Environmental and Sustainability Indicators最新文献

Reducing CO₂ emissions represents a global challenge, and the mobility sectors account for a considerable portion of total emissions, with marked disparities across diverse economies. Viewed from a macroscopic perspective, countries and regions around the world can be categorized in various ways. However, relying on a single or a few indicators often proves inadequate to meet the classification requirements for carbon reduction and sustainable development. In this study, employing machine learning and guided by 10 economic indicators, we classified 188 countries/regions into 6 identifiable clusters. Subsequently, by applying ratio analysis and random forest methodologies, we conducted a matrix-based analysis that elucidates the distinct emission characteristics of each mobility sector. Feature importance analysis revealed that for highly developed economies, the total population's contribution was significant, especially in domestic and international aviation, accounting for 50% and 25% of emissions, respectively. In contrast, for lower-middle-income countries and regions, while the total population still played a pivotal role, its influence was most pronounced in railway transportation, reaching 67%. For rapidly developing economies, domestic aviation emissions reached a peak influence of 61%. These insights emphasize the necessity for strategies tailored to the unique attributes of economic entities.

Land use changes and urban activities cause environmental degradation and climate change. This study aims to assess the impacts of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes on land surface temperature (LST) in Kigali, Rwanda over the past three decades. The combined techniques of remote sensing and GIS were applied to generate good quality Landsat images, categorize land use classes and retrieve urban indices. The modified Mann-Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimator were used to analyze trends in LST. The results indicate that between 1990 and 2020, the extent of builtup and forest areas have increased at an average rate of 3.39 km²/year and 2.42 km²/year respectively, while open land has decreased at an average rate of 5.81 km²/year. In the same period, water bodies and wetlands showed minimal changes with an increase of 1.56 km² and a decrease of 1.66 km² for water bodies and wetlands respectively. The slope magnitudes of LST are predominantly positive (p ≤ 0.05) with a high increase observed in dry seasons (0.51 °C per decade for Tmin in JJA and 0.49 °C per decade for Tmax in JF). The positive correlations between LST and urban indices were observed in all studied subregions (all values are above 0.61, p ≤ 0.05). The findings of this study are useful for the development of future urban land use schemes and the adoption of mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to climate change.

Addressing global change requires standardised observations across all ecosystem spheres. To that end, the distributed Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) strives for an optimal observational design of its over 200 in-situ facilities. Their spatial distribution should be unbiased to scale local data to its continental target region.

Therefore, we assessed biases in the emerging eLTER RI in-situ facility network. We (i) conducted a survey describing the emerging eLTER RI, (ii) detected critical gaps in its coverage of Reference Parameters by identifying biases in a six-dimensional thematic space and determined regions, where these biases cluster spatially, and (iii) derived recommendations to further develop the eLTER RI network.

Three distinct gaps were identified: the Iberian, Eastern and Nordic Gap. They resulted mainly from underrepresentation of agricultural lands, mesic and dry regions with low economic density and the Mediterranean, Continental and Boreal biogeoregions. The patterns of underrepresentation are driven by various factors including the thematic context of site establishment over the past decades, operations logistics and funding constraints. We consider closing these gaps of highest priority for spatial network development.

Mitigating the biases in the eLTER RI network is crucial to enable confident scaling of local data to the European scale. This will allow the eLTER RI to provide a comprehensive foundation for scientists, policy and decision makers to face global change. Next, a comprehensive dataset of possible additional research sites over Europe must be analysed to derive site- and country-specific recommendations for cost-efficient gap mitigation.

In Durban, South Africa, heavy rainfall leading to flooding has become more frequent over the past decade, resulting in devastating consequences for households. However, studies in South Africa have predominantly focused on understanding the impacts of flooding on rural livelihoods. With intense rainfall events that could result in localized flash flooding to be expected to increase in Durban in the near future, failure to understand how households prepare for flooding and the interventions implemented by local authorities could jeopardize the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 – resilient and sustainable cities. To address this gap, primary data were collected from purposively selected residents of the Amanzimtoti community in Durban using questionnaires that comprised both closed and open-ended questions. Additionally, secondary data were analyzed to determine the measures implemented by the eThekwini Municipality to mitigate the adverse effects of flooding. The findings indicate that flooding has triggered psychological trauma among residents. Regarding interventions to mitigate flooding impacts, some homeowners and business owners purchased insurance. Despite the municipality providing early warnings, a severe flood event in 2019 had a significant negative impact on households partly due to the municipality's failure to utilize preferred communication channels – such as X (formally known as Twitter) – that resonate with residents. The study also found that adoption of early warnings may be partly hinged on the extent to which they remember the last flood episode that resulted in disaster. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for achieving SDG 11 in Durban.

The aim of composite indicators is to express the overall performance of countries/regions with respect to a complex goal including sustainability, competitiveness, and innovation. Some of the indices play an important role in real governmental and strategic decisions on allocating sources. Sensitivity analyses usually include the changes in weights (of importance), the evaluations with respect to the criteria and the aggregating functions. In contrast, we investigate the effect of setting the minimal and maximal thresholds of the scoring functions used in the assessment. Thus, only the effect of this transformation is investigated, while the input data and criteria weights are not modified or stochastic. It is demonstrated that even such a seemingly innocent modification of the min/max thresholds might lead to remarkable changes in the ranking. Results are presented in detail on the examples of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). However, the phenomenon is general: further 15 composite indices, applying the min/max threshold, have also been collected. The choice of min/max threshold is functionating as an implicit (re-)weighting of the criteria: criteria with smaller min/max ranges are overweighted. Thus, the steps of weighting and assessment are not independent. This research provides an alternative sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the rankings.

Low-carbon oriented land use change is crucial to tackling climate change issues in rapidly urbanizing metropolitans. Previous studies lacked to consider how the cross-level interaction within multilevel governance of metropolitan areas affect the land use change. In order to simulate multilevel governance interaction, this study proposes a land use simulation model, facilitating a comparative analysis of simulated results under different scenarios. Taking Hangzhou as the empirical study area, the results show that the predicted scale of construction land with high carbon emissions is smallest in interactive governance scenario. Its overall low-carbon performance of land use is the best among all scenarios, with a Polycentric Degree of 0.7856 (N = 4) and 0.9142 (N = 6), and Cohesion Degree and Land-Use Degree Index are 101.8320 and 101.7944 respectively. This study revealed that the interactive governance effectively curbs the growth of land with high-carbon emissions, promoting the spatial carbon efficiency and the low-carbon oriented spatial layout. Multi-level governance provides a framework for effective implantation of low-carbon oriented land use change objective and plays an important role in promoting its low-carbon performance. This study innovatively incorporates governance parameters into the land use prediction model, providing guidance for optimizing land use governance in metropolitan areas.

This study attempts to examine the cost and benefits of shifting the collection process of groundwater revenue and groundwater preservation fees from a manual to automatic meter reading (AMR) system, utilizing marginal cost and marginal benefit. The methodology is based on a benefit-cost analysis, taking into account the monetary value of time. The following specific results are revealed: (1) Changing to an AMR system can provide additional benefits in terms of time-savings for current personnel since the administrative work relating to the collection of groundwater usage fees and groundwater preservation fees can be reduced by 70%. This study is based on two personnel per province, calculated using the rate of 26,397.46 baht (or 792.95 USD) per person per month, 70% of which equates to an opportunity cost of 18,000 baht (or 540.70 USD) per person per month. (2) The accident rate can be reduced if personnel do not need to travel to examine the groundwater usage of licensees. However, because the AMR system is complicated and customizable, transitioning from manual to AMR systems is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. We propose that a pilot project be carried out to properly implement the AMR installation process.

Climate change threatens smallholder farmers' productivity, revenue generation, and increases household food insecurity. Thus, adaptation and coping strategies are paramount for smallholder farming households to mitigate these impacts of climate change. This study used a bibliometric analysis to examine smallholder farmers’ coping and adaptation strategies to climate change (SFCA-SCC) research trends from 2010 to 2022. A total of 1635 papers were analysed from Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases to characterize the field and observe research trends. The articles from these databases demonstrate an upward trend in publications (54–300) over the period under study, signifying the importance of research on adaptation and coping strategies of climate change. The research findings showed that majority of studies originated from institutions in industrialized countries, while very few did so from emerging economies. According to the findings, smallholder farmers have embraced a range of adaptation and coping mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of climate change, such as altering planting schedules, and diversifying crop varieties among others. It is imperative for African researchers and institutions to engage in more research aimed at developing strategies to mitigate the risks posed by climate change.

Environmental governance (EG), climate-resilient development, and environmental sustainability are interlinked phenomena. It is in this context that an evaluation of Pakistan's EG was carried out in order to establish policy insights into the environmental sustainability of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) Plan 2017–2030. A questionnaire survey approach (targeting various stakeholder groups), using a multi-criteria decision analysis of ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ method and an integrated EG framework were used. An important finding is that responsiveness was ranked as best and equity as worst EG themes for CPEC sustainability. Similarly, criteria transparency is considered to be the best aspect and criteria access to information/knowledge the worst. Other aspects scoring highly included e.g. monitoring and evaluation; stakeholder's communication and collaboration in governance processes; mechanisms to ensure that means and rationales of decisions making are transparent for eco-friendly development under the CPEC Plan; stakeholders' input integration in planning and policy implementation; stakeholders capacity building to deal with environmental and CC concerns of CPEC development. Criteria scoring poorly included e.g., effective mechanisms to resolve conflicts between federal and provincial Environmental Protection Agencies and implementation of environmental laws in letter and spirit, as well as marginalized stakeholders' participation in the decision-making process. In this context, the Government needs to establish an effective EG system to ensure environmentally friendly and climate-resilient development (CRD) in the country.

Deforestation in the form of forest land use change (FLUC) increases the emission of greenhouse gases, disrupts the water cycle, dries the soil, and reduces the growth of plant products. This has a direct effect on the well-being of local communities whose livelihoods depend on the forest and threatens biodiversity. The systematic review aimed to analyze the studies conducted on the effects of FLUC on biodiversity ecosystem services (BECS) and human well-being (HWB) of local communities. The study utilized a qualitative content analysis (QCA) based on a deductive approach, which reviewed 114 scientific documents, particularly research articles, selected by searching keywords through a purposeful sampling method. The FLUC indicators in the two groups of dominant morphology (intensity, scale, pattern, and usage) and recessive morphology (function, property rights, and management mode) had 172 repetitions in the articles. Moreover, the BECS criteria (regulating, provisioning, supportive, and cultural services) and HWB (items related to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, subjective well-being, objective well-being, and preferences) had 125 and 148 repetitions, respectively. Results confirm the relationship and effects of FLUC on BECS and HWB, which emphasizes the mutual role of these variables in social, economic, and environmental studies in future research programs. An increase in FLUC can decline the performance and structure of BECS and have a negative impact on the HWB of those communities who depend on forest. Findings are presented in the form of a model that provides a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between FLUC, BECS, and HWB for relevant decision makers.