Explore the vast range of titles available.

Accomplishing the objectives of optimal and sustainable management in the agricultural sector is increasingly getting complicated, which includes increasing the sustainable productivity of water and energy resources, ensuring food security, decreasing contaminations from fertilizers and chemical pesticides, and environmental destruction. The present research deals with designing the relationships between the water-energy-food nexus approach with economic and environmental objectives to accomplish the aforementioned objectives. Hence, a multi-objective programming model was developed to maximize the water-energy-food nexus index and farmers' gross margin, minimize the use of chemical fertilizers (nitrogen and phosphate), and minimize the use of chemical pesticides (herbicides) by considering the balancing constraint to groundwater resources. Afterward, the proposed multi-objective model was solved using the augmented ε-constraint method, and then the total of strong and efficient Pareto solutions was extracted. Then, the best solution was chosen using the TOPSIS method and assigning a weight of equal importance to the desired objectives. The irrigation network of Jiroft plain in Kerman province in Iran was chosen as the study area to implement such a system. The obtained results indicated that the optimal and sustainable management in the agriculture sector can be hopeful using the proposed approach in the current research. On the other hand, the results revealed that despite considering the economic objective in the proposed system, the farmers' profits can be significantly decreased. Thus, the realization of optimal and sustainable management in the agricultural sector is not possible without the implementation of policies for increasing the economic incentive of farmers.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to identify factors moderating the process of managing environmental objectives and to develop potential behavioural scenarios related to this process.Design/methodology/approachThe main research method used by the authors was a systematic literature review. The applied procedure was consistent with the general methodology of conducting research and the methodology of research in management sciences. The conducted literature review was supplemented with an analysis of grey literature.FindingsA number of factors influence the process of managing environmental objectives. Legal factors can stimulate the introduction of pro-environmental measures. The lack of universal legal regulations encourages unethical actions. The ethical values deserve special attention. If their level is high, then even the factors embedded in the environment that foster unethical behaviours are of little importance. In this sense, the performed literature review confirms the theory proposed by Locke. Managerial factors, including remuneration for the achievement of environmental objectives, may be the reason for weakening the process of minimising the negative impact on the environment.Originality/valueOn the basis of the conducted research and various theories of objectives, the authors formulated practical managerial recommendations aimed at reducing the number of errors in the process of setting environmental objectives.

Optimizing the operation of reservoir involving ecological and environmental (eco-environmental) objectives is challenging due to the often competing social-economic objectives. Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II is a popular method for solving multi-objective optimization problems. However, within a complex search space, the NSGA-II population (i.e., a group of candidate solutions) may be trapped in local optima as the population diversity is progressively reduced. This study proposes a computational strategy that operates several parallel populations to maintain the diversity of the candidate solutions. An improved version of the NSGA-II, called c-NSGA-II is implemented by incorporating multiple recombination operators. The parallel strategy is then coupled into the routine of the c-NSGA-II and applied to the operation of the Qingshitan reservoir (Southwest of China) which includes three eco-environmental and two social-economic objectives. Three metrics (convergence, diversity, and hyper volume index) are used for evaluating the optimization performances. The results show that the proposed parallel strategy significantly improves the solution quality in both convergence and diversity. Two characteristic schemes are identified for the operation of the Qingshitan reservoir for trade-off between the eco-environmental and social-economic objectives.

At a time when sustainable practices are becoming increasingly important in many economies, we need a thorough understanding of the determinants of corporate sustainability. Research on the influence of human resources in this context focuses mainly on executive roles such as CEO and board member. This emphasis tends to deny the potential contribution made by other employees to fostering corporate sustainability. This is the setting for our study of the part played by corporate scientists. Their rigorous academic training and specialized research expertise endows corporate scientists with distinct attributes which could encourage more sustainable business activities. We show that the role of the corporate scientist goes beyond enhancement of the firm's inventive capacity and find a causal effect of scientist presence on companies' prioritization of environmental objectives. We also find that the presence of women scientists has a particularly pronounced effect. Our results have implications for policy and recruitment strategies in terms of their emphasis on sustainability and gender inclusivity.

Using a choice experiment, this paper investigates how Swedish citizens value three environmental quality objectives. In addition, a follow-up question is used to investigate whether respondents ignored any attributes when responding. The resulting information is used in model estimation by restricting the individual parameters for the ignored attributes to zero. When taking the shares of respondents who took both the environmental and the cost attributes (52-69% of the respondents) into account, then the WTP for each attribute changes if the respondents who ignored the attributes have a zero WTP. At the same time, we find evidence that not all respondents who claimed to have ignored an attribute really did. However, the most commonly ignored non-monetary attributes always have the lowest rankings in terms of WTP across all three environmental objectives. Thus, our results show that instead of ignoring attributes completely, respondents seem to put less weight on the attributes they claimed to have ignored.

In managing environmental problems, several countries have chosen the management by objectives (MBO) approach. This paper investigates how focus group participants from the Swedish environmental administration used metaphors to describe the mode of organization needed to attain environmental objectives. Such analysis can shed light on how an MBO system is perceived by actors and how it works in practice. Although the Swedish government intended to stimulate broad-based cooperation among many actors, participants often saw themselves as located at a certain “level,” i.e., “higher” or “lower,” in the MBO system—that is, their conceptions corresponded to a traditional, hierarchical interpretation of MBO. Prepositions such as “in” and “out” contributed to feelings of inclusion and exclusion on the part of MBO actors. However, horizontal metaphors merged with vertical ones, indicating ongoing competition for the right to interpret how the system of environmental objectives should best be managed. The paper concludes that any organization applying MBO could benefit from discussing alternate ways of talking and thinking about its constituent “levels.”

Meat consumption is rising annually as human populations grow and affluence increases. Godfray et al. review this trend, which has major negative consequences for land and water use and environmental change. Although meat is a concentrated source of nutrients for low-income families, it also enhances the risks of chronic ill health, such as from colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease. Changing meat consumption habits is a challenge that requires identifying the complex social factors associated with meat eating and developing policies for effective interventions. Science , this issue p. eaam5324 Both the global average per capita consumption of meat and the total amount of meat consumed are rising, driven by increasing average individual incomes and by population growth. The consumption of different types of meat and meat products has substantial effects on people’s health, and livestock production can have major negative effects on the environment. Here, we explore the evidence base for these assertions and the options policy-makers have should they wish to intervene to affect population meat consumption. We highlight where more research is required and the great importance of integrating insights from the natural and social sciences.

The destructive wildfires that occurred recently in the western US starkly foreshadow the possible future of forest ecosystems and human communities in the region. With increases in the area burned by severe wildfire in seasonally dry forests expected to result from climate change, judicious, science-based fire and restoration strategies will be essential for improving the resilience of forest ecosystems. We argue that fire use treatments (including prescribed fires and managed wildfires) as well as restoration thinning strategies, rather than conflicting with existing environmental objectives, will provide numerous co-benefits, including enhanced biodiversity, increased water availability, greater long-term and more sustainable carbon storage, improved forest resilience and adaptation to climate change, and reduced air pollution. Timber production, however, may have to be better aligned with fire management goals to achieve these co-benefits. Taking immediate actions today to promote positive ecological outcomes in seasonally dry forests should be a primary focus of management, particularly in the western US.

The Sustainable Development Goals map out a broad spectrum of objectives. Analytical tools in form of the Index and Dashboards provide a starting point to set national baselines, and allow comparison of the SDGs with other indices of well-being. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — agreed in 2015 by all 193 member states of the United Nations and complemented by commitments made in the Paris Agreement — map out a broad spectrum of economic, social and environmental objectives to be achieved by 2030. Reaching these goals will require deep transformations in every country, as well as major efforts in monitoring and measuring progress. Here we introduce the SDG Index and Dashboards as analytical tools for assessing countries' baselines for the SDGs that can be applied by researchers in the cross-disciplinary analyses required for implementation. The Index and Dashboards synthesize available country-level data for all 17 goals, and for each country estimate the size of the gap towards achieving the SDGs. They will be updated annually. All 149 countries for which sufficient data is available face significant challenges in achieving the goals, and many countries' development strategies are imbalanced across the economic, social and environmental priorities. We illustrate the analytical value of the index by examining its relationship with other widely used development indices and by showing how it accounts for cross-national differences in subjective well-being. Given significant data gaps, scope and coverage of the Index and Dashboards are limited, but we suggest that these analyses represent a starting point for a comprehensive assessment of national SDG baselines and can help policymakers determine priorities for early action and monitor progress. The tools also identify data gaps that must be closed for SDG monitoring.

Due to industrialization, copper demand has increased over the last decades. Recycling rate of copper is high and its scrap requires less energy than primary production, so sustainable closed-loop supply chain network design is considered a primary decision. Besides, the uneven distribution of copper has exaggerated the destructive effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes on mines. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no research about copper supply chain network design. In this paper, a copper network is designed and backup suppliers are used as a resilience strategy to reduce the effects of earthquakes on mining operations. Without backup model and with backup model are presented as multi-objective and are compared with each other. In each model, the economic objective is to maximize the supply chain profit; the environmental objective is to minimize water consumption and air pollutants; and the social objective is to maximize social desirability by considering security and unemployment rates. The models are formulated using mixed-integer linear programming and they are solved by ε-constraint and weighted sum methods. Results show that, with backup model increases the supply chain responsiveness. Also, the model is able to improve the economic and social performances of the supply chain. But in environmental aspect, it performs worse than without backup model. This is because the backup suppliers are added to the supply chain and their exploitation will create negative environmental effects. In addition, using copper scraps saves costs, energy and the consumption of this non-renewable metal.