A methodology for assessing the sustainability of hydrogen production using solid fuels is introduced, in which three sustainability dimensions (ecological, sociological and technological) are considered along with ten indicators for each dimension. Values for each indicator are assigned on a 10-point scale based on a high of 1 and a low of 0, depending on the characteristic of the criteria ass...

There is growing scientific evidence that improving the sustainability of consumer products can lead to significant gains in global sustainability. Historically, environmental policy has been managed by bureaucracies and institutions in a mechanistic manner; this had led to many early successes. However, we believe that if policy concerning product sustainability is also managed in this way, ne...

The vague, yet undoubtedly desirable, notion of sustainability has been discussed and debated by many natural and social scientists. We argue that mainstream conceptions of sustainability, and the related concept of sustainable development, are mired in a “pre-analytic vision” that naturalizes capitalist social relations, closes off important questions regarding economic growth, and thus limits...

Article history: Received 16 November 2005 Received in revised form 10 November 2006 Accepted 10 November 2006 Herman E. Daly noted in 1992 that maintaining the scale of the physical economy within ecological capacity is vital in pursuing sustainability, leading to the use of biophysical assessments as a central concept in sustainability analysis from the perspective of ecological economics. Ac...

Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks have to be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner, we propose to use the concept of viability. Viability means that the differen...

rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. to build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. this paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. the re...

This paper describes a crude yet simple Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) derived solely from the ratio of two classified satellite images with global coverage. An ESI is calculated for each nation of the world by dividing the amount of light energy emitted by that nation as measured by a nighttime satellite image into the total value of that nation’s ecosystem services as measured by a ...

We discuss the recent emergence of ̳deliberative ecological economics‘, a field that highlights the potential of deliberation for improving environmental governance. We locate the emergence of this literature in the long concern in ecological economics over the policy implications of limited views of human action and its encounter with deliberative democracy scholarship and the model of communi...

ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. one element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...