Search Results (525)

Dominant factors of changes in natural habitat quality in arid municipal areas of western China over recent decades remain quantitatively unverified, due to limitations in traditional attribution methods that depend on linear causality or low-dimensional interactions. We generated 30 m resolution habitat quality indexes (HQI) of Yinchuan Municipality of western China from 2000 to 2020 using the InVEST model, and then quantified the relative importance of anthropogenic and climatic variables to HQI changes by Random Forest modeling after eliminating cross-variable collinearity, taking, a typical arid Results indicate that a relatively high-level (HQI > 0.6) of the habitat quality predominated in natural habitats covering forests, shrublands, grasslands, and wetlands within Yinchuan Municipality since 2000, accounting for 76.95% of total natural habitat area. Moreover, this relatively high-level remained stable, with 93.32% of all natural habitat types over the past two decades, though the 4.78% of total natural habitat area with improvement slightly outnumbered the 1.90% of area with decline. The municipality-wide mean HQI of the natural habitats fluctuated from 0.65 in 2000 to 0.66 in 2020, which was primarily shaped by anthropogenic factors without a statistically significant monotonic trend, with population density, gross domestic product, and land use dynamic degree accounting for 31.79%–43.46%, 18.95%–27.96%, and 10.66%–18.85% of the fluctuation, respectively. Climatic factors contributed far less to the fluctuation, with the relative importance of individual variables falling in the range of annual precipitation (9.37%–14.77%), mean annual temperature (4.10%–9.61%) and annual solar radiation (3.28%–9.60%). These findings confirm the dominant role of persistent influences from anthropogenic activities rather than their temporal intensification in maintaining the stable high-level habitat quality of Yinchuan Municipality since 2000, and provide direct targeted guidance for formulating habitat quality improvement strategies that coordinate urban construction and ecological protection in arid western China. Full article

This study examines the relationship between the financial sustainability of local government units (LGUs) and their investment capacity, focusing on differences between municipalities and cities with county rights in Poland. It investigates how operating surplus, debt-servicing costs, and revenue autonomy are associated with investment capacity and whether these relationships differ across LGU types. The analysis uses data for Polish municipalities and cities with county rights for 2018–2024 obtained from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland. Various panel regression specifications were employed, supplemented by descriptive Pearson correlation analysis. The results indicate a consistent positive tendency in the relationship between operating surplus and investment capacity, whereas higher debt-servicing costs were significantly associated with lower investment capacity. Cities with county rights exhibited higher investment capacity than municipalities, although the strength of the evidence varied depending on the measure used. Revenue autonomy, in contrast, was found to be negatively associated with investment capacity. This study provides a comparative assessment of the relationship between financial sustainability and investment capacity, offering implications for local fiscal policy and future research. Full article

As cities accelerate climate adaptation and decarbonisation, municipally owned companies (MOCs) play an important role in delivering sustainable urban infrastructure, accessing transition finance, and supporting Positive Energy Districts (PEDs). However, the expansion of sustainability reporting requirements under the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) raises questions about the preparedness of public infrastructure providers to meet evolving sustainability-information demands. This study examines ESG reporting readiness among Polish MOCs, focusing on current reporting activity, reporting intentions, regulatory awareness, indirect ESG information pressures, sustainable-finance and investment plans, and potential transition-risk exposure. The analysis is based on a Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing survey of 226 municipal enterprises conducted in August 2025. The results indicate substantial reporting gaps. Only 8% of surveyed MOCs had already prepared or planned to prepare a non-financial report. When companies planning EU Taxonomy reporting only were also included, 14% of the sample had some form of current or planned reporting, while the remaining 86% had neither current nor planned non-financial or EU Taxonomy reporting. Reporting readiness was lower among smaller companies, while indirect ESG information pressures arising from business relationships, stakeholder requests, and financing plans were also evident across the surveyed sample. The findings suggest that limited reporting preparedness, when combined with external sustainability-information demands, may contribute to potential transition-risk exposure relevant to municipal investment and financing processes. More broadly, ESG reporting readiness represents an organisational capability relevant to sustainable finance, municipal climate investment, and the development of PEDs and smart cities. Full article

This study presents a comprehensive spatial analysis of the public transport network across the Almaty agglomeration, encompassing 211 routes within eight urban districts and seven adjacent administrative divisions. Drawing on digitized geodata from 3634 unique bus stops, the research methodology integrates quantitative and qualitative spatial metrics, including distribution density, average stop spacing, elevation gradients, and topological connectivity. The analysis highlights significant territorial imbalances: while 70.53% of all unique stops are concentrated within Almaty’s city limits, the surrounding regional network is highly fragmented, with an average stop spacing of 2579.53 m. Furthermore, topographic assessments confirm substantial operational challenges for north–south routing due to steep elevation changes, reaching 984.48 m within the city and 1243.23 m regionally. A critical evaluation of topological connectivity reveals that 44.63% of suburban bus stops lack transfer intersections, underscoring severe deficits in peripheral public transport provision. By assessing 56 distinct connection types, the study categorizes administrative districts based on their route integration levels. Ultimately, the derived spatial parameters offer a robust evaluation of the current transport framework. These insights establish a crucial scientific and empirical foundation for optimizing route geometries, bridging infrastructural gaps, and guiding sustainable transit planning in alignment with Almaty’s transition toward a polycentric urban model. Furthermore, the developed 3D spatial-topological framework provides a scalable, data-driven blueprint for municipal authorities to prioritize infrastructure investments, deploy multimodal hubs and enhance transit equity in other rapidly growing and topographically complex agglomerations worldwide. Full article

Provincial cold-chain investment decisions must reconcile food-loss prevention, digital visibility, logistics capability and the environmental burden of freight-intensive growth. This study develops a sustainability-oriented readiness–intensity framework for 31 provincial-level regions in mainland China. The baseline model uses 14 auditable public-data criteria and combines Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) with the standard Combined Compromise Solution (CoCoSo) algorithm. Because the observations combine 2024 statistics, a 2023 digital-finance index and the cumulative 2020–2025 cold-chain-base list, the design is described as an asynchronous cross-sectional snapshot rather than a single-year panel. Municipal sewage and green-space variables are interpreted as regional enabling capacity, not direct cold-chain environmental performance; road freight turnover relative to gross domestic product is treated as a cost-type freight-intensity transition-pressure proxy. A separate diagnostic replaces the earlier inverse-size term with logistics residuals conditional on agri-food output. Shandong, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Henan and Zhejiang form the leading demonstration-readiness group. Equal-weight CoCoSo closely matches the CRITIC result (Spearman ρ = 0.996), while TOPSIS and VIKOR retain the broad ordering but expose local method sensitivity. Dropping either digital criterion, removing the three indirect green proxies, winsorizing the normalization range, varying the CoCoSo compromise parameter and substituting 2022 digital data do not alter the leading pattern. Under an assumed 5% indicator-error perturbation, Shandong and Guangdong remain within ranks 1–2, whereas the ordering of several adjacent provinces is less secure. The framework supports sequenced investment packages rather than a deterministic league table and distinguishes demonstration-ready, scale-led, intensity-led and coverage-building contexts. Full article

The spatial allocation of urban road infrastructure directly affects urban operational efficiency, social equity, and ecological environmental quality. Taking 36 major Chinese cities as the research subjects and drawing on data from municipal statistical yearbooks, this study employs a composite index method, Theil index decomposition, and correlation analysis to reveal spatial differentiation patterns, imbalances, and driving factors of urban road infrastructure levels, based on both aggregate and average indicators. The results indicate that the aggregate road infrastructure level exhibits a “high in the southeast, low in the northwest” pattern along the Hu Huanyong Line, while the average road infrastructure level reveals relatively lower performance in some first-tier cities. Imbalances exist in both aggregate and average dimensions, with Theil indices of 0.231 and 0.059, respectively; intra-regional disparities contribute more to total inequality than inter-regional disparities. Urban permanent population (ridge regression coefficient: 0.1991) and fiscal revenue (ridge regression coefficient: −0.1087) are the core driving factors among the four influencing factors of aggregate road infrastructure level spatial differentiation, whereas GDP (−0.0318) and built-up area (0.0703) exert only marginal effects. This suggests that current aggregate urban road infrastructure levels are shaped by the interplay of urbanization stage, economic development level, fiscal system, and spatial planning policies, all operating within the constraints imposed by the city’s natural geographical conditions, and have not yet adequately addressed residents’ demand for spatial equity. The study recommends establishing differentiated investment mechanisms, optimizing road network density in developed cities, and constructing a spatial matching early-warning system to promote people-oriented new urbanization and coordinated regional sustainable development. Full article

Building-applied photovoltaics (BAPV) offer a practical retrofit pathway for the prefabricated social housing estates of Central and Eastern Europe. This study assesses the solar and photovoltaic potential of post-WW II housing districts in Poznań, Poland, through a multi-scale workflow spanning the city, district, and building levels. Measured municipal rooftop data for 336 residential buildings in four districts were combined with tree-inclusive parametric solar simulations, calibrated against the rooftop solar cadastre (normalized mean bias error of +0.4% after calibration), to select South Winogrady and two representative buildings. Three PV design scenarios were then evaluated in roof, facade, and combined configurations using a techno-economic model that incorporates manufacturer-warranted degradation, maintenance, inverter replacement, and a ±25% electricity price and installation cost sensitivity envelope. Roof configurations pay back in 6.6–7.2 years (30-year return on investment of 286–321%), facade systems are economically defensible only on the best-exposed surfaces (8.9–13.8 years), and all configurations remain profitable even under the pessimistic bounding case. ENVI-met simulations of the same scenarios show localized pedestrian-level reductions in the Universal Thermal Climate Index of up to 2.41 °C near the PV-equipped buildings, persisting under 2050 climate projections. The results provide a transferable evidence chain for prioritizing BAPV retrofits in standardized post-war housing stock. Full article

Beyoğlu emerged as one of the principal centers of Western influence in the late Ottoman Empire due to the presence of Levantine communities and European institutions. This study investigates the role of the Sixth Municipal Department, the first modern municipal organization in the Ottoman Empire, in shaping urban governance, architecture, and cultural transformation in Beyoğlu. Using a historical-analytical approach, the research examines Ottoman archival documents, travelogues, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, architectural evidence, and secondary literature. The findings demonstrate that Levantines occupied influential positions within the municipal administration and significantly shaped urban development through investments in transportation, lighting, sanitation, public spaces, and architectural projects. However, municipal services were distributed unevenly and primarily benefited affluent Levantine and European residents, while poorer Muslim and non-Muslim neighborhoods received limited attention. The study further reveals that the Sixth Municipal Building, designed in a European Neo-Classical style, symbolized the institutional and architectural dimensions of Ottoman Westernization. Beyond urban administration, Levantine influence contributed to transformations in social life, consumption patterns, language, and architectural culture. The article concludes that the Sixth Municipal Department played a pioneering role in the emergence of modern municipal governance in the Ottoman Empire, while simultaneously reflecting the social inequalities and cultural dynamics that accompanied the Westernization process. Full article

South Africa possesses substantial bioenergy potential derived from agricultural residues, forestry by-products, municipal organic waste, wastewater sludge, and dedicated energy crops, positioning bioenergy as a potentially important contributor to the country’s low-carbon energy transition. Despite more than two decades of supportive policy, modern bioenergy remains a marginal contributor to the country’s energy system. Although previous studies have examined individual bioenergy technologies, feedstocks, environmental impacts, or policy frameworks, a comprehensive assessment of the alignment between policy ambition, technological readiness, implementation outcomes, and emerging sustainable development opportunities in South Africa remains lacking. This review presents a systematic integrative review of bioenergy development in South Africa, evaluating the alignment between policy ambition, technological readiness, and implementation outcomes. Literature published between 2000 and 2025 was systematically reviewed using Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and institutional publications. A PRISMA-informed screening process identified 427 records, of which 116 studies met the inclusion criteria for detailed synthesis. Evidence was synthesized across three interconnected dimensions: (i) policy and regulatory frameworks, (ii) feedstock availability and technological readiness, and (iii) deployment outcomes, implementation challenges, and future development opportunities. The findings reveal a persistent implementation gap despite abundant biomass resources and commercially established bioenergy conversion technologies Although global biofuel production exceeded 180 billion liters in 2023, South Africa’s installed bioenergy electricity capacity remains approximately 265 MW, representing less than 0.5% of the country’s approximately 60 GW installed electricity generation capacity. By comparison, installed solar and wind capacities exceed 8 GW and 3 GW, respectively. The review identifies fragmented governance, limited investment incentives, regulatory uncertainty, infrastructure constraints, and inadequate integration of bioenergy into national energy planning as the principal barriers to deployment. The review concludes that South Africa’s principal challenge is not biomass availability or technological capability, but translating policy ambition into coordinated implementation capable of scaling sustainable bioenergy deployment. Full article

This study contributes to the literature on sustainable international investment by examining how public data openness—treated as a non-rivalrous production factor—enables firms to overcome information asymmetries, reduce financing constraints, and catalyze innovation-driven overseas expansion. Grounded in China’s dual strategic imperatives of digital factor marketization and high-quality outbound investment, we exploit the staggered rollout of municipal public data platforms (2008–2023) as a quasi-natural experiment and apply a firm- and city-level staggered difference-in-differences (DID) design to a sample of A-share listed firms. Our findings demonstrate that public data openness significantly enhances the sustainability of outward investment, measured through improved capital allocation efficiency and long-term resilience. Mechanism tests reveal that innovation capacity and eased financing constraints serve as key transmission channels, with stronger effects observed in firms with higher human capital endowments, robust internal controls, and exposure to technologically dynamic sectors. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that the sustainability impact is amplified under environmental uncertainty, suggesting that data openness acts as an institutional buffer. The results offer actionable policy implications for aligning digital governance with corporate sustainability goals, and provide empirical grounding for integrating open data infrastructure into national strategies for responsible internationalization. Full article

Energy planning should focus on actions to save energy and reduce consumption while also implementing renewable energy sources to support sustainable urban development. In addition to global regulations, individual countries also have documents that facilitate energy management at the local level. This is a particularly valuable source of information about resources that influence energy efficiency at the national level. This article analyzes the Low-Emission Economy Plans (LEEPs) developed for selected cities in Poland. Based on selected provisions, fuzzy modeling solutions are proposed to support energy decisions in municipalities. The research thesis assumes that the appropriate selection of criteria for emission reduction, as well as their objectification and hierarchization, when supported by fuzzy logic modeling and multi-criteria analysis, enables local governments to identify key variables and structures and compare decision scenarios relevant to local energy policies. To verify this thesis, an analysis of the LEEP provisions of four city municipalities located in the Kuyavian–Pomeranian Voivodeship was conducted. Based on these criteria, a set was identified, and diagrams were developed to identify variables and concepts that occupy key positions in the modeled pathways leading to emission reductions. Fuzzy logic modeling and multi-criteria analysis were used as decision-support tools in the research process. A comparison of the applied approaches enables the identification and prioritization of variables of greatest importance within the adopted set of criteria. The obtained results allow us to determine how the adopted energy strategies are linked to the implementation of local policy objectives and which relationships play a key role in the modeled decision-making structure. The analysis indicates that the decision-making variants differ in their impact on the paths leading to reduced final energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Variant W1, which is based on investments in renewable energy sources, is strongly associated with the path leading to reduced greenhouse gas emissions, while increased public awareness and acceptance also play a significant role in the model’s structure. The strongest relationships were identified between increased energy efficiency and building energy standards, between building energy standards and reduced final energy consumption, and between reduced final energy consumption and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The reasoning map thus highlighted the particular importance of the sequence of relationships linking energy efficiency, building energy standards, and reduced final energy consumption. The proposed approach can also provide a basis for further comparisons with solutions used in other countries, thus expanding the possibilities of analyzing low-emission policies at the local and national levels. Full article

This article asks a practical question: do current renewable-energy rules encourage end users to become prosumers, or do they mainly serve those already prepared to invest? This analysis maps recent Polish reforms, especially the shift from net metering to value-based net billing and later adjustments to settlements: the return to monthly average pricing for many early adopters, an optional hourly price model, and a strengthened prosumer deposit intended to reduce the sell–buy gap. It also examines the expanding catalogue of prosumer statuses, from the individual prosumer, through collective prosumption in multi-unit buildings, to the virtual prosumer, which may include people without a suitable roof or land. The article then considers civic forms of organisation—energy cooperatives, energy clusters and citizen energy communities—and the role of municipalities as conveners and intermediaries. It argues that regulatory responsiveness, even when market-oriented and technologically aware, is not enough. Uptake depends on whether the rules fit real constraints: finance, administrative effort, grid capacity and fair allocation of risk. Full article

Amid growing water stress in British Columbia caused by climate change, population growth, and rising demand, local governments in Canada are adopting water demand management and conservation policies as part of broader climate adaptation efforts to promote sustainable water use and optimize efficiency. Our objective was to understand the actions local governments are taking to address climate-related impacts on the water sector. Thus, the study assesses the implementation status and progress of water demand management in British Columbia by surveying water managers from 94 local jurisdictions across the province. Our analysis focuses on four key dimensions: prioritization, planning, investment, and implementation of water demand management policies. Results reveal that 84% of surveyed jurisdictions have water efficiency/conservation plans, and 55% of household water connections are metered. Commonly implemented measures include mandatory water restrictions, volumetric pricing, leak detection, and public education campaigns, with regional policies proving more prevalent than municipal-level initiatives. Despite notable progress, implementation remains uneven, with gaps in resource allocation and many household connections still without water meters. Tracking the progress of implementing best practices in water conservation is an essential part of local climate adaptation. Full article

Rapid urbanization has intensified pressure on public services, infrastructure systems, and spatial equity, highlighting the need for integrated approaches that jointly assess service deficits and emerging urban growth. This study proposes an explainable urban analytics framework for identifying service-gap risk and emerging urban patterns using harmonized spatial, service, population, and digital-readiness indicators. The framework integrates an MCP-enabled data harmonization pipeline, composite service-availability and population-adjusted service-stress features, and a Dual-Head MLP architecture that supports shared representation learning across two related prediction tasks. SHAP-based explainability is employed to interpret the relative contribution of service, stress, digital-readiness, and spatial-context features. The framework was evaluated using Saudi district-level data and proxy-based external city datasets to assess cross-city transferability. Compared with classical machine-learning and single-task neural baselines, the Dual-Head MLP demonstrated stronger task-wise predictive performance, while the external evaluation indicated stable but context-dependent transfer across heterogeneous urban settings. The findings suggest that the proposed framework can support urban planners and municipal decision-makers in prioritizing infrastructure investment, identifying underresourced areas, and interpreting early urban transformation patterns. However, the outputs should be regarded as proxy-based decision-support indicators rather than official administrative measures of service adequacy. Full article

Despite the growing importance of community resilience, there remains a lack of integrated and data-driven frameworks capable of assessing resilience from a sustainable development perspective and supporting decision-making at the municipal level. To address the challenge of evaluating community resilience through an integrated framework grounded in sustainable development dimensions, this study proposes a framework for assessing community resilience through a multicriteria decision-making approach. The methodology integrates economic, environmental, social, and institutional indicators, entropy weighting, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), and gap analysis to generate community resilience indices and identify priority areas for intervention. The framework was applied to municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, a region recently affected by large-scale climate-related disasters. The results revealed significant disparities in resilience levels among the municipalities analyzed while gap analysis enabled the identification of critical weaknesses and development priorities for each municipality. The study contributes to the resilience assessment literature by integrating sustainability dimensions, objective weighting through entropy, TOPSIS, and diagnostic gap analysis into a unified decision-support framework that provides a replicable and data-driven tool for evaluating community resilience, supporting public policy formulation, investment prioritization, and strategies aimed at strengthening sustainable and resilient communities. Full article