Search Results (591)

Mycotoxin contamination in food and feed remains a major public health concern because of its potential toxicological impact and its global economic implications. Aflatoxins and ochratoxin A are of particular concern due to their carcinogenic, hepatotoxic, and nephrotoxic effects, highlighting the need for effective surveillance systems to reduce dietary exposure in the population. This study analyzes 2479 mycotoxin-related notifications concerning both food and feed reported through the iRASFF system during the period 2020–2024, with the aim of characterizing temporal notification trends, identifying the most affected food products and geographical regions, and evaluating the evolution of control strategies implemented by competent authorities. The results did not show a statistically significant long-term increasing trend in the number of mycotoxin notifications, although interannual fluctuations may reflect both changes in contamination patterns and improvements in detection and reporting systems. Products originating outside the European Union accounted for 90.44% of notifications and showed a significantly higher mean number of notifications than products originating within the European Union. Turkey (24%) and the United States (14%) were the most frequently reported countries of origin at a global level. Aflatoxins were the most frequently detected mycotoxins in food (84%), followed by ochratoxin A (15%), mainly affecting nuts, cereals, fruits, vegetables and herbs and spices. These findings demonstrate that mycotoxins continue to represent a persistent challenge for European food safety. Strengthening surveillance systems, enhancing international cooperation, and adapting control strategies to emerging environmental and trade-related factors are essential to minimize consumer exposure, particularly to compounds with genotoxic and carcinogenic potential, and to improve risk management within the food supply chain. Full article

This paper explores the potential for promoting Ethiopian teff flour through the European Union’s Geographical Indications (GI) framework. After outlining the evolution of GI regulations in the international trade context and the EU’s role in quality policy for agri-food products, the paper assesses the value of teff as a high-potential product. Originated and domesticated around Axum, teff is a staple crop in Ethiopia, both nutritionally and socio-economically, cultivated by a multitude of smallholder farmers. However, access to European markets is hindered by insufficient enforcement of food safety standards, lack of quality control, and inconsistent labelling practices. Recognition as a GI—specifically as a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI)—could enhance the visibility, traceability, and legal protection of Ethiopia’s teff. The paper also highlights challenges in advocating for the development of a detailed product specification aligned with EU regulations. Integrating teff production into the GI system may strengthen rural economies, preserve traditional knowledge, and increase the international profile of a product with significant nutritional and economic potential. Full article

Bandwidth-limited aerial–ground sensing requires an explicit trade-off among payload size, decoded-map quality, and downstream route utility. This paper evaluates a strict RGB-D edge-perception interface in which the receiver accesses only a quantized C × 16 × 16 tensor and no encoder-side skip features. Under a fixed AeroScapes protocol, five-seed latent-8 training gives a test intersection over union (IoU) of 0.5617 ± 0.0585 and route utility of 0.0539 ± 0.0227; the strongest validation-selected checkpoint reaches an IoU of 0.6584 but is reported only as a checkpoint-specific result. Acontrolled five-seed width ablation identifies a Pareto set: latent-8 is the lowest-rate operating point at 16.448 kbit, latent-16 has the smallest IoU standard deviation, and latent-32 gives the highest mean IoU (0.5788) and route utility (0.0921), with no significant pairwise differences between widths. A paired threeseed stabilization test likewise finds no significant IoU improvement from depth dropout, a soft topology loss, or their combination (p ≥ 0.6060); the combined configuration raises mean IoU to 0.5700 but increases dispersion. Relative to a practical reference combining JPEG (quality 75) RGB and 8-bit PNG depth, latent-8 reduces the mean payload by a factor of 4.32. The digital-link study extends the additive-noise analysis to fading, intersymbol interference, timevariation, packet and burst errors, near–far interference, and corrupted range metadata. Conventional short codes, source-aware unequal protection, and a 3GPP NR LDPC implementation are evaluated with framing, automatic repeat request, mediumaccess overhead, and transmission delay. Cross-domain evaluation establishes an important limitation: zero-shot AeroScapes-to-UAVid transfer is weak, whereas sequence-disjoint tenseed UAVid training improves the eight-class mean IoU from 0.2417 ± 0.0221 for RGB-only to 0.2602 ± 0.0129 for strict RGB-D (p = 0.0161). Lightweight depth, visibility, missingdepth, weighted-topology, and coarse-to-local refinement experiments further delimit deployment. Together, these experiments provide an auditable cross-layer evaluation linking source representation, channel reliability, protocol cost, spatial error, and receivergrid connectivity without equating one favorable checkpoint with general superiority. Full article

Images used in intelligent graphite ore sorting can reveal grade-related visual and spatial information. Selective encryption reduces the cost of full-image protection and preserves nonsensitive background regions, but the number, location, and shape of protected regions may become public side channels. This paper proposes TASR-AE (Tile-wise Authenticated Selective ROI Encryption), a tile-wise authenticated selective ROI (region of interest) encryption method for graphite ore images. Low-, mid-, and high-grade ore instances are merged into a grade-agnostic ore ROI, dilated for boundary tolerance, quantized onto a fixed grid, and encrypted tile by tile with HKDF (HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand Key Derivation Function)-separated ChaCha20-Poly1305 (an authenticated encryption algorithm). An authenticated sidecar binds tile coordinates, anonymized object identity, algorithm metadata, and the public background. We evaluate correctness, overhead, automatic ROI localization, public-geometry grade-membership inference, decoy-budget trade-offs, ciphertext-position leakage, and adaptive real-ROI recovery. On an audited 121-image graphite test split, TASR-AE with ground-truth masks achieves exact recovery and background authentication while protecting 10.81% of pixels without decoys. Grade-agnostic ROI selection removes deterministic high-grade existence leakage, but full public geometry still yields a High-membership ROC-AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 0.7539. A frozen 576-tile decoy budget lowers the validation ROC-AUC to 0.5088, but the test ROC-AUC rises to 0.6491 while protecting 80.86% of the image. Ciphertext texture does not distinguish real and decoy tiles (pooled ROC-AUC 0.5064), yet a position-and-occupancy adaptive attack recovers real ROI membership with ROC-AUC 0.9868 and mean tile IoU (intersection over union) 0.7051. The results show that TASR-AE provides authenticated content protection with public background visibility, but fixed-budget decoys do not provide strong ROI-location hiding. Full article

Climate-related production variability and increasing market uncertainty pose significant challenges for Mediterranean olive systems. This study examines the long-term production dynamics, market vulnerability, and ecological functions of Mediterranean olive systems under climate change through an integrated assessment combining statistical production analysis, descriptive economic analysis, and a structured ecological literature synthesis. Olive and olive oil production trends were analyzed for Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal using FAOSTAT data (1960–2020), together with European Commission statistics (2010/11–2021/22) on production, prices, and trade. The results reveal significant long-term production trends, with greater year-to-year fluctuations observed in several countries, particularly after 2010. These fluctuations may reflect the combined influence of climatic variability and structural changes affecting Mediterranean agricultural systems, although their relative contribution was beyond the scope of the present study. Despite maintaining a leading position in global olive oil production and trade, the European Union recorded a 52% increase in export volume and a 125% increase in export value, highlighting both market expansion and increasing exposure to international market dynamics. The ecological synthesis indicates that traditional and low-input olive groves provide important ecosystem functions, including biodiversity conservation, soil protection, water regulation, and soil-carbon maintenance, supporting the long-term sustainability of Mediterranean olive systems. Overall, the findings highlight the need for integrated adaptation strategies combining environmentally sound land management, value-chain coordination, and policy support to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Mediterranean olive systems. Full article

The European Union now routinely leverages economic governance to tackle strategic vulnerabilities caused by geopolitical rivalry, foreign dependencies, and supply chain shocks. This article analyses this shift, exploring how the EU adapts its economic toolkit and what restricts its capacity to act as a geoeconomic power. It builds an analytical framework connecting external pressures, strategic vulnerabilities, policy choices, and institutional barriers. Methodologically, the study combines qualitative document analysis of EU policy frameworks with trade metrics and evidence from the Geoeconomic Interconnectivity Index. The findings show a clear expansion in investment screening, anti-coercion tools, targeted industrial policy, and supply-chain diversification—all aimed at safeguarding core sectors and curbing asymmetric exposure. These steps mark a departure from purely regulatory-market logic towards a hybrid model blending market openness, defensive controls, and capacity-building. Persistent institutional splits, conflicting national priorities, technological gaps, and reliance on foreign markets limit the effectiveness of this transition. Ultimately, the EU’s evolving geoeconomic stance aims not for total self-sufficiency, but for the deliberate, strategic management of interdependence. Full article

Forests reduce water-driven soil erosion, yet their protective contribution has not been assessed consistently across the European Union (EU) in a framework that separates per-area service intensity from aggregate service flow. We quantified erosion regulation service (ERS) as RUSLE-based avoided sheet and rill erosion: the difference between structural soil-loss potential (C = P = 1) and loss under forest conditions. Spatially aligned European RUSLE factors were combined with the CORINE Land Cover 2018 forest mask and summarised by country, biogeographical region and elevation. Across 134.10 Mha, ERS totalled 6806.15 Mt yr⁻¹ (mean 50.75; median 12.36 t ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹), revealing strong spatial concentration. Slovenia had the highest mean intensity (257.45 t ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹) across 1.13 Mha of mapped forest, whereas Italy provided the largest national total (1437.05 Mt yr⁻¹) across 7.83 Mha of mapped forest. Alpine and Mediterranean forests supplied 64.0% of total ERS in the 27 EU Member States (EU27) while occupying 27.7% of mapped forest area. Mean intensity increased from 9.70 t ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ below 200 m to 248.53 t ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ at ≥2000 m, but total service peaked at 500–1000 m. This intensity–area trade-off distinguishes priority locations from major national contributions and provides a spatially consistent baseline for multifunctional forest management, soil protection and ecosystem restoration. ERS represents modelled avoided hillslope erosion, not sediment yield or a deforestation scenario. Full article

The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) introduces significant implications for sustainable trade and industrial decarbonization for non-EU industrial exporters. As a major cement supplier to the EU, Turkey faces key economic and environmental transition risks under this framework. This study quantifies the compliance exposure of Turkey’s cement exports to the EU by 2030 within an industrial sustainability framework across multiple carbon pricing, domestic policy, and decarbonization scenarios. Incorporating time-series forecasting, benchmark emissions intensities, and the operational 2026 CBAM regulatory framework alongside Turkey’s Climate Law No. 7552, the study evaluates compliance costs relative to export revenues. Results indicate that under business-as-usual conditions, without decarbonization or domestic carbon pricing, CBAM surcharges would equal 154% of total export revenue by 2030. Accounting for the 2030 CBAM phase-in factor (48.5%), compliance costs remain substantial at 75% of revenue. Establishing a national Emissions Trading System (TR ETS) under Climate Law No. 7552, with a domestic carbon price of €20/tCO₂e, reduces residual CBAM border payments to 44% of revenue, while a €50/tCO₂e domestic price offsets border surcharges entirely, redirecting carbon revenues to an industrial green transition fund. Furthermore, achieving a 41% reduction in direct cement emissions intensity lowers total carbon compliance costs to 21–26% of revenue. These findings demonstrate that domestic carbon pricing paired with dedicated resource allocation for low-carbon technologies is essential to advance long-term industrial sustainability, preserve export competitiveness, and prevent pass-through risks to downstream construction sectors. Full article

This article examines the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) as a regulatory instrument of the European Union, situated at the intersection of international trade law, customs law and environmental protection. The primary objective of the study is to assess the legal nature of the CBAM, evaluate its compatibility with World Trade Organisation (WTO) law and analyse its implications for sustainable global trade governance and climate policy. Particular attention is paid to Articles I, III and XX of the GATT, as well as relevant WTO case law, including the cases of United States—Gasoline, United States—Shrimp, European Communities—Asbestos and Brazil—Retreaded Tyres. The study further examines the procedural transformation of customs authorities, particularly in relation to the verification of emissions, the burden of proof and administrative enforcement. The article also assesses the environmental effectiveness of the CBAM in preventing carbon leakage and in enforcing higher environmental standards in third countries, addressing the legal and economic issues of discrimination, proportionality, administrative complexity and potential impact on developing economies. The research is based on doctrinal legal analysis, comparative legal methodology and a review of relevant international and European legal sources, including WTO case law and Regulation (EU) 2023/956. The authors demonstrate that the CBAM represents a hybrid regulatory mechanism combining elements of environmental taxation, regulatory charges and trade policy instruments implemented through customs procedures. The originality of the article lies in its integrated and comprehensive analysis of the CBAM from the perspective of customs law, international trade law and environmental regulation with a focus on sustainability. In contrast to existing studies focusing primarily on trade or climate aspects, the article highlights the evolving regulatory role of customs authorities in the framework of European Union climate governance. The findings suggest that the CBAM is generally compatible with WTO law, provided that it is implemented in a transparent, proportionate, flexible and non-discriminatory manner. The authors conclude that the CBAM can become an important model for the future development of sustainable international economic regulation and climate-related trade governance. Full article

International shipping decarbonization has expanded beyond technical and operational regulation to include contested market-based bargaining. The proposed International Maritime Organization (IMO) Net-Zero Framework (NZF) combines a marine fuel standard with an economic compliance mechanism. Drawing on IMO submissions, voting records, official statements, and domestic and sectoral materials, this two-level game analysis examines why support sufficient to approve the draft for circulation in April 2025 did not translate into timely adoption later that year. The evidence suggests that the initial agreement space was not durable enough to support adoption on the planned timetable. At Level I, bargaining involved three linked dimensions: rule-making authority, responsibility allocation, and transition pathway design. At Level II, domestic, regional, and sectoral constraints included regulatory credibility and investment signals for the European Union; sovereignty and cost concerns for the United States; trade exposure and disproportionate impacts for trade-exposed emerging economies; ambition and revenue-supported transition for small island developing States; and fuel availability, fleet competitiveness, and legal certainty for energy exporters and open registries. A coalition sufficient at one procedural stage may therefore not remain sufficient at the next. A more durable agreement space would likely require an IMO-centered regulatory core, targeted enabling support, an ambition floor with compliance flexibility, and sequenced implementation and review. Full article

Liquid-hydrogen fuel-cell propulsion is a promising option for reducing the climate impact of short-range aviation, but its aircraft-level feasibility depends on the concurrent integration of cryogenic storage, megawatt-class propulsion systems, and thermal management. This paper presents an integrated conceptual design and technology-sensitivity assessment of a 101-passenger liquid-hydrogen fuel-cell aircraft, targeting a 1000 nmi design range and a 2040 entry into service, framed within the European Union FAME project. A JPAD-based aircraft sizing framework is coupled with a surrogate model for cryogenic tank sizing to investigate how selected hydrogen-subsystem characteristics propagate, through mission-fuel and tank-sizing convergence loops, to configuration-level performance and compliance with top-level aircraft requirements. The storage-system trade study identifies 2.0 bar as the most favourable sampled tank venting pressure; relative to the other investigated pressure levels, this solution reduces MTOM and design-mission block fuel by up to 8.1% and 9.2%, respectively. The propulsion-architecture study selects a four-engine layout as the best compromise between one-engine-inoperative performance, spanwise structural relief, nacelle drag, and mission fuel consumption, yielding a 2.6–2.7% lower MTOM and a 3.5–3.7% lower design-mission block fuel than the two- and six-engine alternatives. A technology-sensitivity matrix spanning 51–55% fuel-cell efficiency and 60–100% cooling-line speed recovery reveals a non-linear increase in installed power, aircraft mass, and hydrogen consumption as either parameter deteriorates. For the fixed-geometry FAME baseline, the onset of multiple TLAR violations occurs as speed recovery falls through approximately the 70–80% region, depending on fuel-cell efficiency. Within the assumptions of the present model, maintaining fuel-cell efficiency at or above approximately 53% and cooling-line speed recovery above this transition region therefore represents an approximate feasibility condition. Full article

This article examines the European Union’s response to the United States’ challenge to two pillars of the multilateral trading system: the Most Favoured Nation principle and compulsory third-party adjudication. Drawing on Hirschman’s analysis of the “Rhetoric of Reaction”, it argues that the United States has framed its attack to the WTO disciplines through claims of perversity, futility, and jeopardy. Rather than resisting this rhetoric, the European Union has increasingly echoed that discourse. Using the “Liberation Day” tariffs and the ensuing Turnberry “deal” as a test case, the article shows how the European Union moved from its firmer reaction to the 2018 Section 232 measures to a more deferential posture in 2025, including the acceptance of discriminatory tariffs and the decision not to initiate WTO litigation. The article contends that this shift weakens the European Union’s traditional role as a defender of multilateralism, normalizes departures from non-discrimination and dispute settlement, and risks accelerating the erosion of key principles of the WTO legal order. Full article

Anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) and emissions from maritime transport represent a significant challenge for atmospheric monitoring and control. The Istanbul Strait, characterized by its narrow, winding geography and high traffic density, presents a unique chokepoint where these emissions directly impact local air quality. This study proposes a gas-focused integrated framework that combines Sentinel-5 Precursor (Sentinel-5P) TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) satellite observations with Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to analyze atmospheric trace pollutant time series in the Istanbul Strait during 2025. A bottom-up emission methodology based on the IMO 4th GHG Study was employed, yielding annual gaseous pollutant totals of 213,678 tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂), 5970 tons of nitrogen oxides (NO_x), and 686 tons of sulfur oxides (SO_x). Time-series and cross-correlation analyses demonstrated a quantifiable relationship between AIS-derived NO_x estimates and TROPOMI NO₂ tropospheric column densities (r = 0.76, p < 0.05, n = 12), validating the use of satellite sensors for marine atmospheric monitoring. A decision support system (DSS) proof of concept (PoC) was developed to evaluate emission control scenarios through speed optimization. The results indicate that implementing a 10% speed reduction strategy could reduce CO₂ emissions by 18% (38,462 tons) and generate net economic savings of EUR 3.07 million under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) carbon pricing framework. Furthermore, a scenario with a 20% speed reduction resulted in a 35% decrease in CO₂ emissions. The findings underscore the potential of integrating satellite-based gas remote sensing with AIS data, thereby facilitating real-time atmospheric monitoring and strengthening emission control policy enforcement in maritime chokepoints. Full article

This study used an institutional perspective to analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in Vietnam, which is a developing country with institutional voids and competing normative systems. Data were collected using a survey of 463 managers of 463 Vietnamese companies. Then, a PLS-SEM model was used to assess the roles of individual-level (IND) variables and the organizational context (ORG) in CSR, as well as the influence of the external social context (EXT). The results showed that ORG is the internal factor most strongly associated with CSR (β = 0.258; p < 0.001). IND exhibits a weak negative association with CSR (β = −0.074; p = 0.033), contrary to theoretical expectations. EXT positively moderates the IND–CSR relationship, with governance and tradition being more significant than modernity. The implications suggest that CSR in transition economies may be hybrid and that there is an institutional hierarchy. Full article

Detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in ground-to-air imagery is challenging because their weak visual cues must be preserved without imposing excessive computation on resource-constrained platforms. To address the unresolved trade-off between tiny-target representation and deployment efficiency, we propose a Lightweight Feature-Fusion and Small-Target Enhancement Network (LFE-YOLO), a lightweight detector that coordinates partial-channel feature extraction, efficient cross-scale fusion, high-resolution prediction, background-interference suppression, and stable tiny-box regression within a unified architecture. Specifically, C2fFaster and GSConv reduce redundant computation while maintaining multi-scale feature propagation; a P2 high-resolution detection branch and Efficient Multi-scale Attention preserve fine spatial cues and suppress background interference; and Normalized Wasserstein Distance complements Complete Intersection over Union to improve tiny-box localization stability. We also construct Det-UAV by integrating newly collected multi-platform and multi-scene UAV imagery with existing data using scene- and sequence-independent partitioning and duplicate control. Experiments on Det-UAV show that LFE-YOLO improves detection accuracy while reducing parameters and computation relative to YOLOv8s. Zero-shot evaluation on the public DUT Anti-UAV dataset further indicates favorable transferability to an unseen data distribution. TensorRT 8.2.1 deployment experiments on NVIDIA Jetson TX2 show that, under the same evaluation settings, LFE-YOLO achieves higher detection accuracy and inference throughput, lower latency, and a smaller engine size than the comparable-scale YOLOv8s and YOLO11s models. These results support a practical accuracy–efficiency balance for small-UAV detection under constrained resources. Full article