• Energy Research
• 2. Zero hunger close
• 3. Good health close
• GB close
• Sustainability close

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that to limit warming to 1.5 °C, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is required. Integrated assessment models (IAMS) predict that a land area between the size of Argentina and Australia is required for bioenergy crops, a 3–7 time increase in the current bioenergy planting area globally. The authors pose the question of whether vertical farming (VF) technology can enable BECCS deployment, either via land sparing or supply. VF involves indoor controlled environment cultivation, and can increase productivity per unit land area by 5–10 times. VF is predominantly being used to grow small, high value leafy greens with rapid growth cycles. Capital expenditure, operational expenditure, and sustainability are challenges in current VF industries, and will affect the ability to utilise this technology for other crops. The authors argue that, whilst challenging, VF could help reach wider climate goals. Application of VF for bioenergy crops could be a game changer in delivering BECCS technologies and may reduce the land footprint required as well as the subsequent associated negative environmental impacts. VF bioenergy could allow us to cultivate the future demand for bioenergy for BECCS on the same, or less, land area than is currently used globally.

COVID-19, caused by a member of the coronavirus family of viruses, has spread to most countries around the world since it was first recorded in humans in China in late 2019. Closing universities and cancelling all face-to-face activities have become a COVID-19 inevitable reality in many parts of the world. Its impact on university programs, particularly to maintain academic standards and quality assurance procedures, has become significantly more challenging and complex. New ways of working digitally, to minimize disruption to daily operations, have also led to enormous anxiety and uncertainty within the student population, and meeting students’ expectations has also become significantly more difficult. This paper reviews actions taken by universities to safeguard high academic standards and quality assurance procedures during this time and appraise the challenges and impacts on students’ academic performance.

Recently, robots have been widely adopted in the hospitality and tourism industry. Efficient robots can help hoteliers and tourism suppliers with their repetitive or manual labor. Due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, there is an increasing number of publications on robotic applications in hospitality and tourism. However, a comprehensive literature review of this realm remains lacking. Therefore, to provide a holistic view of the existing literature on robotic applications in hospitality and tourism, this study reviewed 86 extant robotic application-related articles by conducting descriptive analysis and content analysis. The findings of this study showed that most of the existing relevant studies were conducted from the perspective of consumers in the hospitality context. Potential future research directions for academics are identified herein. Practical implications on robotic adoption are also provided for industry practitioners.

The purpose of this research is to introduce a qualitative sustainability performance assessment framework for food supply networks, based on the perception of their key stakeholders’ upper management. Moreover, the paper provides industry insights by exemplifying the value of the proposed framework for the UK food industry. A critical review on the most acknowledged sustainability assessment methodologies and tools resulted in the synthesis of the proposed framework. An illustrative application follows, based on data from semi-structured interviews with C-level executives from key players of the UK poultry sector. The results demonstrate an easy-to-use approach, with a comprehensive and sharp outcome on supply chain sustainability performance assessment. Industry insights demonstrate an adequate sustainability performance with respect to the entire supply chain. A detailed view on different echelons reveals specific areas that could be improved, such as the environmental performance at both farming (production) and processing levels. This work extends the scope of current sustainability performance assessment tools by providing a tangible triple bottom-line overview, as well as echelon-specific and indicator-specific details, in a user-friendly, yet straightforward, way. UK food industry insights are valuable for practitioners and academics. The illustration is based exclusively on C-level executives’ viewpoint; thus, any generalization of the results should be considered to this effect. Supply chain stakeholders, policy-makers, and researchers could perform a quick and reliable supply network sustainability performance assessment.

Interest in urban food production is growing; recent research has highlighted its potential to increase food security and reduce the environmental impact of food production. However, resource demands of urban horticulture are poorly understood. Here, we use allotment gardens in the United Kingdom to investigate resource demands of urban horticultural production across the country. We conducted a nationwide citizen science project using year-long allotment ‘diaries’ with allotment gardeners (n = 163). We analysed a variety of resources: transportation; time; water use; inputs of compost, manure and topsoil; and inputs of fertilisers, pest control and weed control. We found that, overall, an allotment demands 87 annual visits, travelling 139 km to and from the plot; 7 fertiliser additions; 4 pest control additions; and 2 weed control additions. On average, each kilogram of food produced used 0.4 hours’ labour, 16.9 L of water, 0.2 L of topsoil, 2.2 L of manure, and 1.9 L of compost. As interest in urban horticultural production grows, and policy makers build urban horticultural spaces into future sustainable cities, it is of key importance that this is carried out in a way that minimises resource requirements, and we demonstrate here that avenues exist for the diversion of municipal compostable waste and household-level city food waste for this purpose.

Water resource management in the UK is multifaceted, with a complexity of issues arising from acute and chronic stressors. Below average rainfall in spring 2020 coincided with large-scale changes to domestic water consumption patterns, arising from the first UK-wide COVID-19 lockdown, resulting in increased pressure on nationwide resources. A sector wide survey, semi-structured interviews with sector executives, meteorological data, water resource management plans and market information were used to evaluate the impact of acute and chronic threats on water demand in the UK, and how resilience to both can be increased. The COVID-19 pandemic was a particularly acute threat: water demand increased across the country, it was unpredictable and hard to forecast, and compounding this, below average rainfall resulted in some areas having to tanker in water to ‘top up’ the network. This occurred in regions of the UK that are ‘water stressed’ as well as those that are not. We therefore propose a need to look beyond ‘design droughts’ and ‘dry weather average demand’ to characterise the management and resilience of future water resources. As a sector, we can learn from this acute threat and administer a more integrated approach, combining action on the social value of water, the implementation of water trading and the development of nationwide multi-sectoral resilience plans to better respond to short and long-term disruptors.

Orphan crops are those crops that did not receive the same attention of the research community as in the case of staples such as wheat, maize, or rice despite their regional and nutritional importance. A relatively recent trend has been promoting their research to improve their productivity and resilience to environmental shocks. However, their impact on consumers’ nutrition has been analysed only considering the crops individually and not in the context of the diet. This is important because an increase in the consumption of one product may trigger changes in the other products that conform to the diet. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential impact, in terms of food choices and nutrition, of increasing the consumption of orphan crops (represented by millet) in the Kenyan diet. This is carried out using a microeconomic-based methodology, which augments the original consumer problem with a constraint regarding the amount of the orphan crop on the diet. To compute the required elasticities for the method, three demand systems—i.e., for rural, less affluent urban, more affluent urban households—were estimated using the 2015–16 Kenyan Integrated Household Survey and the two-step approach to address the zero consumption for some food categories; the second step was modelled using the Linquad demand model. The results indicate that although the orphan crops have the capacity to improve some of the nutrients (e.g., vitamins and minerals), in net terms, as measured by the aggregated nutritional indicator the improvement is somewhat limited, the improvements occur in the rural and the less affluent population.

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.