Manufacturing in areas of the developing world that lack electricity severely restricts the technical sophistication of what is produced. More than a billion people with no access to electricity still have access to some imported higher-technologies; however, these often lack customization and...

This paper positions interdisciplinarity as an integral feature of contemporary scientific research, stressing its role and the necessity to overcome possible barriers related to organizational and institutional constraints, team integration imperatives or disciplinary boundaries. At the same...

We are proud of Challenges in Sustainability's (CiS) fruitful start. A variety of quality research articles, editorials and notes have been published on a range of themes and topics, including sustainability governance [1], improved cookstoves [2,3], the potentials of 3-D printing in the global...

The last two decades were characterized by severe conflicts in the West Africa subregion. The era of conflict resolution, management and peace building thus came to define theregion. The destruction left by long years of protracted conflicts and the present state of devel opment is reason enough...

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's death on 5 December 2013 and his funeral ten days later were taken as an occasion in the global media to discuss the merits of political leadership for human security, with occasional comments on its pitfalls. This particular leader is not the most politically safe...

While security of our<em> </em>hominid<em> </em>encampments and settlements must have been at or near the top of our species priorities since our evolution some several hundred thousand years ago, awareness of the magnitude of our alterations, interactions and impacts on our world is a very recent event. Even...

An estimated 2.6 billion people rely on traditional biomass for home cooking and heating, so improving the efficiency of household cookstoves could provide significant environmental, social and economic benefits. Some researchers have estimated that potential greenhouse gas emission reductions...

The influential piracy paper by Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, although mainly based on proprietary data, contained an 'important complement' to the main results, consisting of four 'quasi-experiments' using publicly available data. This replication examines all of these...