Search Results (40)

Background: The Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) status has become the “gold standard” for supply chain security and trade facilitation under the WCO SAFE Framework. Nevertheless, contemporary certification remain largely limited to binary compliance with minimum requirements, restricting deeper strategic evaluation of security management; Methods: This article develops a Maturity Model for Authorized Supply Chains (MMASC), categorizing operators into five evolutionary levels across eight critical dimensions—Leadership, Risk Management, Collaboration and External Partnership, Access Control and Physical Security, Supply Chain Visibility and Protection, Cybersecurity, Personnel Security, and Security Culture. The model was validated through a two-round modified Delphi process and a post-Delphi consensus workshop with ten regional experts (Cronbach’s $\alpha =0.935),$operationalized through a diagnostic engine grounded in Mamdani-type fuzzy logic to reduce subjectivity in qualitative assessments; Results: The framework converts qualitative self-assessment into a crisp 0–100 maturity index, enabling customs administrations and private enterprises to move beyond regulatory compliance while aligning with the 2025 SAFE Framework updates—environmental sustainability, MSME inclusion, and ethical conduct codes; Conclusions: The MMASC provides a basis for a proportional allocation of trade facilitation benefits, such as expedited release, according to an operator’s maturity level, promoting a more resilient, transparent, and sustainable global trade ecosystem. Full article

The growing adoption of context-aware reasoning in Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications, particularly through retrieval-augmented and prompt-enriched architectures, has substantially broadened the utility of LLMs in specialized, real-world scenarios. Yet this progress comes with an underexplored vulnerability: users must supply sensitive contextual information as part of the reasoning process, exposing private data to external LLM service providers and raising serious concerns about informational self-determination. Existing privacy-preserving approaches in NLP are largely ill-suited to this setting, as they either degrade reasoning quality unacceptably or fail to provide formal privacy guarantees. This paper addresses this gap by introducing Textual Differential Privacy (TDP), a principled framework that embeds differential privacy guarantees directly into the textual context supplied to LLMs, enabling privacy-preserving reasoning without sacrificing the semantic coherence that models depend upon. Central to the framework is a Differential Embedding Substitution mechanism, which perturbs sensitive entities in the input space while preserving the structural and semantic properties necessary for downstream reasoning tasks. The framework further introduces a formal privacy loss quantification scheme, providing practitioners with interpretable metrics to navigate the privacy–utility trade-off in deployment. We prove that the mechanism, instantiated as an exponential mechanism over a semantically constrained candidate set, satisfies metric differential privacy with a privacy budget that scales with the cosine distance between entities, and empirical evaluation across context-aware reasoning benchmarks validates its practical effectiveness. By treating privacy as a first-class design principle in LLM-based architectures, this work contributes toward a more trustworthy and broadly deployable foundation for intelligent, context-sensitive AI systems. Full article

The electricity supply system faces major challenges. The physical and social vulnerability of the monoculture of hierarchical, centralized systems urgently requires radical transformation of their organizational structures as well as their infrastructures. These transformations to low carbon are often characterized as ‘decentralization’. However, decentralization is a process that only signifies a move away from centralized models. This does not necessarily result in a decentralized architecture, but rather a model in which the dominance of ‘commercial private’ combined with ‘monopolistic public’ is replaced by cooperation and community. The research question is: what will be the design of future electricity grids after the transformation? The integration of distributed renewable resources and the growing need for resilience requires great diversity and flexibility from socio-technical smart grids. These involve digitization, enabling the transformation of power grids into networks of clustered, self-healing microgrids with distributed energy systems: generation, storage, transmission, demand response, and internal energy management. Several fundamentals of Common Pool Resources theory (Ostrom) on the analysis of sustainable management of natural resources are reviewed on their relevance: the Socio-Ecological System framework, distinct property regimes, the Polycentricity concept, and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The transformation leads to ‘distributed’ rather than ’decentralized’ models. Governance no longer takes place from a single control point, but from many, spread across multiple levels, similar to ecosystems. End users play a key role and become partly coproducing prosumers. Governance is polycentric rather than decentral. The IAD provides as its most important condition that, at the legislative level, there must be minimum recognition of the right of ‘renewable energy communities’ to organize themselves as microgrids. This is immediately the biggest social acceptance challenge, as the current monoculture incorporates several lock-ins: incumbent powerful actors, centralized hierarchical control legislation, and obstructive market conditions, including taxing systems. Full article

Smart cities aim to integrate technological, infrastructural, and socio-environmental systems in order to improve urban sustainability and quality of life. To qualify as both smart and sustainable, a city is generally expected to pursue self-sufficiency through the adoption of sustainable practices in energy production, water supply, and food systems. Such cities also seek to reduce operational costs for both private operators and municipalities, while aiming to enhance the quality of life of their residents. Within this context, the relevance of a web-based application becomes particularly apparent. An application equipped with predefined indicators can provide a structured and measurable framework for assessing the current status of a city or town in relation to smart and sustainable development. This framework allows for the evaluation of the extent to which a city aligns with established criteria associated with smart and sustainable urban models. This paper introduces a Python-based web application, developed using Python version 3.10, designed to assess or support the self-assessment of a city’s alignment with identified smart and sustainable development indicators. This study does not claim empirical validation or benchmarking performance; the proposed system is presented as a proof-of-concept framework. The work does not propose new smart city indicators. Rather, it presents an integrative system that seeks to operationalise existing smart and sustainable city indicators within a unified and modular web-based assessment framework, designed to support cross-domain evaluation and citizen-accessible self-assessment. Full article

In South Africa, small enterprise development is at the top of the government agenda. However, a significant issue lies in the type of skills and support necessary to develop SMMEs through the various phases of the business cycle. This study addresses a knowledge gap regarding whether SMME support interventions comprehensively address all managerial functions as per the P-O-L-C model. Guided by the Resource-Based Theory (RBT), and the Human Capital Theory (HCT), data was collected from 350 SMMEs in the Eastern Cape province using a structured self-administered questionnaire. Multiple regression analyses revealed that non-financial support from both the public (R² = 0.089, p = 0.215) and private (R² = 0.161, p = 0.207) sectors was not significantly associated with SMME success. Furthermore, while private sector support explained 14.8% (R² = 0.148, p < 0.001) and public sector support 7.6% (R² = 0.076, p < 0.001) of the variation in meeting SMME needs, support in key functional areas remains fragmented and poorly targeted. These findings highlight a systemic disconnect between the supply and demand sides of the SMME support ecosystem. To address this, this study proposes an integrative support model that aligns RBT and HCT within the P-O-L-C managerial framework, ensuring phase-appropriate, function-specific support. This framework departs from prior applications by reconceptualizing managerial support not as a generic intervention, but as a strategically sequenced process aligned with the business lifecycle. The model contributes a new lens for theorizing support efficacy and offers practical guidance for more targeted intervention design. This framework offers both theoretical and practical contributions toward improving the design and implementation of business interventions in South Africa. Full article

Background: Undergraduate nursing students (UNSs) often enter clinical training just as they are still mastering the emotional labor of the profession. In Nepal, where teaching hierarchies discourage upward dialogue and hospitals routinely struggle with overcrowding, supply shortages, and outward nurse migration, these learners confront a distinct, under-documented burden of psychological distress. Objective: This study examines how UNSs interpret, negotiate, and cope with the mental health challenges that arise at the intersection of cultural deference, resource scarcity, and migration-fueled uncertainty. Methods: A qualitative design employing reflexive thematic analysis (RTA), guided by the Reflexive Thematic Analysis Reporting Guidelines (RTARG), was used. Fifteen second-, third-, and fourth-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing students at a major urban tertiary institution in Nepal were purposively recruited via on-campus digital flyers and brief in-class announcements that directed students (by QR code) to a secure sign-up form. Participants then completed semi-structured interviews; audio files were transcribed verbatim and iteratively analyzed through an inductive, reflexive coding process to ensure methodological rigor. Results: Four themes portray a continuum from silenced struggle to systemic constraint. First, Shrouded Voices, Quiet Connections captures how students confide only in trusted peers, fearing that formal disclosure could be perceived as weakness or incompetence. Second, Performing Resilience: Masking Authentic Struggles describes the institutional narratives of “strong nurses” that drive students to suppress anxiety, adopting scripted positivity to satisfy assessment expectations. Third, Power, Hierarchy, and the Weight of Tradition reveals that strict authority gradients inhibit questions in classrooms and clinical placements, leaving stress unvoiced and unaddressed. Finally, Overshadowed by Systemic Realities shows how chronic understaffing, equipment shortages, and patient poverty compel students to prioritize patients’ hardships, normalizing self-neglect. Conclusions: Psychological distress among Nepalese UNSs is not an individual failing but a product of structural silence and resource poverty. Educators and policymakers must move beyond resilience-only rhetoric toward concrete reforms that dismantle punitive hierarchies, create confidential support avenues, and embed collaborative pedagogy. Institutional accountability—through regulated workloads, faculty-endorsed wellbeing forums, and systematic mentoring—can shift mental health care from a private struggle to a shared professional responsibility. Multi-site studies across low- and middle-income countries are now essential for testing such system-level interventions and building a globally resilient, compassionate nursing workforce. Full article

Wellington, New Zealand, is highly vulnerable to disaster-induced food security crises due to its geography and geological characteristics, which can disrupt transportation and isolate the city following disasters. Urban agriculture (UA) has been proposed as a potential alternative food source for post-disaster scenarios. This study examined the potential of urban agriculture for enhancing post-disaster food security by calculating vegetable self-sufficiency rates. Specifically, it evaluated the capacity of current Wellington’s community gardens to meet post-disaster vegetable demand in terms of both weight and nutrient content. Data collection employed mixed methods with questionnaires, on-site observations and mapping, and collecting high-resolution aerial imagery. Garden yields were estimated using self-reported data supported by literature benchmarks, while cultivated areas were quantified through on-site mapping and aerial imagery analysis. Six post-disaster food demand scenarios were used based on different target populations to develop an understanding of the range of potential produce yields. Weight-based results show that community gardens currently supply only 0.42% of the vegetable demand for residents living within a five-minute walk. This rate increased to 2.07% when specifically targeting only vulnerable populations, and up to 10.41% when focusing on gardeners’ own households. However, at the city-wide level, the current capacity of community gardens to provide enough produce to feed people remained limited. Nutrient-based self-sufficiency was lower than weight-based results; however, nutrient intake is particularly critical for vulnerable populations after disasters, underscoring the greater challenge of ensuring adequate nutrition through current urban food production. Beyond self-sufficiency, this study also addressed the role of UA in promoting food diversity and acceptability, as well as its social and psychological benefits based on the questionnaires and on-site observations. The findings indicate that community gardens contribute meaningfully to post-disaster food security for gardeners and nearby residents, particularly for vulnerable groups with elevated nutritional needs. Despite the current limited capacity of community gardens to provide enough produce to feed residents, findings suggest that Wellington could enhance post-disaster food self-reliance by diversifying UA types and optimizing land-use to increase food production during and after a disaster. Realizing this potential will require strategic interventions, including supportive policies, a conducive social environment, and diversification—such as the including private yards—all aimed at improving food access, availability, and nutritional quality during crises. The primary limitation of this study is the lack of comprehensive data on urban agriculture in Wellington and the wider New Zealand context. Addressing this data gap should be a key focus for future research to enable more robust assessments and evidence-based planning. Full article

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are voluntary coalitions of citizens, small and medium-sized enterprises and local authorities, which cooperate to share locally produced renewable energy, providing environmental, economic, and social benefits rather than profits. Despite a favorable European and Italian regulatory framework, their development is still limited in the Member States. To this end, this paper proposes a methodology to identify optimal spatial configurations of RECs, based on proximity criteria and maximization of energy self-sufficiency. This result is achieved through the mapping of the demand, expressive of the energy consumption of residential buildings; the suitable areas for installing photovoltaic panels on the roofs of existing buildings; the supply; the supply–demand balance, from which it is possible to identify Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) and Negative Energy Districts (NEDs). Through an iterative process, the optimal configuration is then sought, aggregating only PEDs and NEDs that meet the chosen criteria. This method is applied to the case study of the Avellino Province in the Campania Region (Italy). The maps obtained allow local authorities to inform citizens about the areas where it is convenient to aggregate with their neighbors in a REC to have benefits in terms of energy self-sufficiency, savings on bills or incentives at the local level, including those deriving from urban plans. The latter can encourage private initiative in order to speed up the RECs’ deployment. The presented model is being implemented in the framework of an ongoing research and development project, titled Renewable Energy Communities Monitoring, Optimization, and Planning (RECMOP). Full article

Counterfeit products cause financial losses for both the manufacturer and the enduser; e.g., fake foods and medicines pose significant risks to the public’s health. Moreover, it is challenging to ensure trust in a product’s supply chain, preventing counterfeit goods from being distributed throughout the network. However, fake product detection methods are expensive and need to be more scalable, whereas a unified traceability system for packaged products is not available. Therefore, this research proposes a product traceability system, named Trusted Traceability Service (TTS), using Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). The TTS can be incorporated across diverse industries because of its generic and manageable four-layer product packaging strategy. Blockchain-enabled SSI empowers distributed nodes, to verify them without a centralized client–server authorization architecture. Moreover, due to its distributed nature, the proposed TTS framework is scalable and robust, with the use of web3.0 distributed application development. The adoption of Fantom, a public blockchain infrastructure, allows the proposed system to handle thousands of successful transactions more cost-effectively than the Ethereum network. The deployment of the proposed framework in both public and private blockchain networks demonstrated its superiority in execution time and number of successful transactions. Full article

The surging global population and urbanization trends present new challenges to food production systems and energy, especially in resource-limited urban environments. Vertical farming on façades (VFOF) is an innovative strategy to address this challenge by growing crops on building skins, efficiently using urban space, increasing food self-sufficiency, and reducing the environmental impact of carbon emissions. This article is a comprehensive review of VFOF and closely related topics based on 166 journal articles. It covers the latest research advances in design, technology, social impact, and environmental benefits. In addition to enhancing the autonomy of urban food supply and improving residents’ quality of life, VFOF also has the potential to optimize the thermal performance of buildings and promote energy conservation by having some of the qualities of vertical greening systems (VGS). The planting system design and technical support factors for different façade locations are explained in detail. The symbiotic relationship between VFOF and architecture is examined to enhance sustainability. The popularity of VFOF is increasing in terms of social acceptance, and the government, together with the private sector and communities, play a vital role in promoting its development. In addition, this review also collates the cases of VFOF implementation in recent years. Research shows that the implementation of VFOF has many advantages, especially when considering future urban challenges under climate change scenarios and the need to provide solutions to achieve carbon neutral buildings and cities. Still, high initial investment, operating costs, technical complexity, security issue, policy and regulatory constraints, and public acceptance are all challenges to overcome. Further research should be carried out in the above fields. Full article

This case study analyzes how Qatar rapidly achieved dairy self-sufficiency through public–private partnerships following the 2017–2021 blockade. Specifically, it examines the role of Baladna, Qatar’s leading dairy company, in scaling up its domestic production through alignment with government policies. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from the Qatari government and Baladna and a review of Baladna’s internal documents and reports. Thematic content analysis was used to identify key themes, and data from Baladna’s reports were triangulated to validate the findings. Collaboration between Qatar’s government and Baladna ensured the self-sufficiency of domestic dairy demand, expanding operations with new products and exports, and strengthening supply chains. However, reliance on government support raises sustainability concerns, highlighting the need for efficiency and diversification. This partnership aligns with national policies, such as the Qatar National Food Security Strategy 2018–2023, and offers insights into how public–private collaborations can promote growth and supply security while balancing state support with market dynamics. This case study highlights how the blockade crisis catalyzed effective public–private collaboration, driving rapid growth in Qatar’s dairy sector to meet domestic demand. The lessons from Qatar’s developmental approach can provide insights for resource-rich countries struggling with food insecurity. Full article

As creative tourism consolidates both as an autonomous research area and a valid sustainable form of tourism based on learning, active participation, co-creation, creative self-expression, and local community engagement, its economic models have evolved from simple creative activities to complex territorial and technological-based networks, boosting the entrepreneurship of creative communities in tourism. Seen as a means of territorial development strategy through tourism, creative networks can stem from private partnerships, the public sector, the local community, or third sector organisations. Focusing on a case study approach, this research adopts a multidimensional framework with the goal of analysing the benefits of creative tourism towards a creative tourism network. Using a quantitative approach through Likert scale statements of five items, this research aimed to study the creative supply and demand linked to a creative tourism network. Based on the principles and benefits of creative tourism and the goals of the creative network, the following dimensions were analysed: job creation; production and commerce of creative products; safeguarding of tangible and intangible heritage; development of social capital between network agents; creative and innovative images of the region; the active role of the local community in the network; and the consumption profile of the creative tourist through the network. The main conclusions of the study point to the network boosting local job creation and preserving local traditions but struggling to expand sales and increase tourist stays. While it enhances the region’s image, there is a need for stronger collaboration and community engagement. Full article

Climate change is affecting water resources and other aspects of life in many countries, generating more frequent extreme events. Users react to intermittent supply by implementing local private tanks to collect as much water resources as possible to cope with water distribution suspension periods. Such tanks are commonly overdesigned due to the common perception that water resources are essential for human activities and the general need of users to safeguard their water supplies. This study evaluated the impact of water scarcity and users’ self-adaptation strategies on water demand under intermittent flow conditions by implementing an experimental campaign in a real network. The analysis was conducted using a short-term water demand forecast model that reproduces periodic patterns observed at an annual, weekly and daily level to evaluate the adaptation response of users concerning the scarcity of water resources through a comparison between the real pattern of the network and the pattern of local tanks. Full article

The energy transition involves transforming electricity supply systems. Smart grids are resilient, polycentric systems consisting of integrated, self-governed Microgrids including distributed energy systems (DES). Renewable energy requires high numbers and a huge variety of infrastructures, requiring large amounts of spaces, including land. Renewable energy flows and land are natural resources. This analysis applies Ostrom’s common pool resources (CPR) theory on the sustainable use of ecosystems and natural resources to explore DES as a “common good” with spaces and land as crucial scarce resources. Currently, electricity grids are monocultures with highly centralized and hierarchical governance structures, where the juxtaposition of electricity as public and private good is considered self-evident. The emergence of DES in smart Microgrids is disrupting these monocultures, which is one aspect of the full transformation from current centralized grids towards resilient, integrated Microgrids based on variety and adaptive capacity. The other component of the transformation concerns the essential resource of space. As land and other spaces, such as rooftops, are subject to diverse property regimes, CPR is also applicable for analyzing the required changes in property rights and land-use decision-making. Such changes are necessary to make sufficient space available for the infrastructures of community Microgrids. Full article

Water schemes that rely on user (co-) ownership and collective action have been described in the irrigation sector for a long time. Still, interest in such forms of (co-) investment in the domestic/multiple use sector is more recent. To address the persisting issue of rural water service, (what has been coined) self-supply is proclaimed to be a (supposedly) low-cost, sustainable manner to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). User (co-) investments are to be promoted and realized through the creation of an enabling policy environment and development of, and training on, low-cost technologies through government and NGO support and private sector-steered access to such technologies. In this article, we apply the Rooted Water Collectives (RWC) framework to describe two such schemes, one in South Africa and one in Switzerland. The data collection followed an action research methodology, with the main author being involved in interventions in all three schemes. We show here that these collectives create positions of purpose within societies and that what motivates people is to help themselves and contribute to the greater good of the community. This article shows that interventions to foster and sustain such collective actions that follow a neoliberal/modernist imaginary negatively affect their viability since these collectives, through their other-than-capitalist interactions, form part of and depend on an alternative imaginary. We conclude that interventions aiming to strengthen forms of collective action can only succeed if they recognize contextuality, unequal power relationships, and grass-rooted forms of interdependence and collaboration, and actively build on and work toward such alternative, more convivial imaginaries. Full article