Sustainability, Volume 7, Issue 8

Over the past twenty years, agricultural biotechnologies have generated chronically unresolved political controversies. The standard tool of risk assessment has proven to be highly limited in its ability to address the panoply of concerns that exist...

The concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and user experience have been identified as core determinants of the success of service providers. Accordingly, practitioners and researchers have investigated the effects of service providers’ CS...

Growing scientific evidence for the indispensable role of environmental sustainability in sustainable development calls for appropriate frameworks and indicators for environmental sustainability assessment (ESA). In this paper, we operationalize and...

Urban green spaces are essential elements of cities, contributing to the quality of life in numerous ways. However, densification strategies create a complex relationship between urban development and the quality, as well as the quantity, of urban gr...

The internet and associated Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are diffusing at an astounding pace. As data centers (DCs) proliferate to accommodate this rising demand, their environmental impacts grow too. While the energy efficiency...

Numerous countries have established policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and have suggested goals pertaining to these reductions. To reach the target reduction amounts, studies on the reduction of carbon emissions have been conducted with r...

The development of cities has always had a very close relation with water. However, cities directly impact land use patterns and greatly change natural landscapes, aggravating floods. Considering this situation, this paper intends to discuss lowland...

Most studies explored green-roof thermal effects on a few hot summer days based on short-term monitoring data. Few studies investigated the seasonal and diurnal patterns of thermal performance and associated weather effects. This research aims to add...

Changes in agriculture, including simultaneous intensification and abandonment, have significantly shaped the evolution of rural areas. The assessment of resilience in agricultural systems could provide insights into the ability of many rural areas t...

In developing countries, the drinking water supply is still an open issue. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 68% of the population has access to improved sources of drinking water. Moreover, some regions are affected by geogenic contaminants (e.g., fluori...

Tourism is perceived as an appropriate solution for pursuing sustainable economic growth due to its main characteristics. In the context of sustainable tourism, gamification can act as an interface between tourists (clients), organisations (companies...

In room–corridor building geometry, the corridor smoke temperature is of great importance to fire protection engineering as indoor fires occur. Theoretical analysis and a set of reduced-scale model experiments were performed, and a virtual fire model...

Traditional rural landscapes emerged from the long term interaction of the natural and anthropogenic environment. These landscapes are now threatened by drastic social-ecological changes. Recent international trends on sustaining cultural landscapes...

The metropolitan city of Istanbul is becoming overcrowded and the demand for clean water is steeply rising in the city. The use of analytical approaches has become more and more critical for forecasting the water supply and demand balance in the long...

Smart cards are able to store and protect relatively large amounts of data. When applied in universities, they can act as multi-purpose, multi-function and smart ID cards. This would avoid the waste of resources and maintain environmental sustainabil...

Sustainability reports are tools for disseminating information to stakeholders and the public, serving the organizations in the dual purpose of communicating CSR and being accountable. The production of these reports has recently become more prevalen...

This research is the first attempt of a carbon emission investigation of tourism-based farms. A total of 36 cases were investigated. The result reveals that each tourist returns an average revenue of 28.6 USD and generates an average 10.9 kg-CO₂eq p...

This paper provides an overview of the main manufacturing technologies of displays, focusing on those with low and ultra-low levels of power consumption, which make them suitable for current societal needs. Considering the typified value obtained fr...

This study forecasts the liquidity gap in China’s pension scheme for urban workers in the context of an ageing population and the possible effects of recent governmental policies by constructing a basic pension model, including “old people”, “middle...

The growth economy imposes multiple crises on humanity and the natural world. To challenge this economic growth imperative, the degrowth movement emerges as a dissident response. Although within an economic growth perspective, payments for ecosystem...

This research paper aims at developing and applying a constructive weighting methodology for the elicitation of local stakeholders’ preferences regarding a set of sustainability evaluation criteria during the assessment of low-carbon energy technolog...

In this study, we allocate Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of electricity transmission to the consumers. As an allocation basis, we introduce energy distance. Energy distance takes the transmission load on the electricity energy system into account in...

Recently, as more people are concerned with the issues around environment protection, research about how to reduce carbon emissions has drawn increasing attention. Encouraging public transportation is an effective measure to reduce carbon emissions....

In higher education there is a growing demand for graduates with the competence to transform our society toward a sustainable future. Part of this competence in sustainability is anticipatory competence, the ability to engage with multiple futures, m...

This study aimed to investigate the influence of the service encounter expectations of senior customers during wellness tours on customer satisfaction. The organizational attributes of hotels, organizational characteristics and employee characteristi...

Water table control has been successfully tested to improve the sustainability of water management in cranberry production. In the province of Québec (Canada), three sites were investigated to determine the optimum water table depth below soil surfac...

Research from a variety of disciplines suggests that online technologies (i.e., Web 2.0 and social media) have considerable potential for spurring proenvironmental action; however, relatively little work examines how to effectively capitalize on thes...

Effective change order management is very important in maintaining the financial sustainability of various stakeholders related to construction projects by minimizing cost overruns. In this study, we propose a zero-cost risk management approach based...

Electronic paper (e-paper) is a major sector of Taiwan’s Optoelectronic industry. It has paid much attention on the development of flexible displays. Even though the market is booming, the future is still unclear for business development. No research...

Greenhouse gas emissions have serious impacts on the natural environment. Therefore, the restrictions imposed on carbon emission force enterprises to take carbon emission into consideration when making production decisions. In this paper, in the cont...

Rising global energy needs and limited fossil fuel reserves have led to increased use of renewable energies. In Germany, this has entailed massive exploitation of agricultural biomass for biogas generation, associated with unsustainable farming pract...

Any World Heritage Cultural Landscape requires a clear boundary for administration. One of the administrative goals is sustainability. There is no widely identified way to demarcate the boundary of a World Heritage Cultural Landscape. This paper aims...

Customer expectations can be extremely nebulous. This research identifies the demographic segmentations and their respective expectations for the spa market. Interviews were conducted and a subsequent questionnaire was employed to gather the voice of...

Proper lighting is vital to improve, from an artistic point of view, the surface expanse and decorative detailing of architectural heritage buildings considered valuable. When properly lit, monumental buildings can become to onlookers an essential pa...

In recent years, global climate change has altered precipitation patterns, causing uneven spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation that gradually induces precipitation polarization phenomena. Taiwan is located in the subtropical climate zon...

According to the increasing worldwide attention to energy and the environmental performance of the building sector, building energy demand should be minimized by considering all energy uses. In this regard, the development of building components char...

The relationship between soil fauna and different fertilizer management practices is of growing concern. The aim of this research was to investigate the response of soil fauna to fertilization regimes, to explore the relationships among the community...

Congestion pricing strategy has been recognized as an effective countermeasure in the practical field of urban traffic congestion mitigation. In this paper, a bi-level programming model considering carbon dioxide emission is proposed to mitigate traf...

Local ecosystem services have been significantly affected by land cover changes associated with rapid urbanization in China. Based on the 2000 and 2010 land cover data products with 30-m resolution, we examined the similarities and differences in the...

An accurate assessment of a building’s wall performance, defined through the thermal transmittance, is essential to compute the annual energy consumption. Analyzing opaque surfaces, the heat transfer across walls can be modeled by an electro-thermal...

The oceans are a crucial source of natural resources for human development, as productive terrestrial resources increasingly reach their limits of economic and ecological exploitation. With increasing human impact on oceans, it is vital to maintain a...

The goal set by the EU of quasi-zero energy buildings is not easy to reach for a country like Italy, as it holds a wide number of UNESCO sites and most of them are entire historical old towns. This paper focuses on the problem of the improvement of e...

During the last few years, the issues of energy efficiency and energy saving have dominated the buildings research field. New constructions are based on efficient design and, because of this, the real challenge is to retrofit existing buildings. Ital...

Establishing an advanced European bioeconomy is an important step in achieving the transition towards sustainable development and away from fossil fuels. The bioeconomy can be defined as an economy based on the sustainable production and conversion o...

This study describes a new assessment model framework, termed the driving forces-pressure-state-impact-policy and pattern (DPSIP) model, for environmental change efficiency in urban land development, based on urban sustainable development and the the...

With an increased awareness of sustainability issues, natural ventilation has become an elegant method for reducing the costs and environmental effects of the energy that is used to maintain comfortable indoor air quality rather than using mechanical...

The tree-growing sector is considered to be an important supplier of food and raw material for industry worldwide. Increasingly competitive decisions regarding international investment in orchards depend on business analysis. This study compares thre...

We propose an ethical analysis as a method to reflect on how companies’ decisions promote sustainable development. The method proceeds by first identifying the choice according to financial business interests, and by then scrutinizing this choice acc...

Using a sequential slack-based measure (SSBM) model, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal disparities of urban land use economic efficiency (ULUEE) under environmental constraints, and its influencing factors in 270 cities across China from 2003–20...

A discrete-time model is presented to describe the complex interaction between industrial production and environmental quality in a closed area. Its Neimark–Sacker bifurcation and chaos are discussed based on Wen’s explicit Neimark–Sacker bifurcation...