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Tropical rainforests are of vital importance to the environment, as they contribute to weather patterns, biodiversity and even human wellbeing. Hence, in the face of tropical deforestation, it becomes exigent to quantify and assess the contribution of ecosystem services associated with tropical rainforests to the environment and especially to the people. This study adopted a nuanced approach, different from traditional economic valuations, to estimate the water-related ecosystem services (WRESs) received by the people from 2010 to 2020 in the Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park (HTRNP). The study focused on water yield, soil conservation, and water purification using InVEST, the SCS-CNGIS model, and spatial analysis. The results show (1) significant land cover changes within the HTRNP, as forest decreased by 4433 ha and water bodies increased by 4047 ha, indicating the active presence of human activities. However, land cover changes were more pronounced within the 5 km buffer area around the HTRNP, suggesting the effectiveness of the tropical rainforest conservation efforts in place. (2) The water yield of the HTRNP in the years studied decreased by 307.03 km3, based on the water yields in 2010 and 2020, which were 5625.7 km3 and 5318.7 km3, respectively. (3) Change detection showed that runoff mitigation in the rainforest has a negative mean (−0.21), indicating a slight overall decrease in soil conservation and runoff mitigation in the rainforest from 2010 to 2020; however, the higher curve number indicates areas susceptible to surface runoff. (4) The ecological effectiveness of water purification to absorb and reduce nitrogen load was better in 2020 (145,529 kg/year), as it was reduced from 506,739 kg/year in 2010, indicating improved water quality. (5) Population growth is more pronounced in areas with high water yields. Overall, the proposed framework has shown that the water yield potential of the HTRNP can meet the water consumption demands of people and industries situated within the buffer area. However, analysis of the study shows that it does not meet the crop water requirements. This study provides insights for decision makers in identifying potential beneficiaries and the essence of effective area-based conservation measures, and the proposed framework can be applied to any area of interest, offering a different approach in ecosystem services assessment.

To face the growing challenges of urbanization, urban management models grounded in the principles of sustainability and smart cities are being proposed. Despite their acknowledged importance, these models are often misunderstood or improperly applied due to a lack of thorough conceptualization, and they are frequently viewed as interchangeable. The aim of this study is to verify whether a correlation exists between indicators of sustainability and smartness in cities. For a sample of 130 Brazilian cities, their Sustainability Synthetic Indicator of System (SSIS) was computed using the Five-Sector Sustainability Model (5SenSu) and data sourced from the ‘Mandala ODS’ framework. Data concerning smart city were directly sourced from the ‘Connected Smart Cities’ framework. Results show that the 5SenSu model emerges as an alternative multicriteria method, epistemologically grounded in a conceptual model capable of quantifying the sustainability of cities. This approach enables quantitative diagnostics, rankings, and benchmarks, providing information to support decision-making processes. Moreover, the correlation analyses employed reveal a moderate linear correlation (Pearson coefficient of −0.61) and a moderate rank-order correlation (Spearman coefficient of −0.59) between sustainability and smartness. Hence, it would be premature to assume that a city deemed smart would automatically be sustainable, or vice versa. Acknowledging the existing limitations, this study contributes to discussions on the conceptual understanding and quantification through indicators of sustainable and smart cities, providing information for shaping effective public policies aimed at fostering more sustainable urban environments.

The Covid-19 pandemic has uncovered the foremost struggles of the twenty first century: social-economic inequality, global value chains, national security, and the environmental crisis. None of these seems novel, as many staged fiction dystopias have been predicting and warning mankind about the negative impacts of unsustainable consumption behaviors by displaying scenarios of exponential human population and economy growth. Several scientific tools for assessing sustainability have been developed to cover social, economic, and environmental aspects, however, most of them are simply used either separately or without a solid conceptual model supporting an epistemological construct to allow for deeper and scientific-based discussions on sustainability. This work presents a perspective about possible scenarios of the world's sustainability, based on a straightforward integrated framework for its quantification. The three capitals of sustainability, summarized as environmental sustainability, productivity and happiness are combined, based on the input-state-output model, and further plotted on a 3-axis graph. Eight different combinations of the three capitals show eight potential future worlds. The least desirable scenario, named “Ineffective,” depicts an environmentally unsustainable, unhappy and poor world, whereas “Paradise” is the utopia to be pursued: happy, environmentally sustainable and productive. Societies' decisions on taking action after quantitatively measuring and monitoring sustainability will be determinant in placing the world on a more developed and sustainable path, and the model proposed in this work can be useful in promoting discussions in this direction.

Cities play a crucial role in the development of nations, since they concentrate diverse forms of energy and transform them into higher quality outputs. An alternative for assessing urban agglomerates is the use of the eMergy synthesis method and the Odum's macroscope, which allow understanding and quantifying the energy flows that drive the cities functioning. The macroscope is able to identify the dependence relationships between cities and their surrounding environment that provides energy and resources to be transformed into high-quality products and information. After two decades of developing studies related to urban systems under Odum's macroscope approach, the research team of Paulista University in Brazil acquired experience and maturity to write this conceptual analysis about how Brazilian cities work. Several cases are provided—including anabolic and catabolic pathways involved in the regulation of cities mechanisms—to sustain final insights on the way Brazilian cities work. The results show how these cities add to the development the country transforming low quality energy into higher quality outputs. Cases are discussed under the Odum's macroscope perspective providing understanding on the dependence among cities and their neighborhood and helping to plan for future development.

Increasing economic and population growth has put immense pressure on energy, water and land resources to satisfy national and supra-national demand. Through trade, a large proportion of such a demand is fulfilled. With trade as one of its key priorities, the China Belt and Road Initiative is a long-term transcontinental investment program. The initiative gained significant attention due to greater opportunities for economic development, large population and different levels of resource availability. The nexus approach has appeared as a new viewpoint in discussions on balancing the competing sectoral demands. However, following years of work, constraints exist in the scope and focus of studies. The newly developed multi-regional input–output (MRIO) models covering the world’s economy and its use of resources permit a comprehensive analysis of resource usage by production and consumption at different levels, and bring more knowledge about resource nexus problems. Using the MRIO model, this work simultaneously tracks energy, water and land use flows and investigates the transnational resource nexus. A nexus strength indicator is proposed which depends on ternary diagrams to grade countries based on their combined resources’ use and sectoral weighting. Equal sectoral weighting is assigned. The analysis presented a sectorally balanced nexus approach. Findings support existing work by recognizing energy, water and land as the robust transnational connections, from both production and consumption points of view. Resource nexus issues differ from country to country owing to inequalities in industrial set-up, preferences in economic policy and resource endowments. The paper outlines how key resource nexus problems can be identified and prioritized in view of alternative and often opposing interests.

Recognizing that natural environment is reaching its maximum limits in providing resources and diluting the waste generated by human production systems, efforts toward more sustainable production systems are mandatory to secure the development of future generations. For this purpose, changing the productivity model adopted by companies that are almost exclusively rooted on circulating money to generate profit, named business as usual, is an important issue. In this sense, an alternative would be establishing the relationship of stocks and flows of energy, material, and information with environmental, economic and social outcomes, thus resulting in new accounting approaches. This work aims to propose an activity-based costing (ABC) based on multicriteria drivers including economic, emissions, and emergy (with an “m”) values. The proposed ABC costing allocates each one of the multicriteria drivers into a specific part of the sustainability conceptual model, in an attempt to embrace a holistic perspective and allow for a sustainable-based decision, rather than considering purely economic drivers. The goal programming (GP) method is considered so as to support a decision based on multicriteria aspects. Results show that the proposed accounting approach known as ABCsustain allows for decisions toward a company's sustainability by acting on both the amount and kind of a company's product that should be managed, as well as on the effective increase of a specific company's activity or process. The proposed ABCsustain could make the insertion of environmental issues into companies strategic planning more effective. It is expected that environmental issues go beyond a simple diagnoses and begin to be considered as action in factum in the companies' decisions toward achieving a more sustainable world system.

About 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050, emphasizing the importance of assessment tools to guide decisions toward more sustainable cities. The “Mandala ODS” is an alternative tool promoted by the Brazilian government to quantify the sustainability of cities based on the UN SDGs. Although diagnoses are important steps for governance, the behavioral profile of decision makers also appears as a key aspect. This work aims to assess the potential association evidence among biophysical, socioeconomic and cultural variables with city sustainability as measured by the “Mandala ODS.” A sample of 130 Brazilian cities is considered as a sample, and the Pearson's chi-square indicator is calculated for association analysis. Results show that Brazilian cities located in the South/Southeast/Midwest regions, with HDI higher than 0.75, incidence of poverty lower than 40%, territorial area lower than 3,000 km2, and GDP/capita higher than 25,000 R$/person.yr, have significant statistical association that leads them to higher levels of sustainability than other cities without these characteristics. Population density, academic background of mayors, their political ideology and gender showed no association with city sustainability. These findings highlight the fundamental role of governance focused on local characteristics instead of standardized and larger scale based public policies that would hardly bring the same benefits for all cities with different socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. Although additional efforts are still needed to achieve a more comprehensive picture, this work contributes to the discussions about the reasons that lead some cities to achieve higher degrees of sustainability than others.

Agri-products have an impact on food security, ecology protection, and crucial strategic deployment. With this respect, the economic value of agri-products should be paralleled with a non-monetary assessment of ecological value for humans. This study set up an emergy-based life-cycle assessment (Em-LCA) framework to calculate the ecosystem service (ES) and ecosystem dis-services (EDS) that was applied to six typical crops, exploring the implementation path of the agricultural eco-product value. The results showed the agriculture system mainly depends on non-renewable resources. EDS generated by China’s agri-products is higher than the ES provided by them. Nevertheless, there is a low correlation between the current price of agri-products and their greenness, but, economic value presents a rising trend with agri-product greenness increasing. Further to discussing effective approaches to sustainable agriculture, it can be seen that 1) sustainable agriculture will lead to increased greenness, but it is impossible to improve greenness indefinitely. 2) Improving greenness is an effective way to implement ecological value, another way to preserve and raise ecological value is to reduce EDS generation. 3) Reducing energy consumption leads to a decrease in EDS but it is not an appropriate way to achieve sustainable development. These findings provide meaningful suggestions for decision-makers to realize the ecological value of agri-products.