scholarly journals Relations between Agri-Environmental, Economic and Social Dimensions of Farms’ Sustainability

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Sulewski ◽  
Anna Kłoczko-Gajewska ◽  
Wojciech Sroka

Attempts to measure sustainability of farms are usually based on indicators of a set of sustainability dimensions. According to the literature, analyses should (but quite often do not) cover not only the level, but also the relations between the sustainability dimensions, because we could expect complementarity, synergies or competition between the sustainability goals. The aim of this paper was to measure and assess the interdependencies between dimensions of farms’ sustainability. The research was carried out on 601 farms that participate in the Polish Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), with the use of standard FADN data supported by additional information from interviews. Based on many variables, economic, environmental, social, and composite sustainability indices were collected. From the correlation and correspondence analyses it was concluded that the farms reached the balance of all three dimensions simultaneously when the level of sustainability indices was medium, while a high level of sustainability in one dimension made it very difficult to reach a high level in the others. It was also emphasized that assessing farms’ sustainability with the use of a simple aggregation of variables may be not correct since sustainability goals may compete with each other.

1983 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen P. Boyd

The Subjective Workload Asssessment Technique (SWAT) carries with it the implicit assumption that people can accurately predict the amount of mental workload they would experience under various levels of three component dimensions. Research suggests that the perceptions of these dimensions may not be independent. This study was designed to measure the subjective interactions between the dimensions used in SKAT. Mental workload was generated using a text editing task in which the dimensions were manipulated independently. Results revealed significant positive correlations between the subjective levels of the three dimensions. That is, when a subject experienced a high level of one dimension, s/he also tended to rate the other two dimensions high. It may be unreasonable to assume that people can accurately predict the magnitude of these interactions when performing the ranking process which is used to derive the workload scale.


Author(s):  
José Vítor Gonçalves ◽  
Luísa Castro ◽  
Guilhermina Rêgo ◽  
Rui Nunes

Nurses working in palliative care are at risk of burnout. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was used to determine burnout levels of nurses working in the Portuguese national network of palliative care. We evaluated the contribution of personal, work, and COVID-19 variables in three burnout subclasses: personal, work, and patient-related. A cross-sectional, exploratory, and quantitative design was employed and participants were sampled using convenience and snowball technique. An online survey was conducted and 153 nurses participated in our study. Socio-demographic characterization was conducted, levels of burnout and determinants were explored through multiple linear regression models for its three dimensions. High levels of personal, working, and patient burnout were present in 71 (46%), 68 (44%), and 33 nurses (22%), respectively. Most of them agreed that COVID-19 had an impact on their activities. Significant personal and work related burnout factors found were specialization in palliative care, self-perceived health status, unit type, weekly hours of work, and allocation to COVID-19 units. Gender was found to be a significant factor in patient-related burnout. There is a high level of burnout among nurses working in the Portuguese national network of palliative care. Measures for identification and mitigation of burnout are necessary to protect health care professionals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 8719
Author(s):  
Laura Tupenaite ◽  
Viktorija Zilenaite ◽  
Loreta Kanapeckiene ◽  
Tomas Gecys ◽  
Ineta Geipele

As woodworking and construction technologies improve, the construction of multi-storey timber buildings is gaining popularity worldwide. There is a need to look at the design of existing buildings and assess their sustainability. The aim of the present study is to assess the sustainability of modern high-rise timber buildings using multi-criteria assessment methods. The paper presents a hierarchical system of sustainability indicators and an assessment framework, developed by the authors. Based on this framework, the tallest timber buildings in different countries, i.e., Mjøstårnet in Norway, Brock Commons in Canada, Treet in Norway, Forte in Australia, Strandparken in Sweden and Stadthaus in UK, were compared across the three dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic/technological, and social). Research has revealed that none of the buildings is leading in all dimensions of sustainability. However, each building is unique and has its own strengths. Overall multi-criteria assessment of the buildings revealed that the Brock Commons building in Canada has received the highest rank in all dimensions of sustainability. The paper contributes to the theory and practice of sustainability assessment and extends the knowledge about high-rise timber buildings. The proposed sustainability assessment framework can be used by both academics and practitioners for assessment of high-rise timber buildings.


Author(s):  
Xiaoling Luo ◽  
Adrian Cottam ◽  
Yao-Jan Wu ◽  
Yangsheng Jiang

Trip purpose information plays a significant role in transportation systems. Existing trip purpose information is traditionally collected through human observation. This manual process requires many personnel and a large amount of resources. Because of this high cost, automated trip purpose estimation is more attractive from a data-driven perspective, as it could improve the efficiency of processes and save time. Therefore, a hybrid-data approach using taxi operations data and point-of-interest (POI) data to estimate trip purposes was developed in this research. POI data, an emerging data source, was incorporated because it provides a wealth of additional information for trip purpose estimation. POI data, an open dataset, has the added benefit of being readily accessible from online platforms. Several techniques were developed and compared to incorporate this POI data into the hybrid-data approach to achieve a high level of accuracy. To evaluate the performance of the approach, data from Chengdu, China, were used. The results show that the incorporation of POI information increases the average accuracy of trip purpose estimation by 28% compared with trip purpose estimation not using the POI data. These results indicate that the additional trip attributes provided by POI data can increase the accuracy of trip purpose estimation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira A. Brown

This research paper explores the possibilities for virtual reality (VR) documentation of media art installations. Based on an analysis of the characteristics of media art, and a survey of current documentation strategies, this paper investigates the viability of three-dimensional documentation. Four cross-disciplinary case studies are presented and analysed to demonstrate that VR documentation provides an immersive and richer reconstruction of a media art installation in three dimensions. In addition, the interactive components can be simulated within the VR environment, offering the possibility for curators and visitors to virtually re-experience the artwork. The case studies show that, although the creation of VR documentation can be costly and time-consuming, and currently requires a high-level of expertise, it can be a useful addition to established documentation strategies by providing essential information about the visual aspects of the artwork, its environment and the user’s multi-sensory experience.


2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Nidhi Tiwari

Ever since the focus on cultural diversity and identities acquired prominence globally, there has been a shift in limiting sustainability only to environmental, economic and social dimensions. Culture is more than just the manifestation of culture, for example, ‘the arts’ and should be viewed instead as the ‘whole social order’ (Williams 1983). This naturally leads to an interrogation of the construct of sustainable development. The definition which emerged in the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) is the widely accepted one and it states, “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”


Author(s):  
Semra Birgün ◽  
Sudi Apak

The aim of the present study is to develop a model for the integration of lean thinking into the corporate loan process with a special focus on the utilization of the value stream mapping technique. In line with this aim the study proposes a three-legged model specifically for the corporate loan processes of banks in Turkey as a developing country pursuing to integrate into the global financial world. The three dimensions included in the model are operational dimension, staff dimension and customer experience dimension. The study argues that by applying the proposed model based on the lean six sigma approach, banks can achieve and sustain a high level of improvement that would increase speed, value creation, cost-efficiency, profitability and customer satisfaction and reduce waste, processing time and effort, duplication and prolonging of transactions, redundancies, risks and errors in the whole corporate loan process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Requena-i-Mora ◽  
Dan Brockington

At the heart of any colonization project, and therefore any move to de-colonize, are ways of seeing nature and society, that then allow particular ways of governing each. This is plainly visible in a number of tools that exist to measure progress towards (or regress from) environmental sustainability. The tools use indices and indicators constructed mostly by environmental scientists and ecologists. As such, they are not neutral scientific instruments: they reflect the worldviews of their creators. These worldviews depend on three dimensions: the values they prioritize, the explanatory theories they use and the futures they envision. Through these means different tools produce conflicting notions of the sustainability of our economies and societies. In this article, we shed light onto the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that lie behind key international sustainability indices and indicators: the Environmental Performance Index,Domestic Material Consumption, Material Intensity, the Material Footprint, the Carbon Footprint, the Ecological Footprint and CO2 emissions (territorial). The variables included in these indices, the way they are measured, aggregated and weighted all imply a particular way of understanding the relationships between economy, society and environment. This divergence is most clearly visible in the fact that some indices are negatively correlated with each other. Where one index might plot growing environmental sustainability, another shows its decline. Our results highlight that those devices and the theories informing them are particularly interesting for way how colonialism is materialized. Some of these measurements hide the material roots of prosperity and the ecological (and economic) distributional conflicts exported to the poorer countries by the global North, and others show how its production and consumption levels are reliant upon a socio-ecological 'subsidy' imposed on Southern countries. These subsidies represent injustices that present a primafacie case for decolonizing indices and indicators of environmental governance.


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