Assessing the food recovery hierarchy concept from an eMergy accounting perspective: Validation and theoretical insights.

The food recovery hierarchy (FRH) is an important concept widely used worldwide as a guideline for food waste management policies. It consists of different options for food waste management hierarchically organized, in which source reduction is the most preferable option, followed by food donation, feeding animals, industrial use, composting, energy recovery, and landfilling. The most common approaches used in the literature to validate the FRH concept consider both, a user-side and donor-side perspectives.

Dynamics of ecosystem services and nonlinear responses to increased anthropogenic pressure.

Escalating global human activities elicit diverse ecosystem service responses, yet understanding remains limited. This study establishes a framework to clarify these responses, focusing on the Yangtze River Economic Belt in China. Analyzing 2000-2020 data, it calculates ecosystem service economic value and human footprint index.

High-frequency sectoral carbon and environmental analysis based on monthly input-output tables compilation during 2018-2021.

This paper proposes a process for updating monthly input-output tables with monthly macroeconomic statistics and published input-output tables. Reasonable assumptions are set up and 48 monthly input-output tables are prepared from 2018 to 2021 with the combination of the row range series method and nonlinear mathematical planning. The Weaver-Thomas composite index is used to analyze the role of the sector in the economic network, and the sectoral correlation indicators are used to analyze the correlation change of the sector's monthly electricity emissions to show an environmental application effect of the monthly input-output table.

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.

A multi-criteria approach to assess interconnections among the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of circular economy.

The debate about the negative impacts that production and consumption cause on the environment is in vogue. Strategies that point to a sustainable, healthy, and resilient path are being sought. One of these paths is the Circular Economy, which emerges as an alternative to reduce the socio-environmental impacts caused by the linear model of production-use-disposal, presenting opportunities to generate revenue, income, and wealth with circular processes.

Assessment of ecological restoration projects under water limits: Finding a balance between nature and human needs.

Revegetation has significantly contributed to improvements in ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration and soil retention. Yet, vegetation expansion in water-limited regions may generate conflict of water demand between nature and humans. Present studies are still lacking when it comes to identifying the permissible vegetation capacity, i.

Energy constrains to increasing complexity in the biosphere.

Thirty years ago, the systems ecologist Howard T. Odum introduced the concept of transformity, which is a thermodynamic measure of quality within the trial and error evolutionary dynamics of ecosystems, namely an indicator of rank in the hierarchical system structure of the biosphere. Based on a global database of individual processes and whole economies, this paper extends, refines, and updates Odum's idea, demonstrating the strength of the postulated relation.

Environmental impacts characterization of packaging waste generated by urban food delivery services. A big-data analysis in Jing-Jin-Ji region (China).

Controversies on food delivery services environmental impacts have been sparked due to the growth of this economic sector. This study focuses on the environmental impacts generated by packaging waste related to urban food delivery services. In particular, the Python based web-crawling and sample survey methods are used for big data mining, and LCA-based environmental impacts evaluation and Kernel density analysis methods are combined to determine the positioning trend of food delivery service providers and expansion direction of environmental pollution load in Jing-Jin-Ji region (North China).

Donor-side evaluation of coastal and marine ecosystem services.

There is an increasing need for coastal and marine ecosystems conservation. However, information to guide management decisions for coastal and marine ecosystems is still lacking. Considering the present advantages and limitations of existing ecosystem services valuation (ESV) accounting methods, this paper proposes a detailed donor-side accounting approach, based on emergy method, which could be used as the basis for better policies-making on coastal and marine conservation.

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.