The indispensable role of resilience in rational landslide risk management for social sustainability

Landslide disasters reflect the conflict between human society and the natural environment,posing challenges to the sustainable development of mountain regions.Identification of potential landslides,estimation of the degree of damage and potential losses of elements at risk,and control of the loss are the major tasks of landslide risk management.Resilience is defined as a social system’s comprehensive abilities to cope with disasters,including the abilities to prepare,anticipate,preserve,absorb,respond,resist,recover,mitigate,learn,and adapt.As an indispensable role,resilience enables more rational landslide risk management for social sustainability.However,quantitative landslide risk management does not pay sufficient attention to the role of resilience.Hence,in this paper,the role of resilience in a landslide risk management framework is systematically discussed.A quantita-tive landslide risk management framework consists of hazard analysis,exposure analysis,risk estimation,risk evaluation,and risk control.In hazard analysis,resilience assessment could help identify potential landslides that could cause significant damage due to the poor resilience of the elements at risk.Resilience assessment in exposure analysis might aid in identifying the most vulnerable elements or regions to certain landslides.Consid-eration of resilience in risk estimation aids in the calculation of indirect losses and improves the results of direct losses analysis.In risk evaluation,resilience as a disaster-coping ability will impact the social system’s landslide risk tolerance threshold.Enhancing resilience is an essential strategy to reduce the vulnerability of social sys-tems.We also proposed that the efficient use of risk information will increase the accuracy of landslide resilience assessments.

The Importance of Occupational Health and Safety(OHS)and OHS Budgeting in terms of Social Sustainability in the Construction Sector

Nowadays,sustainability is one of the most important construction sector goals,as it is in most other sectors.However,sustainability in the construction sector is dealt mostly with its environmental and economic dimensions,and its social dimension remains in the background.This situation causes the Occupational Health and Safety(OHS),which is perhaps the most important issue within the scope of social sustainability,to be addressed on its own,and its relationship with sustainability to be not introduced clearly.This study discussed the relationship between social sustainability and OHS in the construction sector.Based on the fact that in construction projects,the sustainability goal should be revealed forward to a great extent at the design stage,how to contribute to OHS by budgeting OHS activities together with project activities was explained.We intended to contribute to the provision of OHS and thus the social sustainability of construction projects by revealing how the budgeting will be done and how much OHS budget will be,by referring to the studies in the literature conducted about OHS budgeting and presented robust numerical data.The study is expected to help construction sector stakeholders to understand the relationship between social sustainability and OHS and to provide a clear picture of the role of budgeting in this respect.

Social and Economic Considerations for Creating Sustainable Climate Change Haven Communities

As Climate Change Haven Communities are constructed across the Northern Hemisphere, it will be necessary to attract two types of migrants to populate them. The first group consists of professionals and companies in eco-sustainable businesses, such as law firms, insurance companies, investment firms, banking, technological innovation, mass media, medical research and pharmaceutical research. The second group will consist of persons engaged in organic/eco-sustainable agriculture whose crops and animal husbandry practices can be transferred successfully to Climate Change Haven regions. The present research focuses on the social and economic variables that must be taken into account to insure that each new Climate Change Haven Community becomes successfully integrated with the local population and forms a cohesive, harmonious social structure. Examples are given from the United States, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Rural sustainable development:A case study of the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone in China

Sustainable development is the central theme of modern global development.With the arrival of the urban era,the vulnerability and instability of rural areas have significantly increased,and rural sustainable development faces serious challenges.To address these issues,the study took the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone in China under the National Sustainable Development Agenda as a case,combined with economic,social and land use data during 2016-2020,and applied Granger causality test method to explore the theoretical and practical pathways of“innovation-driven rural sustainable development”.The results showed that rural sustainable development and economic sustainability displayed a trend of synergistic change,with“explosive”growth from 2018 to 2020.The social sustainability steadily increased from 2016 to 2020.Ecological and spatial sustainability continuously declined during the study period.Moreover,the rural innovation capacity of the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone displayed rapid growth during 2016-2020.Although the rural innovation capacity of the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone has rapidly improved,it has a weak driving effect on rural sustainable development and economic sustainability.There are two primary challenges that must be overcome to ensure the rural sustainable development of the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone.The first challenge is the imbalance among the multi-dimensional relationships in the process of rural sustainable development,and the second challenge is the weakening of rural innovation capacity to drive rural sustainable development.To overcome these challenges,this study proposed a systematic pathway for rural sustainable development in the Zaozhuang Innovation Demonstration Zone from multidimensions,such as policy actions,technologies,projects,and institutional guarantees,and formed a universal and representative“Zaozhuang model”.This study expands the theoretical foundation of rural sustainable development and provides theoretical and practical support for innovation-driven rural sustainable development.

How can social enterprises contribute to sustainable pro-poor tourism development?

"Tourism-Assisting the Poor" has been an important approach in anti-poverty strategy. Studies suggest that the conventional tourism model fails to generate benefits for the poor and to some extent enlarges the gap between the poor and the rich, which subsequently causes more social problems. Pro-poor tourism(PPT) is regarded as an alternative model. Precisely targeted assistance to the poor is the key to initiating this model, while the institutional change and implementation mechanism are essential to run it successfully and sustainably. Social entrepreneurship focusing on social values while adopting modern business philosophy has been introduced recently as an instrument in helping disadvantage population. This paper takes the Smangus community in Taiwan as an example to explore the role of social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in PPT development. It also discusses their implications for the anti-poverty practice in other regions including ethnic areas in China.

Efficiency for Sustainability—Smart Energy Management in Social Housing

An average energy consumption distribution in household at the worldwide level illustrates that more than three quarters of total consumption is contributed to room heating and almost 12% to water heating for all the living necessities. Although a slow fall of domestic energy consumption has occurred in the recent 20 years (from 1990 to 2011) with a regular decrease between ?1.2% and ?1.4%/year per dwelling as a result of a decrease income corresponding to the economic crisis in 2008, whereas energy prices for households has increase since 2004, the energy cost of paying especially for space heating and domestic hot water (DHW) supplying is still going up. At the EU level, the building sector including residential, commercial and other service buildings is regarded as the key to greater energy efficiency, because according to statistics the final energy consumption for building sector has taken the largest proportion about 40% until 2020, which is apparently higher than the share in transportation sector by 32% and industry sector by 24%. In the scope of the ongoing research and investigation on energy efficiency in residential fields and its impact on environment and climate, how to investigate smart energy management methods for the promotion of sustainable consumption and green living patterns has been already paid much attention, however it has to be studied further and thoroughly, especially among energy consumer groups whose energy costs have no or just little relevance or dependence on major income source, which leads to a lack of energy saving awareness by users. Energy consumers living in social housing buildings represent this kind of energy consumer group which receive the governmental relief fund as their family income in a great measure, they have different culture, educational and age backgrounds. This paper presents firstly some research results based on authors’ practical experiences on the projects about energy efficiency in social housing buildings in European countries, which is supposed to be introduced in the aspects of subjective and objective energy saving potentials. It is proposed to be able to provide valuable and referential advices exchange our experience on a sustainable development in affordable housing.

Design Strategies for the Sustainable Improvement of Urban Social Assistance Buildings

Transformation and innovation of assistance model promote the transition of urban social assistance building to multi-functional building. This paper, on the basis of analyzing complexity and peculiarity of urban social assistance building, as well as researches and practices of sustainable improvement of domestic architecture, proposed environmental, social and economic objectives of the sustainable improvement of urban social assistance building, and elaborated design strategies from the perspectives of site selection and its impact on environment, application, evaluation and utilization of ecological technologies, reform of old buildings, flexible internal layout of building and combination of routine use and disaster use design, so as to improve social benefits and social assessment of assistance buildings sustainably, and to balance humanistic concerns and social resource input.

Promoting Sustainability with Ecological,Economic and Social Dimensions in Developing Countries

Sustainable development is one of the most important ideas,and goals of our time.It is defined as"development which meets the needs and aspirations of the current generation and develops safe and sound society for future generation".Achieving sustainable development thus involves a vigorous and urgent debate on different dimensions.The different dimensions of sustainability as a framework involve all issues such as science,technology,economic growth and development,health,education,finance investment and trade,politics,natural disasters,population growth and terrorism,etc.No single dimension is responsible to develop sustainable society.This article mainly described the integrated relationship among the three dimensions of sustainability.

Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainable Development Goals: An Exploratory Study in the Context of the Society Domain

Artificial Intelligence (AI) experienced significant advancements in recent years, and its potential power is already recognized across various industries. Yet, the rise of AI has led to a growing concern about its impact on meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of this paper was to evaluate contributions and the potential influence of AI to sustainable development in the society domain. Furthermore, the study analyzed GPT-3 responses, as one of the largest language models developed by OpenAI, descriptively. We conducted a set of queries on the SDGs to gather information on GPT-3’s perceptions of AI impact on sustainable development. Analysis of GPT-3’s contribution potential towards the SDGs showcased its broad range of capabilities for contributing to the SDGs in areas such as education, health, and communication. The study findings provide valuable insights into the contributions of AI to sustainable development in the society domain and highlight the importance of proper regulations to promote the responsible use of AI for sustainable development. We highlighted the potential for improvement in neural language processing skills of GPT-3 by avoiding imitating weak human writing styles with more mistakes in longer texts.

农户电商创业行为研究:文献回顾与进路展望

从制度情景、市场驱动、个体选择方面探析农户电商创业行为发生机理。对电商创业减贫效应与不同电商农户创业行为的异质性进行阐释,指出空间资源异质性以及知识异质性造成农户创业的差异。从体制机制、组织形式、风险感知等维度评析低度嵌入互联网的农户电商发展问题,并从个体、市场与社会因素剖析电商创业行为发展影响因素。指出农户电商创业行为研究需要在可持续性上不断深化,拓展研究视角、创新研究方法、深化机制研究,接续推进农户电商创业可持续发展关键在于建立良性的政策传导机制、有效的资源链接机制、联动的多元参与机制,健康的价值引导机制。