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Published in Mohammad Gharesifard, Community-Based Monitoring Initiatives of Water and Environment: Evaluation of the Establishment Dynamics and Results, 2021
During the functional design of the Ground Truth 2.0 project, based on the higher aim of the CBMs, a distinction was made between three types of initiatives. This categorization is referred to as the ‘citizen observatory domains’, and includes ‘Environmental Monitoring’, ‘Cooperative Planning’ and ‘Environmental Stewardship’ (Wehn et al., 2015a). In this conceptualization, Environmental Monitoring refers to CBM initiatives that focus on implicit and explicit data collection and sharing by the members of the public. Cooperative Planning domain includes initiatives that form interactive activities such as consultation, discussion and feedback among different stakeholders. Finally, ‘Environmental Stewardship’ refers to CBM initiatives that focus on creating shared responsibilities and collaboration between different stakeholders for addressing key environmental issues. Because these domains are not mutually exclusive and a CBM initiative may focus on more than one of these domains, a Venn diagram was used to illustrate these domains (Figure 4.6).
Integrating the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals into Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
Published in Karen Wendt, Green and Social Economy Finance, 2021
Strategic CSR is an investment that requires effective collaboration among stakeholders. Environmental stewardship is a strategic competitive advantage that should result in operational efficiency and effectiveness with results being achieved over the long haul. Though CSR has had a tumultuous legacy, it is being featured more prominently with integrated reporting standards and governmental regulations being adopted in many countries. Measuring the financial and market performance of financial institutions that link their strategic CSR to meet the SDGs is critically needed. The democratic dialogue of SDGs outlines avenues for managerial practices and scholarly discourse in a way that guides financial institutions to turn the 17 goals into opportunities that have positive economic, social, and environmental returns.
Sustainability in engineering design
Published in Riadh Habash, Green Engineering, 2017
The importance of integrating sustainability with manufacturing and design is highlighted, along with the need to utilize appropriate tools, like DfE and LCA. Important contributors to SM, as illustrated in Figure 10.15, need to be considered. It is known that environmentally sound practices, approaches, and tools developed collaboratively by the manufacturing industry, academia, and others are beneficial and implementable. Also, manufacturing decision-makers that adopt a sustainability focus and establish a sustainability culture within companies are more likely to be successful in enhancing design and manufacturing sustainability. Along with competitiveness, profitability, and productivity, environmental stewardship and sustainability are likely to prove increasingly important for manufacturing in the future and in setting the main priorities for advancing manufacturing operations and technologies. Future prospects for SM are mixed, with improvements anticipated due to environmental pressures, while a focus on economics may dominate at the expense of sustainability due to the ongoing global financial crisis (Rosen and Kishawy 2012).
Design concepts for the integration of bamboo in contemporary vernacular architecture
Published in Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2019
The increasing global attention to the limited resources has led to attempts to focus on the potential impact of sustainable development goals in the construction industry. Selection of building materials that have minimum environmental impacts represents a key strategy in achieving sustainable building objectives. In this context, bamboo is a renewable, low cost, and environment enhancing resource with great potential to improve sustainable development goals (Adhikari, Wood, & Sudak, 2015). The environmental properties of bamboo (e.g. high durability, local availability, easy fabrication, multi-purpose usage) make it a remarkable material to meet a wide range of sustainable development objectives (Nguyen, Tran, Tran, & Reiter, 2011). Bamboo grows quickly and is the fastest-growing and most versatile plant on earth (Liese & Michael, 2015). Furthermore, it is relatively lightweight and can be easily harvested and transported. Sustainable development has resource efficiency/ environmental stewardship, social justice and economic components. Developing a bamboo-based building material value chain can contribute to the realization of these outcomes.
Multiobjective optimization of asphalt pavement design and maintenance decisions based on sustainability principles and mechanistic-empirical pavement analysis
Published in International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, 2018
Dan Chong, Yuhong Wang, Zhifeng Dai, Xiaojun Chen, Dawei Wang, Markus Oeser
Highway pavement is an essential component of transport infrastructure systems. The construction and operation of highway pavement network are not only costly but also create significant impacts on society and environment. Transport sector generates approximately 14% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which 72% is related to road construction, rehabilitation, maintenance, service, and usage (ASTAE, 2009; IPCC, 2014). Although the majority of transport-related energy use and GHG emissions may be attributed to fossil-fueled vehicles (OECD/ITF, 2010), they are affected by pavement construction and maintenance activities. If road construction and maintenance are performed too frequently, traffic congestion due to such activities may significantly increase vehicular fuel consumption and GHG emissions. Conversely, if such activities are performed too scarcely, high pavement roughness may lead to poor vehicular fuel economy as well as high emissions (Wang, Harvey, & Kendall, 2014). Optimum pavement design and maintenance decisions may help enhance both the economic benefits and environmental stewardship of highways.