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This article undertakes a comprehensive review of tourism's impacts on social-ecological systems and the use of the local to global commons. It examines a wide range of issues from climate change and air travel to biodiversity loss, pollution, and overtourism. It reinforces that tourism in modernity has pursued a dominant growth-driven paradigm of development and market expansion that is unsustainable. The review raises critical questions about how to move forward in the Anthropocene, where climate change is an existential threat to which travel and tourism must adjust. We offer directions for knowledge creation to develop nature-positive tourism that decouples from greenhouse gas emissions and seeks the regeneration of natural capital and communal health and well-being. This direction includes rethinking the purposes and values of tourism by addressing equity and ethical issues. It also calls for inclusivity of diverse worldviews and knowledge systems, including traditional and Indigenous knowledge. Such a pluralistic paradigm replaces the unsustainable modernist tourism paradigm that has dominated its evolution. We conclude with suggestions for research to advance nature-positive tourism.

Abstract An existing industrial building ubicated in South Italy is investigated by applying a tailored approach to optimize energy retrofit. The baseline provides high energy consumption, which needs to be tackled to promote the transition towards more sustainable buildings. Accordingly, after a detailed energy audit, the building is modeled and simulated under EnergyPlus environment using DesignBuilder® to characterize geometry and HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) systems. The model is calibrated against metered data as concerns the trends of indoor temperatures. Different retrofit measures are investigated, i.e., replacement of windows, implementation of solar screens, use of heat recovery, optimization of HVAC operation and installation of photovoltaics of different sizes. Thus, a large domain of solutions is explored by conducting an exhaustive research through the coupling between EnergyPlus and MATLAB®. The research provides the Pareto optimization of building retrofit minimizing primary energy consumption and global cost for two different scenarios as regards the access to public incentives. The utopia point criterion is used to pick a solution from the Pareto front. Such solution can yield energy and global cost savings up to 81% and 45%, respectively, ensuring the same comfort level compared to the baseline. The primary energy consumption of the whole facility can be reduced up to 40.1 kWhp/m2a. The outcomes can give precious guidelines to refurbish industrial and office buildings in Mediterranean areas with a view to energy-efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

The climate change is increasingly apparent and the need to be independent for the sourcing of energy sources has led to the establishment of the European Community financing schemes to support research and development of systems in place to decrease pollution and independence from fossil fuels. One way to catch up with greater conviction this scope is the production of energy at a large scale, using renewable sources. Now, the incentives are even a fundamental element for the development and competitiveness of these systems, but it is clear that if the policy guidelines will converge in the direction of Horizon 2020, the possibility of implementing such systems will become a model easily replicable and suitable. In this context, this work aims to show how a production system that exploits solar energy, through a plant collector, can be comparable in terms of cost with other energy sources. In particular, an estimate is made of an economic system with solar collectors for the production of electrical energy, starting with the year of production and on the basis of 25 years of life of the plant.

The environmental sustainability is probably one of the most controversial topics of national policy agendas. The needs to combine economic growth and well-being, have forced governments to introduce tools for reducing CO2 emission and avoiding climate change. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of these measures in the 1990-2014 period for a sample of 188 countries; and to analyze the determinants of CO2 in the 2000-2014 period for a sample of 175 countries. The results suggest that i) richest countries have a GDP elasticity of CO2 greater than that of poorest countries; and ii) GDP, energy consumption, urbanization, agricultural development, tourism and depletion of natural resources are directly correlated to CO2, while forest area, alternative energy, trade openness and FDI inflows are inversely related to CO2. Italian Review of Agricultural Economics, Vol 74 No 1 (2019)

The seriousness of the environmental crisis and the current debate on ecological problems are at the basis of this survey, which intends to take a frontline position in this theoretical research in an attempt to reduce the epistemological and philosophical vacuum surrounding the foundations of the ecological idea and its possible evolutionary pathways. Compared to movimentist environmentalism that seeks concrete solutions and is often challenged by the urgency of all the issues massed together in the current circumstances, a more deeply pondered theoretical approach should fully develop a systemic-relational vision, both with respect to scientific investigations on the physical-biological origins of the tangle of life, and to ethical-political perspectives in order to design projects for the future. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the ecological issue in the light of the recent developments of sciences that study the behaviour and evolution of complex systems and that place the investigation in the web of interconnections to which the dynamics of life and evolution can be ascribed. Having ascertained how the prevailing models in modern tradition are inadequate in addressing the environmental emergency, an ecological vision of complexity restores the essential character of interdependent unity to the ecological systems. This is a major contribution not only for superseding the purely utilitarian objectives that currently prevail in economics and politics, but also for basing human development on values of social justice and collective solidarity that could redirect the course of future history along more desirable pathways. Despite the implausibility of supporting any direct applicability of the models of natural sciences to the social, political and economic ambits, an in-depth analysis of the natural lifecycles could help us open up to the prospect of a more realistic positioning and integration of the human species in the cosmos. In this regard, the horizon of complexity - understood as gathering together, connecting, placing in relation - could reawaken a systemic awareness capable of generating more sustainable and liveable social-economic balances.

I will describe a multi-scalar project concerning the municipality of Castelnovo ne' Monti, where I try to develop spaces for socializing in compliance with the distancing constraints that are required at us. The project strengthens structuring elements of this territory by resorting to various interventions. The organization of the small villages connected together working as an integrated system, the insertion of a new central place, the eco-camping project and the three pine forests regeneration without forgetting the desire to spread the interest in two authentic treasures: Pietra of Bismantova and Gessi Triassici of the Secchia valley. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2022: Special Issue. New Scenarios for Safe Mobility in Urban Areas

Abstract We develop a sequential optimization model to analyze a circular economy framework where waste is collected by municipalities and it is partially reused by a recycling company for the production of electricity, thermal energy and other goods. The considered municipalities collect recyclable and not-recyclable waste types, sorted by citizens, which are sold to the recycling company and sent to landfill, respectively. Each municipality aims at maximizing its profits deriving from selling the recyclable waste to the recycling company, taking into account the waste collection and the dismantling costs. On the other side, the recycling company maximizes its total profit obtained from the difference between the revenues of selling the new goods produced and the costs of purchasing and treating recyclable waste. In this closed-loop supply chain, the municipalities define the prices at which they can offer recyclable waste to the recycling company and the tax that citizens has to pay for the waste management service. In contrast, the recycling company selects the processing volumes of recyclable waste to purchase depending on the offer prices set by the municipalities. In order to find the equilibrium of the whole supply chain, we propose an iterative decomposition method, applied to waste collection in the Lombardy Region in Italy, that accounts for the sequence of the decisions taken by the municipalities and the recycling company.

This paper focuses on the results of the research work carried out by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) within the WISE project. This project aims at investigating the effects and the impacts of extreme weather events, particularly very warm summers, mild winters and storms, on the socio-economic systems of European countries. The output consists of a series of empirical studies, both of quantitative and qualitative-descriptive nature. The work of FEEM in the WISE project covers the quantitative analysis of the impacts of climate extremes on the socio-economic system in Italy and the analysis of individuals' perception of climate extremes based on results from individuals' surveys. In this paper is considered the study of the perception of weather impacts through questionnaire survey to the general public. With regard to the individuals' perception survey, a sample of 300 individuals were interviewed by telephone: 150 extracted from the North of Italy and 150 from the South of Italy. Individuals were asked general questions about their perception of climate extremes, and about the impacts of weather extremes on their daily habits at work, at home, in their leisure activities, on their transport patterns, on their health and tourism choices.

Abstract The concrete industry is the largest consumer of natural resources and the Portland cement, the binder of modern concrete mixtures, is not environmentally friendly. The world's cement production, in fact, contributes to the earth's atmosphere about 5–7% of the total CO2 emissions, CO2 being mainly responsible for global warming and climate change. As a consequence, concrete industry in the future has to feed the growing population needs – expected to rise up to ten billion in 2050 - being sustainable by means of the “3R-Green Strategy”: Reduction in consumption of gross energy, Reduction in polluting emissions and Reduction in consuming not renewable natural resources. At the same time, the concept of sustainable development in the concrete industry is not well defined and, currently, there are no holistic models capable of assessing the environmental footprint of cement-based materials. For this reason, a new Empathetic Added Sustainability Index (EASI) was developed taking into account both the environmental impact of mortars and concretes through the global warming potential (GWP), the gross energy requirement (GER) and the natural raw materials consumption (NRMC) but also the durability performance and the engineering performance (such as compressive and tensile strength, bond to reinforcing steel, shrinkage and creep, shear properties, etc) required as a function of the specific application. EASI demonstrated that Alkali Activated Slag (AAS) and High Volume Fly Ash (HVFA) reinforced concretes are characterized by the lower environmental impact in chloride-rich environments. On the other hand, in CO2-rich environments, the best solution in terms of sustainability is represented by the HVFA concretes. Finally, for a thermal plaster exposed to freeze and taw cycles, EASI clearly showed that AAS lightweight plaster is the most appropriate solution.