Environmental Impact Assessment for a Sustainable Future

Dear Colleagues,

Rapid urbanization and industrialization in combination with intensive global changes have caused a continuous accumulation of potential hazardous materials (e.g., toxic metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), excess nutrients) in various natural systems and living environments, which potentially threatens environmental quality, ecosystem services and functions, and human health. To achieve sustainable development, an environmental impact assessment (EIA), an intrinsically complex multi-dimensional process involving multiple criteria and multiple factors, is of particular importance to provide critical information for effective environmental management.

This Special Issue, entitled “Environmental Impact Assessment for a Sustainable Future”, emphasizes the increasing challenges we all face in protecting our ecological environment from pollution or adverse disturbance by potentially hazardous materials, and will offer an excellent platform for scientists, professionals, and policy-makers working on potentially hazardous materials across multiple disciplines to present their state-of-the-art research progresses, exchange ideas, and discuss how the principles and methods can be used to assess our ecological environment quality, and to improve terrestrial ecosystem services and human health.

This Special Issue covers a wide range of potential hazardous materials at local, regional and global scales, and extends to the use of monitoring systems designed to assess environmental risk. This Special Issue seeks to publish original research and review articles exploring the theoretical, methodological, or technical developments related to EIA, and articles using monitoring, GIS, and remote sensing data to assess the consequences of environmental or land use changes to humans and the environment are also within the scope of the Special Issue.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

1) Emerging pollutants and their environmental hazards;

2) Contamination and eco-risk assessment;

3) Environmental and biological indictors;

4) New assessment methods and procedures;

5) Impact of hazardous materials on human, plant, and animal health;

6) Sources, environmental accessibility, and bioavailability;

7) Dynamics and environmental fates in terrestrial and aquatic environments;

8) Interaction of multiple pollutants and potential environmental consequences;

9) Methods and dynamic models simulating or predicting environmental behaviors and impact;

10) Assessment of pollution control and remediation for sustainable development.

Dr. Haijian Bing
Prof. Dr. Linchuan Fang
Prof. Dr. Xiao-San Luo
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-blind 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.