The oceans are a crucial source of natural resources for human development, as productive terrestrial resources increasingly reach their limits of economic and ecological exploitation. With increasing human impact on oceans, it is vital to maintain a sustainable human–ocean relationship. We present an indicator system and information entropy model to assess the evolution of human–ocean systems ...

The major purpose of this study is to assess the perception of managers in the Forest, Range and WatershedOrganization. It is an applied study by using descriptive–correlative method. A questionnaire was developedand data collected from 105 respondents. The validity and reliability of questionnaires was verified. Theresults of study show that there was a relationship between educational level, ...

The author contends that healthy communities must be both environmentally and socially sustainable, given that health depends on the quality of the built and natural environments, and that global change resulting from the industrial economy is affecting the web of life. He argues that suburban sprawl wastes scarce resources and disproportionately places those resources in the hands of suburban ...

Many health systems across the world face the challenge of increasing demand and diminishing resources, which Hovenga, Coiera and Lovis (2007) contend are ultimately unsustainable. Over the next 20 years national health systems will have to treat proportionally more people, with more illnesses, higher expectations and more expensive technologies, but with the investment of relatively less money...

The declining availability of natural resources and the environmental impacts of continued extraction of primary resources for production activities have forced greater focus on waste streams and recycling activities. Industrial ecology as a field of practice and theory has been closely related to sustainability issues, yet despite the development of much theory and specific tools and methodolo...

The Industrial Ecology (IE) is a new interdisciplinary field focused on sustainable development. IE aims to the shifting of industrial processes from open-loop systems where different resources move through a system to become wastes to a closed-loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes. This paper introduces a Green Virtual Enterprise (GVE) model as an emerging sustainable manufa...

Following the lead of the European Union in introducing binding measures to promote the use of regenerative energy forms, it is not unreasonable to assume that the global demand for combustible raw materials for energy generation will be reduced considerably in the second half of this century. This will not only have a favourable effect on the CO(2) concentration in the atmosphere, but will al...

We argue that IoT-enabled socio-technical systems exhibit two inter-related and inter-dependent commons: one being the commons of resources (both physical and intellectual), and the other being the commons of knowledge. We show that both types of commons can be generically managed by applying Ostrom’s design principles for selfgoverning institutions. We then propose that one requirement for suc...

The management of water resources in arid and semiarid areas has long been a challenge, from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern southwestern United States. As our understanding of the hydrological and climatological cycles has improved, and our ability to manipulate the hydrologic cycle has increased, so too have the challenges associated with managing a limited natural resource for a growing po...

The non-sustainable use of water creates major environmental problems on a world wide scale. It is even an issue in regions with a relative abundance of this resources, like the Alps. Here, major problems are associated with the construction of dams and the operation of hydropower plants. The environmental impact of hydropower has been subjected to a fierce political debate in the eighties, esp...