How robust are current narratives to deal with the urban energy-water-land nexus?

Current energy, water, and land (EWL) nexus research treats all resources equally, causing bias in complicated nexus studies. To make the analysis robust, we consider resource endowment and significance. Here, we provide a methodological framework where the urban industrial resource nexus strength is constructed and assign weights to resources according to policies, describing resource efficiency and representing it in ternary diagrams to assess the urban industrial nexus innovatively. Results showed that energy drives urban development under all weights, with energy resource efficiency exceeding 60%. From consumption-based accounting, energy continues to dominate most industries under physical weightings but emphasizes the significance of water and land. While, under economic weightings, land supplants energy's dominance in specific sectors. Setting weights helps understand resource interaction, establish synergy based on urban development objectives, and minimize robustness. Our findings provide quantitative evidence for assessing urban resource efficiency to highlight priority sectors for intervention in urban decision-making.

How has the sustainability of countries changed after COVID-19? Evidence from the pandemics' first year

The Covid-19 crisis has caused several social-related issues; the sanitary is, perhaps, the most significant one. Lockdowns and vaccination were implemented to fight the Covid-19 virus. From a sustainability perspective, Covid-19 has been considered a meaningful crisis driver that has affected nations' economies and social and natural capitals. The literature presents clues that effects appear to be different among countries. Recognizing its importance as public policies for sustainability, this study aims to assess how the sustainability of countries has changed after Covid-19, focusing on countries' economic power that reflects their capacity to face the crisis. A sample of 89 countries is considered, and 2019-2020 are set as base years for data gathering, which covers the first year of the Covid-19 crisis. Sustainability is conceptually supported and represented by a 3-D cube. The natural environment is expressed by the ecological footprint (EF) method, the economic capital by the gross domestic product (GDP), and the social capital by the happiness index. Results show that sustainability of economies was negatively affected after first year of Covid-19 crisis, but in different magnitudes, according to nations' economic power. While the sustainability of the wealthiest economies was slightly changed during 2019-2020 but maintained within the named 'useful-order' world (environmentally unsustainable, productive, and happy), the poorest economies pushed about 169 million people into the worst performance, reaching the 'ineffective' world (environmentally unsustainable, unproductive, and unhappy). Numbers highlight the inequalities of sustainability performance among countries, according to their capacity to face the Covid-19 crisis. The shield of the richest evaluated countries comprising 5 % of the world population is more powerful than the shield of the poorest evaluated countries carrying 67 % of the world population. Results claims for efforts to make different policies and provide economic support differently for countries, since although we are all under the same storm, but in different boats.

Integrating or Des-integrating agribusiness systems: Outcomes of emergy evaluation

The agribusiness contributes significantly to the Brazilian domestic production, and the search for environmentally friendly systems, exploring the maximum possible use of renewable resources and reducing the use of non-renewable ones, affects the agribusiness' productivity and competitivity. An agribusiness producing corn, eggs, pork and milk was evaluated using emergy accounting. The effects of the (des)integration of the production processes on the efficiency and environmental sustainability of the system were assessed using seven scenarios. The first is the existing integrated system and the others are scenarios in which one of the productive subsystems is removed. Efficiency is measured by the global productivity relative to the amount of protein produced. The most environmentally advantageous scenario, in terms of sustainability and productivity, is the one in which pork production is increased and egg production is ceased. This result suggests that increasing integration per se cannot assure gains in environmental sustainability. The integrated management of the residues of the poultry and pig production as organic fertilizer resulted an advantage for the seven scenarios. The scenarios presented should help to evaluate organizational innovations and to identify trade-offs that could influence the environmental performance of agricultural integrated systems.

Sustainability assessment procedure for operations and production processes (SUAPRO)

Sustainability assessment is a fundamental step to support decisions towards sustainable development, and several procedures to assess the sustainability of antrophic production systems have been suggested. However, most of them lack a scientific-based construct supporting their conceptual model of sustainability, which usually results in a choice of indicator(s) without criterion that can best represent a fraction of the larger and deeper concept of sustainability. This work proposes a novel framework, named Sustainability Assessment Procedure for Operations and Production Processes (SUAPRO), supported by the PDCA four-step management method (plan, do, check, and act) and the five sectors sustainability (5SEnSU) model. Grounded on scientific bases, SUAPRO provides the steps for a sustainability assessment, including its contextualization (objectives, functional unit, boundaries, energy diagram), the choice of indicators based on the 5SEnSU model, the quantification step including goal programming as a multicriteria tool, and conclude the first cycle with a sensitivity analysis. To illustrate an application of SUAPRO, the road and railroad transportation options for soybean in Brazil are considered as a case study. Results show that the railroad mode has better performance as for the Sustainability Synthetic Indicator (SSIS of 3.6 ± 0.4) than the road mode (SSIS of 4.0 ± 0.3). Towards a SSIS improvement, the sensitivity analysis highlights that public policies or even private actions should be mainly focused on reducing the emergy invested in the railroad system, while the road transportation option claims effort in reducing its global warming and acidification potentials. SUAPRO is the main contribution in this work, as it tries to overcome shortcomings as usually found in scientific papers aiming to assess the sustainability of antrophic systems. The subjectivity inherent in any multicriteria method is present as the main limitation, thus all criteria used in choosing weights must be clearly presented.

The reliability of experts' opinions in constructing a composite environmental index: the case of ESI 2005

The complexity of the environment demands a well-constructed composite environmental index (CEI) to provide a useful tool to draw attention to environmental conditions and trends for policy purposes. Among the common difficulties in constructing a proper CEI are uncertainties due to the selection of the most representative underlying variables or indicators. A degree of uncertainty accompanies experts' judgments, and to deal with vague, subjective or inconsistent information, logic other than classic is required. This study analyzes a procedure that uses different experts' opinions in constructing a CEI, with the use of paraconsistent annotated logic. For this, a sensitivity analysis of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI 2005) was used as an example to assess the reliability of experts' opinions. The uncertainty due to the disagreement in experts' opinions clearly indicates that the forms we presently use to measure and monitor the actual environment are insufficient, that is, there is a lack of a "science of sustainability".