Search results for "SUSTAINABILITY"
showing 10 items of 3374 documents
Consumer behaviour change through education for sustainable development: case of Latvia
2018
More sustainability and sustainable development are major challenges faced by society today. Consumer's choices and the use of products and services have important impacts on the environment; consequently, consumer behaviour is crucial. Education and pedagogics help select real sustainable living attitudes of students, their families and friends. This case study describes the mid-term results of a teaching assignment and survey in three Latvian higher education organisations which involve system thinking and students' action on consumer choices of household chemicals. The multilayer results provide insight into the consumption of these chemicals and show that one year after the assignment, …
Towards food, feed and energy crops mitigating climate change
2011
Agriculture is an important source of anthropogenic emissions of the greenhouse gases (GHG), methane (CH 4 ) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O), and crops can affect the microbial processes controlling these emissions in many ways. Here, we summarize the current knowledge of plant–microbe interactions in relation to the CH 4 and N 2 O budgets and show how this is promoting new generations of crop cultivars that have the potential to mitigate GHG emissions for future agricultural use. The possibility of breeding low GHG-emitting cultivars is a paradigm shift towards sustainable agriculture that balances climate change and food and bioenergy security.
Decision support systems (DSS) for wastewater treatment plants - A review of the state of the art.
2019
The use of decision support systems (DSS) allows integrating all the issues related with sustainable development in view of providing a useful support to solve multi-scenario problems. In this work an extensive review on the DSSs applied to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is presented. The main aim of the work is to provide an updated compendium on DSSs in view of supporting researchers and engineers on the selection of the most suitable method to address their management/operation/design problems. Results showed that DSSs were mostly used as a comprehensive tool that is capable of integrating several data and a multi-criteria perspective in order to provide more reliable results. Only …
On the Role of Perception: Understanding Stakeholders’ Collaboration in Natural Resources Management through the Evolutionary Theory of Innovation
2021
Natural resources management deals with highly complex socioecological systems. This complexity raises a conundrum, since wide-ranging knowledge from different sources and types is needed, but at the same time none of these types of knowledge is able by itself to provide the basis for a viable productive system, and mismatches between the two of them are common. Therefore, a growing body of literature has examined the integration of different types of knowledge in fisheries management. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this ongoing debate by integrating the evolutionary theory of innovation—and specifically the concept of proximity—and the theory of perception. We set up a theoretical …
Tropical Fruits as an Opportunity for Sustainable Development in Rural Areas: The Case of Mango in Small-Sized Sicilian Farms
2018
Over the last decades, in many rural areas in Southern Europe, farmers have abandoned agricultural activity, especially on small-sized farms, leading to an exodus from rural areas towards urbanized ones. In this context, in the early 1980s, some Sicilian farmers introduced mango on their small-sized farms, as certain areas of Sicily are well suited to tropical and subtropical crops, but also to meet increasing consumer interest for these fruits, as they are perceived as functional foods. This paper aimed to evaluate the economic sustainability of mango and to determine whether its introduction could be considered as an alternative to traditional crops. In particular, an economic-financial a…
Dual-purpose wheat technology: a tool for ensuring food security and livestock sustainability in cereal-based cropping pattern
2020
Wheat cultivation under a dual-purpose (DP) system holds great potential to provide additional fodder for livestock with marginal grain reduction. This study explores the potential of wheat as a DP...
Exploring the unknowns : State of the art in qualitative forest-based sector foresight research
2022
The forest-based sector is facing one the greatest transitions in its history in the face of global megatrends. Globalization, sustainability challenges and the ICT sector have put the world in a new light. Whereas some of the recent developments have resulted in challenges for the traditional forest industry, many positive expectations and opportunities are also seen to arise in the form of the transition to a sustainable bio-economy. However, to be able to fully seize the opportunity, the industry has to navigate through contingency where preparedness can have a major impact. Foresight as a strategic approach can help to prepare and sensitize decision-makers to be prepared for the future.…
The ability of fish ecolabels to promote a change in the sustainability awareness
2021
Abstract Researchers, environmentalists, as well as fisheries and retailers, have been focusing their attention on the design, use and effects that fish ecolabels have on sustainability. The fish processing industry and large retailers have rapidly adopted several market-based standards, with consequences for two major stakeholders: fishermen and consumers. Although the standards have shown rather positive results, from the perspectives of marine biodiversity conservation, the fish industry and trade, it is not clear how they are able to support a change in people’s awareness about sustainability. For this reason, the present work reviews and analyses the literature, produced in the last te…
Electrotechnologies applied to valorization of by-products from food industry: Main findings, energy and economic cost of their industrialization
2016
Abstract There has been a growing interest to reuse food waste and by-products from different processing steps, not only to ensure the environmental sustainability but also to improve the economic performance of the processes. One way of recovery that has raised more interest is the extraction of valuable compounds, which can be used as ingredients in food and pharmaceutical industries due to their technological function, nutritional properties, or their beneficial effects on human or animal health. In many cases, conventional solvent extraction cannot be economically feasible or involves the use of toxic solvents, hindering their subsequent management, or high temperatures, with consequent…
Valorisation of Dairy Wastes Through Kefir Grain Production
2019
The main aim of this work was to investigate on kefir grains (KGs) increase using different dairy by-products. To this purpose, whey and deproteinized whey from cow, goat and sheep milk were compared to the pasteurized milk of the corresponding animal species. Each substrate was inoculated with 3% (w/v) of KGs cultivated in ultra-high temperature cow milk and evalu- ated for pH decrease, total titratable acidity increase and development of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and yeasts released in the matrices after 24 h incubation at three different temperatures (20, 25 and 30 °C). The genotypic characterization of the dominating microbial populations resulted in the identification of two LAB belon…