Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the sustainability of rangeland management. We show that a rain-index insurance with frequent payoffs, i....

a r t i c l e i n f o The sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension systems is a major concern in most European countries. Considering the inverse old-age dependency ratio (the proportion of the class of actives to pensioners) as a sustainability index, based on a classical demographic model, a new optimal control model is proposed where the sustainability index grows along a prescribed trajector...

This paper presents a sustainability assessment model based on requirement trees, value analysis, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, and the Monte Carlo simulation technique. It embraces the approach for assessing sustainability taken by the Spanish Structural Concrete Code. Nevertheless, the deterministic model of the Spanish Code can cause significant problems in terms of adequately managing a p...

The study investigates whether the present pattern of urban development in India in the creation of mega cities is sustainable and what it can learn from the global megacities. This has been done by comparing the two Indian cities Mumbai and Bangalore with selected mega cities of the worlds representing different stages of development (Shanghai, London, and Singapore) using an indicator-based a...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...