outcome assessment addressed specific vulnerable shelters and the imbalance between the demand for and resources of each shelter. Accordingly, this study provides practical information and a valuable reference for supporting local governments and stakeholders to improve future disaster planning, prevention, and preparedness. Full article

The existing series hybrid electric bus (SHEB) uses an ultra-capacitor (UC) to extend battery life, mitigate vehicle weight, and reduce cost. However, previous studies did not clearly identify the operation timing and load of the UC for efficiency improvement in an SHEB. This paper proposes novel efficiency improvement factors, with their application criteria for the ideal operation timing and load of the UC in an SHEB. The factors are the threshold of the required power of the motor (TRPM), slope of the power split ratio (SPSR), and y-axis intercept of the power split ratio (YPSR). The TRPM determines the duration of using just the battery. The SPSR or YPSR determine the most efficient load ratio between the battery and UC. The criteria for using them are set using particle swarm optimization. Manhattan, Braunschweig, and Orange County driving cycles were used to reflect various road load conditions. The results showed that the proposed factors and their setting criteria guarantee a significant reduction in the fuel consumption and more energy-efficient SHEBs. Full article

This paper aims to study non-travelers in order to try to understand why they are absent from tourism and what the causes are for their decision. Our research showed that the study of postmodern causes apart from classic ones holds unique potential in the research of sustainable tourism processes as well. The results of cross-tabulation and correspondence analysis show that postmodern and classic causes are tightly connected to lifestyle, which represents the central theme of the current study based on the results of a Hungarian representative online survey. A certain limitation is that our research is based on the case of Hungary; however, the introduced methodology can be used in general for identifying and evaluating non-travelers. As research implications, the authors believe that the methodology and results can be used by the actors of the tourism supply market and by decision makers as well, especially for segmenting purposes. If we understand who the non-tourists or non-travelers are, we can, on the one hand, determine the latent tourism potential of a tourism destination; on the other hand, we can also receive information on specific market segments, which could contribute to sustainable tourism mostly because of the postmodern causes for non-traveling. Full article

Archimedes Screws Turbines (ASTs) are a new form of small hydroelectric powerplant that can be applied even in low head sites. ASTs offer a clean and renewable source of energy and are safer for wildlife and especially fish than other hydro generation options. As with other energy solutions, ASTs are not a global solution for all situations. However, in terms of sustainable development, ASTs can offer many economic, social, and environmental advantages that make them an important option for providing sustainable hydropower development. Archimedes screws can operate in low water heads (less than about 5 m) and a range of flow rates with practical efficiencies of 60% to 80% and can generate up to 355 kW of power. ASTs increase the number of suitable sites where it is possible to develop sustainable hydropower, including in undeveloped, hard to access regions and small communities. At many low head sites, ASTs may be more cost-effective, with lower installation and operating costs than alternative hydropower systems. An AST may also reduce the disturbance of natural sedimentation and erosion processes and have smaller impacts on fish and other fauna. ASTs can often be retrofit to existing unpowered dams or weirs, providing new hydropower capacity for very little marginal environmental impact. This review outlines the characteristics of ASTs, then discusses and analyzes how they could benefit the sustainability of hydropower development. Full article

In the uncertain entrepreneurial ecosystem, scholarly knowledge is bounded by the sustainable growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus in academic circles on the relationship between entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneurial performance. In adopting the meta-analysis method, we found a significant relationship between entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneurial performance based on an investigation of 45 independent samples (N = 18,752). We also examined theoretically derived moderators of this relationship referring to firm age, industry condition and experience type to test whether the moderating effects can explain the inconsistent research results on the relationship between entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneurial performance. The relationship was stronger for the high-tech industry than for low-tech industry, for the early business stage than for late business stage and for start-up experience compared to management experience, work experience and industry experience. Our research findings are meaningful for practitioners to achieve sustainable growth by better preserving and coordinating entrepreneurial experience in a dynamic environment. Further, these findings are also important for future research to analyze the factors triggering the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial experience and to investigate the extent to which the start-up experience is more capable of promoting entrepreneurial performance. Full article

In order to improve the study of the spatial form of villages, fractal theory is used to analyze the plane and facade of Maling Village, Changdai Town, Mengjin County, Luoyang City, Henan Province, China. The results show that the village facade and plane spatial shape of Maling Village have obvious fractal characteristics and the fractal dimension can be used as an important index to evaluate the plane and facade shape of the village. The fractal dimension of each land use type is between 1.2415 and 1.7443. The stability index of land use types in the village follows the order of village construction land > cultivated land > road > garden land > woodland > grassland. The research results can provide decision-making information for the rational use and planning of village land. Full article

In the wake of a rapidly changing climate, climate services have enabled farmers in developing countries to make informed decisions, necessary for efficient food production. Climate services denote the timely production, translation, delivery and use of climate information to enhance decision-making. However, studies have failed to analyse the extent to which Indigenous farmers residing and producing their food in an environment degraded by multinational corporations (MNCs) utilise climate services. This study addresses this gap by analysing Indigenous farmers’ utilisation of climate services in Igbide, Olomoro and Uzere communities, in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were used to obtain primary data. Findings suggest that although the activities of Shell British petroleum, a MNC, have compromised food production, other factors have fuelled farmers’ unwillingness to utilise climate services. These include their inability to access assets that can significantly scale up food production and lack of weather stations close to their communities needed to generate downscaled forecasts, amongst others. This paper argues that failure to address these issues may stifle the chances of actualising the first and second sustainable development goals (no poverty and zero hunger) by 2030 in the aforementioned communities. Full article

Supply chain management (SCM) concerns itself with the integration of a firm’s internal management processes with the external environment. This could explain why sustainability has been embraced by scholars who study SCM. This bibliometric review was untaken with the explicit goals of updating and extending prior reviews of research on sustainable SCM (S-SCM). The goals of this research were to document the scope and development of S-SCM research; identify influential journals, authors, and documents; analyze the intellectual structure of this field of sustainability inquiry, and highlight emerging topics on the frontier of S-SCM inquiry. By using bibliometric tools, a relatively large and rapidly growing corpus of peer-reviewed research documents concerned with S-SCM were found. Citation analyses of journals, authors, and documents yielded a surprisingly high level of scholarly content for a literature body of such recent vintage. The author co-citation analysis revealed three coherent but closely connected groups of thought that comprise the intellectual structure of this knowledge base. Finally, the analysis identified a constellation of topics concerned with the integration of internal processes (e.g., decision-making, manufacturing, sensitivity analysis, risk assessment, life-cycle assessment) and the organizational environment (e.g., climate change, gas emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, energy utilization, climate change). The results of this research concluded that SCM practitioners and scholars may have embraced sustainability more than any other field of management. Full article

Storm surge disaster is one of the biggest threats to coastal areas. Over the years, it has brought serious losses to the economy and environment of China’s coastal areas. In this paper, Guangdong Province is taken as the research object to evaluate the damage caused by storm surge disasters. First of all, regarding the three-industry classification standards of the National Bureau of Statistics, combined with the storm surge disaster assessment index system, the 10-sector storm surge disaster loss input-output table is compiled and analyzed. Secondly, the indirect economic losses of storm surge disasters between 2007–2017 are determined by calculating the direct and indirect consumption coefficients. Thirdly, based on the static input-output model, considering the time factor, the dynamic input-output model of storm surge disaster assessment is established to calculate the cumulative output loss under different recovery periods (30 days, 90 days, 120 days, 180 days, 360 days). The results indicate that: (1) the losses, after a storm surge, in the agricultural economy have the greatest impact on the manufacturing sector, and conversely, they have less effect on the science, education and health service sectors; as well as the construction sector; (2) taking the industry with the biggest loss ratio as an example, the recovery of damaged industries is relatively rapid in the early stage and tends to be stable in the later stage of recovery; (3) the total output loss calculated using the static input-output model is greater than that computed using the dynamic input-output model. Researching the assessment of the direct and indirect loss due to storm surge disasters is of great value and practical significance for the scientific and rational planning of the country’s production layout, the maintenance of social and economic stability and the protection of life and property. Full article

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call ‘unMOOCing’, in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we ‘unMOOCed’ all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of ‘Openness’ with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe. Full article

In this paper, a dynamic heat transfer model for the vertical double U-tube borehole heat exchanger (BHE) was developed to comprehensively address the coupled heat transfer between the in-tube fluid and the soil with groundwater advection. A new concept of the heat transfer effectiveness was also proposed to evaluate the BHE heat exchange performance together with the index of the heat transfer rate. The moving finite line heat source model was selected for heat transfer outside the borehole and the steady-state model for inside the borehole. The data obtained in an on-site thermal response test were used to validate the physical model of the BHE. Then, the effects of soil type, groundwater advection velocity, inlet water flow rate, and temperature on the outlet water temperature of BHE were explored. Results show that ignoring the effects of groundwater advection in sand gravel may lead to deviation in the heat transfer rate of up to 38.9% of the ground loop design. The groundwater advection fosters the heat transfer of BHE. An increase in advection velocity may also help to shorten the time which takes the surrounding soil to reach a stable temperature. The mass flow rate of the inlet water to the BHE should be more than 0.5 kg·s⁻¹ but should not exceed a certain upper limit under the practical engineering applications with common scale BHE. The efficiency of the heat transfer of the double U-tube BHE was determined jointly by factors such as the soil’s physical properties and the groundwater advection velocity. Full article

In recent decades, the commodification of the English language has aroused intensive research interest in the sociolinguistics on a global scale, but studies on the commodification of the Chinese language are relatively rare. Most studies take a critical approach in relation to its adverse impacts on minority rights and social justice. This study examined the language landscape in Chiangmai, Thailand, and the linguistic beliefs of local Thai Chinese language learners. Based on their feedback, this study investigated the commodification of Chinese language education in the community of Chinese language learners in Chiangmai. We found that from a less critical perspective, the commodification of a second language provides more accessible and affordable educational opportunities for learners, especially those from low-income families, and at the same time language proficiency can broaden learners’ career choices and provide employees with additional value in industries, such as tourism, commerce, and services. This finding implies that language commodification, rather than typically being associated with linguistic imperialism and unbalanced socio-economic status, can be a contributing factor in promoting higher-education availability and social sustainability in certain circumstances. There may be some mediating factors between the commodification of language and changes in the sustainable balance of language, opening up space for future research to explore. Full article

With the increasing popularization and competition of electric vehicles (EVs), EV users often have anxiety on their trip to find better charging stations with less travel distance. An intelligent charging guidance strategy and two algorithms were proposed to alleviate this problem. First, based on the next destination of EV users’ trip, the strategy established a dynamic-area model to match charging stations with users’ travel demand intelligently. In the dynamic area, the Dijkstra algorithm is used to find the charging station with the shortest trip. Then, the area extension algorithm and the charging station attribution algorithm were developed to improve the robustness of the dynamic area. The two algorithms can automatically adjust the area size according to the number of charging stations in the dynamic area to reduce the number of nodes traversed by the Dijkstra algorithm. Finally, simulation examples were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms. The results showed that the proposed intelligent charging guidance strategy can meet the travel demand of users. It is a promising technique in smart cities to find better travel trips with less travel distance and less computed time. Full article

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) classrooms are specialised spaces within mainstream schools that respond to the educational needs of students with autism spectrum disorder. This research aims to analyse ASD classrooms in the Community of Madrid, their features and internal functioning. The research follows a non-experimental, descriptive and comparative methodology, making a comparison between different classrooms and analysing their impact on the teaching-learning process of students with ASD. The variables refer to the physical environment, the characteristics of the children, training of professionals and collaboration with other organisations. The data was gathered using a questionnaire in digital format, collecting responses from 35 schools, using quantitative techniques to relate variables. The results show that most classrooms have a structured organisation that meet the needs of the students, who are generally diagnosed with moderate severity. Furthermore, the relationship between the teachers of ASD classrooms and the mainstream classrooms promotes inclusive educational practice. Finally, it was found that ASD classrooms offer many benefits, due to the personalised attention they provide and the specialised training of teachers. Full article

Repeat spawners constitute an important component of Atlantic salmon populations, but survival of post-spawning individuals (kelts) are often compromised by anthropogenic structures such as hydropower plants (HPPs). Potential effects of HPPs include migration delays and associated increased energy depletion, which potentially results in increased overall mortality. We combined a detailed 3D hydraulic model with high-resolution 3D tracking of tagged kelts (length 73–104 cm) to obtain estimates of kelt movement through water. These estimates were then used in an energetics model to estimate hourly energy expenditure while negotiating the HPP area. Hourly kelt energy expenditure varied between 0.8 and 10.1 kJ × h⁻¹ and was dependent on kelt length. Degree of additional energy depletion can amount to several percent of remaining energy content (our study indicates 4–5 percentage points) potentially leading to reduced post-spawning survival. In turn, this can nullify the iteroparous breeding strategy and jeopardize long-term stability and persistence of Atlantic salmon populations inhabiting HPP rivers. Full article