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In order to address concerns related to global warming and increased atmospheric carbon content, the life cycle assessment (LCA) tool has demonstrated usefulness in the building and construction sector. The LCA is used to evaluate environmental impacts concerning all stages of the building process from pcradleq to pgraveq. The LCA helps to promote sustainable development by considering environmental indicators such as stratospheric ozone depletion, eutrophication, global warming potential, and many more. It is of an interest to know the degree of impact on a given environmental indicator if an input is changed in terms of the type or amount of the materials used. The LCA software Athena IE4B was employed to analyze data of a selected timber building. This study is aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of LCA analysis on a hybrid timber building, which was done via two case studies. Case 1 focused on changes in the volume of wood materials, meanwhile Case 2 focused on simultaneous changes in the volume of materials for wood, steel, and concrete. In Case 1, it was observed increasing wood materials increased environmental indicators, with stratospheric ozone depletion being the most sensitive and global warming potential as the least sensitive. On the other hand, Case 2 discovered that proportionally increasing wood materials in relation to steel and concrete materials decreased environmental indicators, with eutrophication being the most sensitive and stratospheric ozone depletion as the least sensitive. This study helped support the feasibility of using Athena IE4B for LCA analysis in the initial assessment of a building.

Objective: To propose the landscape as an environmental indicator that spatially and temporally, describes, analyzes, and evaluates territory, by changing some natural, social, economic, and cultural components. Approach: Different methodological concepts of the landscape and environmental indicators were reviewed, as well as their characteristics to describe and evaluate the environment. Results: It was found that the landscape is a comprehensive analysis method for the study of the environment, by selecting the parameters that describe and represent each landscape, through shapes, size, colors, textures, shadows, patterns, situations, associated features, and structures arranged under a spatial and temporal order which, when perceived by humans, present a given form of organization or disorganization in the environment. Implications: The environmental indicator allows to analyze and evaluate the changes in space and time, with updated qualitative and quantitative research. These changes play an important role in building the perception of environmental problems through the landscape. Conclusion: Landscape is an integral component that describes the biotic and abiotic elements of a given space. While, as an environmental indicator, it analyzes and evaluates changes in the composition and configuration of the environment, both spatially and temporally.

Humans have always observed their natural surroundings and used signals from the environment—environmental indicators—for survival and wellbeing. This publication provides an overview of the current discussion on environmental indicators, and the way it intersects with biodiversity policy and management at different spatial scales. It considers questions such as what is the meaning of environmental indicators related to biodiversity and ecosystems? How informative are different indicators? How may an environmental indicator help to find solutions for the use and management of ecosystems and the survival of the species it supports?

In this work a new environmental indicator for the analysis of land use change over time (ENV-IND) is presented. The ENV-IND indicator has been defined and assigned to every land use included on the SIOSE, the official Information System on Land Occupation of Spain. The methodology is based on assigning an ENV-IND value for every polygon considered by the SIOSE as a function of the areal percentage occupied by every land use inside each polygon.SIOSE is integrated into the National Land Observation Plan (PNOT) whose objective is to generate a database of Land Occupation for all Spain, integrating all the information available from the regional and central Administration of Spain. The ENV-IND indicator has been defined for 80 different land use categories and its value depend in the joint consideration of the following factors: anthropization nature, water consumption, environmental sustainability and landscape value.The evolution of the ENV-IND indicator over time has been obtained for the whole Valencia Region for three different dates (2005-2009-2015) and shows that the environmental value is decreasing with time in terms of the ENV-IND indicator. The ENV-IND indicator is therefore applicable as a tool to quantify and analyze trends of the environmental quality related with land use change.

Disaster resilience studies have acknowledged the role of the natural environment in reinforcing community resilience; however, pragmatic environmental indicators are lacking, particularly geospatial composite indicators. This paper aims to introduce a composite environmental indicator for assessing community resilience to floods, targeting regional-scale geospatial applications. The composite indicator has been built on conceptualized inter-relationships between Ecosystem Services (ESs) and community resilience. The environmental parameters used to measure the composite were identified by surveying the cross-disciplinary literature from the domains of ESs and disaster resilience. The application of the composite indicator was demonstrated by a case study in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The composite indicator was tested on flood declaration and community response data from Colombo. The application employed a Weighted Linear Combination Method (WLCM) and was executed in a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based platform. The geospatial data for application and validation were collected through secondary sources. The developed composite indicator consists of four proxy indicators (i.e., soil hydraulic properties, slope, land use, and a precipitation factor) and parameters used to measure them. The parameters were also derived from the conceptualized relationship that elaborates ESs into a bundle of services, including flood regulation, climate regulation, and nutrient recycling, whereas many of the existing resilience assessment methodologies focused only on flood regulation. Furthermore, the composite indicator organized the environmental parameters into two tiers, facilitating a range of users. Hence, incorporating this ESs-based composite indicator into existing resilience assessment methodologies could guide community resilience-building initiatives towards more sustainable outcomes.

The aim of this study is to analyse the evolution of the municipal solid waste management system of João Pessoa (Brazil), which was one of the Brazilian pioneers cities in implementing door-to-door selective collection programmes, in order to analyse the effect of policy decisions adopted in last decade with regard to selective collection. To do it, this study focuses on analysing the evolution, from 2005 to 2015, of the environmental performance of the municipal solid waste management (MSWM) system implemented in different sorting units with selective collection programmes by applying the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and using as a starting point data collected directly from the different stakeholders involved in the MSWM system. This article presents the temporal evolution of environmental indicators measuring the environmental performance of the MSWM system implemented in João Pessoa by sorting unit, for each stage of the life cycle of the waste (collection, classification, intermediate transports, recycling and landfilling), for each waste fraction and for each collection method (selective collection or mixed collection), with the aim of identifying the key aspects with the greatest environmental impact and their causes. Results show on one hand, that environmental behaviour of waste management in a door-to-door selective collection programme significantly improves the behaviour of the overall waste management system. Consequently, the potential to reduce the existing environmental impact based on citizens' increased participation in selective collection is evidenced, so the implementation of awareness-raising campaigns should be one of the main issues of the next policies on solid waste. On the other hand, increasing the amount of recyclable wastes collected selectively, implementing alternative methods for valorising the organic fraction (compost/biomethanization) and improving the efficiency of the transportation stage by means of optimizing vehicles or routes, are essential actions to reduce the overall net environmental impact generated by the MSWM system.

Incorporating environmental sustainability into production systems and supply chain management perspectives is a growing issue; this requires thorough efforts in measuring the environmental performance of such systems and benchmarking these against industry standards, through the usage of appropriate indicators. The usage of environmental indicators in order to monitor and manage sustainability issues is an ongoing topic of debate and deliberation in the scientific community, which has generated the development of several methodological and conceptual approaches, often incorporated into Life Cycle Assessment frameworks, enabling the evaluation and monitoring of cumulative polluting impacts resulting across the whole product supply chain. In this field, the main challenge is to identify indicators to be employed in environmental assessments, in such a way that a precise account of sustainability issues is given without overloading end-users with overly complex and redundant information. By utilising well-established environmental indicators measuring the sustainability performance of supply chains, this paper aims at critically assessing the amount of redundancy embedded in current performance measurement systems, also identifying the subset of environmental indicators that, if employed, could cover a wide amount of environmental impact categories without redundancies and providing decision-makers with a clear perspective.

The frequency and intensity of coastal storm events in the Great Lakes region, USA is predicted to increase in the coming decades, exposing at-risk populations to potential hazards including flooding, erosion, and combined sewer overflows. In response, applied research is needed to identify communities that are most vulnerable to storm hazards, and to support municipal officials and local residents with building capacity for resilience. This study analyzes the storm hazards vulnerability of 42 communities that are located within the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD), including the city of Cleveland and its inner and outer ring suburbs. Communities are ranked against each other for vulnerability according to a social and environmental indicator, each of which is comprised of five variables that operationalize the sociodemographic and biophysical challenges facing local populations. The indicators are combined to produce a composite Storm Hazards Vulnerability Index (SHVI). Results suggest that the most environmentally vulnerable communities are not always home to the most socially vulnerable populations. Overall storm hazards vulnerability correlates more closely with the environmental indicator than the social, especially among the most vulnerable communities.

Environmental problems such as global warming are issues that must be addressed urgently. In particular, environmental indicators in the manufacturing industry should be managed systematically in order to not only solve environmental problems but also to reduce manufacturing costs. With securing stable profits by enhancing productivity as their top priority, many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been operating with a focus on productivity. However, government’s environmental regulations for manufacturing companies will only get tougher and this would require introduction of an international certification system for environment effects. Therefore, environmental indicators will need to be meticulously managed by manufacturing enterprises. Economic problems, such as expansion of existing systems or introduction of new environmental indicator management systems, and technical problems, such as conjunction of existing and heterogeneous systems, may arise in the process of managing environmental ...

Diatoms are fundamental carbon sources in a wide range of aquatic food webs and have the potential for wide application in addressing environmental change. Understanding the evolution of topics in diatom research will provide a clear and needed guide to strengthen research on diatoms. However, such an overview remains unavailable. In this study, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a generative model, to identify topics and determine their trends (i.e., cold and hot topics) by analyzing the abstracts of 19,000 publications from the Web of Science that were related to diatoms during 1991–2018. A total of 116 topics were identified from a Bayesian model selection. The hot topics (diversity, environmental indicator, climate change, land use, and water quality) that were identified by LDA indicated that diatoms are increasingly used as indicators to assess water quality and identify modern climate change impacts due to intensive anthropogenic activities. In terms of cold topics (growth rate, culture growth, cell life history, copepod feeding, grazing by microzooplankton, zooplankton predation, and primary productivity) and hot topics (spatial-temporal distribution, morphology, molecular identification, gene expression, and review), we determined that basic studies on diatoms have decreased and that studies tend to be more comprehensive. This study notes that future directions in diatom research will be closely associated with the application of diatoms in environmental management and climate change to cope with environmental challenges, and more comprehensive issues related to diatoms should be considered.

Air pollution in large urban areas has become a serious issue due to its negative impacts on human health, building materials, biodiversity and urban ecosystems in both developed and less-wealthy nations. In most large urban areas, especially in developed countries air quality monitoring networks (AQMN) have been established that provide air quality (AQ) data for various purposes, e.g., to monitor regulatory compliance and to assess the effectiveness of control strategies. However, the criteria of structuring the network are currently defined by single questions rather than attempting to create a network to serve multiple functions. Here we propose a methodology supported by numerical, conceptual and GIS frameworks for structuring AQMN using social, environmental and economic indicators as a case study in Sheffield, UK. The main factors used for air quality monitoring station (AQMS) selection are population-weighted pollution concentration (PWPC) and weighted spatial variability (WSV) incorporating population density (social indicator), pollution levels and spatial variability of air pollutant concentrations (environmental indicator). Total number of sensors is decided on the basis of budget (economic indicator), whereas the number of sensors deployed in each output area is proportional to WSV. The purpose of AQ monitoring and its role in determining the location of AQMS is analysed. Furthermore, the existing AQMN is analysed and an alternative proposed following a formal procedure. In contrast to traditional networks, which are structured based on a single AQ monitoring approach, the proposed AQMN has several layers of sensors: Reference sensors recommended by EU and DEFRA, low-cost sensors (LCS) (AQMesh and Envirowatch E-MOTEs) and IoT (Internet of Things) sensors. The core aim is to structure an integrated AQMN in urban areas, which will lead to the collection of AQ data with high spatiotemporal resolution. The use of LCS in the proposed network provides a cheaper option for setting up a purpose-designed network for greater spatial coverage, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Keywords: Air quality monitoring, Low-cost AQ sensors, AQ network, Sensors deployment, Sheffield

This paper reviews some seawater quality evaluation methods such as Ocean Health Index (OHI) and Puget Sound Partnership (PSP). In this paper, we discuss our UI BlueMetric assessment tools which is a new tool proposed as performance indicators of coastal areas in terms of its biodiversity, water quality, waste, and human activity. This paper presents a benchmarking of BlueMetric with two existing marine assessment tools. We compare UI BlueMetric to the OHI and PSP in terms of the assessment of the seawater quality in the coastal area. The coastal area environmental quality has produced a growing body of literature with meta-analyses on methods. The considerations and evaluation systems that influenced its original design are presented. We also discussed the comparison framework. This paper presents the methodology used in different seawater quality evaluation, the intended users, as well as discussing the difference in the goals and missions of the assessment tools. This paper concludes that all of the three evaluation systems have some similarities in their indicators related to seawater evaluation. UI BlueMetric has the least number of parameters so that it is suitable to be applied in early assessment.

Water is a vital natural resource, demanding careful management. It is essential for life and integral to virtually all economic activities, including energy and food production and the production of industrial outputs. The availability of clean water in sufficient quantities is not only a prerequisite for human health and well-being but the life-blood of freshwater ecosystems and the many services that these provide. Water resource intensity measures the intensity of water use in terms of volume of water per unit of value added. It is an internationally accepted environmental indicator of the pressure of economic activity on a country’s water resources and therefore a reliable indicator of sustainable economic development. The indicator is particularly useful in the allocation of water resources between sectors of the economy since in waterstressed countries like South Africa, there is competition for water among various users, which makes it necessary to allocate water resources to economic activities that are less intensive in their use of water. This study focuses on economy-wide changes in South Africa’s water intensity using both decomposition and empirical estimation techniques in an effort to identify and understand the impact of economic activity on changes in the use of the economy’s water resources. It is hoped that this study will help inform South Africa’s water conservation and resource management policies

Due to growing interest in biofuels as alternative renewable energy sources, several recent studies have assessed the sustainability of their production. Emergy is a widely used environmental indicator for this purpose, as it counts exploitation of natural resources and direct and indirect solar energy requirements of biofuel production. Depending on whether a biofuel is first, second or third generation, its production system differs in nature and the indications derived from emergy evaluations vary as well. This article aims to provide guidelines on how to interpret and properly use the results of emergy evaluation of first, second and third generation biofuels. These guidelines are useful for correct emergy assessment of biofuels and clarify the actual meaning of emergy evaluation outcomes.

Two impact assessment tools, Toro’s recent method and Leopold’s matrix, were used in a complementary manner to predict the impacts of constructing a hydroelectric power plant in eastern Cameroon. We chose these two tools because of their relative simplicity, objectivity and good weighting of environmental indicator values compared to others. While the recent Toro’s method was more effective in terms of predicting impact importance, we found that the old Leopold’s matrix is still best in terms of determining the magnitude of impacts of project activities, i.e. extensiveness. These methodologies can be used in a complementary manner because they give a good weighting of indicator values of importance and extensiveness of the environment. Methodologies too complicated should be avoided. Finally, we recommend that projects predicted to affect habitats of high conservation value be displaced, or if not possible, abandoned because such areas are of great importance for the maintenance of biodiversity an...

International audience; The processes underlying environmental, economic, and social unsustainability derive in part from the food system. Building sustainable food systems has become a predominating endeavor aiming to redirect our food systems and policies towards better-adjusted goals and improved societal welfare. Food systems are complex social-ecological systems involving multiple interactions between human and natural components. Policy needs to encourage public perception of humanity and nature as interdependent and interacting. The systemic nature of these interdependencies and interactions calls for systems approaches and integrated assessment tools. Identifying and modeling the intrinsic properties of the food system that will ensure its essential outcomes are maintained or enhanced over time and across generations, will help organizations and governmental institutions to track progress towards sustainability, and set policies that encourage positive transformations. This paper proposes a conceptual model that articulates crucial vulnerability and resilience factors to global environmental and socio-economic changes, postulating specific food and nutrition security issues as priority outcomes of food systems. By acknowledging the systemic nature of sustainability, this approach allows consideration of causal factor dynamics. In a stepwise approach, a logical application is schematized for three Mediterranean countries, namely Spain, France, and Italy.

This paper uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as the basic framework, and evaluates the water environment risk management technology of the river basin in Liaoning Province, so as to scientifically and reasonably measure the advantages and disadvantages of the existing technology.The research results show that the best technical indicator is the research management technology of water environment quality monitoring technology; the best environmental indicator is the management technology of the research project of water quality safety assessment and early warning management technology in the basin. The highest overall score is the water environment quality monitoring technology method research management technology. Each management technology has certain advantages, and the management technology should be used jointly.

The practice of raw material extraction has a high impact on the environment and represents a potential threat to the health and thriving of local communities. The concept of Extractive Essential Variables (EEVs) are explored in order to propose vari- ables that can be used to quantify the environmental footprint of mineral extraction. Considering the interdependence of mining activities with social, economic and envir- onmental issues, the variables target the development of monitoring tools for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The identification of EEVs is based on the use of Earth Observation products in the field of mineral resources exploitation. A list of variables is proposed based on three classes of Essential Variables (EVs): installation and exploration phase, mineral extraction, and ore processing. These variables take into account the impacts of mining on the hydrology, land, water resources and the atmosphere of the area subjected to mineral exploitation. One of the variables is implemented as an operational workflow addressing SDG15, “life on land”. The workflow is intended to assess the area of forest ecosystem lost due to the presence of a mining site. Geospatial data on the extent of mining concessions and forest cover are combined using ArcGISTM. The workflow is successively translated into a Unix script to automatize the process of data treatment. The script is developed using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL). The use of a Virtual Laboratory Platform (VLab), a web-service-based access platform, increases the accessibility of data and resources and the re-use of the script. This work is a first attempt to propose a framework of EEVs, derived data workflows, while the underlying methodology, partially based on scientific publications and on personal reasoning, still needs to be tested and, improved based on expertise in the sector.

Environmental indicators are powerful tools for tracking environmental changes, measuring environmental performance, and informing policymakers. Many diverse environmental indicators, including agricultural environmental indicators, are currently in use or being developed. This special collection of technical papers expands on the peer-reviewed literature on environmental indicators and their application to important current issues in the following areas: (i) model-derived indicators to indicate phosphorus losses from arable land to surface runoff and subsurface drainage, (ii) glutathione-ascorbate cycle-related antioxidants as early-warning bioindicators of polybrominated diphenyl ether toxicity in mangroves, and (iii) assessing the effectiveness of using organic matrix biobeds to limit herbicide dissipation from agricultural fields, thereby controlling on-farm point-source pollution. This introductory review also provides an overview of environmental indicators, mainly for agriculture, with examples related to the quality of the agricultural soil-water-air continuum and the application of model-derived indicators. Current knowledge gaps and future lines of investigation are also discussed. It appears that environmental indicators, particularly those for agriculture, work efficiently at the field, catchment, and local scales and serve as valuable metrics of system functioning and response; however, these indicators need to be refined or further developed to comprehensively meet community expectations in terms of providing a consistent picture of relevant issues and/or allowing comparisons to be made nationally or internationally.

Environmental management in the Chinese manufacturing industry has attracted global attention. Using environmental indicator data from 2001 to 2010 for this industry, we empirically examine its environmental management efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Hierarchical Clustering methods. Our findings reveal that the environmental management of the Chinese manufacturing industry has more DEA inefficiency than efficiency. Environmental management efficiency showed a significant decline before 2004, but rapid growth since 2007. Our findings also indicate that there is input redundancy and output insufficiency in the manufacturing industry's environmental management from 2002 to 2004. In addition, we found that most manufacturing sectors in China had consistently inefficient environmental management over the 10 years under study. Overall, our findings reveal that efficiency remains low. Thus, the manufacturing industry's environmental management needs to improve from the perspective of enterprises and government. We hope that our study paves the way for future research into improving the manufacturing industry's environmental management in emerging countries.

Earth observation (EO) provides the opportunity for periodic and spatially detailed assessment of the state of the environment in urban areas. In this study, the potential of EO based indicators (EI) to assess the state of environment in the urban agglomeration of Athens (UAA) is examined. EO based indicators as used in the study, include land surface temperature, land use, land cover and aerosols distribution. The indicators are also related to the household density and population density, as extracted from census data, for the same area. Indicators are applied at the municipal scale and are also used to estimate an aggregate environmental indicator (AEI), at municipal scale, by integrating all indicators mentioned above in a GIS environment. It is found that the urban agglomeration of Athens is practically “dichotomized”, by being divided in a western and eastern area, with considerably different environmental conditions. Results are considered important for focused interventions supporting environmental urban planning, whereas they represent the high potential of EO based indicators to monitor and assess the state of the urban environment.

Introducing a geopolitical-related supply risk (GeoPolRisk) into the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework adds a criticality aspect to the current life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to more meaningfully address direct impacts on Natural Resource AoP. The weakness of resource indicators in LCA has been the topic of discussion within the life cycle community for some time. This paper presents a case study on how to proceed towards the integration of resource criticality assessment into LCA under the LCSA. The paper aims at highlighting the significance of introducing the GeoPolRisk indicator to complement and extend the established environmental LCA impact categories. A newly developed GeoPolRisk indicator proposed by Gemechu et al., J Ind Ecol (2015) was applied to metals used in the life cycle of an electric vehicle, and the results are compared with an attributional LCA of the same resources. The inventory data is based on the publication by Hawkins et al., J Ind Ecol 17:53–64 (2013), which provides a current, transparent, and detailed life cycle inventory data of a European representative first-generation battery small electric vehicle. From the 14 investigated metals, copper, aluminum, and steel are the most dominant elements that pose high environmental impacts. On the other hand, magnesium and neodymium show relatively higher supply risk when geopolitical elements are considered. While, the environmental indicator results all tend to point the same hotspots which arise from the substantial use of resources in the electric vehicle’s life cycle, the GeoPolRisk highlights that there are important elements present in very small amounts but crucial to the overall LCSA. It provides a complementary sustainability dimension that can be added to conventional LCA as an important extension within LCSA. Resource challenges in a short-term time perspective can be better addressed by including social and geopolitical factors in addition to the conventional indicators which are based on their geological availability. This is more significant for modern technologies such as electronic devices in which critical resources contribute to important components. The case study advances the use of the GeoPolRisk assessment method but does still face certain limitations that need further elaboration; however, directions for future research are promising.

It is very useful and important to see the status and change of necessary parts in a short period through selecting and observing the bioindicator continually to forecast and prepare the future. Especially, living things are so closely related to the environment that the indicator between the environment and living things shows close interrelationship. Also, the indicator related to environment provides information about representative or decisive environmental phenomenon and is used to simplify complicated facts. Considering wide range of background and application including various indicators such as the change-, destruction-, pollution-, and restoration of habitats, climate change, and species diversity, the closest category includes “environmental indicator,” “ecological indicator,” and “biodiversity indicator.” The selection and use of bioindicator is complicated and difficult. The necessary conditions for the indicator selection are flexible and greatly depend on the goals of investigation such as the indicator for biological diversity investigation of specific area, the indicator for habitat destruction, the indicator for climate change, and the indicator for polluted area. It should meet many various conditions to select a good indicator. In this study, eleven selection standards are established based on domestic and overseas studies on bioindicator selection: species with clear classification and ecology, species distributed in geographically widespread area, species that show clear habitat characteristics, species that can provide early warning for a change, species that are easy and economically benefited for the investigation, species that have many independent individual groups and that is not greatly affected by the size of individual groups, species that is thought to represent the response of other species, species that represent the ecology change caused by the pressure of human influence, species for which researches on climate change have been done, species that is easy to observe, appears for a long time and forms a group with many individuals, and species that are important socially, economically, and culturally.

The present work was carried out in the context of the research project entitled “LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT (LCA): ANALYSIS OF SUSTAINABILITY IN THE WOOD SUPPLY CHAIN OF BASILICATA REGION” ITALY. The work had as main objective the identification of the fundamental geo-environmental factors of Mount Vulture forested areas of the Basilicata region, which directly or indirectly affect the quality and quantity of forest areas, for a detailed analysis of certified raw materials used in the sustainable building. The survey, with appropriate skills provides a optimal study of the life cycle (LCA), which analyzes the into and out material flows, energy and emissions at all stages of the product, “from cradle to grave”. For feedback LCA, it was used a new environmental indicator, represented by the Water Footprint (WF) which was calculated by means of CROPWAT version 8.0 Software. The results show that most of the Water Footprint associated with the raw material, in the wood supply chain, is attributable to the growth stage of forest types present in the Mount Vulture area. Obviously, this study focused on the initial phase of an extensive research project and has provided the information required for the next application of LCA in the sustainability analysis.

In 1948, the Thornthwaite Moisture Index was introduced as a new global climate classification system. Since its advent, the use of the index has moved beyond climate classification for agricultural systems. This review article identifies cases where the Thornthwaite Moisture Index has been applied in the design and maintenance of infrastructure, with an emphasis on its application in the transport arena. Furthermore, the article investigates the possible application of the Thornthwaite Moisture Index in providing an environmental indicator in the design of infrastructure to allow future adaptation to changing climate conditions. An adapted road degradation model for Australia is presented illustrating the effects on pavement degradation under changing climate conditions using the Thornthwaite Moisture Index. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

High-density living is now widely accepted in the built environment. At the apartment entry price-point, space and place appear to be the key considerations, with limited attention to a building’s social, physical and environmental features. To examine this, the researchers interviewed leading Melbourne property developers and consultants to identify the challenges of incorporating innovation relative to governance, design, and construction and building operations into the competitive high-density property development market. Responses demonstrate that post-occupancy analysis can be a tool to better inform property stakeholders. When presented to prospective purchasers, this information could shift the key consideration from an entry price point to the features of a well-designed apartment and so redirect the current ‘minimalist’ approach adopted by some new property development entrants to improving occupier living experience and ongoing maintenance costs.

The contribution of ecosystems to human well-being has been widely recognised. Taking into account existing trade-offs between ecosystem services (ES) at the farm scale and the dependence of multiple ES on processes that take place at the landscape scale, long-term preservation of multifunctional landscapes must be a priority. Studies carried out from such perspective, and those that develop appropriate indicators, could provide useful tools for integrating ES in landscape planning. In this study we propose a new integrative environmental indicator based on the ES provided by the landscape and named "multiple ecosystem services landscape index" (MESLI). Because synergies and trade-offs between ES are produced at regional or local levels, being different from those perceived at larger scales, MESLI was developed at municipality level. Furthermore, in order to identify main drivers of change in ES provision at the landscape scale an analysis of the relationship between the environmental and the socioeconomic characteristics of the municipalities was carried out. The study was located in the Basque Country and the results demonstrated that the MESLI index is a good tool to measure landscape multifunctionality at local scales. It is effective evaluating landscapes, distinguishing between municipalities based on ES provision, and identifying the drivers of change and their effects. This information about ES provisioning at the local level is usually lacking; therefore, MESLI would be very useful for policy-makers and land managers because it provides relevant information to local scale decision-making.

Five variants of material compositions of sloping roofs were analyzed from environmental perspectives. They were designed to fulfil the requirement from thermal transmittance (U = 0.10 W/m K) for nearly zero-energy buildings. The environmental impacts were expressed by indicators such as embodied energy (EE) from non-renewable resources, CO2eq. emissions (GWP, global warming potential) and SO2eq. emissions (AP, acidification potential) as well as environmental indicator ΔOI3. They represented the equivalent emissions within the LCA boundary - cradle to gate and input data were extracted from the LCA database - IBO. The final values were compared by using methods of multi-criteria decision analysis. The lowest value of embodied energy of 745.52 MJ/m2 achieved variant with lower thickness of mineral wool thermal insulation. Highest values of embodied energy of 1408.455 MJ/m2 achieved variant with additional thickness of mineral wool thermal insulation. The best alternative from CO2 emissions (−106.1 kgCO2eq./m2) was the variant defined as green roof but concurrently it achieved the highest value of SO2 emissions (0.617 kgSO2eq./m2). The worst variant from regarding CO2 emissions (57.75 kgCO2eq./m2) consisted of mineral wool thermal insulation.

In this paper, the concept of environmental indicator is reviewed as a relevant element used in the environmental management of any organisation. The importance of this element within an Environmental Management System (EMS) is also justified. Although EMS standards recognise the relevance of using indicators, they do not specify any methodology to identify which indicators have to be implemented. In addition, the present research demonstrates that although there is a high percentage of European ports that have already implemented performance indicators, most of them do not mention the method applied to obtain the indicators. This suggests that some of the procedures used by ports to identify indicators may not necessarily be science-based or systematic in approach. For these reasons, the need to develop a new methodology able to identify the ports' most adequate indicators was detected. Therefore, a Tool for the identification and implementation of Environmental Indicators in Ports (TEIP) was developed. It aims at identifying performance indicators in ports and providing guidelines for their proper implementation. This is a computer and science-based tool (www.eports.cat/teip) that provides a quick calculation and outputs, and it is designed to be as user-friendly and practical as possible in order to facilitate its completion by the user. This new methodology is applicable to all types of ports no matter the size, geographical location or its commercial profile; it provides targeted and specific results for each one. TEIP aims at helping port managers at easily determining their significant port indicators, which provides valuable elements for the decision-making processes.

Irrigated agriculture creates substantial environmental pressures by withdrawing large quantities of water, leaving rivers and wetlands empty and unable to support the valuable ecosystems that depend on the water resource. The key challenge facing society is that of balancing water extractions for agricultural production and other uses with provision of appropriate environmental flow to maintain healthy rivers and wetlands. Measuring tradeoffs between economic gain of water use in agriculture and its environmental pressures can contribute to constructing policy instruments for improved water resource management. The aim of this paper is to develop a modelling framework to measure these tradeoffs. Using a new approach - Luenberger environmental indicator - the study derives environmental efficiency scores for various types of irrigation enterprises across seventeen natural resource management regions within the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Findings show that there is a substantial variation in environmental performance of irrigation enterprises across the regions. Some enterprises were found to be relatively environmentally efficient in some regions, but they were not efficient in others. The environmental efficiency scores could be used as a guideline for formulating regional policy and strategy to achieve sustainable water use in the agricultural sector.

To tackle the problems and challenges posed by the rapid urbanization processes and to purse urban development in sustainable manners, the Chinese government has taken vigorous efforts in developing eco-cities across the nation. After reviewing the studies on concepts, frameworks and indicator systems of eco-city, we have observed a large amount of literature on the selection of indicators under a singular framework in China rather than having a quantity comparison from a broader scope. To obtain a quantitative sense of how well China’s eco-cities are doing compared to the best practices in the international arena, we have selected two cases from Japan and Germany. By examining their indicator quantities under the national eco-city framework of China, we have identified the gap between economic related indicator values, suggesting lower averaged economic values and energy efficiencies of Chinese eco-cities. Targets concerning the waste sector are also lower in China than in the other two cases. The environmental indicator values show lower quality than in the other two cases as well, and the social indicators manifest a specific methodological approach for measurements in China. Discussions and suggestions are made based on the outcomes of comparisons, hopefully to provide reference for the future development of eco-cities in China.

Due to the fact that food manufacturing is one of the major drivers of the global environmental issues, there is a strong need to focus on sustainable manufacturing toward achieving long-term sustainability goals in food production of the United States. In this regard, current study assessed the direct and indirect environmental footprint of 33 U.S. food manufacturing sectors by using the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) model. Then, a non-parametric mathematical optimization tool, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), is utilized to benchmark the sustainability performance of food manufacturing sectors by using the results of the EIO-LCA model. Next, sustainability performance indices (SPIs), rankings, target improvements, and sensitivity of environmental impact indicators are presented. The average SPI score of U.S. food manufacturing sectors is found as 0.76. In addition, 19 out of 33 food sectors are found as inefficient where an average of 45–71% reduction is indicated for various environmental impact categories. Analysis results also indicate that supply chains of food manufacturing sectors are heavily responsible for the impacts with over 80% shares for energy, water and carbon footprint, fishery and grazing categories. Especially, animal (except poultry) slaughtering, rendering and processing sector is found as the most dominant sector in most of the impact categories (ranked as 2nd in fishery and forest land). Sensitivity analysis indicated that forest land footprint is found to be the most sensitive environmental indicator on the overall sustainability performance of food manufacturing sectors.

Eco-efficiency is a tool for the analysis of the sustainability of industries, which indicates the economic relationship and environmental impact. This research presents the development of eco-efficiency indicators for quantitative measurement of the wooden toy industry, as well as the raw material suppliers who are a part of the supply chain. The eco-efficiency of the wooden toy industry was measured by using the key indicators of the three axes of sustainable development, which are (i) economic indicator: net sale and gross margin, (ii) environmental indicator: material, energy, water consumption, waste disposal, and (iii) social indicator: frequency rate of accidents, local employment, and corporate social responsibility. Moreover, the combined eco-efficiency evaluation of the supplier and company showed that the company’s eco-efficiency has likely increased during 2 years of observation, while the eco-efficiency of the supplier-company combination has decreased. The evaluation of socio-eco-efficiency results showed that the company has acquired a socially supportive management system at the company level, community level, and social level. This research can contribute to the improvement of the resource and process efficiencies in economic, environmental, and social dimensions. It can also provide a basic framework on eco-efficiency evaluation for the small and medium enterprises in Thailand, which will feed into policy and strategic development.

Generally speaking, an ecosystem is seen as a complex set, it is composed by different biotic and abiotic parts. Naturally, each part has specifics functions related with mass and energy, those functions have influence between the parts directly and indirectly, and these functions are subjected to the basic laws of thermodynamics. If each part of the ecosystem is taken as thermodynamics system its entropy generation could be evaluated, then the total entropy generation of the ecosystem must be sum of the entropy generation in each part, to be in accordance with the Gouy-Stodola theorem. With this in mind, in this work an environmental indicator, for any kind of ecosystems, can be determined as a function of the ratio of total entropy generation for reference state, for instance a healthy forest; and the entropy generation of new different state of the same ecosystem can take, for instance a deforestation. Thus, thermodynamics concepts are applied to study the eutrophication of freshwater ecosystems; the strategy is based on techniques that integrate assumptions of the methodology of entropy generation inside ecosystems. The results show that if the amount of entropy generation is small respect a reference state; the sustainability of the ecosystem will be greater.

This article argues that policies aimed at sustainability need to address the spatial dimensions of environmental problems and their solutions. In particular, spatial configurations of economic activities deserve attention, which means addressing land use, infrastructure, trade, and transport. Unfortunately, good theory and indicators to support the analysis and design of spatial-environmental policies are not fully developed. One approach that has become very popular in the last decade is the ecological footprint (EF). It is both an environmental accounting tool and aggregate indicator, which is used by scientists, environmental organizations, and popular media. Despite criticisms of the EF method in the past, its popularity has only increased. In fact, an increasing number of publications with an application of the EF appear in scientific journals. We review the EF approach from indicator-methodology and welfare angles and assess its policy relevance. Our conclusion is that it does not offer any meaningful information for public policy.

Aim Most risk assessments and decisions in conservation are based on surrogate approaches, where a group of species or environmental indicators are selected as proxies for other aspects of biodiversity. In the focal species approach, a suite of species is selected based on life history characteristics, such as dispersal limitation and area requirements. Testing the validity of the focal species concept has proved difficult, due to a lack of theory justifying the underlying framework, explicit objectives and measures of success. We sought to understand the conditions under which the focal species concept has merit for conservation decisions. Location Our model system comprised 10 vertebrate species in 39 patches of native forest embedded in pine plantation in New South Wales, Australia. Methods We selected three focal species based on ecological traits. We used a multiple-species reserve selection method that minimizes the expected loss of species, by estimating the risk of extinction with a metapopulation model. We found optimal reserve solutions for multiple species, including all 10 species, the three focal species, for all possible combinations of three species, and for each species individually. Results Our case study suggests that the focal species approach can work: the reserve system that minimized the expected loss of the focal species also minimized the expected species loss in the larger set of 10 species. How well the solution would perform for other species and given landscape dynamics remains unknown. Main conclusions The focal species approach may have merit as a conservation short cut if placed within a quantitative decision-making framework, where the aspects of biodiversity for which the focal species act as proxies are explicitly defined, and success is determined by whether the use of the proxy results in the same decision. Our methods provide a framework for testing other surrogate approaches used in conservation decision-making and risk assessment.

The environmental management and land use planning, turns out to be a difficult issue for all governmental authorities. Monroy Ph.D., in his doctoral work called Systemic Model for Environmental Impact Assessment at a River Basin Level, proposed a methodology to quantitatively assess the environmental impact at a river basin level. In the same work proposed an indicator called EVI (Environmental Value Indicator, standing for IVA in Spanish), which includes the result of environmental impact value with other macroeconomic variables, with the support of Fuzzy Logic. It is important to note that the estimated environmental impact at the Cuenca level is quantitative, and the EVI is an important and innovative contribution in environmental assessment and management. For the ablation of this methodology was worked as a case study of the Garagoa River Basin in Colombia. This work supports a better decision making about its use and environmental management.

Carbon footprint (CFP) is widely applied as an indicator when assessing environmental sustainability of products and services. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the validity of CFP as overall environmental indicator for representing the environmental burden of residents from urbanized areas. Applying four different Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods environmental impact profiles were determined for the consumption patterns of 1281 Danish urban residents. Six main consumption components were distinguished including road transport, air travel, food, accommodation (covering consumption of materials for the construction of dwellings) and use of energy in terms of thermal energy, and electricity. The results for the individual consumption components showed a strong correlation between CFP and nearly all other impact indicators for all the applied LCIA methods However, upon aggregation of the indicator results across consumption components, the impact indicators for the total consumption showed no significant correlation between CFP and the other impact scores for any of the four impact assessment methods. These findings suggest that while CFP can be a good indicator of the environmental burden associated with specific activities, this is not the case for more complex activities (such as consumption patterns related to urban life styles). This conclusion discourages the use of CFP as sustainability measure in relation to regulation of private or public consumption. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PubMedID: 28000120 Mediterranean coastal landscapes are complex systems that are subject to rapid and extensive changes due to unprecedented human interference. Changes in these landscapes are strong indications of anthropogenic disturbances that should be monitored carefully in order to make effective management decisions. Landscape changes can be analyzed using many qualitative and quantitative techniques. In this respect, the importance of land cover information arises from the fact that any change in the composition and/or configuration of land cover can be used as a landscape-level environmental indicator. Therefore, proper understanding of spatial and temporal characteristics of this environmental attribute is of vital importance as it enables decision-makers to reveal causes of environmental issues and to cope with consequences of mismanagement. The aims of this paper are to analyze landscape-level changes using the largest patch index (LPI) as a simple pattern indicator and provide guidelines for studying change phenomena that take place in the Mediterranean coastal areas. In this respect, changes in the LPI values for agricultural and built-up areas in three different sites were analyzed using georeferenced Ikonos and Quickbird images. The concepts of pattern and process were highlighted as important indicators for studying landscapes and understanding their change. © 2016, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

Predictive environmental indicators in mining can be defined as ‘values derived from parameters that provide quantitative information against which some aspects of environmental risks associated with mineral resource development can be measured’. At mine sites, such indicators provide information on conditions and processes that may develop during the mine life cycle and after mine closure. They are measures to forecast changes in the quality of the air, water, land and ecological systems. Predicting environmental risks is typically not an attribute that is strongly embedded into the development of mineral resources. However, a more predictive and proactive approach to early environmental characterization and risk assessment should be used early in the life-of-mine stages, because such an approach supports more effective mineral processing, better storage of waste, improved mine closure outcomes and ultimately reduced financial risks and liabilities to operators and regulators.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been reporting country-level area in primary forests in its Global Forest Resource Assessment since 2005. The FAO definition of a primary forest (naturally regenerated forest of native species where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed) is generally accepted as authoritative and is being used in policy making. However, problems with this definition undermine our capacity to obtain globally coherent estimates. In addition, the current reporting on primary forests fails to consider the complementarily of non-primary forests toward the maintenance of ecosystem services. These issues undermine the appropriate tracking of changes in primary and non-primary forests, and the assessment of impacts of such changes on ecosystem services. We present the case for an operational reconsideration of the primary forest concept and discuss how alternatives or supplements might be developed.

Evidence on the role of information and knowledge for policy making shows that policy actors seldom use information as a direct input to their decisions. Similar patterns of (non)use have been identified in the case of indicators in the environmental and sustainable development policy domains. The objective of the paper is to elucidate the patterns of environmental indicator use and to argue for the introduction of a ‘politics of policy indicators’. With a limited set of characteristics (e.g. legitimacy, credibility and salience) of indicators, which help to apprehend the usability of indicators, we argue that the usability profile of indicators can be analysed as a matter of construction and deliberation by indicator creators and policy actors. The performance of indicators as policy tools – as rendered with their usability profile – is co-dependent of the institutional embeddedness of the indicators. Our conclusion makes the case that if environmental improvements towards more sustainability are partly relying on the quality and uptake of information into policy processes in order to steer decisions, then the ‘usability profile’ of indicators itself should be subject to collective and conscious steering. This call to ‘steer the steering’ is supported by the wider calls to initiate patterns of ‘reflexive governance’ within the sustainability policy domain.

The ongoing worldwide biodiversity crisis comes along with a growing demand for feasible environmental indicators to measure, evaluate and communicate anthropogenic influence on biodiversity. Those indicators can be useful tools for national and regional management and support decision making processes. We propose degree of naturalness ( N d ), distance to natural habitat ( D n ) and the composite index distance to nature ( D 2 N ) as a highly comprehensible environmental indicator set that can be used as surrogate for land use related anthropogenic influence on biodiversity. A high resolution naturalness map for Austria based on the best nationwide available land use data was produced and used to test and demonstrate the applicability of the indicator set. Spatially inclusive and comprehensive indicator maps were calculated for the entire country (83,872 km 2 ). Exemplary indicator values for all 2359 municipalities and six altitudinal zones were calculated and evaluated. Indicator maps of Austria clearly delimitate regions with elevated anthropogenic pressure on biodiversity due to land use characteristics. A sensitivity analysis conducted to evaluate the effect of land use data with different spatial and thematic resolution on the indicators showed that D n reacts sensitive to spatially more detailed information about natural and near natural habitats. By contrast N d and D 2 N were robust regarding the spatial and thematic resolution of input data. The proposed indicators do not measure biodiversity or a part of it directly, but the degree of habitat changes caused by anthropogenic land use, therefore they can be used for analysis over wide geographic ranges including different bio-geographic or climatic zones, and different spatial scales.

This paper analyzes the evolution of environmental policies and the related indicator systems that have been introduced in both Japan and China. The findings reveal that the lack of both natural resources and space for the final disposal of wastes, resulted in Japanese policy placing special emphasis on, initially, waste treatment technologies with high capacities such as incineration, and more recently, on integrated resource management. This trend is also reflected in the recycling targets for specific waste policies proposed in the 1990s and the introduction of comprehensive resource management indicators in the early 2000s. In China, the impressive economic growth of the last decades has relied both on coal as the primary energy source and mostly small scale industries for production. However, the environmental impacts and low energy efficiency associated with both coal-power plants and small-scale industry forced the government to introduce emission reduction targets followed by energy efficiency and macro energy intensity indicators. While the importance of indicator systems and policies has been demonstrated for specific cases, such policies are not yet comprehensive. This is reflected by the finding that while Japan has improved both its resource productivity and reduced total direct material inputs into the economy, overall CO2 emissions and waste generation have increased. China also suffered a setback when its overall energy intensity started to increase in 2000 after 20 years of improvement. This study argues that a comprehensive sustainability policy is necessary in order to overcome the problems associated with production and consumption patterns and their impact on the environment. In this sense it is important to consider the different comprehensive assessment methods proposed by the scientific community in the policy making process. Finally the paper proposes that the experience of Japan and China in dealing with environmental issues could be an important reference for policy development in Asia.

The last decade has seen a step change in our efforts to monitor the state of the worlds’ oceans. This has at least partly been driven by a need to better understand the role of the oceans in climatological processes. This unmet need also stimulated the development of an array of new technology; principally in the form of unmanned floats and gliders and more comprehensive fixed mooring array systems. This instrumentation has underpinned the delivery of time series of data that are used to update a suite of indicators. However, despite the step change in observing efforts, the vast majority of this effort has been directed towards the monitoring and indicators of physical processes in the oceans. Although these physical processes play a central role in global climate dynamics, from a marine resource and systems management perspective the key ecosystem goods and services are mostly biological in nature. It is therefore argued here that despite the recent advances in efforts to observe the marine environment, there remains a large unmet need in monitoring and observing, and hence establishing time series of indicators of the key biological and ecological stocks, flows and processes in the oceans.

The analysis of the environmental situation in urban areas is of higher importance than ever because of the altered urban ecosystem itself and its impacts on ecosystem services for the rapidly growing urban population. A major challenge remains in developing methods to assess and value ecosystem services and integrate them in urban decision-making processes. In this paper, the urban environmental indicator “Biotope Area Ratio” (BAR) is studied. We aim to analyse the benefits and limits of the BAR to assess and manage the urban ecosystem services using high resolution remote-sensing. We choose two urban environmental settings in Berlin and Seoul where the BAR has been already successfully applied. Results show that the BAR as is represents a valuable instrument and augments existing indicators but that there are modifications advisable to address recent challenges of ecosystem services in urban areas. For the successful implementation as a planning instrument we identify the legally required regulation in the planning process and the existence of reliable data as major challenges. The investigated high resolution remote-sensing based approach provides some advantages to map surface types of the urban environment for a first screening, monitoring and evaluation of implemented measures of the BAR and can therefore support existing field mappings. Insights from our study may stimulate developments of explicitly assessing and managing urban ecosystem services using aggregated indicators such as the BAR and may highlight the importance of a more adequate representation of the urban environment in decision-making processes in other cities in the future.

Summary 1. Biodiversity assessments usually rely on indicators as surrogates for direct measures. Although the ecological validity of indicators has been extensively studied, their economic feasibility and costeffectiveness have seldom been assessed. 2. Here we present a novel generic framework for analysing the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity indicators and the effect of budget allocations on the quality of biodiversity surveys. We sampled a suite of environmental and biological indicators in a Mediterranean ecosystem and calculated their cost-effectiveness using measures of species richness, rarity and composition. 3. Environmental indicators were the cheapest indicator for richness and rarity but not for composition patterns, and they conveyed low accuracy (