Sustainability, Volume 7, Issue 5

Loss of biodiversity is one of the most severe threats to sustainability, and land use and land use changes are still the single most important factor. Still, there is no sign of any consensus on how to include impacts on biodiversity from land use a...

The ever-increasing quantities of digital photo resources are annotated with enriching vocabularies to form semantic annotations. Photo-sharing social networks have boosted the need for efficient and intuitive querying to respond to user requirements...

Biodiesel from used cooking oil (UCO) is one of the most sustainable solutions to replace conventional fossil fuels in the transport sector. It can achieve greenhouse gas savings up to 88% and at the same time reducing the disposal of a polluting was...

Green design is advocated and developed in response to the increasingly deteriorating global environment, but its implementation is only based on the morality of the entrepreneurs, without economic incentive and legal restraint. As a result, green de...

Disaster recovery sites are an important mechanism in continuous IT system operations. Such mechanisms can sustain IT availability and reduce business losses during natural or human-made disasters. Concerning the cost and risk aspects, the IT disaste...

In the age of globalization, the upgrading of China’s manufacturing industries has attracted great attention from both academicians and practitioners, as it certainly has great implications for the development of China and, even further, for the deve...

An Extended Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB) is developed that integrates emotions towards car driving and electric cars as well as car driving habits of the DTPB, and is empirically validated in a Belgian sample (n = 1023). Multi-group...

Sustainability is a key requirement for business success and is often regarded a competitive advantage if strategically managed. Sustainability-mature organisations look to their value chains where the retailer-supplier collaboration becomes critical...

Under pressure toward carbon emission reduction and air protection, China has accelerated energy restructuring by greatly improving the supply and consumption of natural gas in recent years. However, several issues with the sustainable development o...

“Incentivized Sustainable Mobility” is a conceptual business model which involves four stakeholders: citizens, municipalities, commerce and mobility services. A platform named “ISUMO” (Incentivized Sustainable Mobility) provides technological support...

Water yield is of great importance to the balance between supply and demand of water resources. The provision of freshwater for Dali is estimated and mapped in 1988, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2008, using the Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services...

This paper explores the application of information design principles to label design for fish packaging, identifying energy implications for the product. This stage of the project has consisted of: A review and distillation of the relevant literature...

Most General Circulation Models predict more infrequent but larger precipitation events in the eastern United States combined with a warmer climate. This could have a negative effect on maize production. To understand the sensitivity of maize product...

This article focuses on eco-labels from the point of view of consumers and experts/owner-managers of micro-organisations. The analysis maps the 15 most common standardisations within the UK’s fashion industry and elaborates on their commonalities and...

Waste with high biomass content generated in cities in developing countries is sent to landfills or open dumps. This research aims to degrade biomass content in urban waste through cultivation, at pilot scale, of the edible mushroom Pleurotus ostreat...

Sustainable fishing includes the socioeconomic status of fishers. We combined empirical quality of life (QOL) and subjective lived experiences methods to explore the social sustainability of artisanal fishers in five fishery collectives along the coa...

Feeding the world population, 7.3 billion in 2015 and projected to increase to 9.5 billion by 2050, necessitates an increase in agricultural production of ~70% between 2005 and 2050. Soil degradation, characterized by decline in quality and decrease...

Programs are demarcated as administrative structures established to realize planned organizational strategies through multi-project activities. Programs occupy a distinct locus in organizational hierarchy, so therefore necessitate specialized managem...

Reliable and safe operation of a coal-fired power plant is strongly linked to freshwater resources, and environmental problems related to water sources and wastewater discharge are challenges for power station operation. In this study, an evaluation...

This research investigates what information German Fairtrade coffee consumers search for during pre-purchase information seeking and to what extent information is retrieved. Furthermore, the sequence of the information search as well as the degree of...

A common approach for understanding people’s domestic energy behavior is to study the influence of deterministic factors, such as attitudes, norms and knowledge, on behavior. However, few studies have succeeded in fully explaining people’s behavior b...

Taiwan is eager to develop renewable energy because it is vulnerable to energy price distortion and ocean level rise. Previous studies show bioenergy technologies can be applied mutually, but pay little attention on feedstocks to energy conversion ra...

Securing public participation in environmental actions such as recycling, energy conservation measures and green consumerism is a means of progressing towards sustainable consumption. Participation in environmental actions (EAs) has typically been st...

In this work, fouling and bottom ash were collected from a low-power boiler after wood pellet combustion and studied using several analytical techniques to characterize and compare samples from different areas and determine the suitability of the ana...

The functional performances of conventional roundabouts (single-lane and multi-lane) and innovative roundabouts (spiral, flower, C and turbo) can be improved through right-turn bypass lanes controlled by stop, yield or free-flow signs. The article p...

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is able to make the transportation system safer, smoother, and more sustainable. The research and practice of pre-trip traveler information (PTI), an indispensable component of ITS, is very limited in China...

This study presents experimental results on evaporation and drainage in both wettable and water-repellent sands whose surface wettability was artificially modified by silanization. The 2D optical and 3D X-ray computed tomographic imaging was performe...

Aboriginal people in Canada experience disproportionately high rates of diet-related illnesses, such as obesity and diabetes. Food insecurity has been identified as a contributing factor to these illnesses along with a loss of traditional lifestyle....

China has achieved rapid urbanization and unprecedented economic booming over the past three decades. Numerous cities and towns dreamed of cloning the miracles of Shenzhen and Pudong, Shanghai, in terms of their international development. However, in...

In district heating stations, the heat carrier is circulated between the energy source and consumers by a pumping system. Fluid handling systems, such as pumping systems, are responsible for a significant portion of the total electrical energy use. S...

Public-private partnerships (PPP) can be employed to provide public rental housing for young graduates, which has been urgent to achieve social sustainability in China. However, few studies have been conducted to investigate the financing structure o...

Sustainability assessment has emerged as a key decision-support process in development cooperation in response to the growing acknowledgement of the impacts of global change. This paper aims at conceptualizing the effectiveness of sustainability asse...

Shea trees grow across 4 million km² of sub-Saharan Africa. Shea parklands provide a sustainable source of edible fat (shea butter) that, in terms of volume, is currently second only to cocoa butter as a vegetal source of stearic acid in the multi-bi...

With less than 6% of total global water resources but one fifth of the global population, China is facing serious challenges for its water resources management, particularly in rural areas due to the long-standing urban-rural dualistic structure and...

The Hsinchu Science Park was established in Taiwan in the 1980s, replacing traditional industries with high value-added and technology-intensive industries. Taiwan has become one of the Newly-Industrialized Economies (NIEs). However, the continued e...

International agri-food trade has expanded rapidly during the past decades and changed considerably in structure with important implications, especially for developing economies. One of the main environmental concerns regarding international trade is...

This study is an overview of the effectiveness and institutional challenges of China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP). The SLCP is the Chinese government’s largest Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program and one of the largest PES progr...

To improve education regarding sustainability and green buildings, we designed a multiplayer (2–4 people) green building strategy game called GBGame to deliver knowledge of and introduce applied technologies for green buildings. To verify the game’s...

As the largest developing country in the world, with rapid economic growth, China has witnessed fast-paced urbanization development over the past three decades. In fact, urbanization has been shown to promote economic growth and improve the liveliho...

A burgeoning population, pressing development needs and increasing household consumption are rapidly accelerating water use in direct and indirect ways. Increasingly, regions around the world face growing pressure on sustainable use of their water re...

China’s current national policies promote high levels of economic growth, transforming China into a “world factory”, but at a high cost in terms of energy and the environment. At the same time, this growth and transformation also forms the backbone o...

Legacy networks do not open the precise information of the network domain because of scalability, management and commercial reasons, and it is very hard to compute an optimal path to the destination. According to today’s ICT environment change, in or...

In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the use of in-home displays affects daily practices and electricity consumption. Through two pilot projects, in-home displays were installed in 33 Norwegian homes, and we provide a qualitative analysi...

Climate change is a potential threat to Vietnam’s development as current and future infrastructure will be vulnerable to climate change impacts. This paper focuses on the physical asset of road infrastructure in Vietnam by evaluating the potential im...

In this article, “sustainable education” is reconceptualized, drawing on the insight that education runs on the energy of students, teachers and all other stakeholders involved. Sustainable education systems are defined as systems in which students’...

A chosen case study house forms the basis of this paper, which is a pilot energy-efficient social housing project, completed by one of the largest housing developers in the UK. The main aim of this study is to inform the redesign of flexible energy-...

Exposure to hazardous concentrations of volatile organic compounds indoors in small workshops could affect the health of workers, resulting in respirative diseases, severe intoxication or even cancer. Controlling the concentration of volatile organic...

Against the background of economic transformation and urban renewal, the protection and sustainable development of urban industrial landscapes has become an important practical issue, and how to maintain the unique local culture of these landscapes i...

This paper deals with the construction, decomposition and comparison of water footprint time series in 40 countries and one aggregate macro-region, in the period 1995–2009. The analysis of the different “footpaths” allows us to investigate the possib...

Cloud computing has emerged as more than just a piece of technology, it is rather a new IT paradigm. The philosophy behind cloud computing shares its view with green computing where computing environments and resources are not as subjects to own but...