Sustainability Appraisal Quantitative Methods And Mathematical Techniques For Environmental Performance Evaluation

One of the most important issues in developing sustainable management strategies and incorporating ecodesigns in production, manufacturing and operations management is the assessment of the sustainability of business operations and organizations’ overall environmental performance. The book presents the results of recent studies on sustainability assessment. It provides a solid reference for researchers in academia and industrial practitioners on the state-of-the-art in sustainability appraisal including the development and application of sustainability indices, quantitative methods, models and frameworks for the evaluation of current and future welfare outcomes, recommendations on data collection and processing for the evaluation of organizations’ environmental performance, and eco-efficiency approaches leading to business process re-engineering.

One of the most important issues in developing sustainable management strategies and incorporating ecodesigns in production, manufacturing and operations management is the assessment of the sustainability of business operations and organizations’ overall environmental performance. The book presents the results of recent studies on sustainability assessment. It provides a solid reference for researchers in academia and industrial practitioners on the state-of-the-art in sustainability appraisal including the development and application of sustainability indices, quantitative methods, models and frameworks for the evaluation of current and future welfare outcomes, recommendations on data collection and processing for the evaluation of organizations’ environmental performance, and eco-efficiency approaches leading to business process re-engineering.

This book deals with a rapidly growing field aiming at producing food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. It is a discipline that addresses current issues: climate change, increasing food and fuel prices, poor-nation starvation, rich-nation obesity, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control and biodiversity depletion. This series gathers review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge, then proposes alternative solutions.

This book presents new concepts as well as practical applications and experiences in the field of information technology for environmental engineering. The book has three main focus areas: firstly, it shows how information technologies can be employed to support natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Secondly, it demonstrates the application of computing in the everyday practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists and social scientists. And thirdly, it demonstrates how the complexity of natural phenomena can be approached using interdisciplinary methods, where computer science offers the infrastructure needed for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support documentation and reporting.The book collects selected papers presented at the 7th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in July 2015. It discusses recent success stories in eco-informatics, promising ideas and new challenges from the interdisciplinary viewpoints of computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem-solving and decision-making.

This monograph addresses the methodological and empirical issues relevant for the development of sustainable agriculture, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. It relates economic growth to the other dimensions of sustainability by applying integrated methods. The book comprises five chapters dedicated to the theoretical approaches towards sustainable rural development, productivity analysis, structural change analysis and environmental footprint. The book focuses on the transformations of the agricultural sector while taking into account economic, environmental, and social dynamics. The importance of agricultural transformations to the livelihood of the rural population and food security are highlighted. Further, advanced methodologies and frameworks are presented to fathom the underlying trends in different facets of agricultural production. The authors present statistical methods used for the analysis of agricultural sustainability along with applications for agriculture in the European Union. Additionally, they discuss the measures of efficiency, methodological approaches and empirical models. Finally, the book applies econometric and optimization techniques, which are useful for the estimation of the production functions and other representations of technology in the case of the European Union member states. Therefore, the book is a must-read for researchers and students of agricultural and production economics, as well as policy-makers and academia in general.

The three-volume set LNCS 8009-8011 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, UAHCI 2013, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 230 contributions included in the UAHCI proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this three-volume set. The 74 papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: design for all methods, techniques and tools; eInclusion practice; universal access to the built environment; multi-sensory and multimodal interfaces; brain-computer interfaces.

As well as taking stock of the current and proposed legal instruments, the book looks at the wider policy and economic aspects of coping with climate change. It provides a comparative overview of key issues across Europe, the United States, Asia-Pacifi

In this Open Access publication Claudia Lemke develops a comprehensive Multi-Level Sustainable Development Index (MLSDI) that is applicable to micro, meso, and macro objects by conducting methodological and empirical research. Multi-level comparability is crucial because the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at macro level can only be achieved if micro and meso objects contribute. The author shows that a novel information-theoretic algorithm outperforms established multivariate statistical weighting methods such as the principal component analysis (PCA). Overcoming further methodological shortcomings of previous sustainable development indices, the MLSDI avoids misled managerial and political decision making.