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Nowadays, following the increased interest and need for the issue of sustainability, tourist destinations are called upon to promote sustainable tourism development through the implementation of investments and initiatives. Despite the investments by the destinations, how are these perceived by tourists and residents? Based on this, this paper aims to assess the perception of sustainable investments in a coastal area located in Tuscany, through the administration of a questionnaire among 750 people, including both tourists and house owners. The study adopted statistical logit and probit models to detect the perception of sustainable initiatives in relation to beach satisfaction. Moreover, this research developed a model for understanding if there are substantial differences in perception between Italian and foreign beach users and at the same time between residents/house owners and tourists. The findings reveal that those who perceive investments in sustainability are more than satisfied with beach and facilities. The model shows that foreigners and residents/house owners perceive sustainable investments implemented in the destination more than tourists and Italian respondents. This research can provide support to local operators and policymakers in defining the destination image in relation to sustainability.

This research focuses on the evolution of the largest iceberg A68 and analyzes the trajectory using Sentinel-1 SAR data. The monitoring began when A68 calved Larsen C Ice shelf on 12 July 2017, and ended on 1 February 2021. A total of 47 images were analyzed and studied to ascertain the changes in the area, trajectory and the factors that might have influenced said changes. The big size of the iceberg caught the scientific community’s attention when it started moving towards South Georgia Island, a habitat of penguins and seals. The pattern of decrease and increase in the iceberg’s size was analyzed and compared with the surrounding sea ice extent to account for longitudinal stretching and shrinkage. Iceberg’s trajectory was also studied to take into account the underlying seabed and ice rises, and their implication on A68’s maneuverability, giving rise to unique motions in the coastal regime. Two subsequent calving events in the iceberg were distinctly observed in March 2019 and April 2020. Since its inception up to December 2019, its drift was fairly gradual, with the pick up in pace observed upon its entry into open waters and departure from the peninsular region. The decrease in size was also fairly gradual with only two main calving events, as mentioned above. The cold water and sea ice surrounding the iceberg potentially helped maintain a steady state. Post its sojourn into the Southern Ocean, major calving began in December 2020 and continued through January 2021. This study explores the potential of SAR remote sensing in iceberg monitoring and tracking.

Customers’ attention to sustainability labels in fishery and aquaculture products (FAPs) has been increasing in the last decades, and the industry has adapted to this growing interest by adopting fish ecolabels. However, there is a growing interest to widen the sustainability concept to include the social and ethical information of the fishery and aquaculture industry and to go further from the voluntary approach on the labeling of these aspects in FAPs. For this reason, using data from 2021 Eurobarometer and using machine learning techniques, we disentangle the characteristics of the FAP buyers that consider the importance of environmental impact, ethical, and social information appearing on FAP labeling. The results confirmed that most of the consumers who consider environmental, social, and ethical aspects when buying FAPs also think that this information should be labeled. In line with other works, young, educated, and environmentally aware consumers in high-income countries are more likely to request this information in the FAP label. One interesting finding of the study relates with the asymmetric impact of the variables and the important group of respondents who do not consider these aspects but also advocate to include them in the FAP label. The study outcomes can be beneficial for policymakers to design future public policies regarding FAP labeling, as well as to be taken into consideration in the marketing policies of fishery and aquaculture producers and retailers.

The sustainable use of common pool resources (CPRs) such as fisheries constitutes a major challenge for society. A large body of empirical studies conducted in discrete time indicates that resource users are able to prevent the ‘tragedy of the commons' under institutional arrangements that can promote cooperation. However, the variability exhibited by the human behaviour and the dynamic nature of renewable resources require continuous time experiments to fully explain the mechanisms underpinning the sustainable use of resources. We conducted CPR experiments in continuous time to investigate how the extraction behaviour of resource users changes in real-time in response to changes in resource availability under communication and no communication. We find that when communication is allowed, users adjust their extraction efforts based on knowledge of previous resource availability. In contrast, when communication is not allowed, users do not incorporate resource availability into their utility function. These results suggest that communication does not merely provide a forum for coordination but mediates a causal relationship between resource levels and extraction behaviour. Our findings may help the development of effective resource management policies.

For today’s global value chains, seaports and their operations are indispensable components. In many cases, the cargo handling takes place in close proximity to residential and/or environmentally sensitive areas. Furthermore, seaports are often not operated by a single organization, but need to be considered as communities of sometimes hundreds of internal and external stakeholders. Due to their close cooperation in the cargo handling process, risk management should be a common approach among the internal stakeholders as well in order to effectively mitigate and respond to emerging risks. However, empirical research has revealed that risk management is often limited to the organization itself, which indicates a clear lack of cooperation. Primary reasons in this regard are missing knowledge about the relations and responsibilities within the port and differing terminologies. Therefore, we propose an ontology (CoRiMaS) that implements a developed reference model for risk management that explicitly aims at seaports with a cooperative approach to risk management. CoRiMaS has been designed looking at the Semantic Web and at the Linked Data model to provide a common interoperable vocabulary in the target domain. The key concepts of our ontology comprise the hazard, stakeholder, seaport, cooperation aspect, and risk management process. We validated our ontology by applying it in a case study format to the Port of Hamburg (Germany). The CoRiMaS ontology can be widely applied to foster cooperation within and among seaports. We believe that such an ontological approach has the potential to improve current risk management practices and, thereby, to increase the resilience of operations, as well as the protection of sensitive surrounding areas.

Abstract In the last three decades, scholars and operators have paid increasing attention to the environmental sustainability and energy efficiency of seaports. To achieve high competitiveness in seaports in response to environmental and energy regulation, port authorities (PAs), policymakers, port users and local communities have to invest considerable resources. This paper investigates the role of the managerial instruments in the decision-making processes of PAs for reducing and preventing negative environmental and energy effects from ports. This research consists of a two-step study. First, we conduct a literature review to analyse the academic views by systematically reading the reports to investigate practitioners’ views on the performance indicators for environmental sustainability and energy efficiency in the port industry. Second, we provide, through a qualitative method, a portrait of the Italian seaports and a multiple case study to confirm the developed conceptual managerial key performance indicators (KPIs). Specifically, applying the Balanced Scorecard model, this paper provides managerial KPIs to support PAs in their decision-making processes within the inter-organizational relationships with shipping lines for developing environmentally sustainable and energy efficient ports.

Food supply chains are increasingly asked to deliver sustainable products in a sustainable manner. Sustainability affects every segment of the supply chain and it is a key driver of innovation today. Even so, many companies are still reluctant to more environment-friendly investments. Public procurement through its "power of purchase" is one of the most influential means through which the state can effect behavioural change in economy and society. Forcing sustainable improvements in its suppliers, public procurement can have a huge influence over the food system, but organisational innovation is needed in logistics and supply chain management. In the food sector, fish supply chain is one of the most critical in terms of sustainability due to the overexploitation of oceans' resources, the decline in wild fish stocks and the big amount of waste generated along the chain from the ship to the consumers' plate. In this paper we report on our experience in innovating the logistics and the management of the fish supply chain for the school canteens of the city of Rome, in which around 150.000 pupils have lunch every day. The innovation consists of the introduction of fresh, organic, farmed fish of locally grown species transformed in attractive recipes, accurately studied based on the nutritional needs and the level of appreciation of the young consumers, instead of frozen, few wild fish presented in boring and tasteless preparations such as boiled fillets and breaded sticks. Examining the barriers and the solutions adopted, we explain how public procurement can become a creative force for sustainable development in the fish supply chain. A qualitative case study methodology is used where catering managers and staff, fish suppliers and distributors, food procurement officers, dieticians and nutritionists are interviewed. The innovations in logistics, organisation and management are defined in interaction with all the actors of the chain involved in the research and implemented under several different conditions. Observations of the feasibility of the supply chain, from production to consumption, are conducted to assess the results. Findings show an example of good practice in the area of sustainability in the food supply chain and illustrate the substantive progress that can be made in achieving supply chain sustainability. At the same time, the paper provides the specific challenges in developing a management model in which the power is more balanced along the chain and where a holistic approach requires to be taken to reach sustainable improvements. Considering the scarcity of work examining empirically the issue of sustainability in food supply chains, this study demonstrates the evolutionary process and its stages based on the examination of the Rome school canteens' supply chain and the sustainability approach it has taken with its suppliers. The author also illustrates a range of key implications that need to be considered by both managers and policy makers and it provides a range of areas where further research is required.

This study explores the application and critical issues related to the implementation of blockchain technology (BT) to the aquaculture sector, in order to understand the possibilities of improving the relationship with the supply chain and the end consumer, with a view to a sustainability for the marine environment and circular economy. Starting from considerations of commercial and political challenges related to credibility and fairness for all parties involved—from producers, to retailers, to end consumers—the procedure adopted was applied to the case of an Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture project, developed in the sea of Taranto (Italy). Furthermore, it considered two different end markets: the food market for farmed fish and the ornamental fish market for marine aquariums. The results of the study confirm that although the implementation of BT by industries and producers of marine species has the potential to lead to successful sustainability solutions, such adoption is feasible over time only if all actors in the supply chain, from aquaculture companies, to retailers, to consumers, are actively and consciously involved and can access common benefits.