Standards

The growing concerns about global warming and its perceived influence on economic sustainability require a reassessment of the environmental consequences of gold mining, with a special focus on BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. This paper examines the environmental sustainability corridor, carbon emission, gold price, economic growth, foreign direct investment (FDI), and renewable energy use between 1989 and 2020. The long-run association among the variables is checked by us through the PMG technique. Our findings indicate that while the gold price, FDI, and renewable energy use decrease carbon emission, economic growth adds to the increase in carbon emissions in the long run. These findings bring out the dual challenge of promoting economic growth while managing environmental impact. The study underlines how policymakers need to provide regulatory frameworks which will encourage renewable energy and responsible foreign investment, as a means of trying to mitigate the environmental impacts of gold mining and achieve sustainable development. Our research adds to the continuing debate about how economic expansion can be balanced with environmental preservation for resource-rich countries. Full article

This study addresses the critical need for improved sustainability reporting in the construction sector, focusing on the integration of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) indicators to enhance reporting quality and promote standardization. The increasing regulatory pressure from the European Commission, particularly in sustainability reporting, has intensified the demand for corporate transparency. Despite these efforts, many companies still face challenges in implementing robust sustainability performance measures. This research employs a systematic literature review alongside the case studies of three leading German construction companies to critically assess the current reporting practices and explore the integration potential of LCSA indicators. The findings highlight a significant gap between the existing sustainability disclosures and LCSA indicators, with only 7–19% of the assessed indicators being integrated into the current reporting practices. Although some consistency in reporting themes and qualitative disclosures is evident, the misalignment with LCSA indicators underscores the need for further integration of standardized, life cycle-based metrics. This study concludes that collaborative efforts among companies, policymakers, and LCSA researchers are required to bridge this gap, ensuring the adoption of the existing, scientifically robust indicators that enhance the precision, comparability, and transparency of sustainability reporting in the construction sector. Full article

According to conclusions agreed to in the 1995 Report of the World Summit for Social Development and the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit, seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) have been ratified and published as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In 2022, the 8th Environment Action Programme was legally agreed upon, following the six European Green Deal priorities. These SDGs serve as a constant reminder of the importance of globally coordinated actions in compliance with the theory of sustainable development. However, more than a constant reminder, this international agreement should become the foundation for necessary change. On 22 July 2024, the daily global average temperature reached a new record high. The EU treaties signed between 1951 and 2007 laid the foundation for the creation of EU environmental policy. However, those EU treaties, along with environmental policy, form merely a non-binding and minimum set of priorities without any sanctions imposed for illegal practices. In 2021, EU member countries adopted the European Climate Law as the first legally binding document seeking to achieve goals set by the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. Any further EU sustainable development policies are dependent on global cooperation as a key element of survival. With the EU’s dependent on the rest of the world for its energy, the forcing of any obligatory change will be hard to achieve. This proves the importance of the 17th SDG, agreed in 2015. Only global partnership for sustainable development can prevent further damage to our ecosystem and achieve priorities set by the EU and UN agendas. The review aims to present the connection between sustainable development (SD) goals defined by the European Commission, for which the most important aspects are the need to meet the environmental requirements to protect future needs in the long run, and to confront the shortcomings of European law-making practices, in which most crucial reforms are presented as non-binding legal acts. Finally, in 2024 members of the European Parliament established an extended list of environmental crimes to be regarded as punishable offences and replaced the Environmental Crime Directive, making criminal activities and offences potentially legally punishable; however, it is yet to be seen how this initiative will be incorporated within the national legislations of each EU member country and to what extent. Full article

The purpose of the qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies some supply chain managers of the United Nations (UN) use to leverage operational efficiencies in the UN humanitarian programs. As a result, communities supporting sustainability and peace or those fostering economic development will be able to respond effectively to humanitarian crises. Moreover, the UN can remain operational and engage in political and conflict-reduction interventions integral to economic and social recovery and sustainability. This study applied the qualitative multiple case study through semi-structured interviews with nine supply chain managers in the United Nations, direct observations, document analysis, and artifacts. The research is grounded in the dynamic capability theory (DCT). The research revealed several strategies that supply chain managers of the UN use to ensure operational efficiencies grouped around three themes: (a) analytical, innovation, and knowledge management strategies; (b) effective supply chain management leadership strategies; and (c) risk management strategies. This study is one of the first to apply generic findings of humanitarian supply chain studies to the United Nations, the global organization with diverse mandates that continuously strives to achieve efficiencies required by donors providing financial support, thus remaining operational. The study’s results could help leaders in the various humanitarian organizations who operate in vulnerable environments and under strict scrutiny from donors to deliver their aid programs most efficiently by understanding dynamic capabilities. Previous studies indicate the lack of strategic frameworks applicable to the United Nations that could improve decision-making at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels, facilitate collaboration among supply chain stakeholders, and reduce the costs of the operational performance of the supply chain system in the UN. Full article

The gap between software design and implementation often results in a lack of clarity and precision. Formal languages, based on mathematical rules, logic, and symbols, are invaluable for specifying and verifying system designs. Various semi-formal and formal languages, such as JSON, XML, predicate logic, and regular expressions, along with formal models like Turing machines, serve specific domains. This paper introduces a new specification formal language, ObTFL (Object Transaction Formal Language), developed for general-purpose distributed systems, such as specifying the interactions between servers and IoT devices and their security protocols. The paper details the syntax and semantics of ObTFL and presents three real case studies—federated learning, blockchain for crypto and bitcoin networks, and the industrial PCB board with machine synchronization—to demonstrate its versatility and effectiveness in formally specifying the interactions and behaviors of distributed systems. Full article

District heating and cooling networks represent a compelling energy system solution due to their capacity to integrate renewable energies and leverage local surpluses of thermal resources. The meticulous design and optimization of network infrastructure are imperative to fully exploiting the potential of these energy systems. The Life Cycle Assessment of district heating and cooling networks for the purpose of environmental sustainability is a crucial and increasingly demanded aspect, particularly in light of the progressively stringent European regulations. The Life Cycle Assessment methodology could offer an evaluation throughout the entire life cycle of such networks. The proposed review scrutinizes the application of the Life Cycle Assessment methodology to evaluating the environmental profile of district heating and cooling systems. The methods, findings, and challenges are examined through a literature review and case study analysis. The results highlight variations in the climate profile influenced by the network generation type and multifunctionality approaches. The analysis revealed a range of emission factors, spanning from 11 gCO₂eq/kWh_th to 470 gCO₂eq/kWh_th for district heating and 6 gCO₂eq/kWh_th to 64 gCO₂eq/kWh_th for district cooling. The discussion emphasizes integrating district heating and cooling network management considerations and addressing methodological challenges. This study concludes by proposing future research directions for developing a universal LCA-based tool for district heating and cooling network analysis. Full article

This article explores the relationship between local authorities (mainly municipal organisations) and a central purchasing body (CPB). It critiques, from an agency theory perspective, the difficulties in aligning socio-economic goals of multiple municipal organisations with the pursuit of procurement goals by the CPB. The aim of this study is to explore which solutions, (governance mechanisms) for agency problems within a Dutch municipality–CPB relationship, are critical in aligning socio-economic goals within a collaborative public procurement (CPP) setting. The quantitative analysis of data from a questionnaire was used to conduct an explorative factor analysis (EFA). The questionnaire was issued to all municipalities in the Netherlands. Grounded on the EFA, the underlying factors within five categories of governance mechanisms for agency problems were recognised. Besides supporting the existing theory, this study provides additional knowledge in the field of agency theory and collaborative public procurement (CPP). The study resulted in the development of a comprehensive measurement scale to conduct research based on agency theory within the context of CPP governance and specifically in the area of central purchasing bodies. The results of this study are applicable in practise on an administrative and management level. Municipal organisations that initiate and/or govern a central purchasing body can take the results of this study into account to develop new standards on the further development of the CPB. At a managerial level, this study provides useful insight for decision-makers in municipal organisations to improve the way in which a CPB executes collective tenders at hand and determine if the joint approach delivers the best results in terms of their procurement objectives. Full article

Risk management involves thinking about what could happen if someone is exposed to a hazard and the likelihood of this event. The vast majority of standards relating to risk management were written in the context of Occupational Health and Safety, as well as Work Health and Safety with the aim of eliminating all risks. In 2023 Standards, Australia published AS ISO 4980:2023: `Benefit-risk assessment for sport and recreational facilities, activities and equipment’. This standard provides a tool for applying risk management in the context of sport and recreation. AS ISO 4980:2023 is a departure from the traditional view of risk management standards in that it presents a view of risk that is not limited to viewing risk only as negative, but rather balances positive benefits with negative risks within the sport and recreation industry. This standard is also different in that it is based specifically on risk to sport and recreational users and not to employees and employers. The benefit that risk provides in the context of sports and recreational activities is placed on an equal footing with the traditional method of assessing risk. There is an expectation in sports and recreational activities that the user is making an implicit trade-off between the benefits and the inherent risks of the activity, including the potential for harm. This implied expectation is that exposure to risk can be positive. Positive risk and learning from making mistakes are not restricted to childhood development where graduated challenges are used but extend throughout our entire life. The goal of this paper is to draw public attention to the new and different perspective of risk on which AS ISO 4980:2023 is based and to provide an understanding of the concept of benefit–risk assessment. The implications of viewing non-workplace risk in a balanced way are discussed. Full article

The intricate process of planning production, involving product life cycle management and the synthesis of manufacturing information, is crucial for coherence in manufacturing. Manufacturing companies, operating in a high-mix, low-volume production environment, integrate production planning with management to focus on production processes, emphasizing high-quality, rapid product delivery. This includes material item planning to anticipate future demands and ensure sufficient raw material and finished product quantities, considering purchasing, production, and sales capacities. This study explores the electro technical sector, specifically a manufacturing entity specializing in low-voltage plastic cable distribution boxes. It scrutinizes the vital role of seasonal data cleaning in optimizing production planning, with a targeted focus on three products. The implementation of a chase demand strategy is related to capacity planning, taking into account the change in production capacity linked to demand over time. The problem in implementing this strategy is related to the fluctuating level of quality due to changes in demand for specified products. Full article

Decision-making, bringing in the opinions of several stakeholders, may be a rather time- and resource-demanding process. Partial order-based methods like generalized linear aggregation (GLA) and average ranking appear as advantageous tools for considering several stakeholders’ opinions simultaneously. The present study presents an approach where stakeholders’ opinions/weights are substituted by a series of randomly generated weight regimes, leading to virtually identical rankings as demonstrated through comparisons to examples where true stakeholder opinions are applied, as demonstrated through a study on food sustainability. This study showed a high degree of agreement between the ranking based on random data and that based on real stakeholder data. The method, which is a top-down approach to the decision process, appears to be a highly resource-reducing decision-supporting process. However, the method, by default, excludes the possibility of incorporating specific knowledge from, e.g., employees or other stakeholders in the decision process. Full article

The presence of chemical contaminants in food is often unavoidable and associated with many adverse health effects. Exposure assessment is the essential element of an overall risk assessment process. While the specific purpose of the exposure assessment process can vary, the main goal is to provide a foundation for health-protective decisions. In recent years, there have been significant advances in exposure assessment methodologies and procedures, subsequently contributing to an increased complexity of the process. This paper aims to provide a generalized, simplified, and practical road map for exposure assessment, pointing to the pros and cons of different methods and challenges that occur while performing this type of study. Full article

There has been an increase in the use of education technology (EdTech) within post-secondary institutions, which has resulted in an unprecedented overflow of EdTech in the market. Institutions then make decisions on which EdTech to procure. This procurement process occurs on a continuum, where on one extreme, an institution takes a decentralized (bottom–up) approach where individuals within an institution independently decide on EdTech procurement, or a centralized (top–down) approach where the institution decides on criteria and standards that the EdTech must meet. This study administered a questionnaire and conducted structured interviews to explore how important standards are, and to identify the associated challenges with implementing centralized procurement. It was distributed to individuals involved in EdTech procurement at universities and colleges across Canada. The results showed that standards related to Privacy and Security, Accessibility, and Care of Data Practices play a larger role in EdTech procurement within most institutions. The use of standards is increasing as institutions become more centralized; however, they are not yet relied on in a structured way. This study suggests ways to move towards a procurement process that incorporates standards and addresses many of the identified challenges with procuring EdTech, thus, improving the efficiency and efficacy of EdTech procurement. Full article

With recent advances in science and technology, more processing capability and data have become available, allowing a more straightforward implementation of data analysis techniques. Fortunately, available online data storage capacity follows this trend, and vast amounts of data can be stored online freely or at accessible costs. As happens with every evolution (or revolution) in any science field, organizing and sharing these data is essential to contribute to new studies or validate obtained results quickly. To facilitate this, we must guarantee interoperability between existing datasets and developed software, whether commercial or open-source. This article explores this issue and analyzes the current initiatives to establish data standards and compares some of the existing online dataset storage platforms. Through a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis, it is possible to better understand the strategy that should be taken to improve the efficiency in this field, which directly depends on the data’s characteristics. The development of dataset standards will directly increase the collaboration and data sharing between academia and industry, allowing faster research and development through direct interoperability. Full article

One of the issues facing modern society, regardless of the socio-economic level of the communities involved, is the development of sustainable strategies for the management of sludge/biosolids. Nowadays, it is imperative to replace solutions aimed at simply “disposing of” with those oriented toward “maximizing recovery benefits”. It is desirable that agricultural use remains the main option in sludge/biosolids management; however, to ensure effective and safe agronomic benefits, correctly fulfill the legal requirements, and build stakeholder and public confidence, rigorous and sustainable procedures need to be established. The development of realistic and enforceable regulations is crucial, as they represent the right balance between the different aspects of coordinated and effective management. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that regulations must be supported by standardized characterization procedures and good practice guidelines because well-defined procedures allow the legal requirements to be correctly and uniformly met, as well as to reliably compare the results obtained under different conditions and their wide application in different regulatory contexts. In this article, the main aspects for (i) the sustainable application of sludge/biosolids in agriculture and (ii) the development of standardized characterization methods and procedures, thus ensuring effective agronomic benefits and guaranteeing quality/safety of agricultural products, are discussed. Some pieces on the evolution of European legislation in this field are also provided. Details and results of the research activities behind the development of these methods/procedures can be found in the referenced documents. Full article

In forensic acoustics, a possible area of analysis is represented by unwanted sound that is perceived as a source of intrusion or disturbance within a certain auditory context. This context is defined as the “auditory scene” and refers to the set of sounds present in a specific environment. The presence of unwanted sounds in the auditory scene can cause a wide range of negative effects, including disturbance, discomfort, moral or immoral harm, and other types of negative impacts on the health and well-being of individuals exposed to noise. In 2022, the technical specification UNI/TS 11844:2022 dedicated to the measurement and analysis of intrusive noise was published. The standard introduces the concept of intrusive noise and defines its calculation methods based on environmental measurements. The purposes of this technical specification is to provide an objective support to methods already in used in acoustic disputes, where the assessment of the annoyance of a noise is often a subjective evaluation of the technician. This work delves into application to some real cases, identifying the potentiality and limits of the standardized method. Full article

This work aims to identify the optimal rating scale for the rating system used by a credit insurance company subjected to the Solvency 2 regulatory framework. To do so, we apply and further develop a previously published result concerning the rating scale properties. The partition underlying a given rating scale must satisfy two needs of the rating model user: efficient information synthesis and stable semantics. Those needs cannot be addressed together in general. Nonetheless, it is possible to specify the partition as a linear combination of the two choices that meet one requirement each. We numerically show that, in general, the optimal combination is nontrivial under realistic assumptions and is mainly driven by the target return fixed by the company’s stakeholders and the debtors’ probability of default distribution. Full article

The first reported infections from COVID-19 were in 2019 and, since then, an outbreak has spread rapidly to other parts of the world, resulting in many deaths. As a result, governments began to implement border restrictions and quarantine measures, bringing the travel industry to a halt and plunging the global economy into a severe contraction. Many regions chose to coexist with COVID-19 and gradually eased their border restrictions with certain conditions, such as using personal health status certificates, vaccination certificates, etc. Digital certificates are becoming a global trend, and Taiwan has invested in developing related tools. This paper presents a technical evaluation from the government’s point of view. Taiwan uses the European Union (EU) Digital COVID Certificate as a basis to build a digital certificate that can fully meet the residents’ current international business and tourism needs. The government hopes that this digital proof will promote the public’s return to normal life and overcome the inconveniences brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the post-pandemic era, finding a way to coexist with the virus while gradually relaxing border and community epidemic-prevention policies without impacting our Taiwan’s medical capacity is a significant challenge. Providing key technological solutions to assist in risk stratification is essential in addressing this issue. Full article

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. Full article

This study collected 220 commercially available samples of γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) tea produced in Taiwan from 2016 to 2021. The 220 tea samples were categorized into five types of GABA tea, including 108 GABA Oolong tea, 71 GABA Black tea, 21 GABA Paochong tea, 12 GABA Green tea, and 8 GABA Puerh tea samples. The most common type of GABA tea in Taiwan is GABA Oolong tea, followed by GABA Black tea. The physico-chemical constituents and consumer acceptance of the GABA tea samples were analyzed. The GABA content varied among the different types of GABA tea: GABA Oolong tea ranged from 128–286 mg/100 g, GABA Black tea ranged from 182–360 mg/100 g, GABA Paochong tea ranged from 98–203 mg/100 g, GABA Green tea ranged from 56–174 mg/100 g, and GABA Puerh tea ranged from 142–191 mg/100 g. In terms of the commercial standard of GABA tea, 22 out of the 220 GABA tea samples failed to meet the commercial standard, with a failure rate of 10%. During the fermentation process of GABA tea, the contents of GABA increased significantly, but the total polyphenol and total catechin contents remained stable. In terms of consumer acceptance, GABA Black tea is the most accepted by consumers, followed by GABA Puerh tea, GABA Paochong, and GABA Oolong tea. The sour flavor in GABA tea is similar to the original sour sensory properties found in black tea. It is assumed that this is the main reason GABA Black tea has the highest acceptance. Full article