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Cities located in the Arctic often have extreme geographic and environmental contexts and unique sociopolitical and economic trajectories that, when combined with amplified effects of climate change in the region, impact future sustainable development. Well-recognized and standardized sustainable development indicator (SDI) frameworks such as ISO 37120 or UN-Habitat City Prosperity Index are often used to compare data across cities globally using comprehensive sets of indicators. While such indexes help characterize progress toward development and guide short- and long-term decision-making, they often lack relevance to specific contexts or characterize future visions of urban growth. To evaluate the extent of these deficiencies and to provide a comparative analysis of approaches to sustainable urban growth in the Arctic, this paper analyzes city planning documents for five northern cities - Anchorage (USA), Utqiagvik (USA), Reyjavik (ISL), Iqaluit, (CAN), Whitehorse, (CAN) - for goals, targets, and indicators and compare these to thematic areas and indicators defined by ISO 37120:2018 Sustainable Cities and Communities. The results confirm that although international SDI frameworks may be useful for comparative analysis of cities across diverse regions, they exclude important local factors that influence goal-oriented urban sustainability planning strategies employed in the Arctic region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of the digital revolution, many cities around the world have made significant investments in planning and implementing smart city initiatives to address the issues of climate change and urbanisation. Concurrently, numerous attempts have been made to evaluate the performance and outcomes of these initiatives. In this study, a static and dynamic ranking of 33 selected cities for the period 2005–2019 is provided using dynamic factor analysis. In this comparative study, cities are evaluated and ranked on various smart drivers including technology, community, infrastructure, community, and governance to identify the best (and worst) smart city and to highlight the changes in smartness over the last 15 years. The results show that urban smartness has changed significantly over the past 15 years, but the smartness of most individual cities in the study has either steadily improved or remained constant. Further, smart practices vary significantly across cities, with Frankfurt, Washington, Munich, Los Angeles, and New York City showing relatively strong urban smartness, compared to the poor performance of Bratislava, Warsaw, and Prague. The findings of this study can serve as an empirical basis for identifying specific strengths and weaknesses of cities and as a knowledge-based decision-making tool for policymakers and metropolitan leaders in selecting policies that can improve the growth and performance of smart cities. The paper recommends several proposals to steer the efforts of policymakers and the private and public sectors towards more effective and efficient strategic planning and implementation of smart city initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on leadership shown in Venda, Southern Africa to protect the lungs of the planet and draws out key themes on the way Indigenous wisdom — underpinned by a sense of the sacred and the profane – expressed in solidarity with nature - are vital for protecting forests. It explores indigenous wisdom on their kinship with organic and inorganic sacred totems (plants, animals and features of the landscape) which are protected through relationships that inform governance. The ongoing community of practice and related projects make a case for standing together to address climate change. The paper was developed as part of a University of South Africa project together with the named authors. Mphatheleni Makaulule has developed an a priori and a posteriori approach to Ecosystemic governance that resonates with the work of Wangari Maathai. Makaulule's leadership in Venda that is discussed with fellow project members who are exploring how the agendas for COP 26 could be attained by fostering law informed by Bateson's concept an "ecology of mind – which means an understanding of human beings' place within living systems and our need for both education and laws to protect ecosystems such as forests (which are the lungs of the world) and the water systems (which are the life blood of all living systems). The governance approach in Venda emphasised the need to think in terms of our relationships with all living systems. The idea of extending a sense of solidarity to others is explored deeply with Makaulule and colleagues by considering similar approaches in other places, such as the Amazon where Makaulule spent time learning from shamanic leaders, Ghana (where Akwasi Achemfuor has undertaken research), Northern Territory and South Australia (where McIntyre was mentored by Peter Turner and Olive Veverbrants). The paper also refers to the work of Widianingsih based on an in-depth discussion on the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar community in West Java that has also been protecting the forests for more than 300 years. The authors explore whether attributing personhood to nature, could be regarded as limiting a notion of mystical and pragmatic recognition of interbeing or even a form of colonising the notion of interbeing? We suggest that a community of practice approach (Wenger, 1999, Wenger et al., 2009) to support learning organisations and communities could support two-way education to enable cross cultural, cross disciplinary and transnational learning to support steps towards wellbeing through sharing our understanding of interbeing in dialogue, it became clear that transcendence through totemism, dreams and shamanistic rituals support a sense of oneness with nature, relationality as well as a sense of awe, solidarity and responsibility for others which is being increasingly recognised in the arts and sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The communication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) highlights the behavior of the business toward CSR and their framework of sustainable development (SD), thus helping policymakers understand the role businesses play with respect to the 2030 Agenda. Despite its importance, this is still a relatively underexamined and emerging topic. In our paper, we focus on what businesses communicate about CSR through social media and how this relates to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We identified the topics discussed on Twitter, their evolution over time, and the differences across sectors. We applied the structural topic model (STM) algorithm, which allowed us to estimate the model, including document-level metadata (time and sector). This model proved to be a powerful tool for topic detection and the estimation of the effects of time and sector on the discussion proportion of the topics. Indeed, we found that the topics were well identified overall, and the model allowed catching signals from the data. We derived CSR communication indexes directly from the topic model (TM) results and propose the use of dissimilarity and homogeneity indexes to describe the communication mix and highlight differences and identify clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change impacts and their consequences are determined not only by the intensity and frequency of different climatic hazards but also by the vulnerability of the system, society or community exposed. While general agreement exists about the importance of assessing vulnerability to understand climate risks, there is still a tendency to neglect global and regional vulnerability patterns because they are hard to quantify, despite their value in informing adaptation, disaster risk and development policies. Several approaches to quantifying global vulnerability exist. These differ in terms of the indicators they use and how they classify countries or regions into vulnerability classes. The paper presents the structure of selected approaches and explores two indices in depth. The aim of this paper is to assess the level of agreement between selected international indicator-based assessments of vulnerability, at the level of climate regions. Results suggest that the two major global vulnerability assessments analysed largely agree on the location of the most and least vulnerable regions when these assessments are aggregated to a regional scale using the IPCC’s climate regions. The paper then discusses the robustness of the information derived and its usefulness for adaptation, disaster risk and development policies. Measuring progress towards reducing vulnerability to climate change and hazards is key for various agencies and actors in order to be able to develop informed policies and strategies for managing climate risks and to promote enabling conditions for achieving the SDGs and building resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of common good(s) is crucial in understanding higher education and its contributions. However, measuring global common goods in higher education has been largely overlooked. This paper proposes a framework to measure global common goods in higher education that contains five core dimensions (i.e., knowledge creation, people mobility, research collaboration, human well-being, and cultural contribution). The framework is based on mostly objectively quantifiable indicators that have broad applicability worldwide. This attempt would facilitate the understanding of higher education’s quantitative contributions to global common goods and potentially help efforts to increase them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, specifically machine learning and deep learning, for the diagnosis of bearing faults. The study explores both data preprocessing-dependent methods (Support Vector Machine, Nearest Neighbor, and Decision Tree) and a preprocessing-independent method (1D Convolutional Neural Network). The experiment setup utilizes the Case Western Reserve University dataset for signal acquisition. A detailed strategy for data processing is developed, encompassing initialization, data loading, signal filtration, decomposition, feature extraction in both time- and frequency-domains, and feature selection. Indeed, the study involves working with four datasets, selected based on the distribution curves of the indicators as a function of the number of observations. The results demonstrate remarkable performance of the AI methods in bearing fault diagnosis. The 1D-CNN model, in particular, shows high robustness and accuracy, even in the presence of load variations. The findings of this study shed light on the significant potential of AI methods in improving the accuracy and efficiency of bearing fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, shared facilities have contributed substantially to increased access to sanitation in urban areas. While shared sanitation is often the only viable option in densely-populated, low-income urban areas, it is currently considered a "limited" solution by the international community. In this paper, we analyze the conditions under which shared sanitation could be considered of adequate quality and propose a set of indicators associated with sanitation quality to be included in national household surveys. We conducted a survey with 3600 households and 2026 observational spot-checks of shared and individual household toilets in Kisumu (Kenya), Kumasi (Ghana), and Dhaka (Bangladesh). We develop a composite sanitation quality outcome measure based on observational data. Using regression analysis, we identify self-reported indicators that correlate with the spot-checked composite measure and are, therefore, robust with regard to reporting bias. Results show that (pour-) flush toilets are a highly informative indicator for sanitation quality compared to other toilet technologies. In contrast to previous arguments and depending on the context, sharing a toilet has a comparatively lower correlation with sanitation quality. Toilets still show good quality if shared among only 2–3 households. Toilet location and lighting, as well as the presence of a lockable door, are equally strong indicators for sanitation quality and could serve as alternative indicators. The findings suggest that the sanitation service levels defined by the WHO and UNICEF might be reconsidered to better capture the quality of sanitation facilities in low-income urban settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a study of the process of the isolation of styrene-butadiene rubber from latex with the method of mathematical planning for a full factorial experiment (23). Regression equations that describe the effect of coagulant consumption, as well as the intensity and duration of magnetic field exposure on the process of obtaining rubber from latex, have been obtained. The physical and mechanical properties of the vulcanizates comply with the regulatory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) declined a multidimensional approach to measure equitable and sustainable well-being (Benessere Equo Sostenibile, BES) at a detailed territorial level, that is, at the provincial level (NUTS3) entailing a wide spectrum of indicators grouped into domains related to Health, Education, Work and life balance, Economic well-being, Social relationships, Politics and institutions, Security, Landscape and cultural heritage, Environment, Innovation research and creativity, and Quality of services. These indicators can help in describing the territories because they can spot situations of concern, such as in the South of Italy. The gap between North and South Italy has increased over time, a picture we can describe using each of the indicators, but also by jointly considering them by using a factor analysis and clustering and constructing a composite indicator. Contrary to some researchers who have suggested the employment of time series indicators for the period 2004–2016 looking for a latent factor, that takes into account the joint temporal trend of the indicators, in this paper, the situation among three different moments over time is compared: before the 2008 crisis and a few years after it. To do this, we have chosen a certain number of indicators on the basis of their features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a growing movement around human rights cities (HRCs) in the last two decades, supported by citizens, public institutions, civil society organizations, and academia. Diverse HRC practices and approaches have accompanied this development. Most work to date has focused on processes and institutionalization and remains case-specific; comparative rights-based empirical research at the local level is rare. To fill this gap, this paper proposes indicators as a tool for assessment of human rights in cities. The development of the indicators forms part of a broader project initiated by Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) Research Worldwide Istanbul and the Union of Turkish World Municipalities, in which seven Turkish municipalities have been collaboratively developing HRC capacities since mid-2017. This study focuses on gender as a cross-cutting component of the multidimensional human rights space. It utilizes a capabilities approach to transform an abstract notion of rights into concrete, observable concepts and indicators that connect human rights and the provision of public goods and services through the capabilities of citizens. The proposed gender indicators have been tested through a series of semi-structured interviews with contact persons in participating municipalities. The HRC processes in these municipalities serve as an exemplar for research and activism regarding HRCs, especially in a developing country context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indices assessing country-level climate and disaster risk at the global scale have experienced a steep rise in popularity both in science and international climate policy. A number of widely cited products have been developed and published over the recent years, argued to contribute critical knowledge for prioritizing action and funding. However, it remains unclear how their results compare, and how consistent their findings are on country-level risk, exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping, as well as adaptive capacity. This paper analyses and compares the design, data, and results of four of the leading global climate and disaster risk indices: The World Risk Index, the INFORM Risk Index, ND-GAIN Index, and the Climate Risk Index. Our analysis clearly shows that there is considerable degree of cross-index variation regarding countries’ risk levels and comparative ranks. At the same time, there is above-average agreement for high-risk countries. In terms of risk sub-components, there is surprisingly little agreement in the results on hazard exposure, while strong inter-index correlations can be observed when ranking countries according to their socio-economic vulnerability and lack of coping as well as adaptive capacity. Vulnerability and capacity hotspots can hence be identified more robustly than risk and exposure hotspots. Our findings speak both to the potential as well as limitations of index-based approaches. They show that a solid understanding of index-based assessment tools, and their conceptual and methodological underpinnings, is necessary to navigate them properly and interpret as well as use their results in triangulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food systems are not sustainable, and efforts to address this are paralyzed by the complex networks of food system actors and factors that interact across sectoral and geographic scales. Actions at the community level can positively contribute toward globally sustainable food systems (SFS). Assessing such contributions has two central challenges: 1) a lack of methods that support alignment between communities and across scales, balanced against the need to involve the community in developing relevant indicators; and 2) the absence of adequate, fine grained data relevant to the community. Addressing these two challenges, this paper illustrates a proposed procedure that supports community engagement with, and assessment of, their contributions. Engaged by a community of Canadian dietitians, researchers used the Delphi Inquiry method, guided by the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, to address the first challenge, and causal loop diagrams informed by the Cultural Adaptation Template to address the second. Indicators were developed for dietitian-identified actions and outcomes for SFS. Modeling indicator interactions provide insight into how some actions are influenced by and reinforce the value placed on SFS within the professional cultural paradigm, as well as priority areas for action and measurement. Process-oriented assessment is useful in the context of partial and subjective understandings of a dynamic system, and supports continual adjustment in action. This article offers theoretical and practical insight for community engagement in addressing some of the systemic challenges in food systems. It accommodates community-based knowledge, applies process-indicators, and emphasizes the importance of cultural paradigms as a driving force of community-level actions, and overall system change. Under current conditions, facilitating SFS literacy among dietitians can amplify adaptations for broader SFS development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]