Growing populations and periodic drought conditions have exacerbated water stress in many areas worldwide. In response, some municipalities have considered desalination of saline water as a freshwater supply. Unfortunately, desalination requires a sizeable energy investment. However, renewable...

This paper proposes a framework based on which innovations in wind power technologies can be evaluated from the standpoint of their contribution to diffusion expansion. The framework helps build up a missing link between the technical literature on innovations and policy-oriented contributions...

Rice forage systems can increase the land use efficiency in paddy fields, improve the self-sufficient feed ratio, and provide environmental benefits for agro-ecosystems. This system often decreased economic benefits compared with those through imported commercial forage feed, particularly in...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used to improve the environmental performance of food systems and simplification of LCA appears to be a vital question, especially for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Following a literature review on simplified LCA tools and their...

With rapid development since the 1970s, China is entering a period of social transformation, which not only creates favorable conditions for sustainable development but also presents new challenges. The transitional period in China is a stage in which two types of social transformation coexist,...

Cycle time management plays an important role in improving the performance of a wafer fabrication factory. It starts from the estimation of the cycle time of each job in the wafer fabrication factory. Although this topic has been widely investigated, several issues still need to be addressed,...

With the process of globalization, many political geographers and research institutions have begun to focus on borders and border areas. Faced with the current debate on the border policies, this paper reviews the former research relating to border studies and provides an evaluation of China’s...

In this paper, emergy analysis is used in association with the ternary diagrams and geographic information system (GIS) tools to improve the evaluation of sustainability for the Pan-Pearl River Delta (PPRD) region. Emergy accounting of PPRD is estimated, and various emergy-based indicators are...

Based on regional coordination theory and system theory, the authors constructed an evaluation index system for the coordinated development of a regional environment-tourism-economy system with a pressure-state-response (PSR) model. With a coordinated development model, it further empirically...

Since the early 1990s, sustainable forest management (SFM) has emerged as a paradigm of forest management on global, regional and national levels. In developing countries, avoiding deforestation is a preliminary step towards SFM. The Korean peninsula experienced severe deforestation and forest...