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This dataset contains terrestrial fluxes of nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4) and ecosystem respiration (carbon dioxide (CO2)) calculated from static chamber measurements in riparian buffers of oil palm plantations on mineral soil, in Riau, Sumatra, Indonesia. Measurements were made monthly, from January 2019 until September 2021, with a break from April 2019 to October 2019 to allow for felling and replanting, and another break from January 2021 to June 2021 due to Covid-19 restrictions. To help to reduce the environmental impact of oil palm plantations, riparian buffers are now required by regulations in many Southeast Asian countries. The experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from the riparian buffers. Research was funded through NERC grant NE/R000131/1 Sustainable Use of Natural Resources to Improve Human Health and Support Economic Development (SUNRISE) Greenhouse gas concentrations were measured using static chambers, enclosed for 45 minutes. Multiple regressions (including linear and hierarchical multiple regression) were fitted to calculate the best fit flux, using the RCflux R package, written by Dr Peter Levy (UKCEH).

Twenty-minute neighbourhoods highlight the importance of well-connected and mixed-used neighbourhoods and communities with proximate access to employment, essential services, public transport, and open spaces. Shorter distances together with re-prioritised public spaces encourage more active transport choices, resulting in public health benefits and reduced environmental pollution. Higher liveability brought about by mixed-use developments enables people to have equitable access to local facilities, amenities, and employment opportunities, promoting vibrancy, social cohesion, and intergenerational connections. The attributes of 20-minute neighbourhoods also combine to create places, that are acknowledged as friendly for all ages, address changing needs across the life course, and provide better support for the ageing population. Furthermore, there are indications that 20-minute neighbourhoods may be more resilient against many of the negative impacts of stringent public health protocols such as those implemented in periods of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we evaluate and compare planning policies and practices aimed at establishing 20-minute neighbourhoods in Melbourne (Australia) and Scotland (the UK). Using case studies, we discuss similarities and differences involved in using place-based approaches of 20-minute neighbourhoods to address 21st-century challenges in key areas of health and wellbeing, equity, environmental sustainability, and community resilience.

One of the repeating themes around the provision of the knowledge and skills needed for delivering sustainable communities is the idea of a “common language” for all built environment professionals. This suggestion has been repeated regularly with each new political and professional review within and between different sectors responsible for the delivery of sustainable communities. There have been multiple efforts to address academic limitations, industry fragmentation and promote more interdisciplinary working and sector collaboration. This research explored the role of skills for sustainable communities, particularly within the higher education (HE) sector, and the responses to support the development of a “common language of sustainability” that can be shared between different sectors, professional disciplines and stakeholders. As an interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners working with the HE sector in the North East of England, we evaluate the progression of sector collaboration to develop a quintuple helix model for HE. We use this as a suitable framework for systematically “mapping” out the mixed sector (academic, public, business, community and environmental organisations) inputs and influences into a representative sample of HE degree modules that are delivered from foundation and undergraduate to postgraduate levels, including examples of part-time and distance-learning modules. We developed a cascade of models which demonstrate increasing levels of collaboration and their potential positive impact on the effectiveness of education on sustainable communities. The methodological assessments of modules were followed by semi-structured group reflective analysis undertaken through a series of online workshops (recorded during the Covid19 lockdown) to set out a collective understanding of the generic skills needed for the delivery of sustainable communities. These generic skills for sustainable communities are presented as a pedagogical progression model of teaching activities and learning outcomes applied to the levels within HE. We propose sustainability education principles and progressions with the hope that they can have an impact on the design or review of current degree modules and programmes. The paper informs future sustainability research to be grounded in holism and systems thinking; better understanding of values, ethics, influencing and political impact; and procedural authenticity.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is advocated for achieving sustainable transportation through development around transit stations. TOD’s global implementation revealed varied outcomes, with many cities failing to achieve the intended objectives. TOD implementation in the Jakarta Metropolitan area still in its infancy. Through a geospatial information system and a survey of 400 commuters who live inside the 1 km radius of planned TOD, this longitudinal study aimed to examine an eight-year lapse between 2013 and 2020 of changes in two aspects, specifically land-use and spatial distribution as well as commuters’ travel behavior and preferences in TOD implementation and travel changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Key findings are as follows: increased diversity in the residential function around planned TOD areas in the Jakarta capital and a decrease in the suburbs, reflecting the commuters’ improved readiness to reside in planned TOD areas. Furthermore, kinship relations were the commuters’ main reason when selecting house locations, with no capacity to change their workplaces. A significant increase in public facilities at the expense of green open space (GOS) indicates that TOD implementation was conducted by the government with the sole authority to manage GOS, lacking private sector involvement. The cost factor was the most dominant reason for the commuter’s use of public transportation, instead of new transport modes such as MRT and LRT. Moreover, the commuter’s travel behavior in all studied transit stations, whilst it showed evidence of changes in time and frequency, was not greatly influenced by the COVID-19 related restrictions.

We assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions over the two-year horizon 2020Q1-2021Q4. We apply a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, which captures complex spatial-temporal interdependencies across countries associated with the international propagation of economic impact due to the virus spread. The model makes use of a unique quarterly data set of coal, natural gas, and oil consumption, output, exchange rates and equity prices, including global fossil fuel prices for 32 major CO2 emitting countries spanning the period 1984Q1-2019Q4. We produce forecasts of coal, natural gas and oil consumption, conditional on GDP growth scenarios based on alternative IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts that were made before and after the outbreak. We also simulate the effect of a relative price change in fossil fuels, due to global scale carbon pricing, on consumption and output. Our results predict fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions to return to their pre-crisis levels, and even exceed them, within the two-year horizon despite the large reductions in the first quarter following the outbreak. Our forecasts anticipate more robust growth for emerging than for advanced economies. The model predicts recovery to the pre-crisis levels even if another wave of pandemic occurs within a year. Our counterfactual carbon pricing scenario indicates that an increase in coal prices is expected to have a smaller impact on GDP than on fossil fuel consumption. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic would not provide countries with a strong reason to delay climate change mitigation efforts.

ACS has made all coronavirus-related research published in our 60+ portfolio of journals open access and free-to-read since learning of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The most effective way to access this research is through this virtual issue, which is being updated regularly as new articles are published. Additionally, ACS has made all COVID-19 related research published in ACS journals freely and immediately available in the National Institutes of Health PubMed and World Health Organization (WHO) databases. Full paper is free for download at: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.0c01304

Over the last thirty years, sustainability has become a growing concern in the fashion industry. While there is agreement among a growing range of actors regarding the need to engage with the social and environmental challenges created by the fashion industry, there is less consent regarding what sustainability entails. Although “sustainability” may be intuitively understood, it has different meanings, depending on how it is applied, and who it is applied by. Without a clear-cut definition, sustainability becomes subjective. In this context, there is a need for research at the intersection of brand-sustainability initiatives and their communication to consumers, who play a vital role in this transition. Drawing on a case study of the Swedish fashion industry, we explore how evolving industrial business models and emerging best practices are informed by a robust understanding of sustainability. We evaluate how brands communicate sustainability to consumers across three key sites: brand websites (including corporate social responsibility reports), social media platforms, and in-store campaigns. We found that not only do brands use a range of practices to define sustainability differently, but furthermore, these definitions vary depending on the context. Considering the industry’s ongoing history with greenwashing, it is vital to address and confront this issue head on. We argue that there is a need to determine what constitutes sustainability in the fashion industry and, in turn, hold businesses to that standard. As COVID-19 has only magnified and intensified these challenges, the article explores the implications of a more robust approach for both theory and practice.

Achieving reductions in global anthropogenic emissions necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change will require significant reductions in energy demand. However, there are concerns that energy demand reductions involving lifestyle and behavioural changes might negatively impact peoples’ wellbeing. The work in this thesis studies the impacts of how people spend their time – commonly known as time-use – to try to understand whether this is the true, or whether energy demand could be reduced while improving wellbeing. Using the UK as a case study, this issue is examined by determining the energy use and wellbeing attributes of different activities and lifestyles, by modelling the impacts of shifts in time-use between activities, and by comparing the importance of three specific changes that might impact future energy use and wellbeing. Firstly, based upon existing literature it is identified that there is a need to better understand the combined energy and wellbeing impacts of different activities and lifestyles. Combining UK time-use and energy consumption data, the energy intensity, enjoyment and sociability of time is studied. Comparing these metrics for different activities suggests that since the most enjoyable (and in some cases sociable) activities are generally the least energy-intensive, acceptable (or popular) lifestyle changes might exist that reduce national energy use and improve wellbeing. However, studying changes between 2000 and 2015 shows that while the population’s time became less energy-intensive, there was little change in average enjoyment and a reduction in sociability. Segmenting the population by age reveals that an ageing population could present a challenge since energy use broadly increases with age-group while social contact reduces. However, comparing occupations highlights opportunities for specific actions that could improve wellbeing and reduce energy use, while regional differences suggest that wellbeing might be improved without increasing energy use. Having determined the energy intensity and wellbeing associated with different uses of time, the impacts of possible time-use changes are then studied. Acknowledging the difficulty in trying to predict how people might choose to re-allocate time in different situations, a sensitivity-based approach is used to study the impacts of a wide range of possible shifts in time between activities. The approach is then applied to explore the impacts of extreme lifestyle changes associated with COVID-19 lockdown measures in the UK and validated against real-world observations during the pandemic. While activity changes associated with lockdown measures reduce energy use, there are varying implications for peoples’ wellbeing, with the youngest appearing to be most negatively impacted but those able to work from home potentially benefiting. Although lockdown measures prevented some of the most enjoyable and sociable activities from happening, alternative activity changes could be supported in future that reduce energy use while improving wellbeing. Finally, time is used as a basis to compare the importance of different types of changes and help to prioritise actions. This is demonstrated by studying the combined impacts of three example changes – greater home working, changes in commuting transport modes and car intensity – on office workers’ energy use and wellbeing. The results show that working from home could have a greater impact upon office workers’ average energy use and enjoyment than changes to commuting modes, but that the social contact provided by the office could be difficult to replace. The study also demonstrates different ways that energy savings might be achieved through home working, shifts in commuting modes and changes to vehicle intensity. This approach could be used more widely to compare a broader range of changes, understand their interactions and different ways to achieve outcomes, and help to identify those changes that are most important to reduce energy use and improve wellbeing. The work presented in this thesis shows that time-use can be used as a basis to examine energy demand and wellbeing together. Using time-use to link these issues enables trade-offs or co-benefits due to different uses of time to be determined and allows rebound effects to be considered. The results suggest that reducing energy use can be achieved at the same time as improving wellbeing. The hope is that the approaches and findings presented in this thesis can provide a basis for wider discussion and a platform for future work to support climate change mitigation strategies that are positive for both the environment and society.