Identifying future research directions for biodiversity,ecosystem services and sustainability: perspectives from early-career researchers

We aimed to identify priority research questions in the field of biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainability (BESS), based on a workshop held during the NRG BESS Conference for Early Career Researchers on BESS, and to compare these to existing horizon scanning exercises. This work highlights the need for improved data availability through collaboration and knowledge exchange, which, in turn, can support the integrated valuation and sustainable management of ecosystems in response to global change. In addition, clear connectivity among different research themes in this field further emphasizes the need to consider a wider range of topics simultaneously to ensure the sustainable management of ecosystems for human wellbeing. In contrast to other horizon scanning exercises, our focus was more interdisciplinary and more concerned with the limits of sustainability and dynamic relationships between social and ecological systems. The identified questions could provide a framework for researchers, policy makers, funding agencies and the private sector to advance knowledge in biodiversity and ES research and to develop and implement policies to enable sustainable future development.     

The implementation of environmental education to promote sustainability: an overview of the processes and challenges

ABSTRACT

This paper interprets aspects of the implementation of environmental education in a Higher Education Institution, situated in a developing country, to promote Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The paper will allow educators to categorise the multiplicity of ESD programmes and projects in higher education institutions, determine their limitations and acceptability, and benefit from the theoretical framework of affective learning in designing new ESD interventions. The paper will also provide an overview of the processes required to establish ESD in developing and developed countries. This paper will further help universities to develop a better understanding of how integration of the three components of sustainable development – economic development, social development and environmental protection – can be incorporated in higher education. The paper explores the challenges for planning the implementation of ESD in an education faculty, outlining the potential lessons learned that could assist in improving ESD efforts in Faculties of Education.     

Perceived importance of sustainability dimensions in the Portuguese metal industry

The growing interest of stakeholders regarding the contribution of organizations to Sustainable Development is influencing organizational behavior and strategic planning. The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the perception of the importance of organizational sustainability dimensions in a relevant economic sector: the metal industry. Survey data was collected from a sample of 211 Portuguese industries, and non-parametric statistical tests were used to validate five research hypotheses regarding the importance of the economic, environmental, social and cultural dimensions of sustainability. The results obtained demonstrate awareness of the sampled industries regarding all sustainability dimensions, recognizing that their importance has been increasing over the years, and prospecting that this importance will continue to increase in the future. The industries in this sample revealed different degrees of perceived importance for the different sustainability dimensions: the highest importance was given to the economic dimension, and culture was considered the least important sustainability dimension. However, the perception of the respondents is that these differences will be less relevant in the future. The results also show that companies with certified management systems reveal a higher perceived importance regarding sustainability dimensions. Also, industries with higher values of annual turnover, number of employees and export sales tend to give higher degrees of importance to sustainability dimensions. Considering the economic, environmental and social impacts of metal industries at an international level, the awareness of this industrial sector regarding the importance of sustainability is a relevant step to the commitment towards Sustainable Development.     

Development of environmental sustainability for the biodiesel industry in Thailand

Wild game and other renewable resources in tropical rainforests inhabited by indigenous peoples are currently often exploited in unsustainable ways. This article shows, for a Kichwa community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, that this can to some extent be explained as a 'tragedy of the commons'. However there are also other mechanisms at work. In particular, there has been some unawareness of the impact of hunting on game populations, and the expansion of fallows at the expense of old growth forest is a result of population growth that increases the need for farmland, and thus decreases the socially optimal area of old growth forest. Whereas many resources are harvested under conditions resembling open access, there have long been established rules for the harvest of thatch leaves, and the community has recently also adopted several measures in order to regulate hunting. Obviously, experiences of resource scarcity may spark conservationist thinking and behaviour. This is a process that scientists can and should support.     

Using the sustainable development goals towards a better understanding of sustainability challenges

The United Nations General Assembly agreed and approved in September 2015 the document ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, which contains a set of measures aiming to balance economic progress and protection of the environment, whilst at the same time remain aware of the need to address the many disparities still seen between industrialised and developing countries. The Agenda document consists of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which among many other tasks, intend to eradicate poverty and create better health conditions in both developed and developing countries. But despite the need for and the relevance of the SDGs, it is unclear how they may help to address present and future sustainability challenges. Based on the need to shed some light on such a relationship, this paper describes each of the SDGs, and offers an analysis of the extent to which their implementation may offer support to ongoing attempts to handle some of the pressing problems seen in pursuing sustainable development. Three case studies are presented to show in practice how best the SDGs can be handled. The paper concludes that the process of implementing the SDGs offers unrivalled opportunities to advance equal opportunity and foster economic empowerment, helping countries to promote the cause of sustainable development in their territories, hence benefiting their populations.     

Glyphosate detection: methods,needs and challenges

Environmental Chemistry Letters - Glyphosate is considered toxicologically harmful and presents potential association with human carcinogenesis and other chronic diseases, including mental and...     

Some of the challenges in implementing Education for Sustainable Development: perspectives from Brazilian engineering students

This article aims to analyse some of the main challenges evidenced in the insertion of sustainability in engineering courses, according to the view from a sample of Brazilian students. Through a systematic literature review, a set of 10 challenges were structured to base the research instrument (questionnaire). These challenges were evaluated by 91 engineering students who participate in sustainable action programs promoted by Enactus Brazil. The collected data were analysed in terms of the averages assigned and via the multi-criteria decision technique TOPSIS, which allowed ranking the challenges. The averages were higher than 5.0 on the scale used, indicating that the students notice the existence of the challenges in the courses in which they are enrolled. The ranking via TOPSIS presented the most evident challenges: ‘Sustainable issues debated only in specific disciplines in a limited extent’; ‘Difficulty to integrate disciplines for the broad teaching of sustainability’; ‘Lack of practical and real examples of how sustainability can be embedded in the specific context of the course’; and ‘Activities and examples presented focus exclusively on environmental issues’. The results presented here may be useful for course coordinators to improve their curriculum; educators to enrich their disciplines from the findings reported here; and researchers interested in the subject can use these findings as a starting point for proposing new teaching techniques. No similar publications were found in the literature, which indicates its originality and contribution to the knowledge base.     

Worldviews,institutions and sustainability: An introduction to a co-evolutionary perspective

This work analyzes hierarchical and causal relationship between worldview, institutions, technology and economic behaviour under conditions of informational uncertainty.

In our pursuit of sustainable living, institutions function both as constraints and as primary instruments of change of socio-economic behaviour. The process of radical institutional change is contingent upon prior change in the dominant worldview, while its dynamics resembles that of a paradigm change in political and scientific arenas. Therefore, the timely and adaptive outcome of institutional change with respect to global environmental problems remains intrinsically uncertain.     

Economic growth,public welfare and sustainability: an empirical system analysis

SUMMARY

This paper explores the relationships between economic activity and sustainability, growth, and welfare. The issues regarding the nature of the relationships were framed by Ekins in questions which are addressed empirically across countries and the states of the US. The sustainability issue is addressed by comparing nonrenewable energy throughput, a surrogate for impacts, to the renewable energy throughput in the associated ecosystem. The effect of a changing energy intensity, in developing and developed countries, on socioeconomic variables provides clues to social welfare. In developing countries a rising energy throughput (economic growth) and energy intensity is positively related to public welfare while impacts are generally moderate. The reverse appears to be true in developed countries, i.e. as energy throughput and intensity rise in developed countries and the US states, pollution and impacts also rise while socioeconomic variables worsen, so public welfare begins to decline. Economic development appears to pass through three phases which can be characterized by the nature and extent of its energy use. Each phase exhibits characteristic energy, pollution, structural and socioeconomic trends.     

Wildlife contact analysis: emerging methods, questions, and challenges

Recent technological advances, such as proximity loggers, allow researchers to collect complete interaction histories, day and night, among sampled individuals over several months to years. Social network analyses are an obvious approach to analyzing interaction data because of their flexibility for fitting many different social structures as well as the ability to assess both direct contacts and indirect associations via intermediaries. For many network properties, however, it is not clear whether estimates based upon a sample of the network are reflective of the entire network. In wildlife applications, networks may be poorly sampled and boundary effects will be common. We present an alternative approach that utilizes a hierarchical modeling framework to assess the individual, dyadic, and environmental factors contributing to variation in the interaction rates and allows us to estimate the underlying process variation in each. In a disease control context, this approach will allow managers to focus efforts on those types of individuals and environments that contribute the most toward super-spreading events. We account for the sampling distribution of proximity loggers and the non-independence of contacts among groups by only using contact data within a group during days when the group membership of proximity loggers was known. This allows us to separate the two mechanisms responsible for a pair not contacting one another: they were not in the same group or they were in the same group but did not come within the specified contact distance. We illustrate our approach with an example dataset of female elk from northwestern Wyoming and conclude with a number of important future research directions.     

On water security, sustainability, and the water-food-energy-climate nexus

The role of water security in sustainable development and in the nexus of water, food, energy and climate interactions is examined from the starting point of the definition of water security offered by Grey and Sadoff. Much about the notion of security has to do with the presumption of scarcity in the resources required to meet human needs. The treatment of scarcity in mainstream economics is in turn examined, therefore, in relation to how each of us as individuals reconciles means with ends, a procedure at the core of the idea of sustainable development. According to the Grey-Sadoff definition, attaining water security amounts to achieving basic, single-sector water development as a precursor of more general, self-sustaining, multi-sectoral development. This is consistent with the way in which water is treated as “first among equals”, i.e. privileged, in thinking about what is key in achieving security around the nexus of water, food, energy and climate. Cities, of course, are locations where demands for these multiple resource-energy flows are increasingly being generated. The paper discusses two important facets of security, i.e., diversity of access to resources and services (such as sanitation) and resilience in the behavior of coupled human-built-natural systems. Eight quasi-operational principles, by which to gauge nexus security with respect to city buildings and infrastructure, are developed.     

Predicting national sustainability: The convergence of energetic,economic and environmental realities

The “constraint space” dictated by energetic, economic and environmental realities on scenarios for future organization of humanity and nature is explored from the perspective of the energy and resources driving economies. Net energy of energy sources is presented as an index (Emergy Yield Ratio; EYR) that must be evaluated for energy sources to better understand their potential contributions to society, but more important, as an indicator of the changes needed in the future if lower net yielding sources are to be relied upon. An aggregate EYR was calculated for the USA economy and shown to have decreased by 38% since 1950, from 11/1 to 6.8/1. Several measures of efficiency at the scale of national economies are explored and the data suggest that the most efficient economies are also the most energetically intense (as measured by empower intensity). An index of environmental loading is suggested as a measure to evaluate environmental efficacy. An obvious outcome is that the smallest most energetically intense countries have the highest environmental loads, and those with large land area and/or continental shelves have the lowest ratios. An Emergy Sustainability Index (EmSI) is defined, computed for countries, and proposed as a multi-dimensional measure of long-term sustainability. The most sustainable economies are those with the highest EYR and lowest environmental loads.     

War and sustainability

SUMMARY

In order to use the planet's ecological life-support systems sustainably, damage to them must be both prevented and repaired. However, repair requires awareness of damage which, in this case, mandates a high level of ecological literacy. Prevention of ecological damage will only be successful on a planetary scale if human society endorses precautionary practices that reduce the probability of ecosystem damage. Society is beginning to endorse precautionary practices to protect human health, which is no longer regarded as merely absence of symptoms of disease and malfunction. Health is regarded as a robust function — an approach toward optimal conditions. Similar views are beginning to emerge regarding ecosystem health, and a close link between human and ecosystem health is gaining increased recognition. However, to achieve health, ecological ‘wounds’ must be repaired, which is impossible until society ‘sees’ the wounds. After this recognition, society must become more literate on the attributes of ecosystem health. The methods and procedures are in place, but they will not be used effectively until a major paradigm shift occurs.     

Towards sustainability: Objectives,strategies and barriers for cleaner production in China

The paper explores the objectives, strategies and barriers to cleaner production (CP) implementation in China. Successful demonstration projects in China have shown that CP is a strategy for reducing pollution and costs, increasing competitiveness and achieving an integrated balance between economic and environmental benefits. As such, it is an inevitable choice and important contribution to sustainable development. However, it has not progressed enough as a strategy for continuous improvement since its effects are limited to industrial sectors or regions. CP implementation can be assisted by further popularization, policy system improvement, perception and awareness raising and technology innovation. These dimensions are the key tasks and incentives for all levels of government, enterprises and social organizations in moving toward sustainability.     

Principal sustainability components: empirical analysis of synergies between the three pillars of sustainability

Starting from the concept of three fundamental sustainability dimensions (environmental, social, and economic), this study investigated professional contributions to sustainability by means of principal component analysis (PCA). Graduates from the Environmental Sciences program (N?=?542) at ETH Zurich described their best professional contributions to sustainable development. Next, they evaluated whether their best practice example contributed to achieving any of the five environmental, social, and economic objectives of the Swiss national sustainability strategy. These judgments served as the basis for a PCA aiming to identify principal sustainability components (PSCs) covering typical synergies between sustainability objectives within and transcending the three fundamental dimensions. Three PSCs capturing important synergies were identified. PSC 1 Product and Process Development reflects how ecological innovation and modernization can generate social and economic benefits and at the same time facilitate the reduction in use of as well as the responsible use of natural resources. PSC 2 Education and Social Economics reflects how educational activities and sociocultural sustainability initiatives can simultaneously promote income and employment, social and human capital, and free personal development. PSC 3 Protection of Nature and Humans covers the synergetic benefits which protection of natural spaces and biodiversity and the reduction of environmental risks have for the protection of health and safety of the population. The study also revealed that integration of environmental, social, and economic aspects is often connected to conflicts between these dimensions. However, contributions which consider the economic situation of future generations or enhance social and human capital achieved considerable integration but showed no inclination toward such conflicts.     

Sibling competition and cooperation in mammals: challenges,developments and prospects

Many vertebrates grow up in the company of same or different-age siblings, and relations among them can be expected to significantly influence individual life histories and the development of individual morphological, physiological, and behavioral phenotypes. Although studies in birds still dominate and have stimulated most theoretical considerations, the increasing number of mammalian studies promises to broaden our understanding of this complex field by enabling interesting comparisons with the rather different bird system. It therefore seems timely to bring together recent studies of sibling relations in mammals and to demonstrate what these can offer in the way of fresh insights. In this brief review, intended to accompany a series of papers on a diverse range of mammals, we outline the current state of sibling research in mammals, comparing it to the better studied birds. Most obviously, in mammals, mother and young are in much closer contact during early life than in birds, and siblings can influence each other’s development as well as the mother’s physiology while still in utero. During nursing, mammalian young also encounter a very different feeding situation to bird siblings. These contrasts should help stimulate further debate, as well as provide further opportunities to study the relative importance of maternal versus sibling effects on individual development. Finally, we discuss the need to balance studies of sibling competition and conflict with a consideration of the benefits accruing to individuals from sibling presence and the need for long-term studies of the influence of early sibling relations on individual development and life histories. This contribution represents the introduction to the special issue “Sibling competition and cooperation in mammals”.     

Ecological processes and sustainability

SUMMARY

Ecology has developed from its position as an obscure science to being at the interface of science and public policy. The impact of mankind can be described in ecological terms relating to population size, energy use and non-renewability. Sustainable development needs to be addressed on the basis of knowledge of ecological processes which maintain the environment in a state of change; the processes need to be conserved, not maintained in any particular state. Recent advances in the understanding of ecological processes are reviewed to highlight the potential contribution of this knowledge to the development of a sustainable policy. At the level of the population the significance of considering the extinction risks in the framework of spatio-temporal dynamics is now established indicating opportunities for planning land use more precisely to sustain biodiversity. Whilst the maintenance of habitats is generally the key to the persistence of biodiversity, they must be viewed as ever-changing mosaics within which cycles of succession, best described by Markovian sets of probabilities, are occurring continually. The extent to which these probabilities are distorted will determine whether the ecosystem returns to the same system or moves to a novel one. At the global level, biogeochemical cycles have a certain flexibility in relation to fluxes and stocks, hence pollution must be defined by relating the flow rate of the substance to this flexibility, which often permits the accommodation of anthropogenic perturbations. Non-sustainable processes can be defined in ecological terms, thus providing functional definitions of a sustainable policy and of sustainable development.     

Community sustainability: a holistic approach to measuring the sustainability of rural communities in Scotland

ABSTRACT

Although sustainable development was defined in the Brundtland Report almost 30 years ago, the current usage of the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development remain highly equivocal. In the context of rural communities, multiple interpretations and weak definitions lead to confusion in understanding what comprises a sustainable rural community. Building on existing definitions (e.g. Baker’s, 2006, ‘Ladder of Sustainable Development’), models (principally, The Egan Review’s, 2004, ‘Components of Sustainable Communities’) and findings of this study, a sustainable community is defined and a holistic model of a sustainable place-based rural community is presented. This model, the sustainable community design (SCD) is used as the basis for analysing community sustainability, which is measured using mixed methods and scorecard assessment. Sensitivity of the method is demonstrated with inter- and intra-community variations in sustainability across three diverse Scottish rural communities. Intra-community variations illustrate heterogeneity in community sustainability, explain ambiguity in characterisations of an individual community’s sustainability, and highlight the importance of an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to community development. The SCD framework is presented as a useful tool for meso-level sustainability assessment and to facilitate the sustainable development of rural communities.