Background: Companioned by economic development, a dietary shift toward higher meat consumption is seen in developing countries and transitional economies, where the demand for livestock production has been increasing in response to such a dietary shift. In the Asian Dryland Belt, approaches to meet this demand have focused on grazing intensification, cropland conversion for animal feed, and su...

High consumption of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is accompanied with a high yield of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Meanwhile, because the different types of resources have their own unique properties, the current content of each type will remain limited in a range of fluctuations. Therefore, WEEE recycling is an obvious choice to meet the resource demands of the...

Non-timber Forest Products (NTFPs), an important provisioning ecosystem services, are recognized for their contribution in rural livelihoods and forest conservation. Effective management through sustainable harvesting and market driven commercialization are two contrasting aspects that are bringing challenges in development of NTFPs sector. Identifying potential species having market value, con...

What is a ‘sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations?’ Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Although several aggregate indexes have been proposed to answer such questions, comprehensive and internationally comparable data are not available for most of these. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indexes of sustainability: the Wor...

Although empirical and theoretical studies affirm that punishment can elevate collaborative efforts, its emergence and stability remain elusive. By peer-punishment the sanctioning is something an individual elects to do depending on the strategies in its neighborhood. The consequences of unsustainable efforts are therefore local. By pool-punishment, on the other hand, where resources for sancti...

Existing paradigms, which are deeply rooted in our educational systems, are fomenting unsustainable development. For this reason, it is necessary to opt for a style of education that allows university students to be aware of the need to live in a different way and be aware of our absolute dependency on our natural environment. This goal requires fundamental changes in the curriculum, as well as...

Many computing systems are constrained by power budgets. While they could temporarily draw more power, doing so creates unsustainable temperatures and unwanted electricity consumption. Developing systems that operate within power budgets is a constrained optimization problem: configuring the components within the system to maximize performance while maintaining sustainable power consumption. Th...

Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy ...

Industrial longline fishing can be understood as a case study of the cultural, economic, environmental and social impacts of unsustainable fishing technology. While much attention has been attributed to the impact of industrial longlines on the marine ecosystem, little is known about the impact of longline fishing on local food security, employment, cultural belief systems and traditions, reven...

This paper integrates fertility choice and exhaustible resource dynamics in a tractable model of endogenous technological change. The analysis shows that, under the right conditions, the interdependence of population, resources and technology produces a transition from unsustainable resource-based growth to sustainable knowledge-based growth that consists of three phases: (1) an initial phase w...