Current Research in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

As green bonds continue their dynamic growth trajectory to finance the transition to a more sustainable future, a gap in the literature remains on how companies have overcome internal barriers to successful green bond issuance. This case-based study analyzes how five Nordic energy companies have successfully surmounted internal barriers to issuing green bonds by leveraging their sustainable business models. The findings show a number of antecedental features of sustainable business models prior to green bond issuance including: a focus on environmental betterment as part of the mission and strategy; investments into assets that provide an environmental benefit and a divestiture of those that do not; the active pursuit to reduce CO₂ emissions through R&D; and, strong governance mechanisms. Throughout the process of issuing green bonds, companies introduce changes to their sustainable business models, most notably, green finance frameworks and additional governance practices. As a result of the green bond issuance, reinforcing choices and consequences emerge to create virtuous cycles. In turn, the virtuous cycles support environmental objectives and foster more economic and environmental value for the company, investors, and society. Our study offers a process-based theoretical outline of how sustainable financing can make a business model more sustainable by removing internal barriers and strengthening company strategy, asset choices, and governance.

The relationship between ecosystem services (ES) and urbanization is crucial for sustainable development. Rapid urbanization threatens the natural capital of Dhaka city, affecting the delivery of ES through changes in land use and land cover. We used vertical growth (VG), nighttime light data (NTL), and population density (PD) as standard urbanization indicators alongside technomass, a three-dimensional indicator, to evaluate the degree of urbanization as a continuous spatial process. We modeled the spatiotemporal relationships between urbanization degrees and ES using the ecosystem service value (ESV) dataset applied in Dhaka, with regional modified value coefficients. Results from the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model showed that technomass emerged as a more appropriate indicator to analyze urbanization for ESV analysis (r > 0.61), followed by NTL (r > 0.56), and PD (r > 0.54) across all zones from 2000 to 2021. We observed a 68.34% decrease in net ESV, equivalent to $245.88 million (in 2021 USD), from 2000 to 2021. This decline was driven by the conversion of water bodies (−70.93%), agricultural land (−60.08%), forest and vegetation (−70.18%) into urban built-up areas and other uses. In contrast, net technomass increased by 243.11% due to the city's vertical growth. The digital building height (DBH) model revealed that the built-up area had expanded by 94.94% over the study period, with an average annual growth rate of 4.52%. Significant correlations (p < 0.05) were observed between ES and urbanization. The rural-urban fringe area exhibited the most significant increase in urbanization (r > 0.90), along with a 440.47% growth in technomass. Our results provide insights into the impact of urbanization on ES, particularly at the regional scale, and have highlighted the importance of integrating VG and technomass for urbanization analysis. These findings could be useful for environmental management, policymaking, spatial planning, and coordinating future ES protection and urban development.

Sustainability implementation efforts, relevant to all Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), can succeed or fail based on how the program activities effectively align with local community norms. Conflict arises when implementers incorrectly assume the ways in which local communities and other stakeholders share their world views. A novel approach was applied to identify conflicts between stakeholder norms through the example of wildlife conservation. This case is based on 62 systematically collected interviews involving law enforcement staff (wildlife police officers [WPOs]) and local community members in four of Zambia's Game Management Areas. Cultural consensus analysis (CCA) was used to extract and compare cultural models across groups. Discordant cultural norms were identified for resource protection, which reflected frailty of collaborative strategies. Concordant norms were relevant to shared understandings of the disproportionate burdens to GMA-based communities from conservation and some potential benefits of collaboration. This case shows exemplar application of CCA to capture and compare stakeholder norms associated with livelihoods and conservation, allowing better program design that reduces conflict and builds on shared values to better support SDGs, especially SDG15 (Life on Land).

Sikkim is a Himalayan state in the northeastern part of India. Its capital Gangtok, is one of the most scenic places is visited by several tourists for a close view of nature. Springs are one of the major sources of water supply for the city, especially for the city's outskirts, and are used for irrigation for the villages around the city. With the rapid population growth, expanding urbanisation, and effects of rapidly changing climatic conditions, Sikkim is struggling to fill the increasing water demand-supply gap jeopardizing the long term security of water resources for its residents. While challenging terrain significantly affects water access, the pre-existing notion that water availability is simply a physical shortage has been debated. This fails to consider issues of water equity, where unequal distribution and social dynamics can limit access for certain groups. This paper employs an intersectional ecofeminism approach to deconstruct the pre-existing notion of how water availability is considered a physical shortage rather than being able to envision other factors that hinder the involvement of women in conserving or managing water resources. Furthermore, the paper also establishes links between such local management practices and responsible tourism growth in the region.

Nature conservation and sustainable development goals are challenged by powerful economic incentives to exploit natural resources, particularly in many tropical countries. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects have been encouraged worldwide for over 40 years to improve the sustainability of nature-based livelihoods and facilitate natural resource governance in accordance with cultural and spiritual traditions. CBNRM has been implemented in Ghana, West Africa, for over 20 years in the form of Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs), but their success in supporting conservation and sustainable development goals remains the subject of debate. We evaluated participant views of 33 conservation, economic, and sociocultural outcomes through 881 interviews with people from 89 communities associated with eight CREMAs. Participants reported highest expectations and performance for outcomes including conservation awareness, increased food and honey production, and collective community action and unity. However, perceived performance failed to meet participant expectations for all 33 outcomes and particularly for conservation and economic outcomes. Expectation-performance gaps were largest for conservation outcomes such as reduced illegal logging, economic outcomes including increased income, financial assistance, and employment, and sociocultural outcomes such as the constancy of children's school attendance. Successfully addressing these gaps will depend largely on external factors, such as government effectiveness in controlling illegal logging and investments in credit and education. While this and other CBNRM approaches cannot stand alone to achieve conservation goals, with sufficient external support they can provide substantial benefits to participants and play a supporting role in conservation and as buffers to successful protected areas.

Food security has been challenging in many countries due to climate change, population growth, water scarcity, and bio-energy development. This work quantifies the impact of water-energy-food (WEF) nexus coupling coordination on food security in China through a multidimensional approach to promote food security and resource sustainability. We first quantify the coupling coordination degree of the WEF nexus using the entropy weight TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method. And then Ordinary Least Squares Multiple Linear Regression model is employed to explore the impact of the WEF nexus coupling coordination degree on food security. The findings show that an improvement of 1% in the coupling coordination degree of the WEF increases the total grain yield, per capita grain yield, grain yield per unit by 2.69%, 1.12% and 2.77%, respectively. It is also found that improvement of WEF coupling coordination is conducive to enhancing food self-sufficiency rate and stabilizing food price. And the increment in grain yield is achieved by increasing the effective irrigated area and agricultural machinery inputs. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect of the WEF nexus on the total grain yield and per capita yield is more significant in the central region, and the improvement of grain yield per unit is more effective in the west. Meanwhile, the interaction term analysis demonstrates that cropping structure, agricultural subsidies, and water-saving technologies all strengthen the positive contribution of the WEF nexus to food security.

Biochar amendment to soils is regarded as the potential practice to mitigate climate change while also increasing yields. However, geographical differences in the effects of biochar on cereal production and greenhouse gas emissions are not well understood at the global scale. Random forest, a classic machine learning algorithm, was employed to reveal the drivers of geographical differences in the effects of biochar on cereals yield and greenhouse gas emissions. The potential for yield increases and greenhouse gas emission reduction was predicted in this study. The results indicate that nitrogen fertilizer rate is the most important factor determining the impact of biochar on cereal yield, while biochar application rate strongly affected greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the maximum increase in cereal crop yields under biochar application was 14.1%. To achieve the largest increment globally, recommended values of biochar application, mineral nitrogen application rate and pyrolysis temperature were predicted to be around 36.3 t ha⁻¹, 193.7 kg N ha⁻¹ and 420 °C, respectively. The maximum reductions of methane and nitrous oxide emissions from paddy fields around the world were 21.6% and 31.0%, and from maize and wheat fields 35.7% and 36.1%, respectively. Although biochar can potentially improve yields while reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide under proper management, the performance of biochar showed great heterogeneity.