Sustainability, Volume 7, Issue 1

The current international society has entered an era of large-scale power transfer. Government interests have gradually transferred from national strength to national influence. As such, how to quantitatively present the fuzzy geopolitical influence...

The built environment contributes around half of total greenhouse gas emissions and with 87% of residential buildings that we will have by 2050 already built, it is vital to adopt sustainable retrofitting practices. The question is: what are the via...

Our objective is to provide an optimistic strategy for reversing soil degradation by increasing public and private research efforts to understand the role of soil biology, particularly microbiology, on the health of our world’s soils. We begin by def...

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) and SSL (solid state lighting) are relatively new light sources, but are already widely applied for outdoor lighting. Despite this, there is little available information allowing planners and designers to evaluate and we...

Sicily has a long tradition in citrus fruit cultivations that with vineyard and olive tree represent the main Mediterranean tree crops. In this paper we have evaluated the economic and financial sustainability of lemon production, both in organic far...

This study involved developing a natural disaster risk assessment framework based on the consideration of three phases: a pre-disaster phase, disaster impact phase, and post-disaster recovery phase. The exposure of natural disasters exhibits unique c...

The heritage landscape of Burhanpur has an architectural and horticultural composition, consisting of many historic gardens, a unique water management system, a sustainable planning and design framework, the use of landscape and topography with numer...

The crops that we grow for food need specific climatic conditions to show better performance in view of economic yield. A changing climate could have both beneficial and harmful effects on crops. Keeping the above view in mind, this study is undertak...

In the new legislation framework enacted by new member countries of the European Union (EU), the characterization of municipal solid waste (MSW) represents an important instrument for local governments and sanitation operators in setting and achievi...

This paper presents a scenario-based approach to strategic environmental assessment (SEA) for wetland trend analysis and land use and land cover (LUC) modeling in an urban environment. The application is focused on the Saskatoon urban environment, a...

Agricultural innovation in low-income tropical countries contributes to a more effective and sustainable use of natural resources and reduces hunger and poverty through economic development in rural areas. Yet, despite numerous recent public and priv...

The aim of the present study is to examine and evaluate the evolving character of sustainability management in corporations, the significance of environmental protection and sustainability, and barriers to carrying out an incorporated and strategic f...

Soil degradation can take many forms, from erosion to salinization to the overall depletion of organic matter. The expression of soil degradation is broad, and so too are the causes. As the world population nears eight billion, and the environmental...

Considering the importance of daylight in the performance and well-being of the students, an investigation has been carried out in daylit classrooms. The objective was applying a methodology that integrates the daylight variations to know the annual...

The conception of contextualism in community planning emphasizes the integrity of architecture and its surroundings. It also implies the sustainability of landscape meaning within a community. In as much as planning theories have not mentioned how ex...

Many studies have investigated the accuracy of the numerical parameters in the application of the quasi steady-state calculation method. The aim of this study is to derive the reference numerical parameters of the ISO 13790 monthly method by reflecti...

The process of urban-rural integration has led to severe ecological environmental pollution in rural areas of China, particularly in the economically-developed areas. This is an urgent issue to be solved. We select Jiangsu Province as a case study. F...

Landscape design, construction and management should no longer be the result of superficial approaches based exclusively on designers’ and planners’ ideas. This research starts with the assumption that the aesthetic component constitutes an essential...

The use of integrated sustainability plans is an emerging trend in higher education institutions (HEIs) to set sustainability priorities and to create a work plan for action. This paper analyses the sustainability plans of 21 Canadian HEIs that have...

Successful sustainable land management efforts rely on stakeholder support and integration of stakeholder knowledge. This study explored the views of sustainable land management expressed by land use stakeholders and how these views contribute to lan...

The physiographic region of the Central Russian Upland, situated in the Central part of Eastern Europe, is characterized by very fertile grassland soils—Chernozems (Mollisols in the USDA taxonomy). However, over the last several centuries this region...

This paper begins with the question “What is special about those institutions that bring about sustainability”? In an attempt to answer this, I use the Institutions of Sustainability (IoS) framework, which structures sustainability analytically accor...

Using a case study of US agriculture, this paper examines how governance affects sustainability transitions in socio-technical systems. The multi-level perspective (MLP) has become a leading framework for theorizing sustainability transitions in soci...

Considerable research attention has focused on the labor market impacts of immigration, the operation and competitiveness of the European Union (EU) labor market, and the expenditures and advantages of labor circulation for sending and receiving econ...

This work presents, for the first time, an overview of the rich geodiversity outcropping in the São Tomé island, one of the two islands that make up the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, the second smallest state of Africa in area. Located at the...

The editors of Sustainability would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2014:[...]

There is not enough land for the current bioenergy production process because of its low annual yield per unit land. In the present paper, an integrated biomass production and conversion process for sustainable bioenergy is proposed and analyzed. The...

The business environment is currently characterized by intensified competition at both the national and firm levels. Many studies have shown that innovation positively affect firms in enhancing their competitiveness. Innovation is a dynamic process t...

Agricultural risk, especially the risk assessment, partition and economic loss estimation of specific and main crops, maize, wheat and rice, is widely touted in China as a means of improving the effective productivity. The main objective of this arti...

In 2014, more than 43 cities in China were racing to construct their urban rail systems (including metro and light rail systems), recognizing that an urban rail system will be a good solution to the tough problems that they are faced with, including...

A model of biogas generation was modified and applied to the case of a sanitary landfill in Italy. The modifications considered the role of the temperature field normally established within each layer of waste. It must be pointed out the temperature...

How to best govern natural resources in order to enable a sustainable way of handling them is what both research and practice aim to achieve. Empirical findings from several studies indicate that resource users are able to successfully cooperate in...

The extent and causes of chemical, physical and biological degradation of soil, and of soil loss, vary greatly in different countries in Western Europe. The objective of this review paper is to examine these issues and also strategies for soil prote...

Heihe River Basin is the second largest inland river basin in China, where water supply service in the upper reach has greater influence on the sustainable development of middle and lower reaches. This study analyzed the influence of land use/land co...

Most studies on the responsiveness of maize production to various variables have dwelled on the responsiveness of maize production to variations in precipitation or temperature. This study seeks to verify the response of maize production in Cameroon...

Place is seen as a process whereby social and cultural forms are reproduced. This process is closely linked to capital flows, which are, in turn, shaped by changing property regimes. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the relation...

This paper addresses an economic study of the installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels for residential power generation in Santiago, Chile, based on the different parameters of a PV system, such as efficiency. As a performance indicator, the Le...

In this article, we analyze how successful the implementation of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) in the Ebro river catchment (in Spain) has been. Our main aim is to show some gaps between theory and practice. This implies analyzing the po...

As healthcare systems face enormous challenges, sustainability is seen as a crucial requirement for making them fit for the future. However, there is no consensus with regard to either the definition of the term or the factors that characterize a “su...

Urban areas play an important role in the global carbon cycle, and human-induced carbon emissions from urban areas urgently need to be reduced. Therefore, understanding the relationship between carbon sources and sinks is the first step toward mitiga...

In four focus group exercises involving both forecasting and backcasting approaches, we gave approximately 100 Australian citizens the opportunity to discuss likely, desirable and feared futures to 2050. The image they paint is both coherent and cons...

Housing affordability is a multi-dimensional issue, yet it is typically defined and assessed quite narrowly in terms of financial criteria. The housing affordability problem encompasses more than financial costs of housing and extends to larger issue...

The 2014 Conference of the Parties (COP 12) for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was another step on the road to achieving the Aichi Targets the CBD agreed in 2010. It was also a key step on the way to making progress towards the vision o...

Measuring progress towards sustainable development requires appropriate frameworks and databases. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA) is undergoing continuous refinement with these objectives in mind. In SEEA, there is a need for dat...

The aim of this paper is to give an overview and analyze the contemporary land tenure relations in Russia in view of their influences on economic viability of agricultural production. The paper investigates progress made toward the development of agr...

Rapid urban land expansion and the resulting arable land loss have put food security in China at risk. This paper investigates the characteristics and mechanism of arable land conversion in Beijing using a logistic model based on land-use data for 20...

Terrain, an important limiting factor in land use change, strongly influences agricultural productivity. This study investigated the topographical characteristics of agricultural potential productivity of cropland transformations in China during the...

Base isolation has been used as one of the most wildly accepted seismic protection systems that should substantially dissociate a superstructure from its substructure resting on a shaking ground, thereby sustainably preserving entire structures again...

Analyzing spatiotemporal changes in land use and land cover could provide basic information for appropriate decision-making and thereby plays an essential role in promoting the sustainable use of land resources, especially in ecologically fragile reg...

Sustainability typically involves the balancing of three major factors: the economy, the environment, and some notion of equity. Though the economy is already a key aspect, the recognition of the informal economy, seems to be absent from the many pos...