Sustainability, Volume 6, Issue 7

Recently, sustainability has been a growing concern for many industries and especially for the transportation sector due to it being the second largest energy consumer and largest contributor of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions within the Europ...

In the field of tourism, the development of tourist attractions is playing an increasingly crucial role in tourism economy, regional economy and national economy. However, the eco-environment has been damaged while tourism industry develops rapidly....

The stated purpose of Norwegian land use planning is to promote sustainable development. Environmental considerations are central in the planning process, but have to compete with many other goals and interests. In recent years, complexity, populatio...

Torespondto the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, this paper investigates the minimal-carbon-footprint time-dependent heterogeneous-fleet vehicle routing problem with alternative paths (MTHVRPP). This finds a route with the sm...

With the rapid development of the national economy of China, an increasing need for transportation facilities is becoming a serious challenge that the existing traffic system has to meet. Thus, the highway transportation capacity development level as...

There is growing interest in communication, participation and learning in multiple fields, such as governance and policy research, natural resource management research and educational research. This paper reports a study on stakeholder dialogues and...

The last revision of the EMAS (Eco Management and Audit Scheme) Regulation encouraged a cluster approach to increase the participation of the organizations and to involve local stakeholders in the commitment to sustainability. Our research activity i...

Decentralization development and changing urban form will increase the mobility and contribute to global CO₂ emissions, in particular for developing countries which are experiencing rapid economic growth and urban expansion. In this paper, an integra...

This special issue of Sustainability is devoted to a very important sustainability topic, viz. cities and waterfront infrastructure. The presence of—and access to—water has been a critical factor in the long history of settlement patterns of humankin...

The widespread acquisition of land for large-scale/commercial production of biofuel crops in Ghana has raised concerns from civil society organizations, local communities and other parties, regarding the impact of these investments on local livelihoo...

This study aims to highlight the importance of thermal inertia in buildings. Nowadays, it is possible to use energy analysis software to simulate the building energy performance. Considering Italian standards, these analyses are based on the UNI TS 1...

The need for improved stewardship of coastal and marine resources is evident worldwide. However, complex ecosystem dynamics, institutional inertia, and budgetary constraints impede such action. This study explores how networks of change-oriented indi...

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is one of the components of the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), which are good examples of evolutionary adapted socio-ecosystems in human history. The Hani Rice Terraces System, located...

While China’s central government has adopted remote sensing technology in land inspection since 2000, little empirical research has been done on its effect. This study aims to measure the effect of satellite imagery-based land inspection (SIBI) on il...

The objective of articulating sustainability visions through modeling is to enhance the outcomes and process of visioning in order to successfully move the system toward a desired state. Models emphasize approaches to develop visions that are viable...

One key reason for the failure of Jatropha plantation is the use of non-improved planting materials. We present in this paper a Jatropha variety (JO S2) through selective breeding with much better seed productivity than wild accessions as proven by f...

A sustainable future for communities that are highly vulnerable to natural hazard events means not locating new sensitive land uses, requiring existing land uses to be retrofitted in order to obtain insurance, and implementing other restrictive polic...

Making the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy seems inevitable. Because energy transition poses new challenges and opportunities to the discipline of landscape architecture, the questions addressed in this paper are: (1) what landscape archi...

This contribution aims at investigating the possibility to cloak a spherical object from an acoustic wave by applying the scattering cancellation approach. In electromagnetism, the scattering problem is treated using the Mie expansion technique, thro...

Climate resilience in subsistence agricultural communities depends strongly on the robustness and effective management of the agricultural natural resource base. For this reason, adaptation planning efforts frequently focus on natural resource conser...

Even though WM-Bus is being considered to be the most promising network protocol for smart metering, it is not suitable for a sustainable real-time home energy management system (HEMS), which requires higher reliability and longer lifetime despite re...

This article studies a supply chain composed of a manufacturer and two competing retailers. The manufacturer produces two substitutable products and offers respective service levels to customers who buy one of the two products. Each retailer can only...

The installation and operation of continuous particulate emission monitors in industrial processes has become well developed and common practice in industrial stacks and ducts over the past 30 years, reflecting regulatory monitoring requirements. Con...

The compact city concept is adopted in city planning policies of many developed countries for the following benefits: efficient use of land while curtailing sprawl, reduction in transport network and reliance on mass transport, a socially interactive...

The ongoing debate about the use of genetically-modified (GM) crops in agriculture has largely focused on food safety and genetic contamination issues. Given that the majority of GM crops have been produced to respond to the problem of crop yield red...

In Sweden and in other countries, building owners are encouraged to help reduce energy consumption, both in order to contribute to national energy saving goals and, in terms of their own interests, to reduce the costs of heating and operation of the...

Several studies have proven that information technology (IT) can improve enterprises’ performance. The effective and efficient management of enterprise resources has for long been the role of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Whereas tradit...

Contextual factors for sustainable development such as population growth, energy, and resource availability and consumption levels, food production yield, and growth in pollution, provide numerous complex and rapidly changing education and training r...

To promote the development of Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA), we conducted a comprehensive review of recently developed frameworks, methods, and characterization models for impact assessment for future method developers and SLCA practitioners. T...

As the most important node in public transport network, efficiency of a transport hub determines the entire efficiency of the whole transport network. In order to put forward effective transfer schemes, a comprehensive evaluation index system of urba...

This paper examines the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) using panel data for 228 Chinese mineral listed firms from 2010 to 2013 with Pooled Least Squares regression analysis. Our st...

This paper identifies the factors necessary for the sustainable performance of two Chinese web marketing companies. The companies are Alibaba and its twin, Taobao. This research is based on the structural equation model (SEM). The paper analyzes the...

The modern industrial cycle is mainly based on non-renewable mineral resources extracted from the Earth’s crust. After being processed and transformed into commodities, the products of mining become manufactured products which go through the economic...

There are many studies of contractor selection based on clients and the selection of suppliers by contractors. However, supplier selection specifically related to green construction projects has been much less studied. Green construction differs fr...

A large portfolio of chemicals and products is needed to meet the wide range of performance requirements of the oil and gas industry. The oil and gas industry is under increased scrutiny from regulators, environmental groups, the public, and other st...

The Elephant Marsh, a wetland in Southern Malawi, is important for small-scale fisheries. It is managed by local institutions, which are not formally linked to any state institutions. This paper uses qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine...

In metropolitan areas of China, farmland functions have undergone tremendous changes due to rapid urbanization and rising income per capita in the past three decades. This study examines tempo-spatial changes in the farmland functions, using a case s...

This study presents a practical methodology to monitor the spatiotemporal characteristics of urban expansion in response to rapid urbanization at the provincial scale by integrating remote sensing, urban built-up area boundaries, spatial metrics and...

Expert knowledge is a combination of prior information and subjective opinions based on long-experience; as such it is often not sufficiently objective to produce convincing results in animal habitat suitability index mapping. In this study, an anima...