Sustainability, Volume 7, Issue 4

The global urban transition increasingly positions cities as important influencers in determining sustainability outcomes. Urban sustainability literature tends to focus on the built environment as a solution space for reducing energy and materials d...

Kinmen National Park is the only battle memorial-themed natural resource conservation park in Taiwan. With the rapid growth in tourism, Kinmen National Park faces the challenge of managing with the resulting environmental impact. For this study, we a...

In this paper we investigate the economic and environmental efficiency of charities and NGO’s “rescuing” food waste, using a 2008 case study of food rescue organisations in Australia. We quantify the tonnages, costs, and environmental impact of food...

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is the phenomenon of altered increased temperatures in urban areas compared to their rural surroundings. UHIs grow and intensify under extreme hot periods, such as during heat waves, which can affect human health and also...

The purpose of this study was to create maps of potentially sustainable leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) habitats for all of South Korea. The leopard cat, which is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, is the on...

Many arable land areas have been converted to residential or business uses by Taiwan government authorities, because the low farmland value is associated with the low value of agricultural products. However, agriculture is multifunctional. This study...

In this study, an inexact stochastic fuzzy programming (ISFP) model is proposed for land-use allocation (LUA) and environmental/ecological planning at a watershed level, where uncertainties associated with land-use parameters, benefit functions, and...

In the traditional studies on small-signal stability probability of a power system with wind farms, the frequency of wind speed was often assumed to obey to some extent a particular probability distribution. The stability probability that is thus obt...

Tree planting is widely advocated and applied in urban areas, with large-scale projects underway in cities globally. Numerous potential benefits are used to justify these planting campaigns. However, reports of poor tree survival raise questions abou...

Fish eco-labeling is a market-based incentive program for sustainable fisheries. This paper examines consumers’ acceptance of eco-labeled fish by using data from a pilot study conducted in a coastal area of northwestern Mexico. An ordered probit mode...

In order to realize economic and social green development, to pave a pathway towards China’s green regional development and develop effective scientific policy to assist in building green cities and countries, it is necessary to put forward a relativ...

Sustainability is conceptualized, approached and acted upon differently by people, sectors, societies, nations and educational systems. Consequently, the “sustainability thinking”-related scientific, technological, environmental, societal, economic a...

How can buildings be combined with agricultural production and what are the major potential benefits and challenges for the introduction of zero-acreage farming (ZFarming) in Berlin from the relevant stakeholders’ perspectives? These questions were e...

Recent housing policies include measures for home purchase control and shanty town redevelopment. This study proposes sustainable pricing, in that the long-run equilibrium price is determined by the fundamentals of house prices. We argue that changes...

Global cities, the command and control centres of the integrated world economy, are facing a sustainability paradox of greater global competition and greater environmental pressure. This study explores the policy approaches to the sustainability para...

Terraced areas have existed in Italy since ancient times, and they continue to be characteristic elements of the cultural identity of the country. The progressive abandonment of rural areas and farmland that began in the 1960s has led to the disinteg...

With accelerating urbanization, urban competitiveness has become a worldwide academic focus. Previous studies always focused on economic factors but ignored social elements when measuring urban competitiveness. In this paper, a city was considered as...

Because of his classification as a minor architect, Gaetano Vinaccia’s (1881–1971) role in the history of architecture has not been studied in depth. Despite the fact that his impact on the debate about rational architecture was limited, the depth an...

We study an emission-dependent dyadic fashion supply chain made up of a supplier and a manufacturer, both of which can reduce their own component/product emissions to serve the carbon-footprint sensitive consumers. With Carbon Tax regulation, we cons...

This article describes the evolution of the coastal economy in Alabama and examines the driving forces of the sustainable economy in a historical context. The input-output model was applied to assess the direct and secondary effects of output and em...

The conflict among natural resources, environment and economic development is one of the major problems to be solved in the current world. Sustainable development is a powerful tool on the way toward seeking for harmonious development. Due to a lack...

A growing world population, changing consumption patterns and climate change are affecting water demands, water scarcity and water quality worldwide, while at present, few companies are incorporating good water stewardship. In order to create awarene...

The impact of resources on social unrest is of increasing interest to political leaders, business and civil society. Recent events have highlighted that (lack of) access to critical resources, including food, energy and water, can, in certain circums...

The aim of this study is to determine the impact potential of land use on biotic production and climate regulation in the agricultural phase of a product, taking into account the varied soil and crop management. Land occupation and transformation imp...

This study reports the results of exergy, economic and environmental analyses of simple and combined heat and power internal combustion engines. Values of entropy production, second law efficiency are calculated, and an objective function, including...

Land use and land cover (LULC) models are essential for analyzing LULC change and predicting land use requirements and are valuable for guiding reasonable land use planning and management. However, each LULC model has its own advantages and constrain...

The rapid growth of transport requirements in China will incur increasing transport energy demands and associated environmental pressures. In this paper, we employ a generalized data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the relative energy efficien...

The world is facing a number of serious problems of which population rise, climate change, soil degradation, water scarcity and food security are among the most important. Aquaponics, as a closed loop system consisting of hydroponics and aquaculture...

Published by the World Bank (as “Adjusted Net Savings”) for around 160 countries, Genuine Savings (GS) presents the most respected but also the most debated indicator for “weak” sustainability. It originates from the so-called “Hartwick rule” for the...

We have conducted a broad statistical research on Romanian small to medium enterprises (SMEs), with the goal of better understanding: (1) the incipient organizational culture of a recently-opened East European market; and (2) the role of leadership i...

Many problems that are encountered in regards to water balance and resources management are related to challenges of economic development under limited resources and tough competition among various water uses. The development of major infrastructure...

We adopt a multi-sectoral approach and consider the full range of climate projections. Biophysical damages are translated into economic costs using a dynamic economy-wide model. Our results indicate that the negative impacts on agriculture and roads...

Effective and efficient ventilation is essential when improving energy performance and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) of buildings. Reducing air permeability can considerably improve the energy performance of buildings; however, making the buildings more a...

In the process of heavy oil thermal recovery, the creep of strata can often be accelerated due to injection pressure, the temperature of steam, the structural characteristics of rock itself and other factors. However, the effect of creep in strata ma...

The present study documents the Hg content in 45 urban topsoil samples from the highly urbanized city of Athens, Greece. The Hg concentrations were quantified by applying aqua regia digestion on the <100 μm soil fraction followed by inductively co...

The article summarizes contemporary scientific knowledge of depleted uranium effects on human health due to its use in military conflicts. The discussion covers cases of minimal risk due to external irradiation resulting from the storage and handling...

Based on representative survey data, the present study examines potentials for the sustainable development of a transnational civil society in French-German, Polish-German, and Czech-German border regions. The theoretical framework is a social capita...

The characterization of natural and cultural heritage using popular entertainment, such as TV movies and series, can become an effective and original way to involve society in protecting territory and enhancing local development, thanks to the dissem...

Companies are increasingly required to deal with sustainability issues through the adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Among the different CSR aspects, workers securities fulfill a necessary issue. SA8000 is an internationall...

A metafrontier slack-based efficiency measure is presented to measure environmental efficiency for various regions in China. The objective of the new approach is to investigate the change of environmental efficiency while incorporating group heteroge...

Urban forests represent key elements of green infrastructure and provide essential ecosystem services in both the ecological and social spheres. Therefore, forestation planning plays a decisive role in the sustainable development strategies of metrop...

Using complex networks and spatial econometric methods, we empirically test the extent to which a country’s influence and its position in an international investment network affect environmental quality as well as the country’s role in transboundary...

To increase the likelihood of success and sustainability, organizations must fundamentally reposition themselves and try to change current processes or create new products and services. One of the most effective approaches to find a solution for tran...

Urban population potential is a good measure of urban spatial interactions. However, previous studies often assigned population data to the administrative point of the government or the centroid of the region, such as the county, ward or village. In...

As the number of speech and video documents increases on the Internet and portable devices proliferate, speech summarization becomes increasingly essential. Relevant research in this domain has typically focused on broadcasts and news; however, the a...

The acceleration of urbanization and industrialization has been gradually aggravating water security issues, such as water shortages, water pollution, and flooding or drought disasters and so on. Water security issues have become a great challenge to...

Sustainable energy production and consumption is one of the issues for the sustainable development strategy in China. As China’s economic development paradigm shifts, household energy consumption (HEC) has become a focus of achieving national goals o...

Cities around the world are facing an ever-increasing variety of challenges that seem to make more sustainable urban futures elusive. Many of these challenges are being driven by, and exacerbated by, increases in urban populations and climate change...

During the last decades, society’s concern for the environment has increased. Specific tools like the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and software and databases to apply this method have been developed to calculate the environmental burden of products o...

As afforestation programs of former farmlands take hold in Taiwan to achieve a variety of ecological and socio-economic values, it is becoming necessary to define best forest management. Hence, we simulated mixed stands of Cinnamomum camphora and Fra...