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This article examines the slowdown of globalisation following the 2008 crisis and the growing significance of the Global South, focusing on value chain shortening and regionalisation in critical inputs. It analyses the general and sectoral performances of the Global North and Global South, with particular attention to South America’s positioning. A multi-country input-output model is employed, incorporating hypothetical extraction exercises for critical inputs. The findings highlight challenges and opportunities for South American nations within the regionalisation process, offering key insights into its implications for macro-regional spaces and their evolving dynamics.

PurposeRecently, an update of the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method ReCiPe was released: ReCiPe 2016. The aim of this study was to analyse the effect of using this update instead of the previous version: ReCiPe 2008. Do the absolute outcomes change significantly and if so, does this lead to different conclusions and result-based recommendations?MethodsLife cycle assessments (LCAs) were conducted for 152 foods for which cradle-to-plate inventories were available and that together are estimated to account for 80% of the total greenhouse gas emissions, land use and fossil resource depletion of food consumption in the Netherlands. The LCIA was performed on midpoint and endpoint level, with both ReCiPe 2008 and 2016, and using the three perspectives provided by ReCiPe. Both the uses of the global-average characterisation factors (CFs) and the Dutch-specific CFs were explored.Results and discussionResults showed a strong correlation between LCAs performed with ReCiPe 2008 and with 2016 on midpoint and endpoint level, with Spearman’s rank correlation between 0.85 and 0.99. Ranking of foods related to their overall environmental impact did not differ significantly between methods when using the default hierarchist perspective. Differences on endpoint level were largest when using the individualist perspective. The predicted average absolute impact of the foods studied did change significantly when using the new ReCiPe, regardless of which perspective was used: a larger impact was found for climate change, freshwater eutrophication and water consumption and a lower impact for acidification and land use. The use of Dutch CFs in ReCiPe 2016 leads to significant differences in LCA results compared with the use of the global-average CFs. When looking at the average Dutch diet, ReCiPe 2016 predicted a larger impact from greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater eutrophication, and a lower impact from acidification and land use than ReCiPe 2008.ConclusionsThe update of ReCiPe leads to other LCIA results but to comparable conclusions on hotspots and ranking of food product consumption in the Netherlands. Looking at the changes per product due to the update, we recommend updating endpoint-level LCAs conducted with ReCiPe 2008, especially for products that emit large amounts of PM2.5 or consume large amounts of water within their life cycle. As new and updated methods reflect the scientific state of art better and therefore include less model uncertainty, we recommend to always use the most recent and up-to-date methodology in new LCAs.

The article explores the scope of use and the level of terminological and conceptual maturity of “Central Europe” in the post-war Soviet academic discourse. While there is a current in the international debate examining the notion in substance, an investigation of its usage in distinct academic languages can help to render the discussion more practice-oriented. The present work is based on a review of authoritative sources of the period, such as encyclopediae and academic dictionaries as well as publications of prominent Soviet scholars in the disciplines where the notion found its application (geography, history, etc.). The influence of foreign publications and the tendency to employ “Central Europe” as a schematic mental placement for distinct phenomena are found pivotal for the term development. The article contributes to the attempts of delimiting the region, through evincing shared understandings of and around it, and looking into the continuity between the Soviet and the post-Soviet perspectives.

The fifth-generation Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5) was used to dynamically downscale two Coupled Global Climate Model (CGCM) simulations of the transient climate change for the period 1950–2100, over North America, following the CORDEX protocol. The CRCM5 was driven by data from the CanESM2 and MPI-ESM-LR CGCM simulations, based on the historical (1850–2005) and future (2006–2100) RCP4.5 radiative forcing scenario. The results show that the CRCM5 simulations reproduce relatively well the current-climate North American regional climatic features, such as the temperature and precipitation multiannual means, annual cycles and temporal variability at daily scale. A cold bias was noted during the winter season over western and southern portions of the continent. CRCM5-simulated precipitation accumulations at daily temporal scale are much more realistic when compared with its driving CGCM simulations, especially in summer when small-scale driven convective precipitation has a large contribution over land. The CRCM5 climate projections imply a general warming over the continent in the 21st century, especially over the northern regions in winter. The winter warming is mostly contributed by the lower percentiles of daily temperatures, implying a reduction in the frequency and intensity of cold waves. A precipitation decrease is projected over Central America and an increase over the rest of the continent. For the average precipitation change in summer however there is little consensus between the simulations. Some of these differences can be attributed to the uncertainties in CGCM-projected changes in the position and strength of the Pacific Ocean subtropical high pressure.

On the grounds of the long discussion in the literature for the construction of regional input–output (I/O) tables, the present study endeavors to identify the best performing method among the most applied location quotient based non-survey techniques. The analysis uses actual data—in particular, the EU input–output tables for the years 2010 and 2014—and by employing three different statistics, it compares the tables created by the quotients FLQ, AFLQ, SLQ, CILQ and RLQ. Comparison is made in both the technical coefficient tables and the Leontief ones. The results indicate that the AFLQ and FLQ provide better results for values of δ from 0.1 to 0.3, whereas for values of δ from 0.4 to 0.9, the results of the two quotients are not satisfactory. At the same time, using another statistic, the SLQ–CILQ technique seemed to yield satisfactory results. Similar results are also presented for the Leontief tables. Finally, using a linear regression model, the imports do not appear to be related to the value of δ in the FLQ.

Ecological restoration has become a critical tool for mitigating ecosystem degradation and enhancing ecological health. Effective restoration efforts require regionalisation through identifying of social-ecological system (SES) that integrate socioeconomic and ecological characteristics. However, methodological gaps in clarifying interdimensional interplay often hinder coastal restoration planning. This study develops a spatial characterisation framework to identify coastal SESs for targeted ecological restoration in Zhejiang Province, China. Integrating socioeconomic data and land-marine ecological variables across 28 coastal counties, we employed principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering to delineate nine distinct SESs exhibiting significant heterogeneity: northern clusters (SES1/7/9) show high socioeconomic performance but suboptimal environmental indicators; southern systems (SES2/8) feature lower development but superior environmental conditions; central zones (SES5/6) demonstrate moderate socioeconomic-environmental profiles; while island systems (SES3/4) display low population density, high aging rates, and unique biogeophysical traits. Precise SES categorization enabled identification of primary degradation pressures and formulation tailored restoration strategies within each SES in Zhejiang. Critically, transcending administrative boundaries is essential to accommodate intra-city diversity and cross-city unity, given prevalent transboundary SESs and intra-city variations. We propose four management implications: ecosystem service conservation, pressure-specific interventions, cross-sector governance mechanisms, and participatory restoration incentivization. This framework establishes a transferable approach for sustainable coastal SES restoration management.

This paper explores diverse visualisation methods of regionalisation based on a semantic analysis of institutionalised region names (choronyms) and adopts a fluid (fuzzy) approach to regional boundaries. Grounded in the theory of the institutionalisation of regions, the study examines how region shapes delineate their identities, resulting in an overlapping space of regions. Thus, the nature of this approach in regional geography requires multiple visualisations of areal features. The outcome is map representations of regions in the Czech-German-Polish borderland, illustrating regionalisation beyond traditional regional geography. European regionalism requires regionalisation using innovative cartographic visualisation methods to represent a cultural landscape without the use of borders. Boundaries, names of the regions and institutions form the basis of the region's identities.

Some fifty years in the development of ideas about the definition and use of functional regions are elaborated in this article, as an introduction to this Special Issue of the Moravian Geographical Reports. The conceptual basis for functional regions is discussed, initially in relation to region-organising interactions and their behavioural foundations. This paper presents an approach to functional regions which presumes that such regions objectively exist and that they are based on more or less tangible processes (however, a different view of regions is also briefly described). A typology of functional regions is presented and the development of methods for finding a definition of functional regions is discussed, as well as a typology for these methods. The final part of this article stresses the importance of functional regions in geographical research, and introduces some emerging new prospects in the study of functional regions.

Given the regional disparities that historically characterize the Italian context, in this paper we propose a framework to evaluate the regional health care systems’ performance in order to contribute to the debate on the relationship between decentralisation of health care and equity. To investigate the regional health systems performance, we refer to the OECD Health Care Quality Indicators project to construct of a set of five composite indexes. The composite indexes are built on the basis of the non-compensatory Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto Index, that allows comparability of the data across units and over time. We propose three indexes of health system performance, namely Quality Index, Accessibility Index and Cost-Expenditure Index, along with a Health Status Index and a Lifestyles Index. Our framework highlights that regional disparities still persist. Consistently with the evidence at the institutional level, there are regions, particularly in Southern Italy, which record lower levels of performance with high levels of expenditure. Continuous research is needed to provide policy makers with appropriate data and tools to build a cohesive health care system for the benefit of the whole population. Even if future research is needed to integrate our framework with new indicators for the calculation of the indexes and with the identification of new indexes, the study shows that a scientific reflection on decentralisation of health systems is necessary in order to reduce inequalities.

Streamflow prediction in ungauged basins (PUB) is necessary for effective water resource management, flood assessment, and hydraulic engineering design. Spain is one of the countries in Europe expected to suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, notably an increase in flooding. The authors selected the Miño River basin in the northwest of Spain, which covers an area of 2,168 km2, to develop a novel approach for predicting streamflow in ungauged basins. This study presents a regionalisation of the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT), a semi-distributed, physically based hydrological model. The regionalisation approach transfers SWAT model parameters based on hydrological similarities between gauged and ungauged subbasins. The authors used k-means and expectation−maximisation (EM) machine learning clustering techniques to group 30 subbasins (9 gauged subbasins) into homogeneous, physical, similarity-based clusters. Furthermore, the regionalisation featured physiographic attributes (basin area, elevation, and channel length and slope) and climatic information (precipitation and temperature) for each subbasin. For each homogeneous group, the SWAT model was calibrated and validated for the gauged basins (donor basins), and the calibrated parameters were transferred to the pseudo-ungauged basins (receptor basins) for streamflow prediction. The results of the streamflow prediction in the pseudo-ungauged basins demonstrate satisfactory performance in most of the cases, with average NSE, R2, RSR, and RMSE values of 0.78, 0.91, 0.42, and 5.10 m3/s, respectively. The results contribute to water planning and management and flood estimation in the studied region and similar areas.