Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111370

Authors: Fan Xia Xin Li Dengming Yan Xinying Fan Maihuan Zhao Tao Han Hui Guo Yuzhen Su

(1) Background: Tropical island watersheds are characterized by steep terrain, short flow paths, limited storage capacity, and frequent short-duration heavy rainfall, which lead to rapid runoff concentration and a pronounced mismatch between abundant precipitation and limited water availability. Under the combined influence of climate change and underlying surface changes, water resources in such regions exhibit complex variability, yet existing attribution studies have mostly focused on single hydrological indicators such as total runoff, precipitation, or evapotranspiration. Quantitative attribution of multiple water-cycle components is therefore needed to clarify the evolution mechanisms of water resources in tropical island watersheds. (2) Methods: By enhancing the SWAT model, we adapted it to island climates, which simulates the evolution of water resources within the basin. This model was coupled with Budyko to quantify driving factors’ contributions to water resources. It was used to conduct an attribution analysis of water resource evolution in typical tropical island watersheds of China. (3) Results: The results indicate that climate change contributes 65.77% to variations in water resources, specifically affecting surface runoff by 21.21%, groundwater by 26.81%, interflow by 33.41%, evapotranspiration by 50.24%, and soil moisture by only 4.10%. In contrast, changes in underlying surfaces account for 34.23% of water-resource variations, impacting surface runoff by 78.79%, groundwater by 73.19%, interflow by 66.59%, evapotranspiration by 49.76%, and soil moisture by 95.90%. Changes in water resources within the Wanquan River Basin are characterized by increases in both vertical and horizontal fluxes of the water cycle. Climate change is the primary driver of these variations, while changes in the underlying surface act as the dominant factor influencing runoff and soil moisture. (4) Conclusions: Climate change dominates total water-resource variation in the Wanquan River Basin (65.77%), while underlying-surface change governs runoff (78.79%) and soil moisture (95.90%), with both vertical and horizontal water-cycle fluxes increasing. The island-adapted SWAT–Budyko coupling enables component-wise attribution beyond total runoff, supporting targeted water and land management in tropical island watersheds.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111335

Authors: Oluwaponmile David Alao Maaz Akhtar Muhammad Abid Ali Shefik Mustafa Dagbasi Aminu Musa Garba Naser A. Alsaleh Ikenna D. Uwanuakwa

This paper examines the potential of solar and wind energy-based hybrid energy systems for residential applications using the meteorological data for Antalya, Turkey. To this end, a Hybrid Renewable Energy System (HRES) is designed to provide electricity, cooling, space heating, and domestic hot water to meet the energy requirements of a residential building in a remote area of Antalya. TRNSYS software is employed in the performance analysis of the system. The key findings of this study indicate that the proposed HRES is able to offer a technically dependable and economically viable energy system for residential applications through the generation of environmentally friendly and sustainable energy outputs. The HRES generated annual thermal, cooling, and electrical energy of 6916.652 kWh, 3027.083 kWh, and 2730.489 kWh, respectively. System economic analysis and optimization is also carried out to ensure the cost-effectiveness and robustness of the system. The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is found to be 0.237 USD/kWh. Multi-objective PSO optimization performed gave a CAPEX and LCOE reduction of 16.1% and 35%, respectively. This study therefore addresses the limited integrated modeling, optimization, and reliability assessment of off-grid solar–wind residential multigeneration systems under Antalya’s Mediterranean climatic conditions, and it shows the potential of the HRES to save a total of 78,500 kg CO2 emissions throughout its lifetime. These research results reveal the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the proposed renewable energy system for residential applications in Turkey.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111369

Authors: Tianzi Guo Dan Yuan

Regional sustainability increasingly depends on interactions among regional digitalization, green mobility, and tourism development, yet the temporal structure of these relationships remains insufficiently understood. Using a balanced panel of 31 provincial-level regions in mainland China from 2012 to 2023, this study constructs entropy-weighted composite indices of regional digitalization, green mobility, and tourism competitiveness. These indices are analyzed using a panel vector autoregression model, Granger-causality tests, impulse-response functions, and forecast error variance decomposition. The results identify a digitally centered and asymmetric pattern of lagged predictive relationships from regional digitalization to green mobility and tourism competitiveness, from green mobility to tourism competitiveness, and from tourism competitiveness back to regional digitalization. These relationships differ markedly in their temporal profiles. Specifically, responses to digitalization peak near one-fifth of a standard deviation and persist. Digitalization shocks account for an increasing share of the forecast error variance of green mobility and tourism competitiveness over time, whereas the response of tourism competitiveness to green mobility emerges quickly but attenuates over time. By integrating the three systems within a joint dynamic framework, this study extends research based on separate pairwise relationships and shows that they co-evolve at different speeds. The findings support long-term digital investment and closer coordination between tourism demand and green-mobility provision in regional sustainability strategies.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111368

Authors: Ioakeim Christos Symeonidis Eugenia Papadaki

Spent coffee grounds retain potentially valuable constituents after brewing and may therefore be suitable for reuse in subsequent coffee preparations. This study characterized the grounds exploited in three brewing cycles and the resulting beverages from two commercial Greek coffee blends containing 70% Arabica/30% Robusta (w/w) and 80% Arabica/20% Robusta (w/w). Total phenolic content and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical-scavenging capacity were determined in the original grounds, the grounds used in subsequent preparations, and the resulting beverages. Ultrasound-assisted extraction was optimized by response surface methodology, with DPPH radical-scavenging capacity as the response. Extraction was used to prepare solid samples for analysis, whereas beverages were analyzed directly. Methanol concentration and extraction time significantly affected the response, whereas temperature did not. At the optimum (22% v/v methanol, 61 min, 47 °C), the predicted and experimental responses were 16,614 mg/kg and 16,039 mg/kg ± 432 mg/kg, respectively. Relative to the initial grounds, total phenolic content and DPPH capacity were 13.4% and 12.8% in Cycle 2 and 3.9% and 3.4% in Cycle 3 for the 70% (w/w) Arabica blend, compared with 25.9% and 10.2% in Cycle 2 and 10.4% and 9.2% in Cycle 3 for the 80% (w/w) Arabica blend. Turbidity and sedimentation showed cycle- and blend-dependent behavior, while microscopic examination revealed heterogeneous particle morphology in the grounds. An anonymous questionnaire conducted in Greece explored consumer perceptions of coffee-residue reuse and stated willingness to consider related applications. The findings characterize changes in the grounds and beverages during repeated brewing and provide insight into the potential and limitations of coffee-ground reuse.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111367

Authors: Alihan Hadimlioglu Md Irshad Ahmad

Urban flooding poses significant risks to life, infrastructure, and the environment, motivating the development of interactive digital-twin platforms that combine geospatial modeling, real-time environmental observations, and immersive visualization. This study presents UniTwin, a sensor-informed digital twin platform for campus-scale environmental monitoring and flood-awareness visualization developed in Unity. The framework focuses on real-time visualization, environmental data integration, and interactive situational awareness within a digital-twin environment. A site-specific virtual model of the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi campus was reconstructed using geospatial terrain, building geometry, and elevation information derived from Cesium and complementary spatial data sources through a Blender-based workflow. Historical rainfall datasets together with live rainfall observations retrieved from the WeatherLink API drive environmental scenarios and real-time visualization, enabling users to examine evolving rainfall conditions, assess building-level flood-awareness states through dynamic color-coded indicators, adjust rainfall intensity, and interactively explore the environment from multiple viewpoints. The implementation leverages Apple Metal GPU acceleration and the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to deliver responsive, real-time rendering and interactive performance. By integrating geospatial reconstruction, live environmental observations, immersive visualization, semantic building information, and digital twin technologies within a unified framework, UniTwin provides a practical foundation for flood awareness, environmental monitoring, emergency preparedness, and the future integration of physics-based flood simulation and AI-assisted decision support capabilities.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111366

Authors: Lei Zhou Xiaonan Sun Tao Liu

Improving transportation resource efficiency while meeting delivery service requirements is a key challenge in sustainable logistics. Shipment consolidation can increase capacity utilization; however, waiting for shipments to accumulate may lead to delivery delays and additional compensation costs. To address this trade-off, this paper develops a multi-category, multi-stage stochastic programming model for delayed shipment consolidation. The model captures the relationships among stochastic demand, dispatch decisions, and subsequent distribution states through the recursive evolution of interstage backlogs. Because the number of state–strategy combinations grows rapidly with the number of product categories and decision stages, a generalized expected value model and a corresponding recursive solution method are further developed. Numerical results show that higher transportation costs make delayed consolidation more economically attractive, whereas higher delay compensation rates favor earlier dispatch. Compared with dispatching at every stage, delaying consolidation across all stages reduces the expected number of containers by about 21–25%. The risk-preference parameter changes the optimal strategy mainly near the cost-indifference boundaries, and the direction of this change depends on how stage demand matches container capacity. This study supports decisions that balance transportation resource utilization, operating costs, and delivery delays under uncertain demand, thereby helping logistics firms improve transportation resource efficiency.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111365

Authors: Daniel Ofori Stephanie Efua Frimpong George Amofa Sarpong Martin B. Osei Charles Turkson Martyn Polkinghorne

The study investigates the impact of Global Value Chain (GVC) participation on socio-economic development and environmental quality in African economies. Specifically, it examines how agricultural and industrial activities within these chains influence natural resource consumption and environmental pollution (carbon emissions). While GVC integration offers African nations pathways to technology transfer and export diversification, the environmental costs, such as resource depletion and increased carbon intensity, remain underexplored. There is a critical need to understand the ‘trade-off’ between leveraging natural resource endowments for competitiveness and maintaining environmental sustainability. This study employs Method of Moments–Quantile Regression (MM-QR) to analyze how agricultural and industrial drivers influence environmental outcomes across different quantiles, capturing variations at different levels of natural resource pressure and pollution intensity. This paper uses an annual, balanced country year panel of data from 1996 to 2021 for 54 countries enabling both ‘within country’ and ‘between country’ inference, while controlling unobserved time invariant heterogeneity. The findings reveal that the effect of GVC linked activities is heterogeneous across the distribution. While industrial and agricultural activities stimulate growth, they significantly escalate natural resource consumption and pollution, particularly in countries with high existing environmental pressure. The results highlight a vulnerability to external shocks, and a tendency toward the exploitation of low-value primary sectors. This research contributes to the discourse on sustainable development by quantifying the environmental price of GVC participation in Africa. It provides policy insights for balancing economic growth with environmental objectives, suggesting that African countries must shift from primary sector exploitation toward higher value, greener segments of the global value chain, to ensure long-term resilience.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111363

Authors: Changyong Deng Alexander Tay Guan Meng

Whether international investment can support low-carbon development remains a question for emerging economies. We examine the relationship between China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and carbon emission intensity in ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies over 2007–2024, distinguishing associations in levels from those in annual changes and accounting for host-country conditions and cross-country heterogeneity. First-difference models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors are used to examine annual changes, while the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator is used to assess heterogeneous level associations. The baseline AMG estimates indicate a significant negative association between OFDI stock and carbon emission intensity, but this finding is not reproduced by common correlated effects mean-group (CCEMG) and is sensitive to alternative variable transformations. First-difference estimates provide no consistent evidence of a contemporaneous OFDI association across common-slope and heterogeneous-slope specifications. Evidence for trade-openness moderation is inconclusive across estimators, while renewable-energy development shows no statistically significant moderating association. Country-specific estimates reveal substantial heterogeneity across ASEAN economies. Overall, the findings suggest a conditional and specification-sensitive relationship between Chinese OFDI and the carbon-efficiency dimension of low-carbon development, without establishing a stable long-run equilibrium or causal effect.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111364

Authors: Turgut Kalay Ayşenur Kandemir

Text-to-image generative artificial intelligence tools are increasingly used in interior architecture and design education, yet it remains unclear whether biomimicry and sustainability retain their distinct design intentions when visualized through such tools. This study comparatively examines biomimicry (B), sustainability (S), and combined (B + S) conditions in AI-generated interior images from 22 student projects in a Biomimicry and Space Design course, using descriptive content analysis. Visual-aesthetic similarity (VA1–VA5, Gower), biomimetic representation (B1–B4), sustainability strategies (S1–S7), and integration level (IL0–IL3) were coded as separate layers, with prompt (P-) and visual-output (V-) levels analyzed independently. The B and S outputs showed high visual-aesthetic similarity (mean Gower 0.82; 81.8% of projects scoring ≥0.80); however, biomimetic representation was strong at formal and structural levels but was verified in no project at the functional-mechanism level (V-B4). Sustainability prompt–output correspondence was 26.3% overall, 66.7% for visually assessable strategies, and 0% for strategies requiring specification or performance evidence. Combined outputs remained additive or coordinated (IL1–IL2), and none reached synergistic integration. In this course-based dataset, nature-oriented visual features were represented more readily than functional and performance-related dimensions; visual similarity is not equivalent to environmental performance, suggesting that prompt literacy and critical evaluation deserve attention in design education.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111361

Authors: Houcine Benlaria

Does renewable electricity change the association of foreign direct investment (FDI) with sustainability outcomes in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)? This study uses a panel of six GCC countries over 2000–2024 (150 country-years) and a Bayesian hierarchical Student-t model with correlated country effects and an FDI by renewable capacity share interaction, benchmarked against two-way fixed effects. Unit-root tests do not reject the nonstationarity of log carbon intensity, so the carbon outcome is its annual change. The hypotheses posited a positive interaction for growth and a negative one for the change in carbon intensity. The standardised interaction is −0.011 (95% credible interval −0.130 to 0.100; probability of a positive sign 0.43) for growth and 0.032 (−0.145 to 0.249; probability of a negative sign 0.39) for carbon-intensity change. Under independent errors, FDI is positively associated with growth (0.33 percentage points per point of FDI/GDP at negligible renewable capacity; 0.07 to 0.62); with autoregressive errors, the standardised slope falls from 0.195 to 0.104 and its interval includes zero. FDI is not associated with slower emission growth, so the faster fall in carbon intensity in high-FDI years reflects output. Prior, measurement and leave-one-country-out specifications give interaction estimates centred on zero, and a sample ending in 2021 gives a positive carbon interaction. The estimates are conditional associations for total FDI and installed renewable capacity over the low renewable shares observed to 2024.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111362

Authors: Filippo Edoardo Capasso Manuel Bucciarelli Barbara Lavorini Chiara Alisi Francesca Falconi Andrea Cagnini Eleonora Gioventù

This study investigates the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool to evaluate the environmental performance of innovative methodologies in cultural heritage conservation. Three categories of restoration treatments were analyzed: disinfection of stone surfaces, consolidation of degraded organic materials, and dry cleaning of metal surfaces. For each category, experimental or alternative conservation solutions were compared with conventional commercial or artificial products, focusing exclusively on environmental impacts rather than technical performance. The results highlight significant variability across treatments. In stone disinfection, the biological approach based on Serratia ficaria SH7 shows a substantially lower environmental impact compared to the synthetic biocide Preventol RI50. In contrast, the consolidation scenario reveals a more complex pattern: crystalline nanocellulose demonstrates low impacts when water-based, but its environmental performance worsens considerably when organic solvents are used, in some cases exceeding that of the synthetic resin Plexisol P550. For dry cleaning, all tested eraser formulations exhibit relatively low impacts, although silicone-based systems outperform latex-based alternatives due to reduced material consumption. Beyond comparative results, the study critically examines methodological limitations of LCA in conservation contexts, including data asymmetry between laboratory-scale and industrial processes, sensitivity to modelling assumptions, and restricted system boundaries. The findings demonstrate that environmental performance depends not only on material origin but also on formulation, energy use, and operational conditions. Overall, LCA proves to be a valuable but context-dependent decision-support tool, requiring transparent assumptions and careful interpretation to effectively guide sustainable practices in cultural heritage conservation.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111360

Authors: Peiqi Zhai Lingying Pan

Photovoltaic products, lithium batteries, and new energy vehicles, collectively known as China’s “PLV” exports, have become important drivers of the country’s foreign trade development. Their close industrial linkages make understanding the dynamic interactions among their exports essential for examining cross-industry coordination and export competitiveness. Using monthly panel data for 30 Chinese provincial-level regions from 2017 to 2024, excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, this paper constructs a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model and conducts an empirical analysis using Granger causality tests, impulse response functions, and variance decomposition. The results show significant dynamic interactions among exports of the “PLV.” (1) Photovoltaic products and lithium battery exports have significant Granger-cause NEV exports, highlighting the supporting role of related industries in the development of China’s NEV exports. (2) Bidirectional Granger causality exists between photovoltaic exports and the lithium battery-new energy vehicle coupling system, and between lithium battery exports and the photovoltaic-new energy vehicle coupling system, highlighting the potential for cross-industry synergy. (3) The interactions among the three exhibit differentiated time lags. New energy vehicles and lithium batteries respond quickly, while photovoltaic exports show a lagged strengthening pattern. (4) By the 30-period horizon, photovoltaic and lithium battery shocks jointly account for 72.0% of the forecast error variance in NEV exports, underscoring the importance of industrial-chain coordination for export competitiveness. Based on these findings, this paper proposes recommendations for strengthening supply-chain coordination, optimizing market layout, and improving policy support to promote the coordinated overseas expansion of China’s “PLV” exports.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111358

Authors: Feng Ji Ziyang Wang Shuo Zhang

To address the practical challenge of significant fluctuations in the driving range and energy consumption of electric logistics vehicles (ELVs) caused by seasonal temperature variations, this study develops a soft time-window electric vehicle routing problem (EVRPTW) model incorporating multi-dimensional seasonal correction coefficients to optimize seasonal distribution scheduling for urban courier enterprises. By comprehensively integrating ambient temperature, heating and air-conditioning auxiliary energy consumption, and road traffic congestion, the model establishes season-adaptive state-of-charge (SOC) safety thresholds and charging upper limits, thereby abandoning the crude modeling approach of simply altering the maximum driving range. Furthermore, the heuristic rule of selecting the nearest charging station is eliminated; instead, charging station decisions are determined by minimizing the incremental global total cost. An improved genetic algorithm (IGA) hybridized with 2-opt local search is designed, embedding a targeted battery energy constraint repair operator after neighborhood operations to prevent the generation of a large number of energy-infeasible routes. Ablation and comparative experiments are conducted using Solomon-based extended EVRPTW benchmark instances. Results from 30 independent simulation runs demonstrate that, compared with the standard genetic algorithm, the IGA effectively mitigates route crossing and detours while achieving significantly better average solution quality (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p < 0.001) and higher operational stability across 30 independent runs. Empirical simulations based on real-world data from a courier enterprise in Xuzhou are conducted across three operational scenarios: spring/autumn, summer, and winter. The simulation results reveal a clear tiered cost escalation across seasons. Taking the spring/autumn scenario as the baseline (3870.21 CNY), the summer cost rises moderately by 3.4% to CNY 4002.61 due to air-conditioning loads. However, under low-temperature winter conditions, due to higher energy consumption and range degradation, the required number of delivery vehicles increases from 9 to 11, causing the total winter cost to surge to CNY 4810.41, which represents a 24.3% increase compared to the baseline (and a 20.2% increase relative to the summer scenario). A counterintuitive phenomenon is observed where the winter time-window penalty cost decreases; this is essentially attributed to the trade-off of deploying additional vehicles and splitting long routes into short segments to secure delivery timeliness at the expense of higher fixed costs. Sensitivity analysis indicates that vehicle fixed costs and the winter energy consumption coefficient are the most influential factors affecting total costs. This study provides decision-making references for urban courier enterprises to respond to seasonal temperature variations and implement seasonal capacity allocation and routing optimization that balances economic and environmental benefits. It holds practical significance for enhancing the operational efficiency and sustainability of urban last-mile delivery.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111359

Authors: Anh V. Do Binh T. T. Dao Phuong H. Lai

This study examines how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) influences firm performance and assesses whether firm-level financial stability moderates this relationship. A sample of 272 companies from six countries in ASEAN over the period of 2020–2024 is investigated using the Bayesian regression. The findings reveal a positive relationship between ESG and firm market performance, suggesting that stronger sustainability practices tend to enhance market values. Firm-level financial stability amplifies this association, indicating that financially stable firms are more capable of converting ESG initiatives into sustainable long-term values. Among the three ESG dimensions, the environmental pillar exhibits the clearest positive association with firm performance. However, the moderating effect of firm-level financial stability is more evident for social and governance pillars, implying that financially stable firms derive greater value from social and governance practices. The study underscores the importance of aligning ESG strategies with firm-level financial stability to foster sustainable performance.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111357

Authors: Fengxia Li Haixue Chen Chao Wu Chaoyi Liu Xiaogang Feng

Road network expansion is a critical factor driving urban landscape pattern changes and ecosystem degradation. To investigate the spatiotemporal evolution of landscape ecological risk within the influence zones of different road grades, this study took the central urban area of Xi’an as a case study. Based on CLCD land-use data and OpenStreetMap road vector data for 2014, 2019, and 2024, buffer zone analysis was employed to delineate three types of road influence domains: motorways (4 km), trunk roads (2 km), and primary roads (1 km). Using ArcMap 10.8 and Fragstats 4.2, we conducted land-use change analysis, landscape ecological risk assessment, and spatial autocorrelation analysis, and applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to explore the spatial heterogeneity of driving mechanisms. The results show the following: (1) Built-up land was the dominant land-use type across all three road influence domains and expanded continuously over the study period, with a corresponding decline in cropland. Under a unified fixed-threshold system, the mean ERI within all three road influence domains exhibited a declining trend; the proportion of low-risk areas increased continuously, while moderate-and-above risk areas contracted, and risk transitions generally converged toward lower grades, with only a minor localized escalation from moderate to relatively high risk along primary roads during 2019–2024. The risk-level ranking remained stable as motorway > trunk > primary. (2) Global Moran’s I values were all significantly positive (pseudo p = 0.001); High–High clusters expanded along the edges of motorway corridors, trunk-road clusters were fragmented, and primary roads formed localized cold-spot aggregations in the highly built-up core area. (3) Distance to roads, the nighttime light index, and road density were selected as explanatory variables. The GWR model revealed pronounced spatial non-stationarity in local coefficients: nighttime light was predominantly negatively associated with ERI in the motorway and trunk-road influence domains; the effect of distance to roads shifted from mainly positive during 2014–2019 to negative in some peripheral segments by 2024; and road-density effects showed a clear grade-dependent pattern, being predominantly negative in the highly built-up core along primary roads but locally positive in the peripheral expansion segments of motorways and trunk roads. This study characterizes the differentiated landscape ecological risk within road-grade influence domains and provides decision support for hierarchical ecological control and road-network optimization in Xi’an and other rapidly urbanizing regions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111356

Authors: Yiwei Gao Fei Shao Linyue Bai Qian Xu Xingkun Xie Ting Chen

The large-scale deployment of shore power in inland river ports offers new opportunities for optimizing port scheduling under time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing and supports green sustainable port development. However, existing scheduling methods are mostly designed for seaports and ignore the unique constraints of inland ports, such as mandatory shore power compliance, navigation channel time windows, and transformer capacity limits. Focusing on inland container ports in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, this paper investigates the integrated scheduling of berths, quay cranes, and shore power under TOU pricing. A bi-objective integer programming model is formulated to minimize both operational efficiency cost and TOU electricity procurement cost, and an improved NSGA-II framework with a weighted sum scanning strategy and greedy repair operator is developed to generate the Pareto front. A standard case with 20 ships, 6 berths, and 24 quay cranes validates the proposed method. Results show that compared with the arrival-order reference, the selected compromise schedule reduces operational cost by 71.15% and electricity cost by 16.39% and raises the valley-period energy share from 33.92% to 45.18%. All ships achieve zero tardiness with an average waiting time of 0.54 h. The improved algorithm yields a mean hypervolume of 0.810 ± 0.025 and an IGD+ of 0.042 ± 0.006 over 30 independent runs, with a total runtime of 52.6 ± 3.1 s for the 20-ship case. Under stated efficiency and emission assumptions, net daily CO2 reduction reaches 1.21 tons per day. Dedicated 400 kW shore transformers remain non-binding for the modeled ship loads. The proposed method can support inland port scheduling decision-making and promote sustainable low-carbon port development.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111355

Authors: Xiaoting Jie Hanyi Rui Fenghua Bai Qinyuan Zhu Xin Liu Qiuke Su Zhu Ming

China’s eco-environmental zoning management (EEZM) system extends environmental impact assessment (EIA) from the project to the territorial scale, relying on ecological–environmental access lists to translate the ecological conservation red line, environmental quality baseline, and resource utilization ceiling into enforceable unit-level requirements. The linguistic structure of these lists has, however, been quantified at the clause level only for a single provincial corpus. Using the 2025 access lists of Jiangsu Province, this study constructs a corpus of 75,659 sentences (2.92 million characters) covering 4571 control units in total (4268 land-based control units, 302 sea area units, and the provincial-level general requirements). We apply a ten-category keyword taxonomy, term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting, a 24-label industry–control form scheme, three lightweight classifiers, and co-occurrence semantic networks, supplemented by direct regular expression measurement of quantitative content, citation extraction, deduplication, and sensitivity analyses. Negative constraint (33.3%) and referential (26.4%) keywords dominate the lists, direct measurement shows that 7.5% of sentences contain explicit quantitative thresholds, but these are strongly concentrated in the pollutant discharge (15.8%) and resource efficiency (11.9%) dimensions and almost absent from spatial-layout (1.9%) and risk prevention (1.9%) provisions, indicating a dimension-specific rather than absolute quantification gap. The three unit types exhibit distinct linguistic profiles—legal referential, project-prohibitive, and guidance-oriented—and the sparser semantic network of general control units remains robust to equal corpus size subsampling, node count variation, and four co-occurrence normalizations. A linear support vector machine (SVM) reaches a micro-F1 of 0.962 against rule-generated labels under a random split, and 0.879 (95% CI 0.850–0.909) after deduplication and unit-grouped splitting. These findings describe how institutional design shapes the language of spatial environmental regulation and provide a transferable text mining framework for zoning-based environmental governance; all findings describe the 2025 snapshot of a single province and are not extrapolated to other jurisdictions without replication.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111354

Authors: Zhaoting Xing Zizhen Zhang Nan Zhang

Corporate supply chain green transformation supports sustainable production and environmental coordination across supply chains. Identifying its key predictors can inform sustainable supply chain management. Using a sample of 1119 Chinese listed firms from 2018 to 2023, this study applies explainable machine learning to examine predictive factors, nonlinear associations, and regional heterogeneity. The results show that firm size, leverage, fixed asset ratio, and operating expense burden make relatively large predictive contributions among internal factors, while industry peer greenness and regional economic development stand out among external factors. The predictive contribution of firm size increases at higher levels, whereas those of the fixed asset ratio and operating expense burden initially rise and then decline. Firm size and industry peer greenness exhibit model-based predictive interactions. Secondary predictors vary across regions: economic development and ownership concentration are prominent in eastern China, trade openness in central China, financing structure and profitability in western China, and ownership type and asset structure in northeastern China. These findings suggest tailoring support to firm resources and regional conditions, strengthening industry collaboration and information sharing, and cross-checking textual disclosures against actual environmental performance.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111350

Authors: Monika Hadaś-Dyduch

Biocapacity is a key indicator of sustainable development. This study identifies homogeneous groups of 21 European Union member states characterised by similar temporal and distributional profiles of biocapacity over 1961–2025. The main methodological contribution is a hybrid clustering framework combining Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Energy Distance through an optimised linear weighted distance, followed by hierarchical clustering and bootstrap-based stability assessment. The framework is general; however, for the preferred fine-grained solution the optimisation selected the boundary value α*=1.0, meaning that the Energy Distance component receives zero weight at k=12. This is reported as a substantive empirical finding: for a fine-grained partition, temporal similarity alone suffices. For coarser solutions (k=3–6), the optimal α ranges from 0.45 to 0.65, indicating that both components contribute when the partition is less granular. A hierarchical typology is therefore proposed: a parsimonious macro-level classification (k=3–5, with genuinely hybrid weights) is used for the main conclusions, while the 12-cluster solution is retained as a secondary, fine-grained classification. The analysis identified 12 clusters among the 21 countries. Of these 12 clusters, 7 are singletons (Austria, Lithuania, Denmark, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden) and 3 are two-element clusters (Belgium–Italy, Cyprus–Malta, Poland–Romania), meaning that 10 of 12 clusters (83.3%) and 13 of 21 countries (61.9%) fall into single- or two-element groups. The difference between the highest and lowest cluster mean is 9.793 gha per capita (17-fold). Scandinavian and Baltic countries achieved very high values (6.57–10.37 gha per capita), while Mediterranean and some Western European countries recorded values below 1.0 gha per capita. The solution showed high bootstrap stability (mean ARI =0.9589). External validation using independent indicators (forest share, agricultural share, population density, GDP per capita) confirms that the macro-level clusters differ significantly on these variables (Kruskal–Wallis, p<0.05). Six EU member states were excluded due to incomplete data, so the findings are not a complete EU-27 typology. The analysis identifies biocapacity profiles only and does not assess EU policy effectiveness. The study also provides a systematic comparison of DTW-only, Energy-Distance-only, and genuinely hybrid solutions, and demonstrates that the hybrid framework is robust to alternative normalisation, linkage, and missing-data treatments. The analysis does not include policy variables and therefore cannot establish causal relationships between EU policies and biocapacity outcomes.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111352

Authors: Raymond O. Kene Thomas O. Olwal Udochukwu B. Akuru Agha F. Nnachi

Electric vehicle (EV) charging from the grid presents significant challenges for the grid due to increased power demand added to the existing base load. This scenario leads to grid instability arising from voltage drops and new peaks generated due to uncontrolled charging. This study proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-based optimization approach to mitigate the impact of large-scale, uncontrolled charging of EVs. Using real-world datasets of EV charging sessions, we first quantify the impact of EV charging under a baseline “uncontrolled” charging scenario using the IEEE 33-bus test system. We formulate the charging problem as an optimization task with the objective of minimizing energy consumption and peak power demand. A genetic algorithm (GA) and model-predictive control (MPC), combined with solar PV, are employed as charging strategies to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results show that the AI-driven strategy significantly reduced peak power demand by 38.35% and energy consumption by 12.09% with solar PV utilization. A sensitivity analysis of peak power demand reveals that grid stability will be violated with higher charging rates.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111353

Authors: Liting Zhang Sipeng Lai Fanyue Qian Xi Xu Yongwen Yang Lifei Song Qifen Li

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies and the increasing energy demand of data centers, energy systems need to be operated with increasing reliability and flexibility. To address operational risks caused by renewable energy fluctuations and random equipment failures, this study takes a distributed integrated energy system for a data center as the research object and proposes an optimal scheduling strategy that coordinates dynamic reliability and flexibility. First, a dynamic reliability assessment model is established using a sequential Monte Carlo simulation based on a two-state Markov model, and the system’s reliability is quantitatively evaluated using the loss of load probability (LOLP) and expected energy not supplied (EENS). Second, equipment-level and system-level flexibility margin models are developed, and a dynamic reliability baseline constraint is introduced to integrate reliability requirements and regulation capability into a unified optimal scheduling framework. Finally, a simulation case based on the characteristics of a data center in Lingang, Shanghai, is used to evaluate the proposed method under typical seasonal operating conditions. The results show that the proposed strategy can effectively improve energy supply reliability and operational flexibility. Under typical summer conditions, the EENS of the cooling system is reduced by 82.3% compared with the conventional strategy, while the total system operating cost is reduced by 10.93–15.16% under different seasonal conditions. The proposed framework provides an effective approach for the reliability–flexibility-coordinated operation of data center integrated energy systems.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111351

Authors: Jiaying Duan Yingying Han

Environmental disclosure can diverge from rated environmental performance, raising questions about the operating implications of this gap and the role of corporate governance. This study examines these relationships using 32,126 firm-year observations from 4580 Chinese A-share listed firms during 2015–2024. The gap is measured as the difference between industry–year standardized environmental disclosure and Huazheng environmental ratings. Firm and year fixed-effects estimates show a negative average association between the gap and subsequent operating revenue per employee, with sensitivity to historical-performance controls, matching, and outcome measurement. The negative association is stronger among firms with CEO duality: a one-standard-deviation increase in the gap is associated with approximately 2.07% lower revenue per employee in the following year among firms combining the CEO and board-chair positions. The interaction remains negative and significant across the principal revenue specifications and receives weak support at the 10% level under strict accounting value added on a common sample. Component analysis shows that, among firms with CEO duality, disclosure is negatively associated with subsequent revenue per employee conditional on ratings, while ratings are positively associated with the outcome conditional on disclosure. These findings extend organizational decoupling research by identifying leadership structure as a governance condition associated with differences in the operating implications of environmental disclosure–rating divergence.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111349

Authors: Yuyan Luo Qingcao Ren Ting Zhao Yong Qin Hao Xu

Enhancing tourism system resilience is important for sustainable tourism development in ecologically fragile regions, where economic, social, and environmental systems are closely interdependent. This study evaluates the tourism system resilience of 18 counties in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China, based on the Driver–Pressure–State–Impact–Response–Management (DPSIRM) framework. An integrated ANP–CRITIC weighting approach and comprehensive evaluation model are employed to examine the temporal and spatial evolution of tourism system resilience from 2010 to 2020, while kernel density analysis and an obstacle degree model are used to explore distributional characteristics and key bottlenecks. Three grey GM(1,1) models are further compared to simulate the future trend of tourism system resilience. The results show that: (1) tourism system resilience fluctuated but generally improved over the study period, evolving from a relatively high level to medium–low and subsequently recovering toward a medium–high level; (2) the spatial pattern shifted from relatively balanced development to eastern concentration and then toward greater spatial balance, although an east–west differentiation persisted; (3) the distribution of resilience gradually shifted toward higher levels, accompanied by narrowing disparities among counties; and (4) the main relative bottlenecks were concentrated in economic foundations, ecological resource support, infrastructure, public services, and governance conditions. The selected grey model indicates a generally stable improvement in tourism system resilience during 2026–2030. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding the spatial and temporal evolution of tourism system resilience in Ganzi and offer insights into sustainable tourism development and rural revitalization in ecologically fragile regions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111348

Authors: Shan Li Ziran Tang

Does China’s smart city pilot policy (SCPP) do more than raise economic output? This paper asks whether it also spreads development gains across regions and between urban and rural areas, treating the policy as a lens on selected socioeconomic dimensions of sustainable urban development. We study the 2012 SCPP on a panel of 167 prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2022. A common prosperity index, constructed with entropy-weighted TOPSIS, measures overall prosperity, urban–rural integration, and regional coordination; the policy effect is estimated with PSM-DID. The SCPP raises the index by 0.0328 points in the fixed-effects model and 0.0304 points in the PSM-DID model with controls. The gains are uneven across dimensions: they concentrate in overall prosperity, appear weakly in urban–rural integration, and are not statistically detectable in regional coordination. Digital economy development and new-type urbanization both moderate the policy effect upward. Location matters as well: the effects concentrate in eastern cities and in cities with higher human capital and better informatization infrastructure. Local development conditions, in short, shape where the benefits of smart-city investment land.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111347

Authors: Jialei Xu

The journal retracts the article titled “Service Trust and Customer Loyalty in China’s Hotel Services: The Causal Role of Commitment” [...]

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111346

Authors: Oddrun P. Røsok Mark de Bruijne Wijnand Veeneman

Projects in the infrastructure sector are becoming increasingly interdependent and complex, and how to deal with that complexity is something to pay close attention to in the process of developing a sustainable society. This article sets out to provide an overview of how complexity is dealt with in real projects and thus asks the question of how complexity is considered in scientific literature, based on empirical studies about collaboration in infrastructure projects. Consequently, this article presents a structured literature review using PRISMA. Three scientific libraries were used: Web of Science (for 1 January 2000–31 December 2023), Scopus (for 2000–2026), and OpenAlex (for 2024–2026). The search query included complexity, collaboration, infrastructure, project management, and case study, as well as synonyms. A total of 43 articles were included in the final sample for the review. Interestingly, the analysis of the sample reveals that the initial expectations were not met, so instead of creating a comprehensive overview of the methods used to deal with complexity, a different discovery is made instead: complexity is often mentioned, but is hardly defined, barely operationalized, and not understood.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111344

Authors: İnan Keskin Selman Kahraman Mohamed Bashir S. Raddad Amir Hossein Vakili

This study investigates the mechanical performance, freeze–thaw durability, and microstructural characteristics of marl soil treated with iron and steel cooling water sludge (CWS) and polypropylene fibers (PPFs). The CWS used in this study is an Fe-rich industrial by-product generated from the cooling water circulation system of an iron and steel production facility. In an initial screening stage, mixtures containing 5–30% CWS and 0.2–1.4% PPF were evaluated using 7-day unconfined compressive strength (UCS) tests. The highest UCS values within the investigated ranges were obtained at 15% CWS and 1% PPF, increasing the UCS of untreated marl from approximately 254 kPa to 430 kPa with 15% CWS and 450 kPa with 1% PPF. These dosages were subsequently selected for the freeze–thaw durability program. Untreated and treated specimens were conditioned or cured for 7, 28, and 90 days and subjected to up to 10 freeze–thaw cycles. Repeated freeze–thaw exposure reduced the UCS of all the specimens; however, the magnitude of deterioration depended strongly on the treatment type and the curing duration. Untreated marl exhibited strength losses of 27.7–31.5% after 10 cycles. The 15% CWS-treated specimens showed comparatively stable freeze–thaw resistance, with strength losses of 20.5–22.6%, whereas the performance of 1% PPF was strongly curing-time dependent, with the strength loss decreasing from 58.2% at 7 days to 27.5% at 90 days. The combined 15% CWS + 1% PPF treatment exhibited the most favorable response at 90 days, with a strength loss of 20.7% after 10 freeze–thaw cycles. The SEM observations qualitatively indicated a comparatively more compact and continuous matrix in the treated specimens, while the XRD patterns showed mineralogical differences associated with CWS incorporation; however, specific cementitious or hydration products could not be conclusively confirmed. Overall, the combined CWS–PPF treatment improved the mechanical integrity and freeze–thaw durability of marl soil and may provide a practical route for the beneficial reuse of an iron and steel industry by-product, provided that its environmental suitability is confirmed.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111345

Authors: Seyed Ahmad Moumen Ghazvini Francesc Romagosa

The tourism industry is recognized as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, significantly advancing climate change. Carbon offsetting is often suggested as an ancillary approach to alleviate or counterbalance inevitable emissions generated by tourism activities; nevertheless, what is the public impression of this measure? When are they expected to engage in it? This study employing the Value–Belief–Norm theory (VBN) mainly aims to investigate the influence of visitors’ value orientations on their overall perceptions regarding carbon offsetting within the leisure context of protected-area visitation—a realm where leisure pursuits represent a considerable contributor to carbon emissions. A total of 517 protected-area visitors in Spain and 383 in the Netherlands participated in the study. Results indicate that individuals who prioritize biospheric and altruistic values are more likely to exhibit robust support for carbon offsetting initiatives in protected areas, demonstrating the importance of fundamental value orientations in shaping pro-environmental attitudes. In addition, the findings stress human accountability for climate repercussions and reveal offsetting alternatives as ethically justifiable and effectively gratifying. The study offers governance-related implications, indicating that harmonizing carbon offsetting programs with fundamental societal principles may bolster the perceived legitimacy of offsetting initiatives, foster visitor involvement, and lead to improved environmental results.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111342

Authors: Joanna Brzeska Magda Morawska Agnieszka Tercjak Anita Kukułowicz Jakub Karczewski

Studies have shown that the use of readily available and easily prepared modifiers can control the specific properties of the starch material, targeting those that are most beneficial for specific applications. Starch is one of the materials poised to replace traditional polymers in food packaging and wound dressings. However, its functional properties, including barrier properties, antibacterial and mechanical properties, need to be improved. Films made of kuzu starch cross-linked with citric acid and plasticised with glycerol were modified with various modifiers: Kalanchoe pinnata extract, silver nanoparticles in this extract, an extract additionally stabilised with a biopreservative, and chitosan. The effect of these modifiers on the chemical structure and morphology of the starch films, as well as on their barrier properties, thermal, mechanical, and bacteriostatic properties, was determined. Only films containing silver nanoparticles produced clear inhibition zones against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. Chitosan-containing films exhibited weak antibacterial activity, while no measurable inhibition zones were observed for unmodified starch films or films containing only Kalanchoe pinnata extract. No viable yeasts or moulds were detected on the film surfaces during the 14-day storage period under the conditions of the study. The starch film with chitosan had the highest tensile strength, while film with the Kalanchoe pinnata extract had the highest elongation. The film made of starch with Kalanchoe pinnata extract had the highest water vapour transmission rate and the lowest contact angle, while the film made of starch with chitosan had the highest barrier properties.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111343

Authors: Marcelo Leon Maria de la O Barroso Gonzalez Bryan Rivera

This study examines the relationship between energy intensity and economic complexity across 135 countries over the period of 2000–2022, with particular attention paid to differences across income groups and their implications for sustainable development. Using data from the Harvard Growth Lab, the Heritage Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme, the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, and the World Bank, the analysis applies fixed-effects panel regression and panel Granger causality tests to assess the association and temporal direction between energy intensity and the Economic Complexity Index, while controlling for human capital, globalization, and economic freedom. The results show substantial heterogeneity across income groups. Lower energy intensity is significantly associated with higher economic complexity in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, whereas the relationship is not statistically significant in lower-middle-income and low-income countries. Panel Granger causality tests revealed a unidirectional predictive relationship from energy intensity to economic complexity in high-income, lower-middle-income, and low-income countries (p < 0.001), but no significant causal relationship in either direction in upper-middle-income countries. No evidence of reverse Granger causality from economic complexity to energy intensity was found in any income group. In higher-income economies, energy-efficiency improvements can be integrated with technological upgrading, industrial modernization, and the development of higher-value productive activities. In lower- and middle-income economies, the results suggest that energy-efficiency policies should be sequenced and combined with investments in human capital, productive and energy infrastructure, technological capabilities, and institutional capacity to support diversification. Energy intensity was positively and significantly associated with economic complexity in high-income (PIA; β = 0.0597, p < 0.05) and upper-middle-income economies (PIMA; β = 0.0393, p < 0.01). In contrast, the coefficients were not statistically significant for lower-middle-income (PIMB; β = 0.0327) and low-income economies (PIB; β = −0.00592). These findings suggest that the relationship between energy intensity and economic complexity varies across income groups, with statistically significant positive associations observed only among high-income and upper-middle-income economies. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of income-specific policy design when linking energy transition, productive transformation, and sustainable economic development.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111341

Authors: Lehlogonolo Moroasehla Mkwanazi Sizwe Madonsela Nelson Sizwe

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly recognized as a transformative technology for enhancing Environmental Management Systems (EMSs); however, successful implementation remains constrained by organizational, technological, and governance-related challenges. While the existing literature has largely examined AI adoption, environmental management, and supply chain sustainability separately, limited attention has been given to how organizational readiness, practitioner involvement, data integrity, and responsible AI governance collectively influence AI-enabled Environmental Management System (EMS) implementation and continuous improvement. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative case study involving three focus group discussions with eighteen (18) cross-functional professionals such as quality managers, SHERQ officers, supply chain analysts, sustainability managers, HSE managers, and continuous improvement specialists. Upon conducting the third focus group discussion, sampling ceased, thereby reaching thematic saturation, and data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Using reflective thematic analysis, and the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework as a theoretical lens, the study identifies two themes: challenges related to AI implementation, operational efficiency and data integrity. The findings reveal that organizational readiness, practitioner involvement, data quality, system integration, and governance mechanisms are critical enablers of successful AI implementation, while fragmented systems, manual reporting, privacy concerns, AI reliability, and resistance to change remain significant barriers. Building on these findings, the study proposes an extended AI-driven EMS Continuous Improvement Framework that integrates TOE dimensions with responsible AI governance, emphasizing human oversight, transparency, accountability, and ethical AI use. The study presents a practical implementation pathway to guide organizations from readiness assessment and data standardization to AI governance and continuous improvement. By extending the TOE framework to the context of AI-enabled EMS, the study contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge by demonstrating that sustainable AI adoption depends not only on technological capability, but also on practitioner involvement, data integrity, and governance structures that support continuous improvement.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111340

Authors: Zhiming Guo Wenzhong Lou Shaoqian Ji Hu Qiao Zilong Bai

The resilience and stability of industrial supply chains are the core pillars of the sustainable development of the global economy, and also an important foundation for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of “Responsible Consumption and Production” and “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure”. To address the problem that traditional industrial supply chain risk assessment systems have fixed indicators and static weights, which are difficult to adapt to complex scenarios such as dynamic adjustments of supply chain nodes, fluctuations in market demand and changes in geopolitical patterns, and thus restrict the construction of sustainable supply chain resilience, this paper proposes a comprehensive indicator-weight dynamic evolution algorithm for industrial supply chain risk assessment systems. Firstly, the evolutionary characteristics and trigger rules of the industrial supply chain risk system are defined. Indicator-weight evolution is performed when the original indicator system can no longer meet the evaluation requirements. The Delphi method combined with the actual risk characteristics of the supply chain is adopted to determine the candidate indicator set. The candidate indicators are screened using the grey relational analysis algorithm and the entropy weight-variation coefficient method to construct the evolved risk indicator set. Secondly, an improved DEMATEL model is used to analyze the causal relationships among the evolved indicators. Evolutionary analysis of the original indicator weights is carried out according to the influence degrees between indicators, so as to obtain the evolved indicator weights and realize the dynamic linkage update of evaluation weights. This study conducts a case analysis using publicly available aggregated synthetic data on supply chain disruptions and resilience and compares the proposed method with the entropy weight–analytic hierarchy process (EW-AHP) and dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) methods. The performance of the methods is evaluated in terms of the consistency of indicator weights or relative importance, computational time, out-of-sample prediction performance, and retrospective analysis of a representative disruption event scenario. The results indicate that, under the current case and parameter settings, the proposed method can reconstruct the risk indicator system and coordinate indicator and weight updates, demonstrating certain advantages in computational efficiency and risk factor identification in the specified comparative experiments. It should be noted, however, that the current validation relies primarily on publicly available synthetic aggregated data and retrospective event-scenario analysis. Therefore, the evidence is insufficient to directly establish the risk-warning benefits or improvements in operational response efficiency that the method might deliver in real-world enterprise settings. This study provides a methodological framework for the coordinated updating of indicators and weights in dynamic industrial supply chain risk assessment. Its applicability across industries and practical effectiveness require further validation using independent data sources and actual enterprise operational data.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111339

Authors: Dragan Vukolić Tamara Gajić Mladen Radišić Maja Radišić Dušan Pevac

Research on artificial intelligence (AI) in tourism often emphasizes personalization and trust while overlooking how AI-generated recommendations direct tourists’ attention toward specific alternatives. This study examines the relationships between perceived AI-powered digital nudging, personalization, trust, and tourists’ evaluations and intentions regarding local food. Survey data from 390 tourists visiting rural and mountain destinations in Serbia were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicate that perceived AI-powered digital nudging is positively associated with perceived local food value and local food choice intention, whereas personalization shows no statistically significant relationship with perceived local food value. Trust is positively associated with choice intention but not significantly associated with perceived local food value. The relationship between digital nudging and environmental awareness is positive but weak. This study demonstrates that the perceived attention-directing role of AI recommendations represents a distinct dimension of gastronomic decision-making, suggesting that encouraging local food choices requires more than personalized recommendations alone.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111338

Authors: Kuiqing Liu Chuanxiao Liu

Soil salinization poses severe threats to agricultural production and ecological sustainability in the Yellow River Delta of China. Conventional porous barrier materials such as straw, river sand and construction waste have unavoidable limitations in raw-material supply and environmental safety. This study explored the potential of Phragmites australis segments as an eco-friendly, locally available porous barrier layer for sustainable coastal saline-soil remediation. Laboratory soil column simulation tests were carried out with four reed-segment length treatments (2 cm, 5 cm, 8 cm, 11 cm) and a reed-free control (CK) to investigate soil percolation and drainage, vertical salt content distribution and layered desalination rate. Buried reed segments significantly enhanced percolation and drainage under leaching, with the 5 cm treatment performing best. After leaching, soil salt content increased monotonically with depth in all treatments, and CK retained significantly higher salt contents than the reed-amended treatments throughout the profile. Reed-segment length exerted slight effects on topsoil desalination but significant effects on deep soil layers. All reed treatments achieved higher desalination rates than CK. The 5 cm treatment yielded stable salt-mass-weighted profile desalination rates of 96.59%, 96.76% and 97.15% at 24 h, 84 h and 168 h, respectively, showing optimal performance under laboratory soil-column conditions. These findings provide a sustainable, low-cost technical reference for the ecological amelioration of coastal saline soils.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111336

Authors: Zhehan Zhu Mingming Yu Di Han Kun Xu Bo Feng Yu Chen Yun Fu Lingguo Meng Jingzhong Kuang

Iron tailings stockpiling occupies land and poses potential environmental risks. This study compared mastics containing untreated and mechanically activated iron tailings from the same source with limestone mastic at a filler-to-binder mass ratio of 1.0. Particle characterization was combined with rheological testing, linear amplitude sweep testing with viscoelastic continuum damage analysis, and leaching measurements. Grinding for 1.5 h reduced the median particle size from 61.00 to 16.95 μm, a decrease of 72.2%. The activated tailings mastic showed the highest complex modulus and rutting factor. Its non-recoverable creep compliance values were 1.52 and 2.08 kPa−1 at 0.1 and 3.2 kPa, respectively, representing reductions of 34.8% and 27.0% relative to limestone mastic. Predicted fatigue lives were slightly higher than those for untreated tailings and close to those for limestone at the selected strains. No clear evidence of new bond formation was observed, suggesting that the performance improvements were mainly attributable to physical interactions. Measured leachate concentrations were below the reported comparison limits. This same-source comparison links grinding-related particle refinement with mastic performance and provides preliminary leaching evidence to inform the evaluation of iron tailings as an alternative filler.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111337

Authors: Zhennan Shi Meiqi Chen Jinghao Cai Yurong Li

Improved road connectivity need not produce equivalent gains in access to economic opportunities. Using modeled intercity travel times and city GDP for 278 Chinese cities during 2000–2023, we compare physical network reach with relative external market accessibility (EMA), which weights inverse road times by each origin’s external destination GDP shares. Analysis combines trends, relative and absolute inequality, spatial clustering, rank mobility, regional comparisons, and two-factor Shapley accounting. Mean intercity travel time fell by 28.7%, while relative EMA rose by 39.6%. Although relative inequality declined after 2010, absolute city-level gaps widened, spatial concentration persisted, and 202 cities occupied the same quartile at both endpoints. Nationally, the road-time component represented 97.0% of observed relative EMA growth. Northeast China reveals a sharper regional contrast: shifts in destination GDP shares offset 65.8% of favorable road-time contributions under the baseline measure, primarily through declining relative weight on other Northeast destinations. This component persists across alternative distance-decay parameters, origin weights, denominator definitions, and a targeted administrative-boundary exclusion. An exploratory comparison using city-reported growth rates to construct a comparable-price opportunity proxy also retains the negative component, although the offset magnitude and net EMA movement are sensitive to the GDP treatment and decay specification. These findings establish a transferable diagnostic sequence for regional planning: monitor connectivity and opportunities separately, assess persistent territorial disparities, and investigate destination composition alongside observed freight and economic interactions before setting intervention priorities.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111334

Authors: Sun Hee Kwon Segu Oh Hyemi Bang

Mobile-game publishers face the dual challenge of retaining existing players while sustaining continuously updated digital services. This study develops and tests an integrated model linking psychological flow and overall game evaluation, shaped by service quality, system quality, and pricing policy, to satisfaction, word-of-mouth (WOM), and reuse intention. Survey data from adult paying mobile-game users in Korea and Japan were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, bootstrap inference, measurement-invariance assessment, and multigroup comparisons. Flow and game evaluation were positively associated with satisfaction, which in turn was positively associated with both loyalty intentions. Cross-national comparisons suggested a stronger satisfaction–WOM relationship in Korea and a stronger satisfaction–reuse intention relationship in Japan. These directional patterns persisted after controlling for gender, age, gaming tenure, and daily playtime, although statistical support for between-country differences was sensitive to the outcome and multiple-testing considerations. The findings integrate experiential and operational explanations of player satisfaction and offer cautious implications for sustaining consumer relationships in digital services.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111333

Authors: Jiangping Jing Gaige Liang Fei Xu Ye Guo Ling Hao

Sustainable electricity systems require reliable power supply and the effective integration of distributed renewable energy. In active distribution networks, feeder disconnection can threaten both objectives by causing undervoltage during load transfer and creating overvoltage or reverse power flow risks under high photovoltaic (PV) generation. This paper proposes a post-fault coordination method integrating voltage risk zoning, resource direction screening, and restoration optimization. The method combines voltage and interface conditions, electrical distance changes, and resource sensitivities to identify and rank feasible regulation directions according to their benefits and costs. An outer procedure updates the risk zones and candidate set around a lexicographic mixed-integer linear optimization that prioritizes load restoration, constraint violation mitigation, and operating cost. Tests on a modified IEEE 33-bus system reduce candidate directions by 40% while preserving near-complete load restoration and modeled voltage and interface limit compliance, although operating cost, PV curtailment, and total computation time increase. A complementary study on the IEEE 123-node feeder with a fixed restored topology achieves the same percentage reduction in dispatch variables with essentially unchanged cost and a shorter dispatch solution time. The results inform sustainable distribution-network operation by quantifying trade-offs among service restoration, renewable-energy use, operating cost, and computational burden; screening benefits depend on the flexibility retained and the operating conditions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111330

Authors: Manli Zhang Shihao Dai

More public spending on education does not necessarily translate into better educational conditions. Using provincial panel data from China (2006–2019), this study examines how different measures of public education finance are associated with three educational indicators: Primary-school Student–Teacher Ratio, Junior-secondary Student–Teacher Ratio, and Illiteracy. The findings reveal that these relationships vary across fiscal measures, educational outcomes, and model specifications. Government appropriation for education is associated with lower student–teacher ratios in parsimonious models, whereas local fiscal education expenditure is negatively associated with illiteracy in simpler specifications. However, these associations become less consistent after additional fiscal and socioeconomic controls are introduced. Significant interaction effects emerge for both student–teacher ratios, but not for illiteracy, indicating that conditional fiscal associations vary across educational outcomes. These findings suggest that higher education expenditure alone is an insufficient indicator of educational improvement. For SDG 4 and social sustainability, the findings highlight the value of distinguishing fiscal measures and considering multiple educational outcomes in a comprehensive, context-sensitive assessment of public financing beyond expenditure levels.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111332

Authors: Lin Chen Chao Liu

Waste-to-energy (WTE) infrastructure is central to sustainable waste governance and circular economy transitions, yet its siting continues to trigger Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) conflicts worldwide. This study examines how a rural Chinese county converted a WTE project—the only successful one among four siting attempts in its municipality—into a Please-In-My-Back-Yard (PIMBY) facility. Drawing on multi-wave fieldwork (2022–2025), in-depth interviews, and multi-source triangulation of statutory assessments, archives, and monitoring data, we develop a Multi-Logic Governance Framework comprising political, administrative, emotional, and technical logics. We trace a four-stage process from Resistance and Governance Adjustment through Collaborative Consolidation to PIMBY Acceptance, and record measurable outcomes, including over 1400 consecutive days of safe operation under EU emission limits, 28 publicly disclosed statutory approvals, and benefit sharing with nine surrounding villages. The study nuances the authoritarian environmentalism paradigm by conceptualizing relational bureaucracy, offers an actionable alternative to the Decide-Announce-Defend model, and yields practical guidance for siting facilities in transitional economies. Three implications follow: an independent pre-siting risk assessment, benefits linked to village development rather than cash transfers, and a grievance channel paired with disclosure, since disclosure alone did not build trust.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111331

Authors: Liangquan Dong Yong Liu Yiwei Wang

With the development of dual-channel supply chains, consumers have more purchasing options, and reference price effects have become increasingly important in shaping their purchasing decisions. To attract consumers, some suppliers and retailers need to adjust their pricing strategies and provide measures such as return services to gain more profits. To address these problems, considering that the reference price effect and return service level are important factors affecting the supply chain, we construct game-theoretic models for a manufacturer-dominated dual-channel supply chain comprising one manufacturer and one retailer, use them to examine the optimal decisions, and analyze the effects of the reference price effect and return service level on the supply chain. Then, a two-part pricing contract is developed. The results show that, within the feasible parameter region, a higher return service level improves the total supply chain profit. In the parameter regions examined, a stronger reference price effect increases the manufacturer’s online channel demand and revenue, whereas the retailer’s offline channel demand and revenue tend to decrease when the return service level is relatively low. Furthermore, the manufacturer’s profit increases, while the retailer’s profit may decline at relatively low return service levels. A sufficiently high return service level can mitigate this adverse effect. The proposed two-part pricing contract yields a feasible interval of fixed transfer fees within which the profit conflict between the manufacturer and the retailer can be resolved.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111328

Authors: Cem Ayık

Urban areas are shaped by physical, social, cultural, and economic dynamics, requiring sustainable planning approaches that balance liveability, accessibility, and cultural continuity. This study examines Atakum, a rapidly urbanised district in Samsun, Turkey, which has evolved from a coastal resort into one of the densest urban areas in the Black Sea region. Focusing on the Türkiş region, Atakum’s earliest intensively developed residential area, this study evaluates urban morphological sustainability through typo-morphological analysis within the framework of New Urbanism. The methodology integrates a literature review, spatial analysis, morphological mapping, and space syntax to assess building typologies, block structures, green space distribution, pedestrian accessibility, and transportation networks. The findings revealed imbalances in public and green space provision, inadequate pedestrian infrastructure, and challenges related to density, sunlight access, and street hierarchy. Despite mixed land uses and commercial vitality, deficiencies in walkability and environmental quality contribute to fragmented urban patterns, undermining sustainability and quality of life.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111327

Authors: Pablo Alejandro Quezada-Sarmiento Francesc Andreu Martínez-Gallego Wilson Teodomiro Salas-Álvarez Patricia Marisol Chango-Cañaveral

Higher education initiatives engaging Indigenous and ancestral knowledge often document community knowledge without fully integrating it into curricula, assessment, or educational authority. This study systematizes implementation experiences from Connecting Ancestral Knowledge from Academia to Peoples and Nationalities, a multi territorial Ecuadorian initiative conducted in Saraguro (Loja), Azogues (Cañar), and Paltas (Loja), to develop the Territorial Intercultural Learning Cycle (TILC). Rather than testing causal effectiveness, the TILC organizes community university learning into six interconnected phases: relational entry and co-definition; mapping living knowledge; situated intergenerational learning; collaborative documentation and multimodal production; curricular translation and co-design; and reciprocal return, validation, and stewardship. These phases foster four cross-cutting capabilities: intercultural epistemic literacy, place-based inquiry, collaborative digital documentation, and ethical stewardship. Across the participating territories, implementation generated intercultural educational materials, collaborative digital resources, and processes for documenting and translating community-validated knowledge. Because no standardized pre–post assessment was applied across territories, these outcomes are interpreted as formative implementation evidence rather than causal learning gains. The study therefore proposes a community-governed assessment framework combining student portfolios, dialogic rubrics, community validation, multimodal artifacts, and curricular products. The principal contribution is a transferable but locally adaptable pedagogical process that positions communities as knowledge authorities and universities as learning partners.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111329

Authors: Lei Liu Xiyuan Wang Chunhui Li Xiaoyu Li Lingli Ren Jiaxu Zheng Qinglong Li

Microplastics (MPs) are environmental pollutants that have attracted widespread concern. However, the effects of particle size on the uptake, translocation, and tissue distribution of polyethylene microplastics (PE-MPs), the dominant polymer in agricultural mulch film residues, in maize plants remain insufficiently understood. To investigate the size-dependent PE-MP migration and distribution in maize plants, we conducted hydroponic experiments using maize seedlings. By combining confocal laser scanning microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, we investigated the uptake, transport, and accumulation of PE-MPs with four particle sizes (0.1, 1.0, 10.0, and 100.0 μm) in maize plants. The results showed that maize roots exhibited particle-size selectivity in the PE-MP uptake and transport. Small-sized particles (0.1 and 1.0 μm) were detected within the root tissues and aboveground parts, while large-sized particles (10.0 and 100.0 μm) were detected mainly on the root surface. The small-sized PE-MPs were observed at the junctions between primary and lateral roots and were also detected in root vascular tissues. The PE-MP accumulation pattern across plant tissues was root > leaf > stem. The 1.0 μm PE-MPs exhibited a numerically higher apparent translocation to aboveground tissues than the 0.1 μm particles. Particle aggregation is one plausible explanation for the higher root retention of 0.1 μm PE-MPs, while the underlying mechanisms remain to be further verified. The observed distribution patterns were consistent with a potential contribution of the apoplastic pathway to PE-MP translocation through the root vascular system. These findings demonstrate particle-size-dependent differences in PE-MP uptake, distribution, and accumulation in maize and provide a basis for further investigation of the environmental behavior of MPs in soil–plant systems. These findings deepen the understanding of PE-MP environmental behavior in crop systems, and provide basic scientific evidence for the sustainable management of agricultural mulch film residues, microplastic risk assessment in agro-ecosystems, and agricultural product safety prevention and control.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111326

Authors: Miguel Ángel Álvarez-Vázquez Eva LLorca Carasa María Luz Rodríguez-Blanco Elena De Uña-Álvarez

User-generated content in virtual spaces is the first source for obtaining information and generating the digital footprint of a territory. This knowledge is fundamental to promoting environmental, social, and economic sustainability. However, this issue has rarely been addressed by UNESCO Global Geoparks. The case study of the Courel Mountains Global Geopark (Galicia, NW Spain) explores its online image as a tourist destination. As a pilot study, it was aimed at identifying and understanding the key components and the meanings of that image. Using 389 online reviews from the online platform Booking, between April 2022 and April 2025, an exploratory analysis of online comments was conducted. The applied methods include qualitative and quantitative procedures. The results define the characteristics of content generated by users and provide insights into impressions, opinions, and feelings about the geopark. Mountains, nature, villages, pilgrims’ ways, and local gastronomy appear as top attractions, valued together with the accommodations and local people for their contribution to wellbeing, leisure, and recreation experiences. Online narratives reflect the importance of the affective dimension in the perception of the geopark as a tourist destination to disconnect and relax. Their interpretation highlights the importance of knowledge about online-generated content for territorial improvement, management, and sustainability.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111325

Authors: Huanxin He Fangliang Zhang

Performance above aspirations can support favorable stakeholder evaluations, but it may also create pressure to sustain them. Drawing on temporal comparison theory and social comparison theory, this study examines how performance above historical and social aspirations relates to the likelihood of ESG greenwashing. We propose that performance above historical aspirations can raise subsequent historical aspirations, creating pressure to sustain favorable stakeholder evaluations through ESG greenwashing. Performance above social aspirations, by contrast, can reassure managers about the firm’s competitive position and reduce their perceived need for ESG greenwashing. Based on panel data on Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2023, we find that performance above historical aspirations is positively associated with the likelihood of ESG greenwashing, whereas performance above social aspirations is negatively associated with it. Institutional ownership strengthens the negative association between performance above social aspirations and ESG greenwashing. Evidence that listing age strengthens the positive association with performance above historical aspirations is limited and sensitive to measurement choices. This study connects performance comparisons with ESG greenwashing by explaining how historical and social aspirations have different implications for managers’ efforts to sustain favorable stakeholder evaluations.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111324

Authors: Chaturapron Chokphukhiao Burin Plengdeesakul Hawa Wongpongkham Homhuan Buarapha Niyom Wongpongkham

Sacred processions are among the most visible ways living cultural traditions persist today, yet many are threatened by declining community participation, standardized attendance, and a widening gap between ritual meaning and touristic spectacle. This study examines the Phra Lab procession, a merit-making ritual centered on a bronze Buddha image held annually during the Songkran Festival in Khon Kaen Province, Thailand. Using a qualitative case-study design combining in-depth interviews with 35 purposively sampled community leaders, officials, and cultural-tourism specialists, and a structured questionnaire administered on-site to 339 spectators and participants recruited through convenience sampling, the study finds that the procession’s own order of march encodes its participation problem: professional performers are placed at the front, drawing public attention, while community members and spectators remain at the rear, uncounted and without a distinct role, reflecting the tokenism level of participation independently identified through a stakeholder analysis using Arnstein’s ladder. This asymmetry is reflected in attitudes toward the event: community representatives rated management, atmosphere, and community/tourism benefits significantly lower than spectators and participants (all p < 0.05), suggesting those closest to organizing the event experience it differently from those who simply attend. Drawing on theories of invented tradition, cultural capital, and ritual communities, the study proposes a framework for co-creating the procession’s design with its own community: preserving authenticity and sacredness, embedding meaningful participation into the parade itself, communicating value through memorable experience, integrating community economic production through a circular, locally sourced supply chain for ceremonial materials, and treating design as iterative and measurable. This is operationalized through a five-stage participation process and a circular-economy system with a jointly administered benefit fund. The study contributes a transferable co-creation cultural ownership model for designing festival processions, with practical guidance for community-centered parade design in Southeast Asian heritage contexts.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111322

Authors: Eleonora Santos

This article examines how time-limited, project-based public funding instruments (the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), EU LIFE, and Erasmus+) mediate rural cooperation. Integrating policy instrumentation, innovation systems, and territorial resilience literature, it proposes latent territorial resilience: functionally effective yet institutionally fragile cooperative arrangements that deliver outcomes without consolidating into stable organizational forms. A multiple-case design examines 13 purposively selected Portuguese cooperative initiatives, with four illustrative shadow cases (Greece, Austria, Germany, and Hungary). Three candidate mediation mechanisms are specified: functional coordination below institutional thresholds, policy-induced misalignment and exclusion, and informal substitution of governance functions. The first is documented in all 13 cases, the third in ten, and the second in seven, all of them on one clause of the PRR notices, which is not recorded as having blocked formalization in any case. All 13 cases are rated Low or Medium on institutional consolidation. Eleven cases follow a trajectory linked to the project (A), in which joint activity is documented only within the funded period; two (Fruta Feia and Adopt an Olive Tree) continue beyond, or without, project funding (B); and none follow a consolidated trajectory (C). The post-funding phase is documented only for Fruta Feia. CAP-funded support is documented for three cases, and only one of them (Cultivar & Cooperar, under LEADER) involves a cooperation measure, so this study takes project-based public funding, not the CAP alone, as its object. The patterns are consistent with, but do not demonstrate, a role for such funding in institutional fragility. A provisional typology of cooperation trajectories is proposed, and conditions the CAP 2028–2034 proposal would need to meet are discussed.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111323

Authors: Anan Chen Yizhou Wu

Aligning regional innovation capability with territorial space use efficiency (TSUE) is important for regional sustainable development. Using data from 2010 to 2020, this study examines their spatiotemporal patterns and matching-type transitions in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration through entropy-weighted TOPSIS, a super-efficiency slacks-based measure (SBM) model incorporating undesirable outputs, and four-quadrant analysis. The results show that: (1) Both innovation capability and TSUE increased overall, but innovation disparities widened while efficiency disparities narrowed. (2) The composition of matching types shifted toward a predominance of high–high and innovation-lagging units. A core–periphery pattern was evident, with high–high units concentrated along the Pearl River Estuary and innovation-lagging units widespread in peripheral areas. (3) Matching types exhibited substantial persistence, alongside prominent transitions from low–low to innovation-lagging and from efficiency-lagging to high–high. High–high and innovation-lagging units showed particularly strong persistence, although some reversals also occurred. These findings support differentiated and locally adapted spatial governance: high–high areas should enhance spatial quality and innovation diffusion; innovation-lagging areas should strengthen innovation capability; efficiency-lagging areas should prioritize site-specific industrial-land regeneration and functional restructuring; and low–low areas should improve infrastructure and industrial conditions while gradually cultivating innovation capacity.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111321

Authors: Runchida Daoruang Watcharapoj Sapsanguanboon

This study examined how employees’ Inner Development Goals (IDGs) are associated with their perceptions of corporate sustainability performance (CSP) in Thai small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs, including micro enterprises), and whether this association runs indirectly through perceived organizational culture, corporate performance, or competitive advantage. Survey data from 720 SME employees in Bangkok were analyzed with covariance-based structural equation modeling, with IDGs modeled as a second-order construct of five dimensions. IDGs were positively associated with perceived organizational culture (β = 0.584), competitive advantage (β = 0.507), and, weakly, corporate performance (β = 0.160). Only organizational culture was consistently associated with perceived CSP (β = 0.271). The indirect association through culture (β = 0.159) remained significant with robust and bootstrap intervals, after removing overlapping items, with a multidimensional CSP specification, and after modeling common-method variance. However, its advantage over the competitive-advantage pathway disappeared when respondents giving uniform answers were excluded. The findings suggest organizational culture as a plausible, but not established, link between employees’ inner capacities and perceived sustainability practices. The cross-sectional, single-source design precludes causal and firm-level conclusions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111320

Authors: Jun-Yu Zhang Tong-Wei Gao Yi-Ming Tang Xiang Chen Xin-Run Sun Li-Juan Feng

Nanoplastic pollution is increasingly pervasive in marine environments, yet how their interfacial behavior modulates microbially biogeochemical function under saline conditions remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effects of aminated (PS-NH2) and sulfonated (PS-SO3H) polystyrene nanoplastics on the dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP)-catabolizing marine bacterium, Roseovarius nubinhibens. Both particles underwent pronounced aggregation and charge screening in the marine basal medium. At 5 mg/L, only PS-NH2 inhibited bacterial growth and increased oxidative stress. At their respective observed-effect concentrations (20 and 400 mg·L−1), both treatments induced comparable growth inhibition but contrasting membrane-permeability responses. Tightly bound extracellular polymeric substances (EPSs) exhibited more pronounced changes in composition and structure than loosely bound EPSs, with a greater aggregation-promoting effect on PS-NH2 than on PS-SO3H. DMSP conversion remained largely unchanged at 5 mg·L−1 but reduced modestly under PS-NH2 exposure and more markedly under PS-SO3H exposure at the respective observed-effect concentrations, accompanied by significant changes in the consumption of extracellular 3-methylmercaptopropionate (MMPA) and acrylate. Transcriptomic analysis identified 1167 and 1590 differentially expressed genes under PS-NH2 and PS-SO3H exposure, respectively, involving genes associated with sulfur oxidation, assimilatory sulfur reduction, cysteine metabolism, and redox processes. Together, these findings reveal distinct EPS responses alongside alterations in DMSP-related sulfur metabolism, highlighting the importance of considering both extracellular responses and microbial functional endpoints when assessing nanoplastic effects under saline conditions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111319

Authors: Thilina Ganganath Weerakoon Keshmin Senaratna Janis Zvirgzdins Ineta Geipele Sanda Lapuke Sulaksha Wimalasena Praseetha Cheriyam Veettil

Retrofitting heritage buildings promotes sustainable development by balancing decarbonisation with lifetime implications on cultural conservation, comfort, and resource efficiency. Existing data-driven techniques emphasise accuracy over conveying physical-consistency uncertainty, heritage limitations, and embedded operational-carbon trade-offs. This study introduces Adaptive Retrofit and Conservation for Heritage Energy Resilience (ARCHER), an explainable physics-guided deep learning framework that combines reduced-order physics lifecycle-carbon accounting, temporal representation, ensemble uncertainty, and constrained multi-objective optimisation. ARCHER translates dual-target forecasts into retrofit alternatives that are evaluated for moisture legacy impact cost and discomfort before recalculating Pareto solutions using the governing equations. In 8192 Sobol-sampled scenarios for one heritage building, ARCHER attained domain R2 values of 0.9986 for supplied energy and lifespan carbon. Although the Temporal Transformer had lower errors and ARCHER’s intervals remained undercalibrated, the uncertainty ranking lowered RMSE in the least-uncertain decile to 1.51 kWh m−2 year−1 and 15.40 kgCO2e m−2. Exact recalculation kept 42 Pareto optimum possibilities, whereas balanced solutions cut energy and lifetime carbon by 84.3% and 88.1%, respectively, compared to the no-action baseline. ARCHER promotes sustainable heritage decision support by integrating environmental performance, cultural compatibility, and risk screening.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111318

Authors: Murat Unanoglu

This study examines whether economy-level innovation intensity is associated with environmental action and whether that association differs across green outcomes and levels of adoption. Using harmonized World Bank Enterprise Survey indicators for 89 economies observed in 2023–2024, the analysis relates the prevalence of highly innovation-active firms to energy-management adoption and CO2 monitoring. The empirical strategy combines HC3-robust OLS, beta regression, MM-robust estimation, bootstrap inference, continent controls, leave-one-economy-out diagnostics, quantile regression, alternative innovation measures, and formal cross-outcome coefficient tests. Innovation intensity is positively associated with energy-management adoption, although precision varies across specifications. Construct robustness is strongest for process innovation and a standardized additive innovation index; product innovation is also significant in the macro-control sample, whereas R&D alone is not. Quantile point estimates are largest at the 25th conditional quantile, but a joint 5000-replication bootstrap yields only suggestive global evidence of heterogeneity (p = 0.077), with no pairwise differences significant under sign-based bootstrap inference. The clearest result is the Carbon-Monitoring Gap: the innovation slope is significantly weaker for CO2 monitoring than for energy management in the full sample, after outcome-specific continent adjustment, with standardized outcomes, after influential-case exclusion, and in every leave-one-economy-out re-estimation. The findings indicate that aggregate innovation intensity is associated more strongly with operational green practices than with carbon measurement, while the significant management-outcome interaction suggests that this outcome heterogeneity is not unique to innovation.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111317

Authors: Danica Radifković Filip Denda Ema Mandić Nejla Javorovac Ivana Katnic

EU accession requires candidate countries to adapt environmental legislation and institutions, but the implications for implementation and environmental outcomes remain uneven. This article examines that relationship in Montenegro, using Slovenia and Croatia as historical reference cases around accession. Documentary analysis is combined with descriptive comparisons of municipal waste generation, recycling and greenhouse gas emissions excluding land use, land-use change and forestry. For Montenegro, Eurostat’s estimates indicate a 7.3% increase in municipal waste generation per capita between 2019 and 2024 and a decrease in the recycling rate from 5.3% to 3.6%. All observations in Montenegro’s selected municipal waste series are estimated, and the precision of these changes could not be established from the published series. Greenhouse gas emissions decreased by approximately 1.0% between 2019 and 2022, with a partial reversal in the final year. Slovenia and Croatia recorded higher recycling rates alongside rising waste generation, while their emissions changed in different directions during the respective observation periods. Documentary evidence for Montenegro identifies difficulties in separate collection, infrastructure operation and the application of local rules. The documentary findings identify specific implementation problems, but their contribution to national indicator changes and the independent effect of EU conditionality remain unestablished. The findings contribute to sustainability assessment by distinguishing between formal reform, policy implementation and environmental outcomes, with particular attention to how collection and recycling services function.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111315

Authors: Olena Pavlova Kostiantyn Pavlov Iryna Skorokhod Nataliia Vdovenko Oksana Drebot Tetiana Larina Iryna Bashynska Sofiia Minenko Denys Spiesivtsev

Capital investment and the financial viability of agricultural producers are central to the economic pillar of sustainable agricultural development, yet regional evidence from verified administrative data remains limited. This study examines regional agricultural production performance in 20 Ukrainian oblasts over 2020–2025 using a balanced panel of 120 region-year observations. Performance is measured as the log geometric mean of five physical outputs: grain, oilseeds, milk, livestock liveweight for slaughter, and eggs. A pre-estimation data-consistency audit excluded agricultural land area and the number of agricultural producers, whose annual values were largely interpolated and strongly collinear. Fixed Effects estimates show that capital investment (β = 0.131, p < 0.001) and the share of profitable enterprises (β = 0.005, p < 0.05) are positively associated with production performance, while the 2022–2025 period is associated with an average conditional reduction of approximately 7.0%. Event-study estimates reveal a non-monotonic trajectory, with the largest reduction in 2024 (approximately −9.9%). The results remain stable under year fixed effects, Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, leave-one-regressor-out tests, cluster bootstrap intervals, dynamic specifications, structural-break validation, and placebo tests. The investment association also holds across alternative constructions of the composite indicator and in all macro-regions, whereas the association with financial viability is weaker, depends mainly on livestock outputs, and is absent in the central grain-producing oblasts. Because reverse causality cannot be excluded in this observational design, the estimates are interpreted as robust within-region associations rather than causal effects. The findings identify investment capacity as a robust correlate, and enterprise financial viability as a regionally conditioned correlate, of the economic-productive dimension of sustainable regional agricultural development and highlight data-quality auditing as a prerequisite for evidence-based policy.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111314

Authors: Tangwu Yang Jingyan Wang Yiqi Shao Pingyan Ge Dehua Zhao Dianpeng Li Shuqing An

sWe evaluated the diagnostic and predictive performance of the coupled General Ocean Turbulence Model–Framework for Aquatic Biogeochemical Models–Water Ecosystems Tool (GOTM–FABM–WET) in shallow Kun Cheng Lake, China. Monthly near-surface observations supported model calibration during 2021–2023 and out-of-sample ecological validation during 2024–2025. Model skill was assessed through one-at-a-time parameter screening, moment-independent Delta sensitivity analysis with sample-size convergence diagnostics, sequential multi-parameter calibration, and comparisons against statistical and nutrient mass-balance benchmarks. Water temperature calibration was strong (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, NSE = 0.933), although temperature observations were available only for 2021–2023. Dissolved oxygen (DO) exhibited modest validation skill (NSE = 0.290). Nitrogen parameter refinement improved correlation direction and simulated variability, yet the simulated seasonal TN peak remained five months earlier than observed. Total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and chlorophyll a (Chl-a) all retained negative validation NSE values. In particular, Chl-a calibration remained inadequate (calibration NSE = −0.405; validation NSE = −0.481), and its dedicated calibration stage retained the incoming seed parameters. Only 0.50–0.78% of evaluated candidates satisfied the cross-variable calibration guardrails. Temporally constant nutrient boundaries, coarse TP reporting resolution, and frequent numerical state repairs highlight key priorities for model improvement. Overall, the current evidence supports retrospective near-surface thermal diagnosis and conditional interpretation of broad seasonal DO patterns, whereas reliable nutrient and algal prediction will require time-varying inflow and nutrient chemistry, process-level field observations, and independent verification of seasonal timing and spatial representativeness.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111316

Authors: Aysun Yaralı Akkaya Canan Dural Tasouji

The sustainable development approach positions higher education institutions not only as structures that produce education and research, but also as actors of sustainable governance that drive social transformation. Within this framework, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) envisages the holistic integration of gender equality into institutional policies, while Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) have become one of the fundamental tools for sustainable institutional transformation in universities within the scope of the European Union’s research and innovation policies. However, empirical studies addressing whether GEPs produce concrete institutional transformation rather than symbolic compliance have been largely neglected outside EU countries. This study conceptualises feminist institutional transformation not as an immediate outcome of adopting a Gender Equality Plan, but as a contingent and potentially long-term process. The research adopts a mixed-methods design combining analytic autoethnography with descriptive quantitative analysis, drawing on the experiences of a researcher directly involved in the GEP preparation process, institutional documents, meeting records, administrative correspondence, and institutional data. The findings demonstrate that the GEP preparation process is more than a technical planning activity; it is a multi-actor transformation process shaped through institutional support, feminist coalitions, sex-disaggregated data production, institutional learning, and negotiations conducted through informal rules. By examining the GEP preparation process at a Turkish public university through the combined lenses of analytic autoethnography and feminist institutionalism, this study offers an empirical and theoretical contribution to the international literature on the institutionalisation of gender equality policies in higher education.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111313

Authors: Kati Koivunen Sanna-Mari Renfors

This article examines how regenerative, place-based tourism innovation emerges in response to socio-ecological disruption in the Teno River Valley, an Arctic river destination in northern Finland. It focuses on an early-stage pink salmon tourism pilot developed after the decline of Atlantic salmon stocks, tightening fishing restrictions, and the increasing presence of pink salmon. Drawing on a qualitative single-case study based on two interviews with central actors and documentary materials associated with the pilot, complemented by contextual media materials, the article identifies three interrelated processes. First, disruption exposed ecological, economic, cultural and social interdependencies surrounding salmon, livelihoods, food practices, and community wellbeing. Second, the innovation developed through cross-actor collaboration, trusted local actors, legitimacy formation, and partial enactment by a local entrepreneur. Third, pink salmon became a nodal element through which value could circulate across ecological management, guest participation, hospitality, food provision, and community care. The article shows how pink salmon, initially framed as an ecological problem, was reworked into a place-based tourism innovation that connected invasive species removal, guest participation, local food provision and support for older residents. The findings demonstrate regenerative intent and emerging practices, while the longer-term SES outcomes remain to be assessed. The article highlights the importance of understanding value circulation within the SES in which tourism is embedded and incorporating impact monitoring into regenerative tourism innovation planning to assess ecological, economic, cultural, and social effects over time.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111312

Authors: Hui Li Min Zhou Simin Wang

This study develops a multi-objective fuzzy programming model (MOFPM) that integrates water-footprint accounting with fuzzy chance-constrained programming for multi-objective optimization. It sets differentiated constraints for green-blue-grey water-footprint components and adds fuzzy chance-constraints for crop-trade net benefit and virtual-water outflow loss, which simultaneously addresses uncertainties from both credibility parameters and decision-makers’ conflicting objective preferences. The model aims to maximize economic benefits and agricultural water productivity and minimize agricultural grey-water footprint under food-security restrictions. This optimization framework was applied to the Hanjiang River Basin, China. Under credibility levels γ ranging from 0.55 to 0.95, modelling outputs identify rice as the priority crop for expansion, while wheat and maize acreage should be largely reduced across most sub-basins. Relative to the baseline, crop economic benefits increase by 29–39%, water productivity improves by 10–11% (rising from 1.30kg/m3 to 1.43–1.45kg/m3), basin-scale blue water footprint declines by 10.4%, and grey water footprint falls by 11–15%. Spatially, green and blue water footprints rise in central-southern zones whereas grey water footprint decreases in the northwest; water-footprint losses induced by inter-regional crop trade are substantially reduced. Four decision-weight scenarios further verify that optimized schemes can achieve the system-wide economic, water-productivity and pollution-control targets. This study helps to adjust crop planting patterns and advance sustainable agricultural water management.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111296

Authors: Pouya Taraghi Ritish Pentapalli Caleb Kerschbaumer Fadil Mustafa Hossein Daneshvar

The global housing crisis reflects a persistent imbalance between supply and demand, intensified by restrictive land-use regulations, housing financialization, and zoning practices that constrain incremental densification. Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) provide a sustainable pathway for infill housing by reusing existing serviced land and infrastructure, supporting United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, while offering homeowners an affordable route to additional rental income. However, implementation remains constrained by complex regulations and a lack of integrated feasibility tools. This study develops a two-stage data-driven framework: Stage 1 integrates regulatory, geometric, and image-based constraints, including a YOLOv8n-cls roof-type classifier, for automated parcel-level screening; Stage 2 evaluates construction costs and financial performance for detached ADUs built above an existing garage using light wood frame (LWF) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction. In Edmonton, Canada, Stage 1 screens 296,749 parcels and identifies 8691 flat-roof detached garages, of which 7925 are located in permitted zones and considered in Stage 2, comprising 1619 single and 6306 double garages. Under optimistic assumptions, LWF achieves payback periods of 4.8–5.0 years compared with 6.1–6.7 years for CLT. Under conservative assumptions, these increase to 15.7–16.3 and 19.0–20.8 years, respectively, as undiscounted values extrapolate beyond the 10-year analysis horizon, with construction cost and rental income being the principal factors affecting payback. Full-cost homeowner financing remains positive under optimistic conditions but turns slightly negative for CLT Configuration B under conservative conditions. The framework unifies parcel-level screening with preliminary cost and financial assessment, providing a basis for identifying affordable infill housing opportunities and supporting sustainable urban densification.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111310

Authors: Yongbing Yu Shaoquan Yang Yanwu Chen

Regional-scale ecosystem service surpluses may mask expanding local deficits in rapidly urbanizing areas, weakening targeted ecological management in the basin. Taking the Pearl River Basin as a case study, we integrated the InVEST model, the ecosystem service supply–demand ratio (ESDR), an MLP-XGBoost weighted ensemble optimized with the black-winged kite algorithm (BKA), SHAP analysis, and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering to characterize changes in the supply and demand of water yield, carbon storage, soil conservation, and habitat quality, their contrasting drivers, and ecological functional zoning across the basin from 2000 to 2020. Water-yield and soil-conservation supply increased by 3.75% and 3.03%, respectively, with the northeastern and eastern parts of the basin as the common growth areas. Carbon storage and habitat quality supply decreased by 1.28% and 4.30%, respectively, with marked declines in the mountainous northwest and urban southeast. Carbon-storage demand increased by 245.45%, the largest demand-side increase among the four services, and southeastern cities were the principal areas of growth. Although the basin-wide mean ESDRs of all four services remained positive, those for carbon storage, habitat quality, and water yield declined overall or during specific periods. The water-yield ESDR decreased from 0.162 to 0.078, the carbon-storage ESDR from 0.303 to 0.090, and the habitat-quality ESDR from 0.555 to 0.503, whereas the soil-conservation ESDR increased from 0.015 to 0.02. Local deficits were concentrated in the Foshan–Guangzhou metropolitan area and around the urban nodes of Nanning, Liuzhou, and Guilin. The MLP-XGBoost weighted ensemble outperformed the individual models, with greater predictive accuracy and generalizability. Its test-set R2 values ranged from 0.211 to 0.737, with the highest predictive performance for water yield. SHAP analysis showed that precipitation was the dominant predictor of the water-yield ESDR, slope and precipitation jointly influenced the soil conservation ESDR, for carbon storage, the dominant controls shifted from vegetation alone to a combination of vegetation, population, and economic activity, and habitat quality was jointly influenced by population, vegetation, elevation, temperature, and road disturbance. Both the GMM and the Bayesian Gaussian mixture model (BGMM) were used to identify service types. Based on clustering performance and stability, we adopted the GMM to divide the basin into five functional zones, namely the Integrated Conservation Zone, the Key Soil and Water Conservation Zone, the Carbon–Water Regulation and Habitat Restoration Zone, the Integrated Enhancement Zone, and the Priority Restoration Zone. This study demonstrates that integrating spatiotemporal dynamics of ecosystem service supply and demand with explainable machine learning and stable clustering enables the identification of localized risks masked by regional average surpluses. These findings reveal heterogeneous governance needs, providing a scientific basis for ecological functional zoning and territorial spatial planning in the Pearl River Basin.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111306

Authors: Coeurine Nindamutsa Mumtaz Ali Mehdi Seraj Turgut Tursoy

Gender development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains influenced by financial, labor market, and institutional conditions that vary across countries. This study examines the relationships of digital financial inclusion (DFI) and female economic participation (FEP) with gender development (GD), focusing on the moderating role of institutional quality (IQI). Using panel data for 15 SSA economies over 2015–2024, the study constructs composite DFI and IQI indices using principal component analysis (PCA) and employs Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) to investigate heterogeneity across the conditional distribution of GD. Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS), Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression (IVQR), and Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimators are additionally used to assess the robustness and sensitivity to potential endogeneity. The MMQR results indicate that DFI and FEP are positively and significantly associated with GD across the baseline conditional quantiles. Economic development and trade openness also exhibit positive association, whereas urbanization is generally negative and its statistical significance varies across specifications. IQI is generally positively associated with GD, although its statistical significance varies across the models and quantiles. The moderating results of DFI×IQI and FEP×IQI interaction terms are heterogeneous across the models and quantiles. The findings highlight the relevance of digital financial inclusion and female economic participation for gender development, while indicating that institutional quality conditions these relationships differently across the distribution of gender development. The findings provide insightful policy recommendations to 15 SSA economies.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111311

Authors: Zhi Pei Ruiliang Yan

Inflation compresses the margins that finance digital coupon programs on e-commerce platforms. This study examines how inflation affects coupon governance in a decentralized manufacturer–e-tailer supply chain and what the allocation of promotional authority implies for the chain’s economic sustainability, measured by channel profit, efficiency relative to an integrated benchmark, promotional cost per unit sold, consumer surplus, and the inflation rate at which each firm can still cover its fixed costs. A Stackelberg model compares manufacturer-funded coupons, e-tailer-funded coupons, cooperative cost sharing, and independent dual coupons enabled by platform stacking. Inflation lowers coupon values and both firms’ profits across all regimes, whereas its effect on posted retail prices depends on coupon effectiveness. In the model, e-tailer funding outperforms manufacturer funding because the party that pays for the coupon also captures the higher retail margin that the coupon supports. Cost sharing raises coupon intensity but lowers channel profit, leaving the e-tailer worse off than under either single-funder regime, making it the regime in which the e-tailer becomes unviable first. Dual coupons yield the highest decentralized profits, but the advantage reflects the division of promotional effort between issuers with separate redemption costs; it shrinks as redemption pools overlap or the two coupons become substitutes, and vanishes when stacking is restricted. Proportional advantages between regimes narrow with inflation only when inflation also raises consumers’ price sensitivity.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111300

Authors: Chao Cheng Jinlin Zhang

China tests sustainability policies, from low-carbon and sponge cities to new-energy-vehicle promotion, in city pilot programmes, and their effects are usually estimated one programme at a time with staggered difference-in-differences (DID) designs. The programmes, however, overlap. Of 297 cities, 169 hosted two or more of ten national programmes by 2022, and 75–95% of each programme’s treated city-years overlapped with another. Monte Carlo simulations calibrated to city PM2.5, with known effects for every programme, show that this overlap contaminates DID evaluations. When each co-located programme is as effective as the focal one, two-way fixed effects, event-study and heterogeneity-robust estimators overstate the focal effect by a median 78–139%. A programme with no effect is found significant in 11–22% of simulated evaluations when co-located effects are small (0.6%), and in 71–100% in a stress test that sets each to the median of three verifiable published estimates (−3.45%). Adding dummies for the other programmes, the usual robustness check, reverses the bias, and pretrend tests rarely detect the problem. Because the contamination is a weighted sum of the other programmes’ effects, with weights fixed by the treatment pattern, these weights can be computed before outcome data are examined; we provide code and a checklist for evaluations of sustainability policies.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111309

Authors: Zhihan Liu Shiliang Wang Chenglin Wang

Climate warming and demographic change pose interconnected challenges to urban sustainability, particularly for older adults and children who may face limited access to urban parks and elevated summer land surface temperatures. However, existing studies often examine park accessibility and thermal conditions separately, providing limited understanding of the fine-scale spatial mismatches among park accessibility, population distribution, and surface temperature across these two age groups. From a climate justice and urban sustainability perspective, this study develops a three-dimensional spatial screening framework integrating these dimensions, using the main urban area of Hefei, China, as a case study. Based on road-network data, WorldPop gridded population data, and MODIS/Terra MOD11A2 land surface temperature (LST) data for July 2024, park accessibility for older adults and children was assessed using the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method. Bivariate local indicators of spatial association (Bi-LISA) were employed to identify local accessibility–population associations, which were subsequently overlaid with high-LST hotspots to delineate dual-vulnerability zones. The results indicate that: (1) pronounced inequality exists in modeled park accessibility, with population-weighted Gini coefficients based on normalized accessibility scores of 0.988 for children and 0.875 for older adults; (2) LH-type clusters, characterized by low accessibility at focal grid cells associated with high population density in neighboring cells, are concentrated in the old city core for both groups; and (3) dual-vulnerability zones account for 7.5% of the study area’s mapped area for older adults and 6.6% for children. These percentages represent area-based shares rather than population-based heat-exposure rates. Shared-risk areas are concentrated in the urban core, whereas age-specific risk areas are more fragmented along the periphery. By linking intergenerational equity in green-infrastructure accessibility with the spatial targeting of heat-adaptation interventions, this framework provides empirical evidence to support equitable green-infrastructure provision, age-inclusive climate adaptation, and more inclusive, climate-resilient, and sustainable urban development.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111305

Authors: Xiaoyu Zhao Yatao Zhang Guodaohou Song Feiyang Li

As an important component of rural revitalization and the green transformation of agriculture, the effectiveness of agricultural pollution control depends on the efficient mobilization and use of rural financial resources. Using a balanced panel of 31 Chinese provinces over 2011–2024, this study employs a two-way fixed effects model, a shift-share instrumental variable strategy, a mediation analysis and a panel threshold model to examine how digital inclusive finance affects agricultural pollution emission intensity. Three findings stand out. First, digital inclusive finance significantly reduces pollution emission intensity, with a 1% increase in the digital inclusive finance index lowering emission intensity by about 0.286%. Second, the effect operates partly through an indirect channel: digital inclusive finance fosters new quality agricultural productive forces, which in turn curb pollution, and the indirect effect is estimated with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals. Third, the relationship is non-linear and follows a double-threshold pattern of increasing marginal returns. Agricultural economic scale, cropping structure and livestock structure are positively associated with pollution, as are environmental regulation and production conditions, whereas a more capable agricultural workforce and a larger stock of agricultural business entities reduce pollution. The study’s novelty lies in formally introducing agricultural new quality productive forces as a mediating mechanism linking digital inclusive finance to agricultural pollution control and in documenting its threshold-shaped, increasingly pronounced effect.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111307

Authors: Erastus Mak-Mensah Peter Bilson Obour Abdul-Rauf Malimanga Alhassan Eric Kwabena Droepenu Alessia Corami Shadrack Fosu Tobias Takawira Shumba

Converting agricultural residues into adsorbents provides a potential strategy for waste valorization and water-pollution control. This systematic review evaluated lead (Pb) and cadmium (Cd) removal using rice husk-, sugarcane bagasse-, and coconut shell-derived adsorbents and examined the implications for sustainable water treatment. Searches of Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and Google Scholar identified 1672 records published between 2006 and 2026, of which 86 studies met the final inclusion criteria. These studies yielded 602 extracted records and 324 dependence-reduced study–adsorbent–metal analytical units. Adsorption performance was summarized descriptively, coupled with reporting assessment and exploratory non-parametric comparisons. Median equilibrium adsorption capacity (qe), model-derived maximum adsorption capacity (qmax), and removal efficiency were 25.89 mg/g, 38.22 mg/g, and 85.22%, respectively. Median adsorption capacities were higher for Pb than for Cd, with exploratory differences in qe (BH-adjusted p = 0.008) and qmax (p < 0.001), but not removal efficiency (p = 0.220). Precursor groups differed in qe (p < 0.001), but not qmax (p = 0.168) or removal efficiency (p = 0.951). Most studies used synthetic waters, with limited reporting of analytical quality control and uncertainty. Numeric regeneration cycle entries were available in only 3.4% of analytical units. Experimental heterogeneity and residual within-study dependence further constrained direct comparisons. Although agricultural residue-derived adsorbents show potential for Pb and Cd removal, establishing their sustainability advantages requires evaluation of real-water performance, production inputs, regeneration, safe management of exhausted adsorbents, and life cycle and techno-economic impacts.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111303

Authors: Esraa Mohamed Sayed Hussein Abdelgalil Ibrahim Abouelsaad Emad Aboukila

Organic by-products are widely used as sustainable amendments to enhance vegetable productivity while reducing the environmental impact of farming practices. Owing to its high nutritional value, cauliflower (Brassica oleracea L. var. botrytis, cv. El-Soultani) was selected for this study to examine the effects of oyster mushroom compost tea (OMCT), as an organic by-product, on its growth and development. Cauliflower plantlets were cultivated under open-field conditions and sprayed with different dilutions of OMCT three times at 15-day intervals after transplanting. The dilutions included 1 L of OMCT-B mixed with varying amounts of water (50, 100, 150, and 200 L) and the plants sprayed with tap water only served as the control treatment. The results demonstrated that foliar application of OMCT significantly enhanced all evaluated parameters, exhibiting a progressive yet nonlinear concentration response pattern (p < 0.01), with the strongest responses consistently observed at the A3 dilution. Under open-field conditions, treatment 1: 100 dilution (A3) produced the highest average curd weight in both growing seasons. Consequently, total yield increased by 137.03% in the 2023 growing season and by 117.41% in the 2024 growing season compared with the untreated control. These findings indicate that the A3 was the most promising OMCT-B treatment for enhancing cauliflower curd yield and overall productivity under the conditions of the present study. The beneficial effect of OMCT on nutrient availability and nitrogen metabolism may be partly attributed to the organic substances present in OMCT. These substances interact with plant nutrients in complex ways, serving multiple functions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111304

Authors: Bo Wang Liang Wu Yanshi Ma

Carbon regulation may not reduce total supply chain emissions if buyers shift carbon-intensive activities upstream. Drawing on Resource Dependence Theory (RDT), this study examines how supplier dependence on buyers relates to carbon intensity across buyer–supplier relationships and how buyers’ supply network positions moderate this relationship. Using a sample of Chinese buyer–supplier pairs from 2012 to 2023, we construct annual supply networks based on observed buyer–supplier relationships. The results show that greater supplier dependence is associated with higher supplier carbon intensity, lower buyer carbon intensity, and higher supplier carbon intensity relative to buyers, suggesting a potential pattern of upstream carbon leakage. Furthermore, the positive relationship between supplier dependence and supplier carbon intensity is strengthened by buyers’ supply network flow control but weakened by their supply network prominence. These associations remain broadly consistent across alternative variable measures and additional analyses examining potential endogeneity and selection bias. By linking supplier dependence, network structure, and carbon leakage, this study offers a micro-level relational perspective on supply chain environmental governance. The findings offer implications for managers and policymakers seeking to mitigate upstream carbon leakage and improve the environmental sustainability of supply chains.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111308

Authors: Marian Pompiliu Cristescu

Citizen-reporting records describe administrative outcomes, but their ability to support operational decisions depends on how those outcomes were produced. FixMyStreet Brussels and New York City’s non-emergency service-request system (NYC 311) were examined through endpoint auditing, censored lifecycle analysis, controlled queue reconstruction and temporally separated prioritization probes. The Brussels export contained 618,694 unique requests. A count-verified NYC extraction restored complete 2023–2025 coverage for four agencies and retained observable inherited cases. Closed-status records without usable closure times were excluded from primary estimation. Brussels administrative units differed substantially in 90-day closure probability and restricted mean open time. Observed Brussels 2023 P50, P90 and P95 closure ages were 7, 261 and 521 days. Restricted-source empty-queue first-in, first-out (FIFO) produced 32, 74 and 99 days. Complete initialization reproduced accounting throughput while overstating lifecycle quantiles. Frozen-rule comparisons were unstable across years, initial conditions and population definitions. In NYC 2025, the lower closed-case P95 point estimate was uncertain, while mature-arrival long-wait burden increased. These conditional results support explicit evidence boundaries for institutional sustainability. Administrative closure records remain informative, but the tested replay does not establish operational capacity, causal policy effects or demographic equity.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111293

Authors: Osamu Watanabe Kento Mio Taijiro Fukuyama

The soil temperature controls soil biological activity, carbon and nutrient cycling, and plant regeneration in mountain forests, so its spatial distribution is needed for the sustainable management of forest soils under a changing climate; however, high-elevation monitoring is costly and scarce. This study evaluated whether the daily mean near-surface (2–7 cm) soil temperature in the snow-free season can be predicted from the air temperature alone, enabling low-cost monitoring from freely available data. A random forest model driven by the current and lagged (0–7 d) daily mean air temperature was trained on snow-free season (May–November) observations from 15 measurement points (11 in a single stand) at five forested sites in Nagano Prefecture, Central Japan (914–2082 m, 2017–2025). The pooled grouped cross-validation RMSE was 1.01–1.05 °C (R2 = 0.955–0.958), and the site-level RMSE was 1.07–1.53 °C when whole sites were withheld. Replacing the observed air temperature with nationwide 1 km gridded data (Agro-Meteorological Grid Square Data) increased the cross-site RMSE only from 1.05 to 1.18 °C. Lapse rate adjustment barely improved the accuracy, indicating that elevation also represents snow, canopy, and radiation effects. Demonstration maps of the snow-free season produced with a 10 m digital elevation model remain unvalidated away from the monitoring points. The approach could provide a resource-efficient basis for soil thermal monitoring to support sustainable forest management and climate change adaptation in mountain regions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111302

Authors: Ruihan Ju Mingli Xie Lingduo Kou

Alpine gorge areas are typical regions where ecological fragility and geological hazard risk overlap strongly. Existing eco-geological assessments remain largely single- or dual-dimensional: remotely sensed indices describe surface status, ecosystem-service indices describe functional supply, and geological models are usually applied separately from ecological assessment, so each approach misses the information carried by the others. To close this gap, this study proposes a three-dimensional coupling framework for Eco-Geological Environment Carrying Capacity (EGECC) that integrates the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI), the Ecosystem Services Index (ESI) and the Geological Environmental Carrying Capacity (GECC), and applies it in Lixian County, Sichuan Province. The three indices were coupled at pixel level, and their coupling and vertical differentiation were analysed along an altitudinal gradient. Three findings are highlighted. (1) RSEI and ESI are only moderately correlated, and their altitudinal peaks are separated, so neither can substitute for the other. (2) GECC contributes the largest share of the variation in EGECC, indicating that the geological dimension carries information that is not a linear combination of the two ecological dimensions. (3) Consequently, the geological dimension cannot be reproduced from the ecological ones: degrading the framework to RSEI + ESI places part of the area in a lower class that the two-dimensional scheme would label as safe. A five-tier management strategy is outlined accordingly. The study provides a transferable basis for eco-geological zoning in alpine gorge counties.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111301

Authors: Mi-Young An

The long-term inclusion of migrant-background youth can be framed, following the social-sustainability literature, as part of the social pillar of sustainability and of the Sustainable Development Goals on inclusive quality education (SDG 4) and reduced inequalities (SDG 10), yet the relational resources surrounding these young people have rarely been modelled at the individual level over more than a few years. This theory-guided descriptive study fits multilevel linear growth models to the 12 released waves (waves 1–10, 12, and 14; 2011–2024) of the first-cohort Multicultural Adolescents Panel Study of the Korean National Youth Policy Institute, following 1635 children of multicultural families from the fourth grade of elementary school in 2011, of whom 892 (54.6%) provided a valid composite at the final released wave; model-specific person-wave observations range from 6593 to 12,237. Six constructs are modelled as seven measurement series, because the self-esteem instrument was replaced in 2017 with no overlap wave; each series is analysed strictly within its own window: perceived peer support, teacher support, and acculturative stress from late elementary school to the final year of middle school (2011–2016); bicultural acceptance and family support from late elementary school to the final year of high school (2011–2019); and self-esteem as two separate series (2011–2016; 2017–2024). Across late elementary and middle school, perceived peer and teacher support rose—peer support fastest, with growth concentrated before the middle-school years and a reversal in the final middle-school year—while acculturative stress declined. Family support, observed through the end of high school, showed no robust directional change, and an equivalence test bounds any change below the magnitude of the acculturative-stress decline, the smallest trend interpreted substantively. Individuals differed reliably in their rates of change on every construct, and bivariate latent growth models show that those rates covaried within persons: young people with larger estimated gains in school-based support also tended to show larger gains in self-esteem and larger decreases in acculturative stress. The between-person spread of perceived school-based support narrowed across waves, although regression to the mean cautions against a strong compensatory reading. The direction of every trend was unchanged under person fixed effects and inverse-probability-of-retention weighting, and re-estimation from the item subset common to all waves yielded larger, not smaller, school-based support increases; a reliability audit established that the post-2017 self-esteem instrument requires reverse-scoring of its four negatively worded items; under the released, unreversed scoring, the resulting composite has effectively no internal consistency. The design is observational and no causal inference is warranted, but the results give an individual-level baseline, bounded by each construct’s measurement window, for monitoring the relational resources of migrant-background youth as a candidate social-sustainability indicator under SDG 4 and SDG 10, a possible application rather than a validated indicator framework.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111295

Authors: Rodrigo Fiorotti Adryanne Fazolo Nardoto Araujo Helder Roberto de Oliveira Rocha Carlos Roberto Coutinho Lucas Freire Santos Azeredo Jussara Farias Fardin

Thermostatically controlled appliances are major electricity consumers in residential buildings, yet conventional home energy management systems (HEMSs) often model them as fixed-power loads, neglecting thermal dynamics. This paper presents a multi-objective HEMS that integrates the NSGA-III evolutionary algorithm with physics-based thermal models, data-driven meteorological forecasting, and electric vehicle smart charging (unidirectional, grid-to-vehicle) considering battery degradation. Air-conditioning demand is estimated using a resistance—the capacitance thermal model of the room, while tankless water-heater demand is calculated from the required temperature rise. Both models are driven by weather forecasts generated using a stacking ensemble of three deep learning models. User preferences are represented through a comfort matrix, while rooftop photovoltaic (PV) generation and hourly grid carbon emission factors are incorporated. The HEMS simultaneously minimizes daily electricity cost and CO2 emissions while maximizing user comfort over a 24 h horizon under two time-of-use tariff schemes. The results show that under the Brazilian White Tariff, the knee-point solution reduces the daily electricity cost by 27.1% and the emissions by 28.3% with respect to a non-optimized household while keeping 90.2% of the theoretical maximum comfort; within the Pareto front, the minimum-cost solution costs 22.2% less than the maximum-comfort schedule. The minimum-emission solution reduces emissions to about 1.09 kgCO2eq/day, and PV self-consumption rises from 50.7% to 94.0%, while grid import in the peak tariff block falls by 67%.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111299

Authors: Chang Zhang Xue Wu Yaxing Li Jianyu Liu Hao Lan Jinglun Xu Pingjie Huang

Coastal reclamation ecological restoration is critical for mitigating nearshore ecosystem degradation; however, achieving robust ecological assessment and effectively improving ecological health remain challenging for governance and sustainable development. This research develops an integrated framework based on two-step fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (two-step fsQCA) that combines ecological assessment with pathway identification to address this issue under small-sample conditions. The framework includes: (i) constructing a tailored ecological health indicator framework; (ii) determining weights via a combined model selected by the Weighted Average of Mutual Information Redundancy (WAMIR) index; (iii) measuring health status and introducing the Rank Sum Ratio (RSR) for objective grading; and (iv) employing two-step fsQCA to identify configurational pathways. The framework was validated using time-series data from Laizhou Bay (1980–2019) and cross-sectional data from 14 functional zones in Zhejiang Province, China. Results show that, compared to previous approaches, the proposed framework can provide a robust ecological health assessment under small-sample conditions and effectively capture the hierarchical combinatorial causality between conditions and outcomes, offering a practical reference for assessment and differentiated management in coastal reclamation areas.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111298

Authors: Jianfeng Jia Le Cheng Penghui Wen Xuegang Zhang Haiyan Li Chaohui Wang

To promote the large-scale recycling of reclaimed inorganic aggregates (RAI) generated from highway reconstruction projects, the effects of RAI content, reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) incorporation, RAI pretreatment, standing time, curing temperature, and curing mode on the performance of cold central plant recycled cement-stabilized gravel (CCSG) were investigated in this study. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to characterize microstructural changes. Increasing RAI content from 0% to 90% increased the optimum moisture content but slightly reduced the maximum dry density. Without RAP incorporation, the 7-day unconfined compressive strength (UCS), elastic modulus, and splitting tensile strength (STS) decreased by 30.34%, 21.29%, and 25.46%, respectively. Abrasion pretreatment and pozzolanic slurry strengthening improved mechanical performance. Compared with untreated CCSG, the latter increased the 28-day UCS, elastic modulus, and STS by 63.67%, 37.27%, and 64.77%, respectively. A 4-h standing period reduced the 7-day UCS and elastic modulus by 15.8% and 13.9%, respectively, while lowering the curing temperature from 20 °C to 5 °C reduced them by 26.9% and 18.8%, respectively. Abrasion pretreatment modified the surface morphology of RAI, whereas pozzolanic slurry strengthening formed a more continuous surface strengthening layer and denser bonding zones. These findings clarify the effects of RAI content, pretreatment, and preparation and curing parameters on the mechanical performance of CCSG.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111297

Authors: Alina Șimon Paula Ioana Moraru Camelia Urdă Felicia Chețan Alin Popa Teodor Rusu Ileana Bogdan Adrian Ioan Pop

Cereal cultivation is influenced by the interaction among genotype, climatic conditions, and cultivation technology—factors that determine yield level, yield stability, and grain quality. In the context of climatic variability, identifying efficient and sustainable cultivation strategies is a priority for modern agriculture. This study aimed to investigate the effects of sowing date, maize genotype, and growing-season environmental conditions on the stability and quality of maize yield in a soybean–wheat–maize crop rotation. A field experiment spanning five consecutive growing seasons (2021–2025) was conducted at the Agricultural Research and Development Station Turda, Romania, using 11 early and semi-early maize hybrids. Three sowing dates were established according to soil temperature: 6 °C (E I), 8 °C (E II), and 10 °C (E III). Analysis of variance indicated that year, sowing date and their interaction (Y × S) exerted highly significant effects on grain yield and all quality traits (p < 0.001), highlighting the substantial influence of interannual environmental variability. Yield generally increased with higher soil temperature at sowing, with E III showing favorable productivity and comparatively stable performance across environments. Sowing at 10 °C also generally favored protein and oil accumulation, whereas fiber content showed no consistent response among years. Overall, the results demonstrate that sowing time should be assessed together with seasonal climatic conditions to support stable maize yield and grain quality under variable environments.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111294

Authors: Weihang Zhang Yajun Shi Xian Wu Zhenlin Wang Wei Wu Xuejun Xiong Yinhang Xu Qitao Pei Zheng Fang

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) contribute approximately 5% of global non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, driving an urgent need for robust assessment methodologies to guide their transition from pollution control toward low-carbon resource recovery. This review provides a comprehensive examination of WWTP green and low-carbon assessment methodologies, indicator systems, and decision support frameworks, based on a systematic literature review of 150 peer-reviewed articles. Carbon accounting methods span from emission factor approaches—widely used but limited by parameter localization issues—to direct measurement, mass balance, modeling, and life cycle assessment. Indicator systems have evolved from single carbon footprint metrics to multi-dimensional frameworks encompassing environmental, economic, technical, and social dimensions, though social indicators remain underdeveloped. Data-driven methods—including machine learning, soft sensing, and digital twins—are enabling real-time emission prediction and process optimization, but they face persistent challenges in data quality, model interpretability, cross-plant generalization, and data privacy. Despite these advances, the field remains fragmented: carbon accounting, indicator development, and data-driven modeling communities largely operate in isolation, and policy frameworks often lack methodological grounding. To address this, the review proposes an integrated “assessment–diagnosis–optimization” framework that links evaluation results to actionable decisions. Key priorities include standardized frameworks, dynamic assessment, hybrid mechanistic data-driven models, privacy-preserving data sharing, and validation against full-scale operational data. A comparative analysis of MCDM applications is presented, and the suitability of each method for different decision-making contexts is discussed. Moving beyond fragmented approaches toward integrated frameworks is essential for transforming WWTPs into carbon-neutral, climate-smart infrastructures.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111292

Authors: Matilda Todesco Mauro Masiero

Wildfires are a key ecological factor shaping many of the world’s ecosystems, including Mediterranean ones. However, recent shifts in fire regimes driven by a combination of climate change, demographic and socioeconomic factors are increasing the risk of high-severity wildfires, posing severe threats to protected areas, including Natura 2000 sites. In Italy, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, these challenges are particularly relevant. We used spatial data to analyze wildfire trends in Italy between 2008 and 2023, with a focus on Natura 2000 sites. We also assessed the economic impacts associated with them through a benefit transfer exercise. Natura 2000 sites account for approximately 30% of the total burned area recorded in Italy over the study period, corresponding to estimated economic losses of ecosystem services foregone ranging from €135.14 million to €186.45 million (i.e., €8.4–11.6 million year−1). At the sub-national scale, these losses may amount to nearly 40% of annual operating expenditures for Natura 2000 management in fire-prone regions like Sicily, highlighting the substantial financial implications of wildfire occurrence in protected areas. Findings can inform future management and policymaking choices in the context of ongoing conservation challenges and the nature restoration targets set by both European and national policies.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111290

Authors: Ping Li Chao Liu Hao Kong Xuexia Wang Peng Xu

Blue carbon finance is constrained by unreliable ecological data, information asymmetry, and high compliance demands. This study develops an ecological–financial governance interface within a conceptual six-layer blockchain architecture for blue carbon finance. The design combines versioned on-chain and off-chain records with a multi-party signature approval workflow and five contract modules. It is intended to support traceable hand-offs among ecological monitoring, methodology-governed accounting, MRV, credit-state management, and financial risk review. The contribution is a defined sequence from versioned ecological evidence to accounting review, credit-state records and authorised financial decisions. A synthetic worked example makes these decision rules explicit while retaining independent MRV and registry authority.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111289

Authors: Chen Pan Jiaming Guo Jun Yang Junming Chen

Urban street-view imagery provides a scalable basis for examining visible environmental conditions relevant to human-centered sustainability. This study combines SegFormer-B5 semantic segmentation, six ResNet-50 classifiers trained using Place Pulse 2.0 annotations, spatial autocorrelation, XGBoost–SHAP, and Grad-CAM to analyze 20,256 images from 5064 sampling locations in the Macau Peninsula. We derived four objective visual indicators from the segmentation results. The mean classification accuracy across the six perception classifiers was 73.70% in the source-domain validation. The image-derived indicators and model-predicted scene categories exhibit significant spatial clustering, including global Moran’s I values of 0.673 for the Boring score and 0.637 for the Green View Index. XGBoost–SHAP further identifies nonlinear associations between 19 semantic scene components and the six model-predicted perception scores, while Grad-CAM visualizes the image regions that contribute to individual predictions. The integrated framework links streetscape measurement, spatial diagnosis, and model interpretation to support systematic identification of streets requiring detailed urban-design assessment and locally informed renewal planning.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111291

Authors: Xubin Wu Tao Chen Yurun Chen Guoqiang Wu Qiliang Yang Xuewei Zhang Liqiang Xie

Precipitation on remote offshore islands is characterized by non-stationarity and strong stochasticity. However, rainwater harvesting systems require accurate precipitation forecasts to ensure effective water storage and discharge and a stable freshwater supply. Here, we propose an intelligent framework integrating precipitation signal decomposition, a hybrid neural network for predicting daily precipitation over the next 30 days, and digital twin technology to optimize water storage and discharge strategies for rainwater collection pools. For signal preprocessing, variational mode decomposition decomposes the original daily precipitation series into multiple intrinsic mode functions, a chaotic sparrow search optimization algorithm performs global parameter optimization, and singular spectrum analysis is applied twice to denoise high-frequency mode components. The hybrid prediction model combines a convolutional neural network to extract local temporal features, bidirectional long short-term memory to capture bidirectional long-term dependencies, and a multilayer perceptron for nonlinear mapping and regression output. Finally, this model is integrated into a digital-twin-enabled decision framework to automatically implement water storage control through water balance calculations and threshold comparisons. The proposed method achieves a test mean absolute error of 2.49 mm, a root mean square error of 5.72 mm, and an R2 of 0.83; digital twin control significantly reduces overflow losses and, during typical typhoon months, maintains the water level in the rainwater collection pool below the warning threshold. In summary, we present a simulation-based pathway for optimizing small-scale intelligent rainwater harvesting systems, which offers a practical pathway to enhance the sustainability of freshwater resources on remote offshore islands by improving the efficiency of rainwater utilization and reducing dependence on external water supplies.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111285

Authors: Özgür Çark Serdar Çakan Niyazi Gümüş

Autonomous vehicles are expected to support safer, more efficient, and potentially more sustainable mobility systems, yet their widespread adoption depends strongly on user acceptance. This study examines how perceived risk, perceived ease of use, perceived value, perceived safety, and subjective norms influence intention to use autonomous vehicles in Türkiye. Data were collected from 280 participants through an online survey and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The results show that perceived risk negatively affects intention to use (β = −0.085, p = 0.028), whereas perceived ease of use (β = 0.103, p = 0.045), perceived value (β = 0.162, p = 0.012), perceived safety (β = 0.327, p < 0.001), and subjective norms (β = 0.300, p < 0.001) have positive and statistically significant effects. The model explains 66.5% of the variance in intention to use (R2 = 0.665). Perceived safety and subjective norms emerge as the strongest positive predictors, indicating that safety perceptions and social influence are central to adoption. These findings provide empirical evidence from Türkiye and offer implications for manufacturers, mobility service providers, and policymakers seeking to facilitate the transition toward intelligent and sustainable mobility systems.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111286

Authors: Xiaolong Xu Zhengyi Sun Zhihao Qiu Songyuan Ni Lei Yu

Glass-enclosed courtyards are common in self-built rural housing, but their summer retrofit value is uncertain because temperature attenuation may coexist with overheating or moisture accumulation. This study compared three south-facing brick-concrete dwellings with glass-enclosed courtyards in Qingdao, China, and integrated matched field measurements with a 64-household survey. Outdoor-normalized temperature offsets, sampled range differences, psychrometric variables, moist-air enthalpy, and courtyard-room temperature separation were analyzed. Mean courtyard–outdoor temperature differences across 18 observations were +1.34, +0.64, and −0.12 °C for Cases 1–3. On 15 July, Case 2 reduced the sampled courtyard temperature range to 0.9 °C compared with 7.9 °C outdoors, while its mean courtyard humidity ratio remained 2.86 g/kg higher than outdoors. This contrast shows that attenuation of dry-bulb temperature variation does not necessarily imply a reduction in absolute air-moisture content. The survey showed that 55.6% of valid respondents reported hot-side summer sensations, while 47.6% identified improved summer ventilation and cooling as a desired retrofit outcome. The survey provides complementary implementation context, while shading, courtyard ventilation, and courtyard–room air-exchange control are identified as candidate measures for future intervention testing rather than as validated retrofit solutions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111282

Authors: Fahri Oluk Sezer Öksüz Caner Dilber

Socially and fiscally sustainable development requires social protection systems (SDG target 1.3) that are financed and managed through effective and accountable institutions (SDG target 16.6). Accrual-based public-sector accounting reform is expected to support this, but whether it shapes the growth contribution of social protection has not been tested. This article examined whether baseline accounting maturity conditioned the relationship between social protection spending and subsequent real GDP per capita growth in the EU-27 over 2014–2024. Two-way fixed-effects models related lagged ESSPROS benefits (SPE) and scope-matched government social protection benefits (GSP) to growth, using benefit-weighted end-2013 maturity scores and wild cluster bootstrap inference. The estimates provided no evidence of a positive spending–growth association and no evidence that accounting maturity strengthened it. The negative full-sample SPE interaction weakened or reversed when pandemic-affected years were excluded or welfare-regime interactions and common correlated effects were added, and it did not survive a Romano–Wolf multiplicity adjustment. The design could detect only interactions comparable to the average spending slope. For sustainable public finance, accounting reform should not be treated as a shortcut to growth-enhancing social protection; its contribution more plausibly lies in transparency about long-term liabilities.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111284

Authors: Juan Villermo Rui Colaço João de Abreu e Silva

The diffusion of information and communication technologies, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has decoupled many daily activities from physical proximity, yet most accessibility indicators still assume that reaching an opportunity requires physical travel. This review assesses how accessibility measurements are adapting to this hybrid reality by focusing on telework and e-shopping because these concern jobs and retail, the opportunities physical measurement traditionally targets. Following PRISMA guidelines, 23 studies (2014–2026) were identified. They show three methodological responses: an operational digital friction defined by broadband quality, digital literacy and last-mile logistics coverage; gravity, floating catchment, composite and dual-access formulations adapted to a virtual channel; and time-geographic frameworks locating the thresholds at which digital substitution becomes viable. Four gaps remain: digital access is operationalised in fragmented, non-comparable ways; no established method combines physical and digital constraints in a common metric through behaviourally estimated weights; the relationship between virtual and physical access is heterogeneous and not uniformly substitutive; and the reviewed methods have been compared only conceptually and not with common data, so how far digital provision alters measured accessibility relative to conventional indicators remains unquantified. This review argues that a utility-based Hybrid LogSum, in which the online alternative enters the choice set with its own calibrated impedance, provides a common framework for integrating physical and digital accessibility in sustainable accessibility planning.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111287

Authors: Andreja Škorjanc Darko Goričanec Klemen Rola Aleksandra Petrovič Danijela Urbancl

Biomass is a promising renewable energy source; however, its direct use is limited by high hygroscopicity, low energy density, and challenging storage conditions. This study investigated the effect of thermal pretreatment temperature on the moisture sorption behavior and thermal stability of waste hops. Waste hops were torrefied at 250 °C, 350 °C, and 450 °C. Equilibrium moisture content (EMC) was measured at 30 °C under three relative humidity levels (50%, 70%, and 80%). The sorption data were fitted using four empirical models (Henderson, Chung-Pfost, Halsey, and Oswin), and model performance was evaluated using statistical parameters (R2, RMSE, RSS). Structural and compositional changes were analyzed by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and elemental and proximate analyses. For untreated hops, the Halsey and Oswin models described the data almost exactly (R2 ≥ 0.999), while the Halsey model was the most suitable for samples torrefied at 250 °C and 350 °C (R2 = 0.991 and 0.951, respectively). For the sample torrefied at 450 °C, none of the models provided an adequate fit. As the material became less hygroscopic, the agreement of all four models decreased (R2 of the best model from 1.000 for WH-raw to < 0.77 for WH-450). Because only three relative humidity levels were measured, the model ranking should be regarded as indicative. At 80% RH, torrefaction at 250 °C, 350 °C and 450 °C reduced the EMC by 30%, 50% and 64%, respectively, compared with that of the untreated material. With increasing torrefaction temperature, the onset decomposition temperature increased from 212.5 °C (WH-raw) to 412.3 °C (WH-450), and the final decomposition temperature from 512.9 °C to 581.4 °C. The improvement in hygroscopic and thermal stability with torrefaction temperature was not linear: the additional reduction in EMC became smaller at higher temperatures, and the higher heating value increased mainly between 250 and 350 °C, with only a marginal further gain at 450 °C. Total mass loss decreased from 77.11% to 39.77%, while the solid residue at 900 °C increased from 22.89% to 60.23%. FTIR spectra indicated degradation of hydrophilic functional groups. Thermal pretreatment improved the hydrophobicity and thermal stability of waste hops. The validated sorption models offer a useful tool for optimizing drying and storage conditions, enhancing the potential of waste hops as a sustainable bioenergy feedstock.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111288

Authors: Xujuan Dong Shanshan Zou Guoqing Liu

Against the background of the sustainable clean-heating transition in rural northern China, quantitative comparisons of the real-world performance of different heating methods in rural dwellings in Cold Zone B remain limited, particularly those integrating objective measurements and residents’ priorities. This study aimed to evaluate the indoor thermal environment, indoor air quality, and comprehensive performance of four heating methods in rural dwellings in southern Shanxi, China. Continuous 24-h monitoring of temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), inhalable particulate matter (PM10), and total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) was conducted in four rural dwellings, one for each heating method, alongside a questionnaire survey involving 457 respondents. Four core evaluation indicators were weighted based on residents’ perceived importance ratings from the questionnaire survey: indoor temperature (0.265), heating costs (0.253), air quality (0.245), and humidity (0.237). Given the balanced weights, a multi-indicator comprehensive evaluation was applied. Only the air-source heat pump satisfied thermal design standards, while the other three approaches failed. District heating achieved the best air quality; coal-fired stoves had an instantaneous peak PM2.5 concentration of 0.253 mg/m3. The ordinal regression model estimated a thermal-neutral temperature of 15.05 °C from residents’ TSV responses, which is lower than the PMV zero-crossing temperature of 21.74 °C. The comprehensive evaluation based on measured data and subjective weights yielded the performance ranking: air-source heat pump > district heating > coal-fired boilers > coal-fired stoves. These findings provide a case-based reference for evaluating rural heating options and support the sustainable clean-heating transition in southern Shanxi.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111281

Authors: Yang Zhao Linzhen Wei Deming Liu Huaiyu Yang Chenyang Shi Ledan Sun Lukai Wang

Health-promoting trail (HPT) networks can provide spatial support for walking-based physical activity and healthy city development. Yet existing planning approaches often address environmental suitability or route optimization without fully integrating spatial continuity, network generation, and service potential. This study develops a data-driven framework for HPT network planning using multi-source spatial data (MSSD), with the eastern urban area of Qingdao, China, as a case study. Previously published choice-based conjoint (CBC) preference estimates were used to weight eight environmental indicators in a geographic information system (GIS) to calculate a fitness suitability index (FSI). Connection nodes were linked by routes minimizing the length-weighted inverse FSI, and urban spaces with high continuity potential were incorporated as planning corridors. The generated network’s service potential was evaluated through Euclidean proximity coverage of residential locations and estimated population, together with network length within residential proximity buffers. The spatial assessment identified limited provision of long continuous walking segments in the existing walking network. The proposed integration identified opportunities for longer continuous walking corridors and extensive potential residential coverage. By linking preference-informed assessment, geospatial network generation, and service potential evaluation, the framework supports sustainable urban planning by identifying opportunities to coordinate existing urban spatial resources for health-promoting walking infrastructure.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111283

Authors: Heejin Yang Doowon Ryu

Corporate ESG commitments and claims can fail for the same reasons as collective action initiatives for sustainability, yet classroom games usually teach only one of them, the free-rider problem. This paper argues that collective action fails for three distinct reasons and proposes a short game for each. A cheating game, a public goods game played without and then with monitoring, teaches the enforcement gap: contributing is efficient but not individually rational unless non-contribution is detected and sanctioned. A bluffing game, in which firms claim to be green, teaches the verification gap: when claims are free, the word “green” earns no premium until verification makes false claims costly. A hats puzzle followed by a stag hunt teaches the common knowledge gap: conditional cooperation requires that everyone knows that everyone knows, so compliance must be visible. Each game is mapped to the institution that closes its gap, and each gap has a counterpart in corporate practice and financial markets, from net-zero pledges without penalties and unverified ESG disclosures to ESG ratings that coordinate investors’ beliefs. The paper provides payoff tables, equilibrium predictions, debriefing questions, and a teaching note for a 90 min session. The proposal has not yet been evaluated in a classroom.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111277

Authors: Jue Li Hengwu Hu Chao Huang

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) emphasizes inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Within this broader framework, the sustainable integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in engineering education raises a specific question: whether students can retain and apply the competencies developed during AI-supported learning when the tool is no longer used. Generative AI can provide learning support beyond limited classroom hours, but it can also perform the cognitive operations that students are expected to master. Using an engineering graphics course, this study compared three strategies of AI use for their effects on how long student competence lasts. The three strategies were no AI, unrestricted AI use, and a request protocol. Under the protocol, students may ask questions about work they have already produced, but they may not ask for the answer. Competence was measured four times under an instruction not to use the tool, and the last measurement fell four weeks after the course ended. The ranking changed after withdrawal. Immediately after instruction, the unrestricted group scored highest before adjustment, but the adjusted between-group differences were not significant. At the delayed test the protocol group held the largest advantage of any contrast and the unrestricted group fell to last. Both adjusted differences were significant at p < 0.001. The advantage was largest among students who started lowest and was no longer distinguishable from zero above a baseline score of 64.95. The difference between the two tool conditions sat in classification rather than drafting. Curve-type misjudgment was about six times as frequent in the unrestricted condition as under the protocol, while the drafting conventions did not differ detectably at the end of term. Protocol adherence acted as a graded skill rather than a compliance record and tracked delayed competence (r = 0.63, n = 33). In this 48 h foundation course, regulating what students asked, not how much they used the tool, was associated with competence that persisted after withdrawal.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111280

Authors: George Papadopoulos Evgenia Georgiou Antonia Oikonomou Spyros Fountas Dimitrios Bilalis

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Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111279

Authors: Şevket Şafak Şafakoğulları Ahmet Maslakçı Lütfi Sürücü

This study investigates how cognitive competence and belief-based mechanisms are associated with the entrepreneurial intentions of university students. A quantitative research method involving a questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 360 university students in Türkiye. A parallel mediation study model, reflecting the research hypotheses, was tested using the PROCESS Macro with bootstrapping. The findings indicate that risk propensity, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and perceived financial literacy are all positively and significantly associated with entrepreneurial intention. Moreover, when tested as parallel mechanisms, both self-efficacy and perceived financial literacy mechanisms were found to partially mediate the relationship between risk propensity and entrepreneurial intention. This study measured general entrepreneurial intention rather than sustainable entrepreneurial intention as a distinct construct. Within this context, the findings align with the view that financial competence serves as an intangible resource supporting venture durability, treating economic viability as a precondition for pursuing socio-ecological objectives rather than a competing goal. As a cross-sectional research design was adopted, the results indicate associations rather than causal effects. Practical implications are discussed for universities and policymakers, who may consider pairing financial training with confidence-oriented pedagogy, including in sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship programs.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111276

Authors: Junpeng Jin Li Zheng Wenqing Qie Qixing Zhang Da Wang Yanchun Ke Shengzhi Xu

Photovoltaic (PV) deployment in China has accumulated silver in long-lived crystalline silicon modules, yet the timing and scale of its end-of-life (EOL) release remain uncertain. This study develops a cohort-based dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) for PV modules installed in China during 2000–2025 and projects silver flows to 2060. Technology-specific pure-silver intensities are reconstructed from cell dimensions and efficiency, paste consumption, metallization composition, and technology shares. Weibull lifetime distributions are used to compare four module lifetime scenarios, while four recovery rate pathways assess the effect of recovery capacity timing. Parameter uncertainty is examined using Latin-hypercube Monte Carlo simulation. From 2018 to 2025, technology-weighted pure-silver intensity fell by 62.0% (from 23.33 to 8.86 mg/W), whereas annual installation silver inflow rose by 170.4% (from 1149.66 to 3108.88 t). Under the baseline lifetime scenario, EOL silver flow peaks at 739.34 t/yr in 2044, nine years before retired capacity peaks in 2053. At the end of 2025, the in-use stock reached 17,784.12 t, equivalent to 99.5% of cumulative installation inflow. Cumulative potentially recoverable silver during 2025–2060 ranges from 3606.94 to 15,335.65 t across the specified recovery scenarios. Module lifetime primarily determines release timing, whereas silver intensity affects the magnitude of release. By linking silver stock accumulation, end-of-life release, and recovery capacity timing, this study provides a quantitative basis for sustainable resource management and circular economy planning in China’s photovoltaic sector.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111278

Authors: Laura Lucantoni Sara Antomarioni Filippo Emanuele Ciarapica Maurizio Bevilacqua

Lean 5.0 extends continuous improvement beyond efficiency toward human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience, but company performance systems rarely measure these dimensions. This study proposes a Lean 5.0 Decision-Support System (L5.0-DSS) that starts from the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) a company already has. It ranks activities by their below-target KPI gaps without weights, traces each loss to the activity where it originates through Generative AI text coding and expert validation, uses Yokoten to transfer internal practices, and interprets the results along the three Lean 5.0 dimensions. In a temperature-controlled fresh-food warehouse, nine projects were implemented; service failures were observed to fall by up to one percentage point, and productivity to rise by 53 and 71 cases per labour hour in Consolidation Staging and Picking. For human-centricity, practitioners reported less manual handling and less dependence on experienced pickers, with Friday peaks covered by cross-trained staff instead of overtime. For sustainability, less product damage suggests lower food waste and rework. For resilience, cross-training and synchronized inbound flows made demand peaks easier to absorb. These effects were not measured directly; the case therefore identified new KPIs, such as the damage rate and the overtime ratio, that existing records allow in the next cycle.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111274

Authors: Lin Zhou Zhaojuan Wu Shichao Zhang

To characterize the evolution of coupling coordination between the development of livable, economically viable, and harmonious rural communities (LEHRCs) and the high-quality development of rural tourism, identify regional disparities, and determine the major factors explaining spatial differentiation, this study constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system for the two subsystems using panel data from 30 provincial-level regions in China for the period 2014–2024. The entropy weight method, a modified coupling coordination degree model, and the GeoDetector method are employed for the analysis. The results show that (1) under the baseline specification, both subsystems exhibited an upward trend, with their composite indices increasing from 0.263 and 0.252 to 0.398 and 0.435, respectively. (2) The national average coupling coordination degree increased from 0.467 to 0.602, with the coordination level improving from the slightly maladjusted to the well coordinated. Regionally, a persistent gradient pattern was observed, with the eastern region outperforming the central region, which, in turn, outperformed the western region. However, the coordination gap between the eastern and western regions narrowed from 0.139 to 0.088, indicating a reduction in regional disparities. (3) Government support and consumer demand are the most consistently supported spatial explanatory factors, with baseline q values ranging from 0.6844 to 0.8076 and from 0.7087 to 0.7446, respectively. Statistical support for joint associations varies with stratification settings and sample size requirements for joint strata. Accordingly, differentiated regional policies and interregional collaboration should be promoted, the complementary contributions of the two subsystems strengthened, and coordination mechanisms integrating government guidance, market forces, talent, and technology improved to advance the coordinated development of LEHRCs and high-quality rural tourism.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111275

Authors: Young Jik Youn Yong Hoon Im Siwon Yoon

Integrating seasonal cold storage into seawater district cooling can extend the use of natural cold resources across seasons and change the annual cooling supply mix by compensating for temperature-dependent limitations of direct seawater cooling. In this study, an 8760 h simulation evaluates hybrid cooling scenarios using a measured annual cooling-load profile from an operating district cooling branch supplying chilled water, totaling approximately 171 GWh. The system prioritizes direct seawater cooling, followed by discharge from a prescribed initial cold-energy inventory and turbo-chiller backup. Under the same intake conditions, approximately 42 GWh of initial storage reduces the chiller’s annual cooling share from 22.9% to 2.2%. For CS_0.198, with approximately 33.8 GWh of initial storage, a +2 °C source-temperature shift advances the 10% storage discharge cutoff from about day 274 to day 196. Increasing the prescribed daily heat-loss coefficient from 0.03% to 0.15% advances it to about day 239. Hourly pumping profiles and annual electricity comparisons show why this reduction in refrigeration duty does not ensure a comparable electricity reduction. For an annual electricity ratio R ≤ 1.5 relative to the constant-temperature benchmark, the selected storage capacity falls from 42.1 to 16.5 GWh as the intake diameter increases from 1.25 to 1.40 m. These results support joint assessment of storage availability, intake pumping and storage capacity in the preliminary design of hybrid seawater district cooling systems.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111273

Authors: Daniela A. Ottmann

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have pledged to achieve net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2060, yet their cities remain among the world’s most carbon-intensive, shaped by extreme heat, near-continuous cooling, desalinated water, car-dependent urban form and hydrocarbon-financed development. This Perspective argues that conventional sectoral decarbonisation strategies, while necessary, are insufficient because building performance, urban morphology, cooling demand, electricity generation, water infrastructure, transport, construction materials and waste management are interdependent. A simplified Net Zero City Equation, adapted from established whole-life carbon accounting principles, provides a conceptual framework for examining these interdependencies. Three structural paradoxes (hydrocarbon dependence versus decarbonisation, cooling demand versus energy and water decarbonisation, and net-zero ambition versus fragmented accounting and governance) help explain the challenges of transition. Four coupled intervention pathways identify opportunities for coordinated action: climate-responsive urban form and buildings; integrated energy, cooling and water systems; low-carbon mobility and circular material flows; and coordinated governance, measurement and finance. Implementation depends less on the availability of technology than on consistent accounting, economic incentives and institutional coordination. This approach is relevant to other hot-arid regions, provided it is adapted to local climatic, urban and institutional conditions.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111271

Authors: Pablo Alejandro Quezada-Sarmiento Francesc Andreu Martínez-Gallego Wilson Teodomiro Salas-Álvarez Patricia Marisol Chango-Cañaveral

Saraguro culinary heritage represents an important expression of intangible cultural heritage and a potential resource for community-based gastronomy education and sustainable territorial development. This study examines traditional culinary knowledge, community participation, and collaborative gastronomic innovation in Saraguro, Ecuador, exploring their potential educational and territorial implications. A qualitative exploratory design incorporated documentary analysis, focus group discussions with 12 local knowledge holders, culinary stimulus-assisted discussions, and collaborative culinary reconstruction involving community members, chefs, and university gastronomy students. Thematic analysis examined traditional ingredients, culinary practices, cultural meanings, and intergenerational knowledge transmission. The findings identified culturally significant preparations, including uchumati, roasted guinea pig, tilapia maito, and chicha de jora, highlighting their connections with territorial identity and ancestral knowledge. Collaborative activities supported the development of contemporary gastronomic proposals informed by traditional culinary practices. These findings suggest opportunities for culturally responsible gastronomic innovation and community-based education. However, student learning outcomes, intercultural competence, and territorial identity changes were not directly assessed. The study contributes to documenting Saraguro culinary heritage and identifies potential connections among cultural safeguarding, experiential gastronomy education, and sustainable territorial development that warrant further empirical evaluation.

Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su182111272

Authors: Sabrina D’Ardia Martina Capone Vittorio Verda

Lowering supply temperatures in existing district heating networks facilitates the integration of renewable energy sources and waste heat, but the higher mass flow rates required to maintain heat delivery can introduce hydraulic constraints. This study investigates how thermal demand-side management can create hydraulic margin for supply temperature reduction. A mixed-integer linear programming model optimizes substation start-up shifts within ±15 min, while hydraulic simulations and energy balances assess the resulting operating conditions. The methodology is applied to a district heating network in northern Italy serving 146 substations. An optimized schedule for a single cold reference day reduces the network peak mass flow rate by approximately 23% and reduces daily peaks on all additional days assessed without further optimization. The resulting hydraulic margin accommodates higher mass flow rates, indicating an estimated potential to reduce supply temperatures from 120 °C to approximately 105–108 °C while preserving daily thermal-energy delivery. Hydraulic simulations at daily network peaks show that the baseline minimum substation differential pressure is preserved. These results demonstrate the potential of thermal demand-side management in enabling lower-temperature operation and enhancing the sustainability of existing district heating networks.