Natural interactions between water, soil, atmosphere, plants and microorganisms include physical, chemical and biological processes with decontaminating capacities. Natural or energy-saving wastewater treatment systems utilize these processes and thereby enable a sustainable management in the field of wastewater treatment, offering low investment and operation costs, little or no energy consump...

This article demonstrates that in recent years, patent settlements between branded and generic manufacturers involving "reverse payments" from branded manufacturers to generic manufacturers have received close antitrust scrutiny, driven by concerns that such settlements harm consumers by delaying the entry of lower-priced generic drugs. The authors note that such settlements will be a focus of ...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, 238 million people live in slums or informal settlements. Because of rapid urbanisation and population growth, settlements have become a major challenge the urban landscape, exacerbating issues related to poverty, inadequate infrastructure, housing poor living conditions. As part collaborative interdisciplinary project ISULABANTU, this paper provides an overview toolk...

The need for sustainable development has been widely recognized and sustainable development has become a hot topic of various disciplines even though the role of ergonomics in it is seldom reported or considered. This study conducts a systematic survey of research publications in the fields of ergonomics and sustainable development over the past two decades (1992-2011), in order to identify the...

The Biosphere Reserve (BR) concept aims at encouraging sustainable development (SD) towards sustainability on the ground by promoting three core functions: conservation, development, and logistic support. Sweden and Ukraine exemplify the diverse governance contexts that BRs need to cope with. We assessed how the BR concept and its core functions are captured in national legislations. The result...

In a tsunami event human casualties and infrastructure damage are determined predominantly by seaquake intensity and offshore properties. On land, wave energy is attenuated by gravitation (elevation) and friction (land cover). Tree belts have been promoted as "bioshields" against wave impact. However, given the lack of quantitative evidence of their performance in such extreme events, tree belt...

Understanding urbanization and evaluating its impact are vital for formulating global sustainable development. The results obtained from evaluating the impact of urbanization, however, depend on the kind of measurement used. With the goal of increasing our understanding of the impact of urbanization, we developed direct and indirect subjective indicators to measure how people assess their livin...

Global climate change has profound implications for human societies. The present---ecologically unsustainable--trajectory of human development fails to provide for the basic needs of a substantial fraction of the global population, while diminishing the prospects for future generations. Human-caused climate change has already begun to affect weather patterns, physical and biological phenomena, ...

Cemre Cubukcuoglu 1, Ioannis Chatzikonstantinou 2,3, Mehmet Fatih Tasgetiren 4,*, I. Sevil Sariyildiz 2,3 and Quan-Ke Pan 5 1 Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Yasar University, Izmir 35100, Turkey; [email protected] 2 Department of Architecture, Yasar University, Izmir 35100, Turkey; [email protected] (I.C.); [email protected]...