Current Research in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

{"title":"Conservation education for sustainable development through field internship at NGOs","authors":"Yoji Natori ,&nbsp;Tomohiro Nakagawa ,&nbsp;Tomomi Saito ,&nbsp;Tatsuhiro Kato ,&nbsp;Takashi Seo ,&nbsp;Makoto Yata ,&nbsp;Yusuke Sawa ,&nbsp;Mika Yasuda ,&nbsp;Akiko Enomoto ,&nbsp;Asako Isobe","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100278","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100278","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Conservation is necessary to achieve sustainable development, and building capacity of youth and having them participate in conservation is an urgent imperative. The SATO-YAMA-UMI Project was a conservation project operated in six countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The project conducted an internship program for Japanese youth in fiscal year 2018–2019, whose impacts were assessed by members of implementing organizations and former interns in 2024 through online questionnaire and a focus group discussion. The assessment sought answers to: What are the benefits of on-site internship, as opposed to classroom learning? What effects have the on-site internship had in the career of the participants? What program elements would facilitate youth participation in conservation? We found that the field internship provides participants with opportunities to see the environmental issues in their totality without screening, and to gain perspectives that will be difficult to obtain once in the corporate system. Results supported the theory of change that direct experiences lead to enhanced engagement in conservation, such that the participants would play stronger roles as agents of change in the society. Non-governmental organizations organizing and presenting field internship program can significantly lower the barriers that impede many youth members to take the critical step, and they can play a significant role in inter-sectoral collaboration in human resource development. We discuss the role of conservation organizations in mobilizing youth as agents of change for sustainable futures, both through their own activities and in collaborations with private sector and academia.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100278"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adapting to climate change under threats of violence: A comparative institutional analysis of incentives for conflict and collaboration","authors":"Leonardo Medina ,&nbsp;Grazia Pacillo ,&nbsp;Peter Läderach ,&nbsp;Stefan Sieber ,&nbsp;Michelle Bonatti","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100276","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100276","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Research on climate and conflict often emphasizes violence and its drivers, overlooking the prevalence of collaboration in shaping social relations. Addressing this gap, this study undertakes a comparative institutional analysis of community-level responses to climate threats in violence-prone settings. The research explores conditions that incentivize either cooperation or conflict, refraining from presuming one outcome as dominant. Using a structured analytical framework applied through a thematic analysis, it systematically examines environmental, relational, institutional, and systemic patterns across three case studies of localized collective adaptation to climate change under varying forms of violence. These case studies are located in Guatemala, Philippines and Kenya. The study identifies 18 factors that drive conflict or foster collaboration, revealing that while these factors are broadly consistent across contexts, their effects are highly context-dependent. In some cases, the same factor contributes to both conflict and collaboration within shared adaptation arenas, underscoring the complex interplay of drivers. These findings highlight the importance of analysing interactions among drivers when designing collective climate adaptation efforts, emphasizing opportunities to mitigate violence and foster collaboration. The study concludes that enhancing adaptive capacities and climate-resilient peace requires expanding adaptation strategies to address often-overlooked dynamics. These include the historical processes underpinning institutional multiplicity, the legitimacy of local security forces, and the cohesion among neighbouring communities. By realigning incentives toward collaboration, such interventions can simultaneously build resilience and advance peaceful relations, providing actionable insights for policymakers and practitioners working in violence-prone regions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100276"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A multi-dimensional approach to improve validation practices for qualitative models of marine social-ecological systems","authors":"Bruno Oliveira ,&nbsp;Nuno V. Álvaro ,&nbsp;Furqan Asif ,&nbsp;Andrea Z. Botelho ,&nbsp;João Canning-Clode ,&nbsp;Daniela Casimiro ,&nbsp;Candelaria Cecilia-Ruano ,&nbsp;Catherine Chambers ,&nbsp;Ana C. Costa ,&nbsp;Ana Dinis ,&nbsp;Jesús P. García ,&nbsp;Ricardo Haroun ,&nbsp;Unn Laksá ,&nbsp;Gustavo M. Martins ,&nbsp;Alexander H. McGrath ,&nbsp;Caterina Mintrone ,&nbsp;Mirjam Carlsdóttir Olsen ,&nbsp;Manuela I. Parente ,&nbsp;Paola Parretti ,&nbsp;Sarai Pouso ,&nbsp;Angel Borja","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100273","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100273","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Current modeling practices for social-ecological systems (SES) are often qualitative and use causal loop diagrams (CLDs), as these models promote an evaluation of the systems loops and variable connectivity. Our literature review demonstrated that quality assurance of these models often lacks a consistent validation procedure. Therefore, a guide to improving the validation of qualitative models is presented. The presumed utility protocol is a multi-dimensional protocol with 26 criteria, organized into four dimensions, designed to assess specific parts of the modeling process and provide recommendations for improvement. This protocol was applied to three demonstration cases, located in the Arctic Northeast Atlantic Ocean, Macaronesia, and the Tuscan archipelago. The “Specific Model Tests” dimension, which focuses on the structure of the model, revealed positive evaluations of its structure, boundaries, and capacity to be scaled up. “Guidelines and Processes”, which focuses on the meaning and representativeness of the process, showed positive results regarding purpose, usefulness, presentation, and meaningfulness. “Policy Insights and Spillovers”, a dimension focused on the policy recommendations, revealed a high number of “not apply”, indicating that several criteria are too advanced for the status of the models tested. The “Administrative, Review, and Overview” dimension, which focused on the managerial overview, showed the models needed improvement in the documentation and replicability, while time and cost constraints were positively evaluated. The presumed utility protocol has shown to be a useful tool providing quantitative and qualitative evaluations for an intermediate evaluation of the model-building process, helping to substantiate confidence, with recommendations for improvements and applications elsewhere.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100273"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spatial variation of biochar production potential from surplus crop residues in India","authors":"Arindam Datta ,&nbsp;Sutapa Dutta ,&nbsp;Shivani Sharma ,&nbsp;Md.Hafizur Rahman","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100279","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100279","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>India faces environmental issues due to large-scale seasonal <em>in situ</em> burning of crop residues, leading to air pollution and nutrient loss. Biochar application can increase soil carbon content, moisture, and nutrient content while reducing air pollution. India produces 156 Mt. of annual <em>in situ</em> surplus crop residues from ten major crops, with the highest potential for rice residue biomass in Sangrur, Punjab. Biochar could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 405 Tg annually and its application to soil could sequester 7.5 Tg of carbon. However, competition between biochar and other crop residue management technologies requires a life cycle assessment for sustainable management.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100279"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143286780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A positive deviance approach to understand gender relations and practices that support transformative adaptation: Insights from Kenya dairy households","authors":"Renee Bullock ,&nbsp;Tanaya DuttaGupta ,&nbsp;Philip Miriti","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100280","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100280","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The impacts of climate change on livelihoods and livestock systems in East Africa are significant. Efforts to bolster resilience will require a concerted focus on social equity to foster transformative adaptation. We integrate a feminist lens in a positive deviance approach to better understand gender relations in dairy producing communities in Kenya. We make theoretical and methodological contributions and suggest practical application to support locally led scaling approaches. Data was collected through 20 sex disaggregated focus group discussions (FGDs) and 10 key informant interviews (KII) with a total of 199 research participants. We focus on women's and men's participation in decision-making to assess gendered agency and labor in households, dairy specific activities, and the uptake of climate innovations. Evaluating these relations provides a better understanding of equity in dairy producing households who are at the forefront of climate adaptation. Women's and men's practices vary, and, through a positive deviance inquiry, we find the common patterns in those practices to characterize the referent group using thematic analyses. Our empirical findings demonstrate that referent group norms, relations and practices are, by and large, inequitable in agency and labor in dairy households underpinned by social norms. Positive deviant practices occur at differential rates in diverse geographies. We extended the concept of positive deviance to a relevant and urgent development agenda, transformative adaptation, that, to support resilience, must address root causes of vulnerability. We advocate for increased efforts to utilize positive deviance in future climate adaptation studies to inform practical and locally led strategies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100280"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143369825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fostering unsustainability? An analysis of 4-year-olds' dietary impacts in Sweden","authors":"Maria Jacobsen ,&nbsp;Lotta Moraeus ,&nbsp;Emma Patterson ,&nbsp;Anna Karin Lindroos ,&nbsp;Mattias Eriksson ,&nbsp;Elin Röös","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100281","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2025.100281","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The dietary impacts of 746 young Swedish children were assessed across ten indicators: carbon footprint, cropland use, new nitrogen and phosphorus inputs, blue water use, ammonia emissions, pesticide use, biodiversity loss, antibiotic use, and animal welfare. This analysis utilized caretaker-reported food intake data from the Riksmaten Young Children study (2021–24). It employed the Sustainability Assessment of Foods And Diets tool to quantify these impacts against per capita 1000 kcal planetary boundaries and variations in dietary impacts based on factors such as gender, municipal area, parental education level, and consumption setting (home or preschool). We found that the mean dietary impacts fell within or exceeded the uncertainty zone per capita planetary boundaries for five out of six indicators, with only blue water use remaining within the ‘safe space’; notably, zero children had eaten below the uncertainty levels for all indicators. Boys exhibited higher dietary impacts than girls in absolute terms and when adjusted for energy intake. Children from rural areas and those with lower parental education levels also demonstrated higher impacts than their peers. Carbon footprint analysis revealed no substantial differences between home and preschool settings, with lower meat consumption in preschools offset by higher dairy intake. The primary drivers of dietary impacts were red meat, dairy products, and fruit and vegetable consumption. These results highlight substantial challenges in achieving sustainable food production and diets in Sweden while providing essential insights for informing policy and governance frameworks to promote healthier dietary patterns among young children.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100281"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Arts, creative & cultural initiatives for citizen engagement on climate action: Insights from Ireland's Creative Climate Action Fund","authors":"J. Mac Mahon ,&nbsp;A. Revez ,&nbsp;M. Burke ,&nbsp;P. Hogan ,&nbsp;M.M. Nyhan","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100274","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100274","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A national study in Ireland on the impacts of creative and cultural climate action initiatives highlights their potential to act as catalysts for fostering citizen engagement. This research evaluated five distinct creative projects, each addressing critical themes such as sustainable agriculture, circular economy, repair culture, consumption habits, sea-level rise, biodiversity, and community-driven climate action. These initiatives formed part of a government programme to enhance public participation in climate action. Utilising surveys, interviews, observations, and focus groups, data was collected and analysed to understand impacts on participants' cognitive, emotional, and practical engagement with climate issues. The <em>COM-B Behaviour System Model</em> was also employed to assess impacts on participants' capacity, opportunity, and motivation to take climate action. Results showed that interactive, participatory-style creative mediums led by artists and practitioners, such as demonstrations, workshops, presentations, and discussion, effectively engaged participants across cognitive, emotional, and practical dimensions. Respondents reported an increased sense of self-efficacy and capacity to take achievable climate actions. Community-centred, peer-sharing formats emerged as trusted and valued opportunities for accessing relevant climate information, aiding constructive dialogue on complex topics. Artists' unique perspectives and creative expressions generated positive energy and an openness to engage, renewing participants' motivation to act. Nature-based events notably deepened emotional connections to the natural world, a strong motivator of pro-environmental behaviours. The study underscored participants' need for supportive and safe spaces to facilitate sustained climate dialogue and action within their communities. Findings suggest that targeted creative community events can significantly support climate policy efforts by fostering high-quality citizen engagement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100274"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Harvesting living labs outcomes through learning pathways","authors":"Astha Bhatta ,&nbsp;Heleen Vreugdenhil ,&nbsp;Jill Slinger","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100277","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100277","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Living labs have emerged as a long-term, collaborative approach to addressing complex societal challenges, such as sustainable land and water management and climate change adaption. While these transdisciplinary environments foster continuous knowledge exchange and interactions among actors from diverse disciplines and sectors, the role of learning in realizing the impacts of living labs on participating actors and broader society is often underexplored. This paper aims to identify and analyze learning that occurs within a sequence of co-creative activities and their resulting outcomes, using the concept of ‘<em>learning pathways’</em>. The ‘<em>living lab learning framework</em>’ provides a systematic approach to organizing and categorizing living lab activities, enabling to infer learning pathways. An ex-post analysis of an empirical case study on a climate adaptation project, KLIMAP, resulted in seven distinct <em>learning pathways</em>: 1) harnessing collective integrated knowledge, 2) building collaborative networks, 3) enhancing stakeholder capacity, 4) adapting and contextualizing knowledge, 5) diffusing knowledge, 6) facilitating co-creation, and 7) reflecting on learning. These pathways were developed by examining the types of learning activities, their processes, and the entities involved, linking them to the outcomes achieved. The findings highlight that learning pathways contribute to identifying outcomes and broader impacts of living labs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100277"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143161658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cyber-echoes of climate crisis: Unraveling anthropogenic climate change narratives on social media","authors":"Or Elroy ,&nbsp;Nadejda Komendantova ,&nbsp;Abraham Yosipof","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100256","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Social media platforms have a key role in spreading narratives about climate change, and therefore it is crucial to understand the discussion about climate change in social media. The discussion on anthropogenic climate change in general, and social media specifically, has multiple different narratives. Understanding the discourses can assist efforts of mitigation, adaptation, and policy measures development. In this work, we collected 333,635 tweets in English about anthropogenic climate change. We used Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning methods to embed the semantic meaning of the tweets into vectors, cluster the tweets, and analyze the results. We clustered the tweets into four clusters that correspond to four narratives in the discussion. Analyzing the behavioral dynamics of each cluster revealed that the clusters focus on the discussion of whether climate change is caused by humans or not, scientific arguments, policy, and conspiracy. The research results can serve as input for media policy and awareness-raising measures on climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, and facilitating future communications related to climate change.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"7 ","pages":"Article 100256"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049024000161/pdfft?md5=d6dac514d30a54eca8b1606231d9e5ea&pid=1-s2.0-S2666049024000161-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141313815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Consumer meaning -making of packaging functions for sustainable food packaging – Insights from qualitative research in Finland","authors":"Kirsi Sonck-Rautio ,&nbsp;Taina Lahtinen,&nbsp;Nina Tynkkynen","doi":"10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsust.2024.100259","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The growing amount of waste originating from food packaging has increased both practical and scholarly interest in the technological development, design and marketing of sustainable food packaging. This article, in turn, scrutinizes the sustainability of packaging from the consumer perspective, arguing that the sustainability of a package is entangled not only in the content of the packaging but also in the functions it fulfills, and that the conditions for acceptable sustainable food packaging from the consumers' perspective differ from the packaging industry's views. We examine the meanings of the packaging functions for consumers based on the data collected through an online consumer panel in Finland. The findings show that while the containment function of packaging plays the most important role for the consumer in general, the informative function is particularly relevant from the viewpoint of sustainability. Moreover, we identified two novel functions consumers highly appreciate –usability and disposability – that are largely irrelevant from the industry perspective. The findings provide important insights in the transformation to more sustainable food packaging and in the development of novel packaging solutions.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":34472,"journal":{"name":"Current Research in Environmental Sustainability","volume":"7 ","pages":"Article 100259"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049024000197/pdfft?md5=a9a99e08b12ce937d64af7ffee1e7570&pid=1-s2.0-S2666049024000197-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141423581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}