Sustainability, Volume 8, Issue 2

The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) is the official Environmental Management System (EMS) issued by the European Union (EU). Italy is the country where EMAS is most widespread, accounting for over 1000 registered organizations. Since entry int...

Optimizing international oil exploration projects is one of the main challenges for oil companies in obtaining investment benefits. This paper establishes an integrated evaluation model to maximize investment benefits within the constraints of techni...

Construction waste management (CWM) has received worldwide attention for some time. As a result, a plethora of research, investigating a wide array of CWM issues such as their profiles, practices, and performance, has been reported in individual econ...

The target date in 2015 for the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was reached, and a new period of global goals for the post-2015 is dawning. To assess whether and how regional progress towards achieving the MDGs has contributed to...

Up till now, the high penetration of intermittent distributed generation (DG) has posed great challenges to the planning and operation of the grid. To achieve the best balance between economic cost and acceptable capacity of DG, this paper proposes a...

Social sustainability is a widely used concept in urban planning research and practice. However, knowledge of spatial distributions of social values and aspects of social sustainability is required. Visualization of these distributions is also highly...

Congestion pricing strategy has been recognized as an effective countermeasure in the practical field of urban traffic congestion mitigation. Despite the positive effects of congestion pricing, its implementation has faced problems. This paper invest...

Biophysical restoration or rehabilitation measures of land have demonstrated to be effective in many scientific projects and small-scale environmental experiments. However circumstances such as poverty, weak policies, or inefficient scientific knowle...

China’s urbanization has resulted in significant changes in agricultural land use. However, understanding of the linkages between urbanization and fertilizer use intensity is limited. Using county-level panel data for Henan Province, 1995–2008 and pa...

Heritage tourism can increase incomes and stimulate the economy in former mining areas. Recreational tourism is one of the main sources of value of heritage. People from urban areas are willing to pay for access to these tourism options. The measurem...

Inappropriate land use has caused a series of environmental disasters such as floods and sand storms, and some of them involved unused land changes with highly localized distributions in arid and semi-arid regions with fragile ecosystems. As the thir...

Heat loss and gain through windows has a very high impact on the thermal comfort of offices. This paper analyzes a standard low energy consumption university office that has a standard envelope. Dynamic thermal simulations with EDSL Tas software, a p...

The emphasis on learning and adaptation among different actors at various political administrative levels and on various geographic scales has become a precondition for the emergence of sustainable development. It is possible to find the essential fo...

A company’s core competitiveness depends on the strategic allocation of its human resources in alignment with employee capabilities. Competency models can identify the range of capabilities at a company’s disposal, and this information can be used to...

Understanding the system of connections between societal contexts and policy outcomes in municipal governments provides important insights into how community sustainability happens, and why it happens differently in various communities. A growing bod...

Western industrial cluster literature pays little attention to specialized markets (SMs) and the geographical agglomeration of distributors or sale agencies (SAs). This paper takes Linyin, Shandong, a famous commodity city in Northeastern China, as a...

Facing widespread poverty and land degradation, Vietnam started a land reform in 1993 as part of its renovation policy package known as “Doi Moi”. This paper examines the impacts of improved land tenure security, via this land reform, on manure use b...

This work focuses on the internal side of social responsibility of organizations in a regional context. Through a survey of 590 managers in classical business services (human-capital intensive) and representative of the productive economy of the Regi...

To date, international processes associated with sustainable development have not led to an internationally legally binding framework that adequately addresses the challenges we face. Human influence on the planet has led to the adoption, although no...

Finding the right strategic alliance partner is a critical success factor for many enterprises. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose an effective approach based on grey theory and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for selecting better par...

The green supply chain is an innovation that extends traditional sustainability initiatives to environmental activities in the supply chain and aims to minimize a product’s environmental impact throughout its life cycle. The adoption of a green suppl...

Regional competition may play an important role in the balance of environmental protection and economic growth. However, it is a pending issue of whether the competition among Chinese local governments leads to a race to black development or green de...

The study of greenhouse gas emissions has become a global focus, but few studies have considered saline-alkali paddy fields. Gas samples and saline-alkali soil samples were collected during the green, tillering, booting, heading and grain filling sta...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) not only affects the economic growth but also affects the environmental protection of the host country. With China’s background of pursuing green growth, we need to consider the performance of FDI from the economic and...

Natural gas is considered by energy experts to be the most promising fossil fuel for the 21st century, and as a matter of fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) introduced for the first time in the 2011 World Energy Outlook a high gas use scenar...

There are a great amount of brownfield in Chinese mining cities. In order to promote mining cities sustainable development, it is necessary to redevelop brownfield. There is a great deal of uncertainty in the process of brownfield redevelopment owing...

The famous “world’s factory” city, Dongguan, like many other places in China, is a typical beneficiary of China’s Reform and Opening-up Policy. However, rapid urban sprawl and economic growth are at the expense of the destruction of the local environ...

The study explores links between types of business models used by companies and their involvement in CSR. As the main part of our conceptual framework we used a business model taxonomy developed by Dudzik and Witek-Hajduk, which identifies five types...

Nowadays, with the green economy becoming mainstream in the world, an industrial revolution as the core of green development has emerged. Based on the empirical evidence from China’s 30 provinces, this study establishes an evaluation index system of...

Waste-wood derived biochar was evaluated for the first time as both an anode and cathode material, simultaneously, in an overflow style microbial fuel cell (MFC) using actual industrial wastewater. Results show that the average chemical oxygen demand...

Several individual scholars and international organizations have attempted to conceptualize “culture” in its different meanings in sustainability. Despite those efforts, a tangle of different approaches are being used, reflecting the various discipli...

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) does not explicitly refer to sustainable development despite the fact that other United Nations (UN) disarmament documents prescribe that international environmental law principles and sustainable development...

Parking is a key component of urban transportation managements and has become a severe problem at many tourist attractions during holidays in China. This paper presents a novel scheme to relieve the holiday parking pressure. Based on the perspectives...

Facing sharp competition in the market for shipping companies, it is necessary to make reasonable and efficient decisions to optimize the container shipping line network so as to improve the shipping efficiency and reduce the transportation cost, as...

This paper highlights the need for a more inclusive and sustainable development of social housing in rapidly developing countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. At the example of the Philippines, a multi-perspective development process for a bam...

Project interventions are important vehicles for development globally. However, while there is often allocation of resources for new and innovative (pilot) projects—with varying levels of success—there is seemingly less focus on consolidating and/or...

Usually, agricultural tractor investments are assessed using traditional economic techniques that only involve financial attributes, resulting in reductionist evaluations. However, tractors have qualitative and quantitative attributes that must be si...

There is a growing consensus that the adoption of performance measurement tools are of particular interest for social enterprises in order to support internal decision‐making and to answer the demands of accountability toward their stakeholders. As a...

Forest biomass is a significant indicator for substance accumulation and forest succession, and a spatiotemporal biomass map would provide valuable information for forest management and scientific planning. In this study, Landsat imagery and field da...

Inter‐basin water transfer projects (IBWTPs) offer one of the most important means to solve the mismatch between supply and demand of regional water resources. IBWTPs have impacts on the complex ecosystems of the areas from which water is diverted an...

Water resource and environment capacity have become two of the most important restrictions for sustainable development in resource-based cities whose leading industries are the exploitation and processing of resources. Taking Ordos in China as an exa...

This study examines and explores the contribution of an energy-optimized urban planning approach to efficient resource use in the context of Dhaka city, Bangladesh. A conceptual energy optimization model called the “EnUp” model has been developed and...

Municipal household solid waste (MHSW) has become a serious problem in China over the course of the last two decades, resulting in significant side effects to the environment. Therefore, effective management of MHSW has attracted wide attention from...

The city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has established, by municipal law, a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions of the transport system by 20% until 2020 compared to 2005. In order to reach this goal, the city’s public transport has been restructu...

Studying the influencing factors of carbon dioxide emissions is not only practically but also theoretically crucial for establishing regional carbon-reduction policies, developing low-carbon economy and solving the climate problems. Therefore, we use...

Nowadays, scholars exploring the relationship between proactive environmental strategy and firm competitiveness do not focus on the question of whether it pays to be green but rather investigate when, for whom or how it does so. This paper analyzes t...

Retail enterprises are organizations that sell goods in small quantities to consumers for personal consumption. In distributed retail enterprises, data is administered per branch. It is important for retail enterprises to make use of data generated w...

Most innovation activities that are inevitable for sustainable growth are coordinated via research and development (R&D) projects, which can differ widely in terms of both project and open innovation characteristics, even when conducted within th...

An anonymous transaction environment and the advantage of virtual property have resulted in trust playing an important role in the rapid growth of online shopping in China. To satisfy this trust issue, Alibaba (China) Co., Ltd. (Hangzhou, China) inve...

In recent decades, the majority of cities in developing countries have grown rapidly and have experienced increasing environmental problems. These changes have generated a broad discussion on urban sustainability and development. In this discussion,...