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From the perspective of sustainable development and based on literature review, this paper introduces modified Delphi and Decision Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to explore the critical factors of sustainable development in rural areas and their correlation. Through literature review and modified Delphi analysis, nine key factors of rural sustainable development are first identified, namely industrial activation, working environment, living conditions, infrastructure, public involvement, rural culture, government-related departments, educational resources, and health and welfare. DEMATEL is then adopted to determine the classification of the aforementioned factors, in which four (government-related departments, public involvement, infrastructure, and educational resources) are classified in the cause group and five (health and welfare, living conditions, rural culture, working environment, and industrial activation) are classified in the effect group. According to the centrality and relation of these factors, the causal network diagram is finally drawn before making practical suggestions based on the overall results, with a view to providing a reference for decision-makers in their follow-up rural sustainable development planning.

The purpose of this study is to propose a hybrid method for disaster prevention and relief (DPR) evaluation for Taiwan. Through the hybrid method and evaluation results, the central and local governments of Taiwan could continuously improve and strengthen their DPR system. The main structure of the evaluation is based on the balanced scorecard (BSC), and 15 indicators are gathered from the literature on related issues. These indicators are further analyzed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) to assess the DPR efficiency of 13 administrative regions in Taiwan. The analysis shows that the DPR system in Taiwan might be improved in Yunlin and Hsinchu City, two administrative regions analyzed during the three stages and time frame studied. The indicators that most significantly affect DPR efficiency are the average number of people served by each government employee or teacher (L1), the supervision score of the Department of Medical Services (DMS) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (I4), the number of licensed medical practitioners per 10,000 people (C1) and the number of social welfare workers per 10,000 people (C2). These indicators also reflect Taiwan's current shortages in DPR-related and medical personnel. First published online 23 August 2019

In this study, we analyzed the CO2 emissions of online music and video streaming services, as one of the digital contents, in Japan using life cycle assessment. As a system boundary of online music and video streaming, processes such as data center construction and server manufacturing, usage of communication networks and internet communication technology devices (personal computers (PCs) and smartphones), and disposal of data centers and servers were considered. Data were collected using statistical and online surveys, and CO2 emissions per 1 MB of communication volume were calculated. One of the results revealed that the lifecycle CO2 emissions of listening to online music using PCs and smartphones were 5.88 × 10−4 and 1.43 × 10−4 kg-CO2/MB, respectively. The overall CO2 emissions for domestic music and video streaming services in 2019 was 921 thousand t-CO2. Online video streaming accounted for 87.7% of the total emissions, which corresponded to approximately 0.23% of domestic CO2 emissions derived from electric power generation.