A way for livelihood improvement: Systematic review on bamboo forest research

Invasions of water hyacinth critically threaten aquatic ecosystems and human livelihoods. The study investigates the impact of water hyacinth proliferation on ecological and socio-economic conditions and management strategies in Kuttanad region, India. A mixed-methods approach, including surveys, Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) mapping, and stakeholder interviews, was employed to investigate the impact on the local communities. Results show that water hyacinths grow in many different backwaters, lakes, and canals and cause significant environmental damage, financial losses, and health issues for local communities. The Composite Vulnerability Index (CVI) of 3.56 (on a scale of 1–5) shows that the Pulinkunnu community is vulnerable to uncontrolled water hyacinth growth. The findings reveal significant environmental degradation, economic losses, especially income from fishing activities, and health risks associated with unchecked water hyacinth growth, highlighting the vulnerability of the affected communities. The study also identifies local knowledge and community engagement as critical components in developing sustainable management strategies that align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By proposing innovative solutions like biofertilizer production, the research emphasizes the need for integrated management practices that control the spread of water hyacinth and enhance community resilience and economic opportunities.

Adapting ecosystem restoration for sustainable development in a changing world

In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aiming for global targets by 2030, are tracked by a monitoring framework comprising 231 environmental, social, and economic indicators. The framework provides data to assess whether, across countries, environmental policies are: (a) Addressing environmental pressures, (b) Linked to environmental improvements, and (c) Linked with social benefits delivered by healthy environments. While several studies have analyzed the implementation and impacts of the SDGs, there remains a critical research gap in assessing the linkage between environmental policies and their potential to deliver multiple ecological and social benefits. This study examines the efficacy of environmental policies and their implications for global environmental health and social wellbeing. We use a generalized linear modeling approach to test for correlations between SDG indicators. We show that some environmental policies, particularly protected areas and sustainable forest certification, are linked with environmental improvements, mainly in forest and water ecosystems. However, we find no evidence that environmental improvements are linked with positive social impacts. Finally, environmental pressures, including freshwater withdrawal, domestic material consumption, and tourism, are linked with environmental degradation. Environmental policy responses are generally increasing across countries. Despite this, the state of the environment globally continues to decline. Governments must focus on understanding why environmental policies have not been sufficient to reverse environmental decline, particularly concerning the pressures that continue to degrade the environment. To better track progress toward sustainable development, we recommend that the SDG monitoring framework is supplemented with additional indicators on the state of the environment.

Mountain Biodiversity Is Central to Sustainable Development in Mountains and Beyond

The Qingyuan mushroom culture system (QMCS) in Zhejiang Province has been recognized as the source of the world’s first artificial cultivation of mushrooms with a history of more than 800 years. The system embodies the farming wisdom of the local people who have adapted themselves to and utilized nature and has integrated the traditional bark hacking method with multiple modern patterns for mushroom cultivation based on artificial microbial strains. We have investigated the input–output operation of farmers and assessed and analyzed emergy indicators in a bid to reflect and compare their economic and ecological benefits, as well as their sustainable development by analyzing the three typical mushroom cultivation patterns. The cost-benefit analysis of the three patterns shows that the sawdust medium-cultivated method (SMCM) is characterized by dominance in both net income without labor cost and labor productivity; while the evaluation based on emergy indicators has proven that each has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of ecological and economic benefits and sustainable development. Among them, the bark hacking method (BHM) features the highest utilization rates of local and renewable resources, the smallest damage to the environment, the lowest production efficiency, and the highest exchange efficiency, but the sawdust medium-cultivated method is just the opposite, and the log-cultivated method (LCM) is the most favorable one for sustainable development. As its agricultural heritage, the QMCS’ core of dynamic protection and adaptive management lies in enhancing the sustainable development of its agricultural production methods. It is recommended that the three patterns be improved by targeting their respective shortcomings and at the same time, integrate their advantages to explore a new sustainable development pattern for mushroom cultivation.

Several decades of technical accomplishments in making environmental improvements to products and processes have taught us that it is possible to achieve environmental improvements while not making real strides towards the goal of sustainability. Cleaner products, in practice, can boost demand for consumption, thus using greater per capita non-renewable natural resources. For instance, the improvement of automobile engine performance has paved the way for our propensity to drive bigger cars with lower mileage per gallon or simply to drive longer distances. A better direction for the future therefore begs for achieving sustainability than for merely improving environmental performance. Realizing the importance of resource conservation and its societal and ecological benefits, many multi-national corporations have already begun programs to address sustainable development issues. Sustainable development, however, is not limited to manufacturing systems only. Civic units, such as cities, regions, and watersheds in many parts of the world are also being evaluated from this viewpoint. These activities undertaken in the interest of sustainable development are in keeping with the awareness created by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). As is evident, sustainability refers to a system that needs to be appropriately defined. Not all systems we can consider can be defined on the basis of global environmental, ecological and developmental attributes and metrics. Sustainability of a village cannot obviously mean the same thing as sustainability of the planet. For systems smaller than the planet Earth, care has to be taken in choosing metrics so as to assure that the metrics provide a real measure of progress towards sustainability while not adversely affecting the surroundings. When done correctly, progress towards sustainability of smaller systems will complement the sustainability of the planet. As I have attempted to show in a Perspective article published in the AIChE Journal (vol 49, no. 8, p. 1929, 2003), if we can design aggregate metrics to represent the environmental, ecological and developmental aspects of a system, we achieve real progress towards sustainability only when all three metrics show improvement independently. Finding a scientific way to devise these three aggregate metrics is, however, a difficult undertaking. The greatest challenge before scientists, technologists, and policy makers today is to devise sustainability metrics that describe quantitatively progress made in a system, be it a manufacturing process or an ecosystem. Someday in the future when we have some expertise in certifying progress towards sustainability, we would need to be able to recognize attainment of sustainability when we actually arrive there. Editorial Clean Techn Environ Policy 6 (2003) 1 DOI 10.1007/s10098-003-0237-4

Critiquing Economic Frameworks in Sustainable Development: Health Equity, Resource Management and Materialism Anisa Khadem Nwachuku This collection examines mainstream economics discourse as it relates to three topics in sustainable development: health equity, sustainable non-renewable resource management and development approaches. The themes of the three papers are as follows: Political Dimensions of Health Equity in Mozambique In order to promote equity in health, analysis should look beyond the standard economic definitions used to identify underserved and vulnerable populations. Human and Social Capital, Compensation or Cost? Reexamining the Hartwick Rule In order to achieve sustainable non-renewable resource management, planners must go beyond the current economic theoretical framework and consider the direct impacts of extraction on human and social capital. The Materialism Paradigm – Neither Sustainable, nor Development The way economists have understood prosperity is materialistic and development is exporting this welfarereducing paradigm. The synthesis of the series The frameworks used in economics to address a variety of issues in sustainable development have limited efficacy and would benefit from insights originating outside the discipline.

Bamboo is regarded as the ‘green gold’ or ‘poor man’s timber’ and is one of the highest producing global renewable natural resources. It is a versatile plant possessing more than 1500 uses and forms an indispensable component in the socio-economy of the rural ecosystem in Northeast India. Bamboo groves or patches are observed to be situated in the two hill districts of Assam, namely Dima Hasao and Karbi Anglong. The present study aimed at understanding the socio-economic dependency of the Karbi tribe on bamboo resources as well as to document the utilization of bamboo in the cultural festivals of the Karbi community for sustenance of their culture & ethnic heritage. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), focus-group discussions, key-informant interviews and semi-structured household surveys were deployed for the purpose of primary data collection. Results revealed that Bambusa tulda, locally referred to as Jati bamboo is predominantly available and observed in the homestead gardens. However, in the natural forested regions, both Bambusa tulda & Dendrocalamus hamiltonii, locally referred to as Kako/Kaipho had a major occupancy. Bamboo is intimately utilized by the locals for the purpose of construction and artwork, handicrafts and agricultural as well as fishing implements. In addition, Bamboo plays an indispensable role in various ethnic rituals and cultural festivals of the Karbi tribe namely Chujoon, Rongker, Karbi Youth Festival, etc. However, bamboo sale and marketability has reduced over the years. Shutting down of paper mills is one of the major reasons towards less involvement in Bamboo farming and management. Illegal trading and third-party exploitation were also reported in the bamboo supply-chain.

Bamboo forms an essential and integral component of the natural landscape as well as the socio-cultural and economic lives of the people of Northeast India. India is home to nearly 45% of global bamboo patches and Northeastern Region (NER) comprises of two-thirds of the total growing stock of the country. However, there has been a lot of challenges and loopholes identified in terms of availability of consistent and accurate data on different aspects of bamboo such as area coverage, productivity, carbon sequestration, feedstock, consumption & livelihood. Earth observation data has been proved to be highly instrumental and successful towards spatial mapping of natural resources, including bamboo ecosystems. The present study aimed at delineating & analyzing the bamboo groves of Karbi-Anglong district of Assam using geospatial technologies. Random Forest Classifier technique was adopted for supervised classification in Google Earth Engine (GEE) using the necessary scripts and codes. Bamboo Index (BI) for the study area was computed by incorporating Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Stress Index (SI). Results of the research work revealed that bamboo patches in the study area had BI values ranging from 0.42 to 0.49. Furthermore, majority of the area was observed to be occupied by the forests (Tropical Moist Deciduous Forests & Tropical Semi-Evergreen Forests) followed by Bamboo groves, Agriculture, Fallow Land, Barren Land, Waterbodies and Built-up areas. The findings were instrumental in contributing to the ambit of information on the Bamboo Groves of Karbi-Anglong District, Assam. This could prove to be vital in creation of a reliable database for monitoring and management of one of the most essential renewable Non-Timber Forest Resources considered as ‘green gold’ and ‘poor man’s timber’ thereby contributing towards elimination of few of the gaps and challenges which has direct implications on the growth and development of the bamboo sector in Northeastern region.

Bamboos are also known to as ‘green gold’ and ‘poor man’s timber’ and is one of the most important groups of plants belonging to family poaceae (Gramineae) and is used as an alternate for timber. They have wide range of uses, such as food sources, building materials, paper etc. they have wide socio-economic values. Bamboos also play a very important role in biodiversity conservation. More than 1250 bamboo species of 75 genera are recorded from around the world. In this paper we recorded 9 bamboo species under 4 genera from Tizit area in Mon district of Nagaland, India.

There can be no health or sustainable development without mental health underscores the inseparable link between the SDGs and mental health. Consequently, achieving the SDGs is a pathway to achieving mental health. Tourism stands as a significant contributor to positively impacting the mental health and well-being of communities. Bamboo, known as 'Green Gold' due to its carbon sequestration capabilities and other eco-friendly traits, aids in reducing carbon emissions and achieving the SDGs. The researcher has formulated a model aimed at achieving the SDGs while addressing climate change concerns and promoting well-being.

Introduction: <scp> <i>Quo Vadis</i> </scp> , Latin America? Human Rights, Environmental Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals

Blockchain technology as a means of sustainable development

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 asserts that social security is an inalienable human right. Realizing this human right is often considered, simply, as a matter of political will and of administrative aptitude. In these terms, the progressive realization of the human right to social security may be viewed as the outcome of an appropriately‐resourced political and bureaucratic process. Such a perspective, however, is clearly inadequate. Characteristically, bureaucracies are designed to cater to the needs of all, based on common procedures and common deliverables designed for the “typical” case. Yet such approaches often lack the necessary flexibility and resources to make a distinction between individuals, which acknowledge their respective differences and needs. To meet the international commitment to progressively realize universal social security coverage, social security administrations are key actors. However imperative this role may be, if the pursuit of this commitment fails to respect people's differences this will put at risk the meeting in full of what is envisioned by the human right to social security. To this end, this special issue aims to foster an understanding that the goal of universal coverage must necessarily also respect and respond to the individual needs of each and every person.