• Energy Research
• 12. Responsible consumption close
• GB close
• IN close
• Sustainability close

Climate change, environmental degradation, and limited resources are motivations for sustainable forest management. Forests, the most abundant renewable resource on earth, used to make a wide variety of forest-based products for human consumption. To provide a scientific measure of a product’s sustainability and environmental performance, the life cycle assessment (LCA) method is used. This article provides a comprehensive review of environmental performances of forest-based products including traditional building products, emerging (mass-timber) building products and nanomaterials using attributional LCA. Across the supply chain, the product manufacturing life-cycle stage tends to have the largest environmental impacts. However, forest management activities and logistics tend to have the greatest economic impact. In addition, environmental trade-offs exist when regulating emissions as indicated by the latest traditional wood building product LCAs. Interpretation of these LCA results can guide new product development using biomaterials, future (mass) building systems and policy-making on mitigating climate change. Key challenges include handling of uncertainties in the supply chain and complex interactions of environment, material conversion, resource use for product production and quantifying the emissions released.

Although the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) advocate, through SDG 4 and SDG 10, equitable quality education and the reduction of inequalities within and between countries, respectively, few studies have examined how inequalities in regional sustainability influence higher education. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between regional sustainability and higher education in China using fixed-effects panel modelling. A systematic force framework showing how regional sustainability drives higher education was constructed from economic, social, and environmental perspectives, and the endogeneity in the process of how regional sustainability affects higher education was explored by introducing one-year lagged values as instrumental variables. Our results show that regional sustainability has a significant impact on higher educational attainment in China, with differing effects in the eastern, central, and western regions, respectively. In central China, economic sustainability plays a significant positive role in higher educational attainment; in the western region, economic and social sustainability have stronger positive effects, while environmental sustainability has significantly negative effects. In terms of policy implications, our findings can be used to support regional development policies to promote regional higher education.

Despite the large quantities of secondary materials flowing within the built environment, their actual volume and respective waste management processes are not accurately known and recorded. Consequently, various sustainability and material efficiency policies are not supported by accurate data and information-reporting associated with secondary materials’ availability and sourcing. Many recent studies have shown that the integration of digital technologies such as city information management (CIM), building information modeling (BIM), and blockchain have the potential to enhance construction waste management (CWM) by classifying recycled materials and creating value from waste. However, there is insufficient guidance to address the challenges during the process of CWM. Therefore, the research reported in this paper aims to develop a blockchain-enhanced construction waste information management conceptual framework (BeCW). This paper is the first attempt to apply the strengths of integrated information-management modeling with blockchain to optimize the process of CWM, which includes a WasteChain for providing a unified and trustworthy credit system for evaluating construction-waste-recyclability to stakeholders. This is enabled through the use of blockchain and self-executing smart contracts to clarify the responsibility and ownership of the relevant stakeholders. As a result, this study provides a unified and explicit framework for referencing which quantifies the value-contribution of stakeholders to waste-recovery and the optimization of secondary construction materials for reuse and recycling. It also addresses the issue of sustainable CWM through information exchange at four levels: user, application, service, and infrastructure data levels.

A variety of pipelines are distributed under urban roads. The upgrading of pipelines is bound to occupy certain road resources, compress the driving space of motor vehicles for a long time, aggravate the traffic congestion in the construction section, and then affect the traffic operation of the whole region. A reasonable layout of traffic signs for inducement to guide the traffic flow in the area where the construction section is located is conducive to promoting a balanced distribution of traffic flow in the regional road network, so as to achieve the reduction of automobile exhaust emissions and the sustainable development of traffic. In this paper, the layout optimization method of regional traffic signs for inducement is proposed. Taking the maximum amount of guidance information that the regional traffic signs can provide as the objective function, and taking the traffic volume, the characteristics of intersection nodes and the standard deviation of road saturation as the independent variables, the layout optimization model of guidance facilities is constructed, which can optimize the layout of traffic guidance signs in the area affected by the construction section, and achieve the goal that the minimum number of facilities can provide the maximum amount of guidance information. The results of the case study show that among the 64 alternative locations where traffic guidance signs can be set in the study area, eight optimal locations are finally determined as the setting points of guidance facilities through this model, and the effective increment of guidance information is the largest at this time. The model proposed in this paper can be used for reference to promote the sustainable development of traffic in the area where the construction section is located.

Saffron, also known as “the golden spice”, is one of the most expensive crops in the world. The expensiveness of saffron comes from its rarity, the tedious harvesting process, and its nutritional and medicinal value. Different countries of the world are making great economic growth due to saffron export. In India, it is cultivated mostly in regions of Kashmir owing to its climate and soil composition. The economic value generated by saffron export can be increased manyfold by studying the agronomical factors of saffron and developing a model for artificial cultivation of saffron in any season and anywhere by monitoring and controlling the conditions of its growth. This paper presents a detailed study of all the agronomical variables of saffron that have a direct or indirect impact on its growth. It was found that, out of all the agronomical variables, the important ones having an impact on growth include corm size, temperature, water availability, and minerals. It was also observed that the use of IoT for the sustainable cultivation of saffron in smart cities has been discussed only by very few research papers. An IoT-based framework has also been proposed, which can be used for controlling and monitoring all the important growth parameters of saffron for its cultivation.

The transport sector needs to go through an extended process of decarbonisation to counter the threat of climate change. Unfortunately, the International Energy Agency forecasts an enormous growth in the number of cars and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Two issues can thus be identified: (1) the need for a new methodology that could evaluate the policy performances ex-ante and (2) the need for more effective policies. To help address these issues, we developed an Agent-Based Model called Mobility USA aimed at: (1) testing whether this could be an effective approach in analysing ex-ante policy implementation in the transport sector; and (2) evaluating the effects of alternative policy scenarios on commuting behaviours in the USA. Particularly, we tested the effects of two sets of policies, namely market-based and preference-change ones. The model results suggest that this type of agent-based approach will provide a useful tool for testing policy interventions and their effectiveness.

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.