Nowadays, the water supply and water demand management are the main issues in water resources planning. It is more important in a river basin with a complex system facing with droughts, climate changes, inter-basin water transfer and operational and under study dams. In this paper, for water resources planning in a river basin and reducing the difference between water resources and water demand...

This paper has the goal of exploring the possibility of using EMERGY in sustainability evaluation. A case study that compares the sustainability of two maize irrigation systems (furrow vs. solid set sprinkler, both with electric pumping) is used as the basis of the discussion. The furrow irrigation system presents a lower total EMERGY, yielding a lower transformity. The main reason is the lower...

Self-sustainability is a property of a system; a system is considered to be self-sustainable if it can sustain itself without external support in an observed period of time. If this property is mapped to a human settlement in context of resources (water, energy, food, etc.), it would describe a human settlement which is independent of external resources (like the national electrical grid or a c...

Sustainable development must satisfy the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Although it looks at the economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability, this article focuses specifically on an analysis of the concept in conjunction with the use and protection of natural resources. It shows how taking account of environme...

O ONE OF THE MOST FORMIDABLE tasks facing humanity at the moment is how to solve the problems associated with energy supply and utilization. The issues are complex, to be sure, and they’re compounded by seemingly confl icting objectives involving cost, sustainability, reliability, environmental soundness, free markets, and an energy supply that is accessible to all—anytime. Because there’s spec...

As an EU policy agenda, the ―knowledge-based bio-economy‖ (KBBE) emphasizes bio-technoscience as the means to reconcile environmental and economic sustainability. This frames the sustainability problem as an inefficiency to be overcome through a techno-knowledge fix. Here ecological sustainability means a benign eco-efficient productivity using resources which are renewable, reproducible and th...

Sustainability is a complex concept comprised of multiple facets such as social, environmental, economic and more that challenges traditional norms of organisational practices. But there is a lack of generally accepted sustainability principles that is supported by most of the organisational stakeholders, and a pattern oriented methodology that is entirely backed by the organisational resources...