Search Results (16)

Relative and absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental pressures is one of the most contested topics in ecological economics. This article situates the decoupling debate within a philosophical and normative framework, building on recent critical contributions and on empirical evidence that challenges the green growth narrative. Through a critical analysis of key methodologies, including the TDI, LMDI decomposition, the CAPRO ratio, and MRIO models, it shows that the choice of indicators is not neutral but carries implicit assumptions about progress, ecological limits, and climate justice. The review of empirical results indicates that robust, sustained absolute decoupling is rare and often undermined by rebound effects, outsourcing, or temporary crisis-driven contractions, whereas relative decoupling dominates. On this basis, the article advances a multi-level decoupling synthesis that integrates empirical indicators with normative thresholds such as planetary boundaries, sufficient absolute decoupling, and climate justice, thereby reframing sustainability assessment from the narrow question of technical feasibility to the broader issue of ecological and ethical legitimacy. Full article

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted concerns about delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment, particularly for lung cancer (LC). We assessed the impact of the pandemic on lung cancer care, diagnostic efficiency, treatment timelines, and short-term survival in a Spanish tertiary hospital. Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study including 530 patients diagnosed with primary lung cancer from March 2019 to March 2022. Patients were grouped into three cohorts: pre-pandemic (2019), first pandemic year (2020), and second pandemic year (2021). Key intervals—referral-to-diagnosis and diagnosis-to-treatment—along with survival outcomes were compared across cohorts. Multivariate Cox regression identified independent predictors of mortality. Results: LC diagnoses declined by 19% in 2020, rebounding by 42% in 2021. The proportion of patients receiving the first definitive treatment remained stable (~70%). Diagnostic timeliness improved: the median referral-to-diagnosis interval shortened from 19 to 14 days (p < 0.0001), with >80% of patients diagnosed within 30 days throughout all periods. Molecular testing turnaround increased (median 11 to 15 days, p = 0.0226). The diagnosis-to-treatment interval remained unchanged (median 34–35 days). One-year survival improved from 37% (2019) to 43% (2020–2021), and two-year survival from 22% to 30%. In multivariate analysis, only advanced stage and poor ECOG performance status independently predicted mortality; delays in diagnosis or treatment had no significant impact. Conclusions: Despite pandemic-related disruptions, essential LC care and short-term outcomes were largely maintained in our center. Early stage at diagnosis and favorable performance status outweighed the effect of moderate delays. Health system resilience and streamlined care pathways proved critical for sustaining cancer outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis. These findings offer actionable lessons for the Spanish healthcare system and may help guide national preparedness strategies for future oncologic crises. Full article

The COVID-19 crisis has turned teleworking from a minority option into an imposed and generalized way of life and has called into question its contribution to corporate sustainability. The present review is the first systematic review of the effects of telework on the environmental, social, and economic pillars of corporate sustainability in the scholarly literature published from 2020 to 2024. A total of 50 studies from three databases (Scopus, Science Direct, and Taylor and Francis) were reviewed according to PRISMA guidelines by both a data bibliometric analysis and narrative synthesis. The findings show that telework has the potential to improve environmental sustainability by decreasing commuting emissions (29–54% depending on its deployment intensity), but rebound effects such as increased residential energy use work against this (in part) positive regard. From a social point of view, telework is double-edged between helping balance personal and work life and possessing the potential to lead to greater isolation and aggravate existing inequalities, particularly in developing countries. Economically, it drives operational costs down and expands the talent pool, with micro-, meso-, and macroeconomic impacts. The possibility of telework as a tool of sustainable development is substantially moderated by organizational culture, digital infrastructure, sociodemographic reality, and even the physical environment. We argue that telework is a potentially transformative driver of corporate sustainability if deployed strategically within a given context; however, disciplinary fragmentation and methodological lacunae in common metrics remain, especially with regard to long-term effects and implementation in developing economies. Full article

This study adopted the event study method to explore the effect of the Hualien earthquake on the performance of tourism stocks in Taiwan. This earthquake occurred on 3 April 2024 and affected Hualien and Taitung. The present study examined the short-term (10 trading days), medium-term (12 weeks), and long-term (5 months) performance of all listed tourism companies in Taiwan (overall sample) and six listed tourism companies with a branch in Hualien or Taitung (six-company sample). The results indicated that the stocks of the overall sample rebounded soon after the earthquake but declined over the long-term period. By contrast, the stocks of the six-company sample exhibited a persistent negative return immediately after the earthquake and gradually recovered in the long term. The findings of this study enhance theoretical understanding regarding the effects of a disaster on the stock market. Moreover, they serve as a reference for practical decision-making related to government risk response, investor behavior, and corporate crisis management in high-risk industries, such as tourism. Strengthening disaster preparedness and corporate branding after a disaster is critical for stabilizing market sentiment and industry resilience. Full article

There is inadequate availability and access to behavioral health services to meet demand, and this issue amplified during the pandemic, creating a mental health crisis. Group therapy is an effective way to meet this need. The rapid implementation of telehealth group psychotherapy as part of a Primary Care Behavioral Health Integration program in a U.S. safety-net health care setting is described. Implementation lessons are summarized as barriers or facilitators, using thematic analysis of qualitative data from meeting notes. Major facilitators identified include having key staff serve as technology champions, dedicated administrative leadership to operationalize workflows, and communication and collaboration across teams and layers of infrastructure. Major barriers include uncertainty about operational workflows and technological challenges. While group visit volume initially waned, it began to rebound and quantitative analysis of demographic data shows that important underserved populations were reached. Frequent communication, collaboration, and adaptation among teams are critical elements for improving the likelihood of successful telehealth group therapy. It is feasible to expeditiously implement telehealth group psychotherapy in safety-net health care systems with limited resources. Full article

For developing nations to achieve net-zero targets, macroeconomic linkages impacting the decoupling of emissions from economic growth must account for non-linear business cycles and economic shocks. This study aims to delineate decarbonization policy pathways for the Indian electricity sector in the aftermath of COVID-19 by analysing the long-term evolution of the economy–electricity–emissions (3E) nexus during the 2008 financial crisis and during COVID-19, covering the period of 1996Q2 to 2020Q3. Upon testing multiple theoretical 3E systems, it was found that a model internalizing trade, inflation, and stochasticity was able to minimize the reproduction errors from growth to recession phases, as well as predict the rebound effect from an economic crisis. This was revealed to be due to more information within the coefficients in a trade stochastic model. Our results confirm the existence of electricity-associated emission decoupling with capital formation in the long-run, post-crisis, while economic growth and inflation increase CO₂ emissions. The main finding highlights the negative feedback loop of inflation->trade->emissions, which shows that GDP and emissions are not directly causal. This long-run macroeconomic dynamic death spiral causes decoupling to be inhibited, where fossil fuel imports should not be subsidized for economic shock rebound, and the risk hedging of energy transition investments should occur in the post-COVID-19 era. Full article

There are widespread assumptions to the effect that the real-time data generated through the 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) will improve material traceability and accelerate the global transition to a circular economy (CE), thereby helping to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals and carbon neutrality. Many industries, governments, and NGOs are supporting this vision by investing in related digital infrastructure (5G networks, servers, computer hardware, etc.). Conversely, recent literature has highlighted a paradoxical phenomenon known as the CE rebound, whereby sound CE activities end up offsetting environmental gain(s). This challenges the assumption that the new 5G-enabled IoT will be conducive to greater circularity while carrying its own environmental weight. Resorting to applied epistemology—a perspective seldom used in sustainability research—and the global e-waste crisis as an intense case in point, we question the confidence with which actors predict positive outcomes from the CE–IoT nexus. We argue that avoiding circularity rebounds cannot be construed as a matter of methodological development or, by extension, modeling sophistication through real-time data exploitation. Instead, circularity rebounds need to be recognized and theorized as a paradox of knowledge that also narrows sustainability research’s horizons, despite AND because of the 5G-enabled IoT. As per this paradox, advanced digital technologies may well be compounding environmental issues at the same time as they illuminate them. Full article

Firefighters are exposed to dangerous and often traumatic events due to the nature of their occupational demands. This repeated exposure to trauma combined with stressful work demands increases their risk for negative physiological and psychological health outcomes. The high prevalence of adverse health outcomes highlights the need for interventions to improve resiliency in firefighters. Resiliency is the ability to reduce the effect of crisis, rebound from adversity, and recover to pre-stimulus homeostasis. When traumatic exposures are unavoidable, as is the case with firefighters, it is important to buffer the resulting consequences on health. While resilience has a genetic component, interventions targeting physiological, psychological, and social components have been successful at improving resilience. These factors are of specific interest as increases in resilience have been linked to improved PTSD symptomology/severity, depression, anxiety, autonomic nervous system activation, hypothalamus–pituitary axis balance, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to identify physiological and psychological components associated with resiliency and discuss strategies that may improve those components to ultimately increase resiliency in firefighters. The strategies discussed include exercise, social support, and mindfulness. Full article

The population growth tendency leads to an increase in demand for food products, and in particular, products obtained from the processing of plants. However, there are issues of biotic and abiotic stresses that can significantly reduce crop yields and escalate the food crisis. Therefore, in recent years, the development of new methods of plant protection became an important task. One of the most promising ways to protect plants is to treat them with various phytohormones. Salicylic acid (SA) is one of the regulators of systemic acquired resistance (SAR) signaling pathways. These mechanisms are able to protect plants from biotic and abiotic stresses by increasing the expression of genes that encode antioxidant enzymes. However, salicylic acid in high doses can act as an antagonist and have the negative rebound effect of inhibition of plant growth and development. To maintain optimal SA concentrations in the long term, it is necessary to develop systems for the delivery and slow release of SA in plants. The purpose of this review is to summarize and study methods of delivery and controlled release of SA in a plant. Various carriers-based nanoparticles (NPs) synthesized from both organic and inorganic compounds, their chemical structure, impacts on plants, advantages, and disadvantages are comprehensively discussed. The mechanisms of controlled release of SA and the effects of the use of the considered composites on the growth and development of plants are also described. The present review will be helpful to design or fabricate NPs and NPs-based delivery systems for salicylic acid-controlled release and better understating of the mechanism of SA-NPs interaction to alleviate stress on plants. Full article

The World Energy Council ranks the Danish energy system among best in the world judging by the energy trilemma criteria: energy security, energy equity, and sustainability. District heating (DH) and CHPs are pivotal for this ranking. This brief historical account illustrates how a mix of historical events, collective societal experiences, cultural and political values inform the Danish history of DH and CHPs. After the global energy crisis in the 1970s, public and political sentiment called for energy independence, alternatives to imported fuels, and alternatives to nuclear power. National-scale collective heat infrastructure planning initiatives targeted the energy policy objectives: energy independence, fuel diversification, and energy efficiency, and a political culture of broad coalition agreements made the necessary long-term planning possible. In the following decades, growing environmental awareness and concern called for renewable energy resources as alternatives to fossil fuels. Research considered the role of collective memories and temporal distance (i.e., time) for this sociotechnical journey; it notes the innovative thinking, re-use/re-cycling and energy efficiency focus that still characterize the Danish DH communities today, and it suggests that the intangible, yet reliable nature of heat could lead to the rebound effect in end-user heat-consumption behaviours. The methodological question of how, and to what extent, historical insights and lessons learnt may be translated across contexts is raised and discussed. Although sociotechnical trajectories may have granted the Danish energy system a head-start in the global race towards low-carbon energy transitions, perhaps the route was less direct than popularly portrayed. The Danish DH sector currently faces challenges of growing biomass import dependency, but also the potentials of sector coupling and energy flexibility. Energy efficiency and energy flexibility potential may be harvested via DH and district cooling solutions in future ‘smart’ energy systems globally. Hopefully, insights and lessons learnt from this brief history of Danish DH and CHPs prove informative elsewhere. Full article

Sustainable business models can help us move beyond the current consumer society and integrate sustainability into our lifestyles. The COVID-19 crisis was a strong test of sustainability for these models. In our study, we assessed which business models are highly dependent on the economic cycle and are highly embedded in consumer society. We conducted our research at the height of the second wave of the pandemic and asked university students about changes in their consumption patterns and their expectations for the future. We carried out cluster analysis on our sample of 622 respondents. We were interested in the extent to which participation in certain business models could be associated with the rebound effect that could be predicted after the epidemic. The stronger this effect, the more embedded a sustainable business model is in consumer society and the less able it is to reduce its environmental impacts in the long term. We found that resource efficiency, the sharing economy, and digitalization fall into this category. Participation in sufficiency and stewardship-based business models predicted much less rebound impact. These models showed more clearly the sustainability characteristics of sustainable business models. Full article

Increased objective uncertainties, upward movement in the hierarchy of needs, and associated cultural and ideational transition are inherent to modern societies. These factors were previously treated as independent macro-shocks and studied separately, without regard for their interactions. In this paper, we provide an all-around framework to interpret fertility behavior and low fertility in developed economies, to compensate for the isolation of economic uncertainty from a cultural and ideational transition in previous empirical studies. In this regard, we conduct an empirical analysis of panel data of 34 OECD countries from 2000 to 2018, to discuss the impact of economic uncertainty on the fertility rate and the moderating effect of cultural and ideational transition on that impact. Below are our findings: (1) economic uncertainty significantly inhibits the fertility rate, and such an inhibiting effect is found to be underestimated after endogeneity is controlled; (2) according to heterogeneity analysis, the inhibiting effect of economic uncertainty on the fertility rate is stronger after the 2008 financial crisis and among low-income economies and countries where Confucianism is practiced; (3) a significant negative moderating effect of cultural and ideational transition on the relationship between economic uncertainty and fertility rate is observed, indicating that the inhibiting effect of structural dimensions that combine objective and subjective factors regarding the fertility rate may be self-reinforcing; and, (4) further tests show that economic uncertainty and cultural and ideational transition affect the fertility rate by means of the effect of delayed parenthood, the substitution of cohabitation for marriage, and fertility preferences. We find that fertility behavior is cumulatively affected by both economic uncertainty and cultural and ideational transition. This implies that reducing economic uncertainty and fostering a culture that encourages marriage and fertility are fundamental for increasing the fertility rate in China, a country resorting to the third-child policy to promote a fertility rebound. Full article

Global human health threats, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate coordinated responses at multiple levels. Public health professionals and other experts broadly agree about actions needed to address such threats, but implementation of this advice is stymied by systemic factors such as prejudice, resource deficits, and high inequality. In these cases, crises like epidemics may be viewed as opportunities to spark structural changes that will improve future prevention efforts. However, crises can also weaken governance and reinforce systemic failures. In this paper, we use the concept of the governance treadmill to demonstrate cross-level dynamics that help or hinder the alignment of capacities toward prevention during public health crises. We find that variation in capacities and responses across local, national, and international levels contributes to the complex evolution of global and local health governance. Where capacities are misaligned, effective local prevention of global pandemic impacts tends to be elusive in the short term, and multiple cycles of crisis and response may be required before capacities align toward healthy governance. We demonstrate that this transition requires broader societal adaptation, particularly towards social justice and participatory democracy. Full article

The rebirth of global tourism with a massive rebound is anticipated due to an emerging touristic behavior coined as vaxication (i.e., post-vaccination travel). Despite the ongoing fatigue triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, travelers’ fear of missing out (FOMO), and destination crisis marketing (DCM) can further accelerate travelers’ momentum towards vaxication. To address this critical knowledge gap in COVID-19 tourism, the present study aimed to examine the effect of pandemic fatigue on vaxication intention for the greatest of all trips (GOAT) under the moderating influence of travel FOMO and destination crisis marketing. Drawing on data of international expatriates in the United Arab Emirates (N = 356) and using covariance-based structural equation modeling with Mplus, the findings provide new evidence supporting a positive impact of international expat’s pandemic fatigue on vaxication intention for GOAT. Interestingly, this relationship is significantly reinforced by the international expat’s travel FOMO as well as tourism destinations switching gears from ‘managing crisis’ to ‘marketing crisis’. Based on prominent theories (i.e., theory of planned behavior, cognitive load theory, and protection motivation theory) and newly developed scales (i.e., travel FOMO and destination crisis marketing), the study implications are directed towards an outpacing trajectory of global tourism return prompted by pandemic fatigue, travel FOMO, destination crisis marketing, and vaxication intention for the greatest of all trips. Full article

In recent years, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a significant impact on economic development. This study examined the relationship between the level of AI development and economic growth in 28 Chinese provinces from 2005 to 2018, and we focused on the mediating role of the industrial structure. We found that the unreasonable state of the structure is an important reason behind the slowdown of China’s economic growth. The development of AI not only has a direct effect on economic growth, but can also improve economic slowdown by inhibiting industrial structure upgrading. Taking into account regional heterogeneity, we also conducted sub-regional regressions, and the results show that this mediating effect is particularly significant in the eastern, central, and western areas of China; the regression results also show that the development of AI technologies did not boost the economy before the 2008 financial crisis, but during the economic recovery period, the R&D and application of AI helped China’s economy to rebound. Thus, AI has gradually become an important power engine for high-quality and sustainable growth in China’s economy. Full article