Environmental Footprints and Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue on Environmental Footprints and Sustainable Development focuses on strengthening how environmental footprints are developed, interpreted, and used to support credible sustainability decisions across value chains. It invites contributions that advance footprinting methods and their applications, with particular attention to comparability, transparency, uncertainty, and relevance for decision-making.

The scope spans product- and system-level assessments, including life cycle assessment (LCA), carbon/water/land and biodiversity-related footprints, and circularity metrics. Submissions integrating environmental footprints with complementary dimensions—such as nutrition, socioeconomic performance, and consumer acceptance—are welcome where they improve real-world applicability.

The purpose is to move the field beyond single-metric evaluations by showcasing robust frameworks, harmonised approaches, and evidence that can guide policy, industry innovation, and responsible consumption.

The Special Issue will supplement existing literature by consolidating recent methodological advances, highlighting best practices for data quality and uncertainty handling, and expanding the evidence base from upstream production to final products and use contexts—thereby reducing burden-shifting and improving the decision-relevance of footprint results.

Dr. Paula Quinteiro
Dr. María Margallo
Dr. Ana Cláudia Dias
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.