Sustainability, Volume 7, Issue 2

Heavy metals are natural constituents of the environment, but indiscriminate use for human purposes has altered their geochemical cycles and biochemical balance. This results in excess release of heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, zi...

Increasing global demand for oil seeds and cereals during the past 50 years has caused an expansion in the cultivated areas and resulted in major soil management and crop production changes throughout Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and souther...

Different variables affect the performance of the Stirling engine and are considered in optimization and designing activities. Among these factors, torque and power have the greatest effect on the robustness of the Stirling engine, so they need to be...

Sustainability is instituting annual awards to recognize the most outstanding papers in the areas of environmental, cultural, economic, technical and social sustainability of human beings published in Sustainability. [...]

Industrial ecology introduced a new paradigm of principles and tools useful to academic analysis and decision support activities for industry and policymakers. This paper presents a view of the state of the art of industrial ecology, encompassing the...

This paper assesses the sustainability, efficiency and equity of water use in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) by means of a geographic Water Footprint Assessment (WFA). It aims to provide understanding of water use from both a production and co...

In a scenario of increasing globalization, sustainable development has emerged as an attractive and strategic issue for both countries and individual organizations and their supply chains. Companies have faced different challenges in seeking to comb...

This paper studies the impact on project duration of different forms of over-confidence among general contractors executing such projects, in the context of retail apparel franchises. It goes on to consider the design of relevant incentives and, in p...

A diverse topography along with deforestation, changing climatic conditions, long-term human settlement, overuse of agricultural lands without sustainable planning, cultural difficulties in accepting conservative land management practices, and wrong...

Recently, as vehicle computing technology has advanced, the paradigm of the vehicle has changed from a simple means of transportation to a smart vehicle for safety and convenience. In addition, the previous functions of the Intelligent Transportation...

Resilience thinking has strongly influenced how people understand and pursue sustainability of linked social-ecological systems. Resilience thinking highlights the need to build capacity and manage general system properties in a complex, constantly c...

A building needs to be designed for the whole period of its useful life according to its requirements. However, future climate predictions involve some uncertainty. Thus, several sustainable strategies of adaptation need to be incorporated after the...

In response to the impact of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, developing and using renewable energy sources and technologies have become vital for managing energy supply and demand in Taiwan. The long-term subsidy programs (...

The Introduction to Sustainability course at the University of Iowa seeks to educate the aware, informed and action-oriented sustainable citizen. A phenomenographic analysis and retrospective pretest were utilized to determine how students formed con...

We analyzed the spatial distribution of lake and reservoir water quality in China, and the trends from 2005 to 2010, based on monitoring data from 28 large Chinese lakes and reservoirs. We used a comprehensive water pollution index (WPI) to describe...

The social dimension of the transition to a low carbon economy is a key challenge to cities. The establishment of local energy initiatives (LEIs) has recently been attracting attention. It is of great importance to draw lessons from best practices wh...

This paper aims to investigate companies’ environmental, social, governance (ESG), and financial implications of their commitment to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). The focus is placed on companies operating in the three countries with the...

Swedish agricultural companies, especially small farms, are struggling to be profitable in difficult economic times. It is a challenge for Swedish farmers to compete with imported products on prices. The agricultural industry, however, supports the v...

The livelihoods of people in the Andes are expected to be affected by climate change due to their dependence on glacier water. The observed decrease in glacier volume over the last few decades is likely to accelerate during the current century, which...

An integrated optimization simulation model has been developed based on an input-output approach to mitigate water pollution and water scarcity through embedding environmental economic policies and applicable technologies into a complex environ-econ...

Developing skills and attitudes among students in terms of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) requires that educators address issues of sustainability in both formal and non-formal education. However, up to now, ESD seems to have been insuff...

Urban areas are increasingly associated with negative environmental impacts due to concentrated resource consumption; however urban areas also offer economies of scale in terms of service provision. There is no accepted mechanism to aid decision-make...

This study injects sustainability into competitiveness to inform policy making and planning for contemporary urban development. This is built upon the recent advancement in the scholarship on urban competitiveness that demonstrates a clear deviation...

This paper explores the externally-led vertical differentiation of third-party certification standards using the case of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). We analyze this process in two dimensions. First, fisheries employ strategies to capture fu...

The energy performance of buildings depends on how effectively the building envelope responds to climate. Architects, therefore, need to design building envelopes with the consideration of local climate characteristics in the early design stage. Simp...

Nowadays, an increasing shortage of water resources intensifies the contradiction among different water-using sectors in the social-economic-ecological complex system. To adjust water used configuration in a holistic framework, a water use system (W...

This study proposes a novel hybrid multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to evaluate green suppliers in an electronics company. Seventeen criteria in two dimensions concerning environmental and management systems were identified under the C...

The seasonal imbalances and price premiums of natural gas imports (NGIs) seriously affect the sustainability of these imports in major Northeast Asian countries, namely, China, Japan, and South Korea. Research on NGI seasonality might provide new ins...

Affected by natural and human-induced factors, cultural heritage sites and their surroundings face threats of structural instability and land displacement. Accurate and rapid identification of the key areas facing existing or potential deformation ri...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have the potential to become a powerful political vision that can support the urgently needed global transition to a shared and lasting prosperity. In December 2014, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General pu...

Malawi is a country in southern Africa facing high climate variability and many agricultural challenges. This paper examines farmers’ coping strategies for crop failure and the determinants of their choices using household level data from rural south...

Climate change is a reality all over the world, and its complexity is increasing. Therefore, sustainability has become a national and international concern, ingrained in many organizational processes. The ability of organizations to respond to sustai...

In recent years, water scarcity and irrational utilization have become the pivotal issues for the sustainable development of river basins in China. This paper attempts to propose a new perspective for the optimization of water resources allocation in...

Synthetic measurement of regional sustainable development has been one of the key issues in the research field of sustainability. In this paper, Qingyang City located in the Loess Plateau ecologically fragile area of Northwest China is used for a cas...

The continuous expansion and change in Asia is attracting increasing attention from the rest of the world. Thus, the papers from the Sustainable Asia Conference 2014 (SAC 2014) could provide a platform to examine outperforming governance factors and...

In recent years, sustainability has been a major focus of fashion business operations because fashion industry development causes harmful effects to the environment, both indirectly and directly. The sustainability of the fashion industry is generall...

This paper introduces the concept of apparent motion, and by examining the characteristics of apparent motion and of velocity vectors, puts forward a new speed reduction method in tunnels. Finally, we verify this effect through a simulation experimen...

Companies have been aware of the benefits of developing Cluster Supply Chains (CSCs), and they are spending a great deal of time and money attempting to develop the new business pattern. Yet, the traditional techniques for identifying CSCs have stron...

Although the regional differences of rural economic development can be easily determined, a challenging problem for research studies regarding rural economic development has been the inter-relatedness between different areas, and this challenge has b...

The main objective of this paper is to present the factors with influence on the sustainable university management and the relationships between them. In the scientific approach we begin from a graphical model, according to which the extracurricular...

Enterprises should find a new business model for their development, so as to make better use of their own advantages. At the same time, with rapid development of the economy and of science technology, the competition between small and medium-sized en...

Food produced but not used for human consumption is a waste of natural resources. In order to prevent and reduce food waste, the main causes have to be identified systematically along the food supply chain (FSC). The aim of this study is (1) to shed...

The environmental crisis and the need to find renewable fuel alternatives have made production of biofuels an important priority. At the same time, the increasing production of food waste is an important environmental issue. For this reason, producti...

Despite the unprecedented rate of urbanization throughout the world, human society is still facing the challenge of coordinating urban socioeconomic development and ecological conservation. In this article, we integrated socioeconomic data and spatia...

Biomass energy and especially biofuels produced by biomass gasification are clean and renewable options for power plants. Also, on hot days the performance of gas turbines decreases substantially, a problem that can be mitigated by fog cooling. In th...

The South Korean government is providing full support for green IT as one of the growth engines of Korea. The purpose of this study is to derive policy issues needed for the sustainable development of Korea through utilizing Big Data by applying gree...

Despite climate change mitigation and sustainability agendas, road transport systems in Germany and the resulting environmental burden are growing. Road transport is a significant source of emissions in urban areas and the infrastructure has a signif...

This paper analyzes gender issues with respect to public pensions in China. Because provision of public pensions in China is highly fragmented, with different programs applying to different groups of people, we focus on the largest mandatory public p...

School cafeterias are a significant source of food waste and represent an ideal opportunity for diverting food waste from landfills. In this study, cafeteria waste audits were conducted at three Florida schools. Food waste comprised the largest fract...

This research assesses the next generation of permeable pavement systems (PPS) incorporating ground source heat pumps (geothermal paving systems). Twelve experimental pilot-scaled pavement systems were assessed for its stormwater treatability in Edin...