• Energy Research
• 9. Industry and infrastructure close
• US close
• Sustainability close

To effectively address the sustainability crises our planet faces, decision-makers at different levels of government worldwide will have to get a handle on three key challenges: learning from Global North and South initiatives in tandem, taking stock of social innovations alongside technological fixes, and nurturing grassroots sustainable development initiatives next to, or in place of, top-down corporate and government interventions. Current scientific literature and grant-making institutions have often reinforced the compartmentalized fashion in which we learn and draw policy lessons from North/South, social/technical, and bottom-up/top-down sustainability initiatives, including local food system innovations. The strategic levers for global sustainable development lying in-between are thus left out. This paper uses exploratory, multiple case study analysis to address this omission. By concurrently drawing lessons from grassroots innovations in Brazil, New York, and Senegal—three profoundly different socioeconomic and geographic contexts—we identify common pressure points that have enabled local communities to drive system-wide transformations toward climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in the agri-food system. The findings of this paper would be of value to scholars, government officials, and community groups engaged in agri-food systems sustainability and interested in the processes of change that have allowed budding innovations to stabilize and scale up.

Eco-innovation has gained considerable attention in the academic and corporate world due to its potential in mitigating a firm’s sustainability issues. Most previous studies focused on the reactive approaches of eco-innovation using primary data. This study mitigates the existing research gap by highlighting proactive eco-innovation and using a secondary panel dataset. The prime objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between proactive eco-innovation and firms’ financial performance. Hence, the study will introduce the proactive eco-innovation index with the help of secondary panel data. In addition to that, the paper will also explore how proactive eco-innovation relates to circular economy. The theory of Resource-Based View (RBV) was used to explain the relationship among the variables. This study was conducted on 31 Malaysian public listed energy companies from 2015 to 2019. A proactive eco-innovation index was inferred by adapting three dimensions of eco-innovation (product, process, and technology) which is applicable for the energy sector. By applying random-effects GLS regression equation modeling, it was found that proactive eco-innovation (product eco-innovation, process eco-innovation, and technology eco-innovation) has a direct effect on firm financial performance. Furthermore, product and process eco-innovation is directly related to a circular economy through a sustainable product development process. The findings suggest that policymakers in the firm should proactively adopt eco-innovative practices. It will positively affect the circular economy as it will be cost-effective and help to reduce potential industrial pollution in the environment.

To contribute to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sustainable transition into the circular economy, the study proposes the activation of organizational learning (OL) processes – denoted here as multi-level knowledge creation, transfer, and retention processes – as a key phase in introducing circular business models (CBMs) at SME and supply chain (SC) level. The research employs a mixed-method approach, using the focus group methodology to identify contextual elements impacting on CBM-related OL processes, and a survey-based evaluation to single out the most frequently used OL processes inside Italian construction SMEs. As main result, a CBM-oriented OL multi-level model offers a fine-grained understanding of contextual elements acting mutually as barriers and drivers for OL processes, as possible OL dynamics among them. The multi-level culture construct – composed of external stakeholders’, SC stakeholders’, and organizational culture – identify the key element to activate CBM-oriented OL processes. Main implications are related to the identification of cultural, structural, regulatory, and process contextual elements across the external, SC, and organizational levels, and their interrelation with applicable intraorganizational and interorganizational learning processes. The proposed model would contribute to an improved implementation of transitioning into the circular economy utilizing sustainable business models in the construction SMEs.

Smart cities are primarily based on information and communications technology development and applications across various academic subjects and domains. Integrating new-generation information and communications technologies, including the Internet of Things data collection, cloud computation, big data applications, and mobile network, smart cities organize the people and things of a city according to application needs to perform real-time computation and processing. Information transmission must be rapid and reliable to protect personal privacy and to secure data. All types of information security problems can lead to disastrous consequences; in particular, they pose great challenges to traditional information security systems. To explore possible solutions to the challenges that Taiwan’s smart city information security faces, this study used the enterprise architecture method and discussed the emphasis and investment capacity of the government and enterprises on information security. Moreover, this study reviewed correct methods of using a smart information security collaborative system to protect not only privacy, however also networks with a large attack surface; the purpose was to establish a reliable data sharing practice and alleviate the cascading effect of failures of smart networks. Finally, this paper provides future research directions for building smart cities and encouraging further explorations in this domain. It is hoped that smart cities can conduct overall planning for information security during the process of construction. Future researchers will be able to propose more effective solutions for smart city information security while developing information and communication technologies.

This paper explores the coupling relationship between land use and rural development to improve the environmentally friendly level of land use and attain accelerated rural revitalization. On the basis of the coupling framework, the quantitative study included the dimensionless method, the entropy method, and the coupling measure model with an empirical study in the Hainan province of China. Specifically, we evaluated levels of environmental friendliness and rural revitalization, and further calculated the coupling degree, coupling coordination degree, and the relative development degree between the two. Results demonstrated that (1) both the levels of environmentally friendly land use and rural revitalization showed an upward trend; (2) the coupling degree between environmentally friendly land use and rural revitalization was always at a high level; (3) the coupling coordination degree was improved from reluctant coordination to a quality coordination level; and (4) the relative development degree has changed since 2014, and environmentally friendly land use began to lag behind rural revitalization. This study contributes to the literature by integrating the coupling model into the relationship between land use and rural development, and the results of the article can provide a reference for China and other developing countries to coordinate land use and rural development.

Interventions in rural development projects vary in their likely time to impact. Some offer rapid payoffs after minimal learning and investment, while others offer larger payoffs but entail delays and may require learning or significant investment of labor and capital. Short-term impacts included reductions in stored grain losses due to improved silos and increase in household savings due to increased participation in savings groups. The least poor are most likely to invest labor and capital in slow-to-accrue payoffs like soil erosion abatement from building conservation structures. Our results suggest that targeting project interventions by asset level can enhance impacts.

Positive Energy Districts (PED) are areas within cities that generate more renewable energy than they consume, contributing to cities’ energy system transformation toward carbon neutrality. Since PED is a novel concept, the implementation is very challenging. Within the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action, which offers an open space for collaboration among scientists across Europe (and beyond), this paper asks what the needs for supporting the implementation of PEDs are. To answer this, it draws on Delphi process (expert reviews) as the main method alongside the literature review and also uses surveys as supplementary methods to identify the main challenges for developing PEDs. Initial findings reveal seven interacting topics that later were ranked as highest to the lowest as the following: governance, incentive, social, process, market, technology and context. These are interrelated and interdependent, implying that none can be considered in isolation of the others and cannot be left out in order to ensure the successful development of PEDs. The resources that are needed to address these challenges are a common need for systematic understanding of the processes behind them, as well as cross-disciplinary models and protocols to manage the complexity of developing PEDs. The results can be the basis for devising the conceptual framework on the development of new PED guides and tools.