Search Results (745)

This Special Issue invites us to think about the conditions of possibility for sustainable welfare within the current political and ecological conjuncture. This paper approaches sustainable welfare through an analysis of transformative eco-social practices, highlighting the generative, experimental, situated, and territorial dimensions of ecological transition. Drawing on the case of Bologna, this study examines the initiatives of agroecological and food movements. This territorial case illustrates the intersection between welfare and agroecological transition, suggesting that welfare can play a proactive role in fostering socio-ecological transformation and reshaping key sectors such as agriculture and food systems. What I am calling agroecological welfare has the potential to connect diverse eco-social experiments with the emergence of new forms of social, economic, ecological, and regulatory governance. Full article

Rapid urbanization has generated substantial economic growth but has also intensified pressure on the environment. China’s New-Type Urbanization Policy (NTU) was designed to promote people-centered, smart governance, and green development. However, whether the NTU policy has improved the coordination between urbanization and environmental quality remains insufficiently examined. Using panel data in China from 2010 to 2021, this study constructs an urbanization–environment coupling coordination degree index based on satellite-derived China’s High-resolution Eco-Environmental Quality dataset and applies a continuous difference-in-differences model to evaluate the impact of NTU policy intensity. The results show that greater NTU policy intensity is associated with significant improvements in urbanization–environment coordination after controlling for pre-existing socioeconomic, ecological, and geographical differences across cities. This finding is consistent with a corrective effect: rather than simply expanding urban scale, NTU appears to help offset the misalignment between urban development and environmental quality. Conditional analyses further suggest that the estimated policy effect is more readily observed where industrial structures are more advanced and local attention to ecological governance is stronger, indicating that these conditions shape the extent to which NTU can be translated into coordination gains. Heterogeneity analyses show that the estimates are statistically more robust in eastern, coastal, and non-resource-based cities, while the comparison across green-coverage groups remains inconclusive because the low-coverage group has a larger but less precisely estimated coefficient. Overall, the findings suggest that NTU has corrective potential, but that its effect is conditional rather than uniform across cities and depends on local governance, industrial, and ecological circumstances. Full article

As green building concepts continue to expand into public cultural spaces, green concert halls not only serve functions of cultural communication and artistic services, but also play an important role in shaping urban residents’ psychological experiences and well-being. However, existing studies on green buildings have mainly focused on energy performance and technical indicators, while limited attention has been paid to how green cultural buildings are associated with residents’ well-being through environmental perception. In the Chinese context, research specifically examining green concert halls remains scarce. Based on environmental psychology and restorative environment theory, this study takes the Chengdu City Concert Hall, which has received China’s Three-Star Green Building certification, as the research object. A conceptual model of “green concert hall design perception–perceived nature connectedness–perceived restorativeness–residents’ well-being” was constructed to explore the underlying mechanisms linking green concert hall design perception and residents’ well-being. Green concert hall design perception was conceptualized as a second-order construct consisting of four dimensions: green design legibility, eco-environmental comfort, green aesthetic integration, and green cultural symbolism. Perceived nature connectedness and perceived restorativeness were introduced as mediating variables. A survey was conducted among 879 Chengdu residents with concert-hall attendance experience, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed for empirical analysis. The results indicate that (1) green concert hall design perception is significantly and positively associated with residents’ well-being; and (2) perceived nature connectedness and perceived restorativeness both play significant mediating roles in the relationship between green concert hall design perception and residents’ well-being, while also forming a significant sequential mediating effect. The findings suggest that green concert halls are associated with more positive environmental experiences through ecological and aesthetic characteristics, and that residents’ well-being may be further linked to strengthened nature connectedness and restorative perceptions. This study extends research on green public cultural buildings from the perspective of residents’ psychological perception, and provides theoretical support and practical implications for human-centered green concert hall design and the development of urban green cultural spaces. Full article

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing interoperability, adaptability, and intelligent collaboration challenges in smart city environments. However, existing solutions often provide only partial support for semantic interoperability, dynamic social relationships, and context-aware service coordination across heterogeneous IoT ecosystems. This paper presents SEMIWARE, a semantic social network-oriented middleware designed to support collaborative, interoperable, and context-aware SIoT applications. SEMIWARE adopts a layered architecture that combines a FIWARE-based middleware backbone with modular services for context management, semantic annotation, semantic reasoning, service discovery, social relationship management, profiling, security, and ontology alignment. Its semantic backbone is provided by an OWL2 ontology that models IoT entities, users, services, contextual information, and trust-aware social relationships. The middleware is validated through two representative applications in distinct domains: smart mobility, where semantic reasoning supports adaptive eco-friendly route computation, and healthcare, where semantically integrated wearable and environmental data support health-event detection for people with dementia. Experimental evaluation further examines the performance of semantic annotation, semantic reasoning, and context management services under increasing workloads. The results provide prototype-level evidence that SEMIWARE supports semantic interoperability, cross-domain adaptability, and graph-based processing under controlled workloads, indicating its potential suitability for complex, data-intensive SIoT applications. Full article

Promoting the green development of the tourism industry is a crucial pathway for achieving coordinated progress in ecological civilization development and industrial transformation and upgrading. Based on panel data for 16 prefecture-level cities in Anhui Province from 2011 to 2022, this study constructs an “inputs–desirable outputs–undesirable outputs” indicator system, measures city-level tourism eco-efficiency (TEE) using a super-efficiency SBM model incorporating undesirable outputs, decomposes provincial disparities and their sources using the Theil index and its decomposition, and further identifies city-specific heterogeneity in influencing factors by employing a panel variable-coefficient fixed-effects model. The results show that: (1) Anhui’s TEE exhibited an overall fluctuating upward trend during 2011–2022, with provincial efficiency values ranging from 1.465 (2016) to 1.500 (2022), and a more pronounced rebound after 2017; (2) spatially, TEE displays a pattern of “higher in the south, lower in the north, with a central uplift,” with southern Anhui cities such as Huangshan and Xuancheng performing relatively well, while many northern Anhui cities lag behind; (3) Theil decomposition indicates that overall disparities are driven mainly by within-region differences, whereas between-region differences contribute relatively little; and (4) influencing factors are markedly heterogeneous: scale- and affluence-related variables promote TEE in core cities such as Hefei, but tend to inhibit it in cities such as Bozhou, Anqing, Chuzhou, and Wuhu. The mechanisms associated with technology and structural variables are more complex; in particular, the expansion of energy consumption exerts a significantly negative effect on TEE in most cities and constitutes a common constraint on efficiency improvement, while the effects of R&D investment, digitalization, and the share of the tertiary sector vary across cities. Accordingly, policy efforts should prioritize energy-efficiency improvement and low-carbon substitution at the provincial level while implementing differentiated, city-specific pathways at the municipal level to jointly advance the low-carbon transition and high-quality development of the tourism industry. Full article

Contemporary post-war cities increasingly require adaptive urban systems capable of addressing climate vulnerability, infrastructural instability, environmental degradation, and human well-being simultaneously. This study develops an interdisciplinary framework for adaptive biophilic infrastructure and resource governance within the context of sustainable post-war reconstruction in Ukraine. The research combines literature analysis, comparative urban assessment, and experimental evaluation of eco-modified construction materials. Particular attention is given to vertical greening systems, adaptive underground infrastructure, daylight-integrated public environments, multifunctional urban systems, and environmentally responsive concrete composites incorporating porous minerals and plant-based biomass. Comparative examples from Montreal, New York, Seoul, and Singapore are examined alongside differentiated Ukrainian urban contexts, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Kherson, Lviv, and Uzhhorod. The findings demonstrate that adaptive biophilic infrastructure may improve urban microclimates, strengthen thermal and acoustic regulation, enhance infrastructural adaptability, and support psycho-emotional comfort within dense and post-conflict urban environments. The study further indicates that underground and layered urban systems increasingly function as multifunctional socio-ecological infrastructures integrating mobility continuity, environmental regulation, public accessibility, emergency protection, and human-centered spatial resilience. The experimental assessment demonstrates that eco-modified materials contribute to moisture stabilization, thermal buffering, acoustic moderation, and passive environmental regulation within adaptive urban systems. The incorporation of porous mineral additives and plant biomass improved the environmental responsiveness of the investigated composites while supporting more resource-efficient construction approaches. The study concludes that sustainable post-war reconstruction requires a transition from fragmented technological interventions toward integrated socio-ecological urban frameworks capable of combining environmental regulation, infrastructural resilience, resource efficiency, adaptive governance, and human-centered spatial design within long-term urban sustainability strategies. Full article

Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDSs) represent a contemporary and eco-friendly method for managing surface water, with the goal of reducing flooding impacts while preserving the environment and enhancing water quality and biodiversity. In Bari, recurrent flooding stemming from water stagnation, extreme weather, and urban development poses challenges to sustainable growth. This study applies the ‘Sponge city’ concept to address these issues through an evaluation of current urban permeability and the implementation of Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) to reduce runoff and manage underground flows. By assessing the climatic conditions and hydrological factors contributing to urban stagnation, this project seeks to create a resilient urban environment capable of adapting to climate change and effectively mitigating both significant and minor rainfall events. It aims to reduce runoff, while also promoting groundwater recharge and alleviating saline contamination effects in coastal areas, ultimately enhancing the safety and livability of urban landscapes. Full article

While land development opportunities stemming from planning regulations demonstrably influence rural household income, quantitative evidence quantifying these effects remains limited. Measuring and decomposing these effects can empirically support territorial spatial planning policies aimed at alleviating associated regional development imbalances and advancing sustainable rural development. This study selects Wuhan’s Sino-French Eco-City (urban development zone) and Xiaosi Township (wetland conservation zone) as typical zones. Based on 573 randomly sampled rural households, we explore the effects of land development opportunities on rural household incomes and find that: (1) Land development opportunities for non-agricultural conversion in the urban development zone significantly increase rural households’ total income, wage income, though their corresponding contribution rates are limited. Endogenously accumulated endowments such as human capital and economic status dominate the formation of such income gaps. (2) Planning-induced land development opportunities yield coefficients of 1.0442 for local employment income and −0.4567 for agricultural business income, with both statistically significant at the 1% significance level. Decomposition results show their respective contribution rates of 70.68% and 86.77%, demonstrating that such opportunities primarily account for cross-regional rural household income gaps. (3) Whereas non-agricultural land development opportunities narrow disparities in households’ local employment income, they raise inequality in rural households’ migrant employment, business, property and transfer income. These growth and equality-enhancing effects on local wage income are particularly pronounced for households possessing high-quantity but low-quality human capital. This study recommends supporting protected zones via farmer vocational training, expanded rural public service expenditure, and a benefit-sharing mechanism that channels land development gains to ecological and agricultural regions to strengthen households’ endogenous development capacity. Full article

The shift to circular agrosystems necessitates using new ideas like sustainable biochar, which provides many eco-beneficial attributes like enhancing soil fertility, storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, and retaining soil moisture. However, there is still a small number of farmers worldwide (particularly those located in low-income countries) adopting biochar. Accordingly, this research is focused primarily on determining how factors affecting behavior will influence the decision of wheat producers in Marvdasht County, in Iran’s Fars Province, to use biochar as a circular technology for farming. The study will focus on addressing issues related to environmental challenges (e.g., degradation of soil and drought) through the implementation of resource-efficient, sustainable agricultural technologies. The intent of this paper was to research the behavioral characteristics associated with wheat farmers who choose to use biochar in the city of Marvdasht, Fars Region, Iran, using a new Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The model is theoretically enriched through the inclusion of personal norms and connectedness to the land, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of pro-environmental decision-making. Data was collected from a total of 386 wheat farmers through the use of a structured survey. The data was analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with the software Smart-PLS 3.0. The results reveal that attitude (β = 0.342, p < 0.001) and personal norms (β = 0.278, p < 0.001) are the strongest predictors of behavioral intention, while perceived behavioral control showed a weaker but significant effect (β = 0.178, p = 0.049). Subjective norms do not have a significant direct effect (β = 0.115, p = 0.199) but significantly influence intention indirectly through personal norms (β = 0.100, p < 0.001). Furthermore, connectedness to the land strongly affects personal norms (β = 0.420, p < 0.001) and exerts a significant indirect effect on intention (β = 0.117, p < 0.001), highlighting the importance of emotional attachment to land. The findings are significant because they demonstrated that farmers’ biochar adoption decisions are shaped not only by rational evaluations but also by moral obligations and emotional relationships with land. This study makes significant theoretical contributions by extending TPB with moral and relational constructs and empirically demonstrating their mediating roles in agricultural innovation adoption. The novelty of this study lies in integrating personal norms and connectedness to the land into the TPB framework to explain biochar adoption behavior within the context of circular agriculture in a developing country. Practically, the findings provide evidence-based insights for designing policies that integrate cognitive, ethical, and emotional drivers to promote biochar adoption and advance circular agriculture. Specifically, policymakers and extension agencies should prioritize behavioral-level strategies such as awareness campaigns, farmer training programs, and community-based initiatives that strengthen positive attitudes, environmental responsibility, and farmers’ emotional connection to land in order to enhance biochar adoption. Full article

Improving the cultivated land use eco-efficiency (CLUE) is crucial to achieving sustainable land use and the green transformation of agriculture. This study is based on the data from 353 prefecture-level cities in China from 2013 to 2021. The slacks-based measurement (SBM)-undesirable model, the social network analysis (SNA), and the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are adopted to measure and analyze the spatial patterns, network characteristics, and multiple driving pathways of inefficiency in the cultivated land use eco-efficiency in prefecture-level administrative units. Results show the following: (1) From 2013 to 2021, CLUE in the study areas shows spatial heterogeneity, with most efficiency values at a moderate level and showing a fluctuating downward trend over time. (2) The nine major agricultural regions have formed a complex association network, with the overall network connectivity being weak but efficiency relatively high. The hierarchical structure is gradually flattening, and inter-regional cooperation is increasing. (3) There are significant differences in influence, control, and accessibility within individual networks, and the collaborative network is developing into a “multi-core-hierarchical” structure. (4) The formation of inefficiency involves multiple concurrent mechanisms. Four typical inefficiency paths were identified, with significant heterogeneity across different agricultural regions. In the future, differentiated land use and ecological protection policies should be implemented based on the spatial network characteristics and inefficiency driving pathways of each agricultural region to promote the coordinated improvement of CLUE. Full article

The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation. Full article

Urban eco-efficiency (UEE) is fundamental to achieving China’s dual-carbon goals. However, the literature has overlooked green space carbon sequestration, and linear models fail to capture complex nonlinear relationships. This study exploratorily integrates green space carbon sinks into the evaluation framework as an initial proxy, employing the global super-efficiency EBM model to measure the UEE of 108 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2012 to 2023. It combines XGBoost-SHAP with Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) to examine UEE’s spatiotemporal dynamics and driving mechanisms. The findings reveal that (1) UEE in the YREB increased from 1.0760 in 2012 to 1.0990 in 2023, while spatial polarization became more pronounced. (2) Core driving factors exhibited significant nonlinear threshold and interactive effects. Specifically, fiscal decentralization’s environmental dividend is contingent on active government intervention to circumvent localized “race to the bottom” behaviors. Furthermore, population density transitions from yielding scale dividends to inducing “crowding effects” beyond optimal capacities—a degradation that advanced financial systems appear unable to mitigate. (3) A spatiotemporal misalignment was observed: fiscal decentralization unleashed green institutional dividends downstream (coefficients up to 0.0682) but was accompanied by a race to the bottom in the middle and upper reaches (extending to −0.6548); excessive population agglomeration in megacities induced a crowding effect, eroding early pollution control dividends. This study supports abandoning one-size-fits-all approaches and developing precise, spatiotemporally differentiated low-carbon policies. Full article

Sign language understanding for automated vehicles sits at the intersection of accessibility, intelligent transportation, and safety-critical human–machine interaction. The existing sign-language recognition systems are largely confined to controlled environments, limiting their utility in mobility scenarios characterized by lighting variation, motion blur, and partial occlusion. This paper proposes STCM-HVNet, a safety-aware hybrid multimodal architecture integrating four components: a spatial visual encoder, a MediaPipe-based pose encoder, a bidirectional LSTM temporal encoder, and a context-aware fusion and safety decision module. The architecture is formulated as a multi-task system that jointly predicts sign category, interaction intent, and urgency level, and incorporates confidence-aware rejection and fail-safe action mapping. Experiments are conducted on two Arabic sign-language resources. On the RGBArS image benchmark (31 classes, 7856 images), the proposed pipeline achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 45.38%, Top-3 accuracy of 75.15%, and Macro-F1 of 0.4479, outperforming LinearECOC, kNN-5, and Bagged Trees baselines. On the Arabic sign-language video benchmark (12 classes, 479 clips), the BiLSTM temporal encoder achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 93.15% and Macro-F1 of 0.9383, outperforming frame-aggregation (87.67%) and CNN-LSTM (89.04%) baselines. Ablation results confirm complementary contributions from the visual and pose branches. A safety-threshold analysis and a Monte Carlo dropout comparison demonstrate that the proposed safety decision/gating layer provides a controllable trade-off between prediction coverage and reliability. Full article

Eco-geological environmental carrying capacity (EGECC) refers to the ability of a regional eco-geological environmental system to support human activities and socioeconomic development while maintaining ecological functions and geological stability. Its assessment is important for preventing geological hazards, regional development, and the green transition. However, existing studies often face challenges, such as subjectivity in assigning weights and limited capacity to capture nonlinear interactions among multiple factors. To address these limitations, this study focuses on Kunming City. It applies the analytic hierarchy process and coefficient of variation methods to derive subjective and objective weights, respectively. At the same time, random forest is used to identify nonlinear indicator contributions embedded in the evaluation results. These weights are then integrated through an improved linear efficacy coefficient framework to construct a comprehensive weighting scheme. The results indicate that Kunming’s EGECC shows a spatially heterogeneous pattern, with higher values distributed mainly in the southeastern and southwestern areas, especially in Shilin County. In contrast, lower values are concentrated in the northern mountainous areas and highly urbanized central districts, such as Dongchuan and Wuhua Districts. Moreover, spatial pattern detection of the EGECC is sensitive to the choice of composite weighting method, while interactions among geological factors—such as disaster point density and slope—play a major role in shaping the carrying capacity. Overall, the proposed composite weighting approach provides a relatively balanced integration of expert-knowledge-based, data-dispersion-based, and nonlinear data-driven information, and its reliability is further examined through geological hazard-point validation and weight-perturbation sensitivity analysis. Full article

Coastal cities are typical regions where economic growth, population agglomeration, and eco-environmental pressures are strongly coupled. Assessing the coordination between urban development and the eco-environment is therefore important for regional sustainability. This study selected seven representative coastal cities in China—Dalian, Qinhuangdao, Qingdao, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Zhuhai—and integrated multisource remote sensing data with statistical yearbook data to construct a comprehensive evaluation system for urban development level (UDL) and eco-environmental quality (EEQ). An ecologically enhanced indicator system incorporating vegetation condition index (VCI), biological richness index (BRI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and dynamic habitat index (DHI) was developed. The coupling coordination degree (CCD) model was then used to evaluate urban sustainable development from 2014 to 2023. In addition, an EWM–MLP adaptive weighting strategy was applied to refine entropy-derived weights, and Random Forest was used to identify variables associated with CCD prediction. The results show that CCD values generally increased during the study period, indicating improved coordination between urban development and the eco-environment. However, the evolutionary pathways differed markedly among cities, and UDL and EEQ changes were not fully synchronized. The EWM–MLP strategy introduced adaptive numerical refinements to CCD values while maintaining the overall stability of coordination-level classification. Random Forest analysis showed that CCD prediction was mainly associated with a limited number of high-contribution indicators. For all indicators combined, approximately 7–10 top-ranked variables were generally required to exceed 80% of the total importance, whereas the UDL and EEQ subsystems reached this threshold with fewer indicators. UDL-related variation was mainly associated with land-use structure, population agglomeration, and economic activity, whereas EEQ-related variation was related to ecological conditions, land-cover composition, and environmental pressure. The high-importance indicators exhibited clear inter-city heterogeneity, suggesting the need for differentiated governance strategies. The proposed framework provides methodological support for sustainable development assessment and differentiated governance in coastal cities. Full article