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The Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA) represents a comprehensive global framework for the assessment of sustainability performance across food and agriculture value chains. Its key feature is its holistic approach to sustainability, which encompasses the environmental, economic, and social dimensions in conjunction with the governance aspects. With the aim of identifying a sustainability assessment model to be applied in the Italian agri-food system, the SAFA method was evaluated as a possible application, examining its characteristics at different stages of the supply chain. At this scope, a systematic literature review was conducted employing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The results revealed that the SAFA approach, which is characterised by a more qualitative assessment, has been met with particular approval by the scientific community. It offers an intriguing contribution to the discourse on sustainability in agri-food systems, effectively integrating all relevant elements. It would be interesting to apply SAFA to assess diverse sectors of the Italian agri-food system, so as to further test the potential of this framework in detecting the commitment to sustainability of the producers.

Sustainable benefits from water resource development involve many factors that need to be holistically considered for implementing management policies. The study aimed to develop a set of key sustainability indicators following the social context surrounding a reservoir. The results show the quality-of-life is the highest significance, followed by natural resource conservation, risk management, participation, and equality, respectively. The indicator of the highest significance in the quality of life was confidence in livelihoods against flood and drought. The findings can apply to the assessment of sustainable development from reservoir projects and support a broader analysis of key sustainability criteria in various areas.

Several proposals have been put forward for measuring sustainability performance at the country-level, in addition to the considerable debate surrounding which pillars (or dimensions) should form part of this sustainability and which variables should make up these pillars. To date, no clear consensus has been reached regarding which sustainability measures are the most appropriate when seeking to reflect not only a country's economic development but also its environmental, social, and governance aspects. To provide an alternative to the existing indicators developed by private agencies, this study proposes an index to measure sustainability at the country-level, considering the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) pillars. In addition, this indicator will serve as a counterpoint to the majority of current sustainability indicators, some of which involve a strong component in per capita income, or which are over-represented in economic terms. In a second stage –and in order to apply the indicator– this study analyses how sustainability at the country-level, and its ESG pillars, influence trade openness through a study of panel data from 47 countries. The results indicate that applying a disaggregated index in its dimensions (pillars) shows both the positive and negative effects that sustainability can have on the variable studied. A non-disaggregated index only reflects the joint effect, which might be insignificant in certain cases. This study contributes to the existing literature as well as to current understanding of how to measure national sustainability and its implications for macroeconomic variables, and it also provides a clear method for future research.

Along with the growing demand and improving diet, the agricultural sector faces challenges in balancing resource consumption, environmental impacts and yields. This study presents an extended exergy accounting to capture the changing characteristics of the usefulness of resources in the agricultural sector of Hebei Province during 2000–2018 from thermodynamics perspective. The accounting includes exergy fluxes of energy, materials, environmental remediation, labor, capital and yields quantified by joules. The agricultural sector of Hebei Province comprising the cropping, forestry, stockbreeding and fishery sub industries, has experienced transformation into a modern pattern. The results showed that (1) the extended exergy in the agricultural sector of Hebei Province exhibited a declining trend; the natural resource exergy, particularly energy exergy, dominated the investments in the sector. (2) The capital exergy, labor exergy and environmental remediation exergy all decreased; the capital exergy and labor exergy decreased more than the environmental remediation exergy. The shares of the labor exergy from the services of agriculture declined, while those of the labor exergy from forestry and stockbreeding notably increased. (3) Since the cropping accounts for a large part of the yields, the large quantity of crop residues should be considered seriously. The potential of the other three sub industries was very high. The comparison between the agricultural sector in Hebei Province and that in China as a whole involving exergy indicators showed that Hebei Province was more modernized and had achieved great progresses. Extended exergy accounting captures the agro ecological economic system to help identify resource depletion and environmental costs in other areas or industries from a sustainable development perspective.

In recent years, it became clear that the human unsustainable behaviours’ impact on the environment. Environment protected behavior is especially relevant in the context of the current epidemiological situation ushered by the COVID-19. Environmental awareness is becoming a part of everyday life. The time has come when it is necessary to sacrifice the comfort for the future of the planet. This study primarily focuses on the attitudes of residents of a typical Russian industrial city towards environmental issues and the use of the Energy-Saving Behavior Index (ESBI) as an environmental indicator of sustainable behavior. Our work investigates ESBI and the factors which are associated with domestic energy-saving behavior. We surveyed 599 people in Chelyabinsk, Russia. We studied (1) the socio-demographic factors of residents and their households, (2) mental health and subjective well-being (SWB), and (3) physical health. The study showed that the overwhelming majority of residents of a typical Russian city are extremely dissatisfied with the state of the environment (more than 80% of respondents) and 70% of them believe that they can contribute to improving the situation. However, Russians are still wasteful in household energy consumption. It has been shown that unstable behavior is due to psychological factors and has a compensatory mechanism that is connected with the “feelings-emotions-behavior” sequence.

Environmental data and research illustrate that global warming, normally assessed through carbon dioxide (CO2) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is a critical element in environmental sustainability and that a shift to decarbonized energy sources is necessary to preserve the environment for future generations. The challenge is that overall global sustainability is more complex than solely focusing on global warming or the environment.As a potential alternative, NOx emissions are explored as a potential surrogate for CO2 and GHG emissions and as an indicator for decarbonization. An added benefit of using NOx is that it has strong correlations with each pillar of sustainability, and therefore can offer a more encompassing view. Global and country specific NOx emissions, between 1990 and 2015, are analyzed in a format paralleling the three pillars. Trends show that, while NOx emissions are increasing, there are improvements in both societal and economic emission intensities. It is also demonstrated that there is no net movement towards decarbonization, and that a paradigm shift will be necessary to achieve the emissions reductions required. As well, human development index appears to be tied to the change in per capita emissions of NOx over the study period. Overall, NOx is demonstrated to be a robust and potentially more effective surrogate for CO2 and GHG emissions in estimating fossil fuel emissions and gauging movement towards decarbonization. The added interconnectedness of NOx with all three pillars makes it an excellent indicator for tracking progress towards overall sustainability.

Ensuring sustainability in electrical power generation is a major concern in the modern world. Reducing energy depletion from power generation can reduce emissions and contribute to sustainability. Exergy analysis can be used to assess and optimize energy systems and thus can help achieve sustainability. In this analysis, energy and exergy utilization of Bangladesh’s utility sector is investigated based on data from 2007 to 2016. The overall energy efficiencies vary from 34.9% to 36.3% while the exergy efficiencies vary from 35.0% to 39.2% within this period. Thermal power plants are seen to have greater exergetic improvement potential than hydro power plants. To correlate between exergy and environmental sustainability, this study applies several exergetic parameters as sustainability indicators. It is found that the depletion number varies between 0.61 and 0.65 while the exergy sustainability index varies between 1.54 and 1.64. The relative irreversibility and lack of productivity are greater for gas operated power plants than other thermal power plants. The largest relative irreversibility is 0.90 while the largest lack of productivity is 1.72. The waste exergy ratio varies from 0.48 to 0.59 while the environmental effect factor varies from 1.35 to 1.68. Renewable power generation is found to have a higher sustainability than fossil fuel power generation. It is believed that current analysis can serve as a benchmark to help attain power generation sustainability.

The increasing number of water withdrawals in Alpine regions represents a significant threat to aquatic ecosystems and river landscape (riverscape). To assess their sustainability, the impacts on river ecological status and landscape features need to be quantified with appropriate indicators. However, assessment of landscape attributes is a complex challenge, due to the lack of standardized methods. Moreover, few metrics quantifying the impacts of water withdrawal on downstream riverscape perception are available in the scientific literature.In this paper, a new indicator, named Landscape Protection Level (LPL), aimed at assessing the effects of water withdrawals on the river landscape, is presented. The indicator has been developed in Aosta Valley (NW Italian Alps), where the river network is heavily exploited by hundreds of withdrawals for hydropower production and irrigation, and it has been included in a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) procedure to assess the sustainability of water withdrawal licenses in relation to different flow release scenarios.The LPL indicator is based on three parameters, Constraint Factor, Release Factor, and Visual Elements Factor, quantifying the presence of landscape protection constraints, the ratio of flow released downstream of the dam to the available river discharge, and the impact on the visual perception of the bypassed stretch, respectively.Its application in four real case studies of existing hydropower plants is presented and discussed in the paper, demonstrating the indicator applicability to assess both specific release values and flow release scenarios varying over the year. Results are analyzed by highlighting the main strengths and weaknesses of the indicator and proposing some suggestions for future improvements. In particular, the reactiveness of the indicator, the representativeness of the stakeholders’ interests, the transparency of the indicator calculation procedure, and the time required for data collection and processing are discussed. Finally, future activities aimed at further improving the indicator applicability and transferability to different river contexts are proposed.

Milk production is an important economic and social activity in Brazil. Failure to meet institutional and market demands for quality and sustainability has led farmers, particularly small-scale farmers, to leave agriculture. The aim of this study was to assess and compare the sustainability of dairy farms in Paraná, Brazil. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 75 dairy farm operators. Sustainability indicators were generated on the basis of economic, environmental and social data using exploratory factor analysis. Factor scores were subjected to hierarchical clustering, which resulted in the formation of three groups of dairy farms. Groups 1, 2 and 3 had high, intermediate and low levels of sustainability, respectively. Group 1 comprised large-scale dairy farms with high productivity. Dairy farms with intermediate sustainability (group 2) had medium production capacity, and farms with low sustainability (group 1) had the smallest production scale and capacity. Large-scale dairy farms have greater economic, environmental and social sustainability and are, therefore, more likely to survive in the medium and long term.

Waste-to-energy technologies play a crucial role in integrated waste management strategies to reduce waste mass and volume, disinfect the waste, and recover energy; different technologies have advantages and disadvantages in treating municipal solid waste under urban conditions. This paper applies the extended exergy accounting method to develop an analytical framework to identify the optimal waste-to-energy strategy from an urban ecosystem holistic sustainability perspective. In the analytical framework, urban ecosystem costs and revenues are formulated as a multi-criteria cost-benefit quantitative model. The urban ecosystem cost is divided into five categories, and the urban ecosystem revenues consist of direct and indirect parts. The direct part is the chemical exergy of the waste-to-energy plants produced product, and the indirect part includes equivalent exergy content of power generation substitution, human health risk elimination, disamenity impact removal and environmental degradation avoidance. Proposing an indicator system to evaluate the waste-to-energy strategy impact on the sustainability of the urban ecosystems and social, economic and environmental sub-ecosystem. Detailed analysis of food waste treatment scenarios of a food center in Singapore was done as a case study to illustrate this analytical framework. Base scenario is current practice that food waste disposal in incineration plant. Anaerobic digestion and gasification are proposed as potential technological solutions for on-site food waste treatment in scenario I and II respectively. In different scenarios, the urban ecosystem costs are estimated to be 71,536.01, 61,854.87 and 74,190.34MJ/year respectively, and the urban ecosystem revenues are estimated to be 135,312.66, 405,442.53 and 298,426.81MJ/year respectively. We show that the scenario where food waste is treated by anaerobic digestion outperforms both the base scenario and scenario II in terms of urban ecosystem costs and revenues, technical energy conversion efficiency, contribution to urban ecosystem holistic sustainability, and natural, social, and economic subsystems improvement, making it the optimal municipal solid waste-to-energy strategy choice., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

The impact of the space development structure on the level of the ecological footprint is an important element of the sustainable development policy, determining not only its directions, but also indicating the manner of respecting environmental principles. The aim of the research is to assess the impact of the spatial development structure on the ecological footprint level. The considerations are based on the assumption that the spatial development structure is a determinant of the ecological footprint level. The study used the shift share analysis method. Selected European countries were the subject of the research. The research period covered the years 2009-2019. The spatial differentiation of the GDP level and the ecological footprint were compared. For each country, the components of structural changes were determined and their changes over time were assessed. The study positively verified the main hypothesis and the auxiliary hypothesis. The ecological footprint decreased in the analyzed period. This phenomenon was not evenly distributed in European countries. Regions with a higher level of changes in the phenomenon than the EU average can be distinguished. The greatest changes in the demand for biosphere' natural resources in hectares of land and sea were recorded in Latvia and Lithuania. In contrast, the largest decrease in the size of the ecological footprint was observed in Cyprus. Differentiation of changes was visible within the individual components making up the ecological footprint in the analyzed period. The biggest changes took place within the fishing grounds. The smallest changes were recorded for cropland. This paper is expected to provide policy makers with a set of policy proposals to achieve sustainable environmental and economic development., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest Izabela Dembińska, Sabina Kauf, Agnieszka Tłuczak, Katarzyna Szopik-Depczyńska, Łukasz Marzantowicz and Giuseppe Ioppolo - all the authors of the manuscript titled “ THE IMPACT OF SPACE DEVELOPMENT STRUCTURE ON THE LEVEL OF ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN SELECTED EUROPEAN COUNTRIES” declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The present study was conducted to comprehensively evaluate watershed sustainability with the help of an initiative barometer developed based on different dimensions of social, economic, environmental, and policy. The newly developed barometer was then applied to assess the temporal variation of sustainability for the Shazand Watershed, Iran, for four-node years of 1986, 1998, 2008, and 2016. The appropriate criteria were then adapted to calculate the study dimensions. The effect sizes of selected criteria on each dimension were also determined. Consequently, the status of each dimension and integrated watershed sustainability status were mapped for four-node years. The results indicated that study dimensions were unevenly distributed over the Shazand Watershed. So that, the social dimension had high effectiveness across different sub-watersheds, and the policy dimension had a poor situation in all study years. In addition, the respective sustainability index of 0.32, 0.32, 0.35, and 0.35 for node years of 1986, 1998, 2008, and 2016 verified a slight improvement. Overall, the proposed barometer of sustainability facilitated understanding the dimensional sustainability and comprehensive watershed sustainability and provided references for policy formulations and watershed management. Besides, the developed barometer has a high potential for evaluating sustainability for other watersheds worldwide., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Road traffic poses negative externalities on society and represents a key challenge in sustainable transportation. However, the existing literature about the assessment of traffic externalities drawn on a common measure is scarce. This paper develops a sustainability indicator that integrates traffic-related externalities as means of traffic congestion, noise, greenhouse gases (GHG) and nitrogen oxides emissions, health impacts and road crash related costs, and adjusted to local contexts of vulnerability. Traffic, road crashes, acoustic and vehicle dynamic data were collected from one real-world intercity corridor pair comprising three alternative routes. The site-specific operations were characterized using a modeling platform of traffic, emissions, noise and air quality. A specific methodology is applied for each road traffic externality and translated in a single factor - external cost. The results indicated that road crashes presented the largest share in the partly rural/urban route while GHG emissions had the highest contribution in external costs for the highway routes. Also, the distribution of external cost component varied according to the type of road, mostly due to different levels of exposed inhabitants. This paper offers a line of research that produced a method for decision-makers with a reliable and flexible cost analysis aimed at reducing the negative impacts of road traffic. It also encourages the design of eco-traffic management policies considering the perspective of drivers, commuters and population., (Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Water Footprint is an indicator recently developed with the goal of quantifying the virtual content of water in products and/or services. It can also be used to identify the worldwide virtual water trade. Water Footprint is composed of three parts (green, blue and grey waters) that make the assessment complete in accordance with the Water Footprint Network and with the recent ISO14046. The importance of Water Footprint is linked to the need of taking consciousness about water content in products and services and of the achievable changes in productions, diets and market trades. In this study, a literature review has been completed on Water Footprint of agricultural productions. In particular, the focus was paid on crops for the production of food and bioenergy. From the review, the development of the Water Footprint concept emerged: in early studies the main goal was to assess products' water trade on a global scale, while in the subsequent years, the goal was the rigorous quantification of the three components for specific crops and in specific geographical areas. In the most recent assessments, similarities about the methodology and the employed tools emerged. For 96 scientific articles on Water Footprint indicator of agricultural productions, this literature review reports the main results and analyses weaknesses and strengths. Seventy-eight percent of studies aimed to quantify Water Footprint, while the remaining 22% analysed methodology, uncertainty, future trends and comparisons with other footprints. It emerged that most studies that quantified Water Footprint concerned cereals (33%), among which maize and wheat were the most investigated crops. In 46% of studies all the three components were assessed, while in 18% no indication about the subdivision was given; in the remaining 37%, only blue or green and blue components were quantified., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)