Fisheries and aquaculture have emerged as a promising food production sector at the global level as well as regional levels. Fish and fish products are produced in one region and then are traded ...across various parts of the world. The whole sector is dependent on chains of workers engaged at landing centres, breeding units, processing units, and the trade and export chains. When the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown hit the country, it affected the whole sector and caused a huge decline in the production and trade of fishing products. This article aims to have a glimpse into the aquaculture sector and evaluate the impact of the pandemic on this sector in India. This valuable information can be of great importance to government and aquatic food suppliers so that they can evolve their strategies to withstand ongoing and future pandemics. It also helps them in framing regional and sectorial adjustments to transform investment plans, match market demands, improve monitoring strategies and get prepared for future needs.
•The purpose of this article is to have a glimpse into the aquaculture sector and evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on this sector in India.•This valuable information can be of great importance to the government and aquatic food suppliers so that they can evolve their strategies to withstand ongoing and future pandemics.•It also helps them frame regional and sectorial adjustments to transform investment plans, match market demands, improve monitoring strategies and prepare for future needs.•Some of the major challenges the entire fishing community faced during the COVID-19 lockdown are (i)difficulty in hiring truck drivers for transport of cargo.•(ii) Delayed seaweed seed material transportation.•(iii) Total shutdown of shrimp processing unit, forced engagement of minimal labour in shrimp feed, medicine and probiotics industries.•and (iv) Negative impacts on the livelihood of local fishermen due to fishing ban and low demand.•The paper also summarizes the reformations in the aquaculture sector in India to future pandemics.•Outbreak of COVID-19 has stimulated digital transformation across many aquaculture supply chain in India to reduce the dependence on manpower.•Scientific farming practices, the inclusion of technology and decreasing the over-dependency on export (around 90%) can recover the sector and can help take it to a desired level.
Land degradation is one of the major global environmental issues that need serious attention. The land itself is a complex system regulating myriads of processes. Any perturbation in these processes ...would undoubtedly lead to the stimulation of land degradation. Among these, fly‐ash (FA) dumping is one of the usual practices, which has been adopted to overcome land‐use disruption and other health hazards. However, this practice has become a driving factor for FA‐induced land degradation. Therefore, in purview to tackle this issue, the present article aimed to identify and suggest sustainable practices to restore and manage FA‐contaminated sites. As a preliminarily it deals with the systematic exploration and identification of FA‐based and associated contaminated lands via geospatial technology with a brief focus on assessing its different contaminant profiles in the FA and soil systems. Further, this moreover, the article emphasizes the need to identify identifying the potential local plant species in the FA‐contaminated regions that can meet the local people's demands. Following this we suggest appropriate sustainable approaches to expedite the restoration of FA‐contaminated lands and highlight the critical bottlenecks during ground implementation. Our article aimed to unravel ways to address the aforementioned bottlenecks to develop an efficient restoration enterprise during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030).
Landslide is one of the important geophysical hazards that can cause a severe damage in the society and economy. Anthropogenic activities, on the other hand, are accelerating the probability and ...extent of the landslide. As a result, a proper estimation of the landslide probability is an essential step in contemporary research. The novel ensemble approach of 'Weight of Evidence (WOE)', 'Logistic Regression (LR)', 'WOE-Classification and Regression Tree (CART)', 'WOE-Multilayer perceptron (MLP)' and 'WOE-Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)' has been considered for estimating the landslide susceptibility of Kalimpong district in India. In validation datasets, the AUC values of ensembles 'MLP-WOE, CART-WOE, LR-WOE and XGBoost-WOE' are 0.924, 0.953, 0.940 and 0.944, respectively. According to its predictive abilities, the ensemble of 'LR-WOE' is the most optimum model, followed by 'XGBoost-WOE, CART-WOE and MLP-WOE'. Aside from that, the 'WOE' model was used to assess the importance of sub-parameters individually.
While abundant scientific literature focuses on diagnosing contaminated areas, solutions with a scientific base are far from balanced. This is the case of the Quintero‐Puchuncaví Bay, a widely known ...contaminated area in the central coast of Chile. Here, arsenic in soils surrounding the industrial complex has been reported as a threat to human health. However, land planning based on As contamination becomes a challenge since the whole area is identified as contaminated. Such a lack of land‐planning constrains the occupation and remediation of contaminated soil leading to a brownfield‐like landscape. To face this challenge, we proposed using a geospatial decision support system (S‐DSS) to integrate the contamination assessment, health and ecosystem risks, and potential land uses. When characterizing soil arsenic concentration thresholds for different land uses in a S‐DSS, we could categorize the land in suitable, caution, and unsuitable areas (based on human health risks). This way, we unravel areas with potential use in the current condition while also discerning caution and unsuitable categories, that can undergo extensive and intensive remediation techniques. Similarly, we took a conservational approach to estimate emerging risk from the industrial complex associated to explosions. Altogether, it highlights the potential of S‐DSS to integrate different geographic information. We finally feature two APPs regarding current land‐use suitability and a modeled one considering future arsenic emissions.
The escalating demand for sustainable business practices underscores the necessity of identifying and adopting innovative solutions tailored for enduring success. This study probes the critical ...questions of what distinguishes certain entrepreneurs as frontrunners in implementing sustainable solutions and how their practices can serve as blueprints for widespread adaptation. The gap this research addresses hinges on a detailed understanding of the mechanisms through which these entrepreneurs’ commitment to sustainability catalyzes broader organizational and cultural changes. Employing a qualitative case study methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted with six entrepreneurs renowned for their pioneering sustainability initiatives. The findings illuminate commonalities among these leaders, including a profound interest in sustainability issues and the courage to pioneer novel, sustainable practices. Their enthusiasm effectively permeates their respective organizations, fostering an environment ripe for continual sustainable evolution. The study contributes significantly to the literature by elucidating how personal commitment in leadership can translate into comprehensive organizational change, setting a new benchmark for sustainability in organizational practices. Furthermore, it provides practical implications by showcasing that sustainable development is an ethical imperative and a viable strategic approach that can enhance competitiveness and stakeholder engagement. The recommendations in this study advocate for businesses to cultivate leadership qualities that champion sustainability, encourage cultural shifts towards sustainable practices, and develop robust frameworks for sustainability integration across all operational levels.
Pilgrimage tourism has gained significant popularity and attention in India due to its significant deliverables including employment, national integration as well as foreign exchange earnings. The ...investment of the government for developing the national infrastructure has been evident, however, the concern towards environmental impact due to pilgrimage tourism has not been explicitly considered. This generated the requirement of sustainable development for safeguarding the environment as well as manmade resources including sacred temples and shrines. The proposed study has analyzed the issues and challenges of pilgrimage tourism and offered significant solutions to attain sustainable measures towards negative impact mitigation in India. The research methodology used for the proposed study integrated an inductive design through the use of case study or journal analysis in order to attain qualitative data. The major gap that has been identified in the past studies is they primarily focused on the significance of sustainable development in tourism but did not focus on pilgrimage tourism which this study has significantly fulfilled. In addition, the information based on pilgrimage tourism is very limited in past research studies. The findings of the study revealed that increasing accommodation facilities, dumping of waste in water bodies and landfills are creating significant threats to the environment. Hence, it is recommended that both governmental bodies and local agencies must align their objectives to develop sustainable practices. In addition, sustainable policies and strategies must be developed which must be followed explicitly by each individual.
A prospective way to make transportation more sustainable is changing the commuters’ travel behavior, which can be realized by creating mobility plans for institutions. A new approach related to ...workplace mobility planning is developed in three pilot locations in Hungary. As a first step, a roadmap is established including current situation analysis as well as collecting potential measures, setting up a mobility team, and developing pilot actions. The paper presents the planning process taking several aspects, such as commitment, vision, stakeholders’ involvement, situation analysis, measure implementation, and recommendations, into account. In the process, several stakeholders are involved to provide useful inputs through online surveys, personal interviews, and focus group meetings. The pilot development process covers three institutions in three locations with such specific parameters as the size of the city, the number of employees, location, and accessibility. As a result, it is seen that most measures aim at cycling infrastructure development, bike fleet introduction, and electric charger deployment. The proposed process is easily transferable and applicable in any location and any institution. The results not only support the commuters but show a potential to serve long-term societal goals, as well.
74% of Europeans live and move every day in cities, and 40% of the total CO2 emissions from transport is caused by urban mobility. The decarbonisation of urban transport can therefore produce a ...substantial reduction in total CO2 emissions. Cities have proposed various measures to reduce CO2 emissions from mobility, concentrating particularly on reducing private individual transport (car) by offering a range of alternatives.
Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) are not new in Europe, as numerous precedents in France, UK, Italy and Germany have now been underway for a decade. SUMPs propose a strategy to reduce dependence on private cars by imposing a series of measures.
As the plans were designed for the long term (ten to fifteen years), it is only natural to question their effectiveness after a certain time has elapsed. However, there is little literature on this issue. To fill this gap this article proposes a methodology to evaluate Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans using indicators to assess the current situation of the city in terms of the effectiveness of the measures implemented, focusing on the specific case of the city of Burgos in Spain, where the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan was introduced in 2005, and on the results based on the proposed methodology.
CO2 savings are always the primary target of a SUMP. Most assessments highlight changes in behaviour or public perception, but contain no in-depth analysis of cost-effectiveness. This paper aims to calculate a cost analysis for each tonnes of CO2 saved. This methodology is used in other fields such as lighting and energy, but not in transport due to its complexity. However, effectiveness ratios can be calculated with the available data on modal shift and investments in the SUMP, taking into account the costs as a whole. Other methodologies to determine external cost savings are included in the proposed methodology to achieve a more accurate ratio and consider more external factors.
•Methodology to estimate the cost of CO2 saved through the use of sustainable transport modes.•Identification of variables affecting the assessment of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans.•Proposal of a new system to assess the measures implemented in a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan.
This paper aimed to provide a set of sustainable measures suitable for workplaces according to local requirements. To support this, a specific Transportation Demand Management strategy was applied, ...which is called Workplace Travel Planning. The result of such a Workplace Travel Plan is a package of measures implemented by an organization to encourage sustainable commuting. This research focused on two stages of the planning process: in the analysis stage, data were gathered from the stakeholders, and travel behavior was analyzed, while in the planning stage, a specific set of measures was proposed to the workplace. The selection of those measures relies on several aspects, such as existing workplace infrastructure, employer policies, employee requirements, local infrastructure, cost of implementation, level of sustainability. The mobility questionnaires are the instruments used to retrieve the input data used in the method, while the categorization of measures contributes to the next phase of the method serving as the output options. To each measure, factors, weights, and sustainability impacts were assigned. The connection of the phases was realized by creating the utility value of the measure, which enables the ranking of the measures. The approach provides a comprehensive framework of connecting employee requirements, employer willingness, and site-specific opportunities by defining a quantitative utility function, which results in a list of most suitable measures for a specific workplace.
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