The rich biodiversity of Cox’s Bazar is facing challenges of deforestation, land degradation, water depletion and contamination, waste mismanagement, and wildlife habitat loss. This research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the environmental impacts on Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, from the influx of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Our qualitative method uses in-depth face-to-face interviews with relevant professionals, including government officials, NGO representatives, and experts in the field. We also gathered data from secondary sources such as journal articles, reports, and press releases. We identified key environmental challenges through a thematic analysis using NVivo software. The findings urge strategic and sustainable policies to mitigate environmental degradation while considering refugee and host communities. This research has a global impact by contributing evidence and insight into the environmental challenges of large-scale refugee migration and the need for effective environmental management strategies in humanitarian contexts.

This study employs a conjoint experimental design to systematically examine the impact of three dimensions of energy justice—sustainability, affordability, and accessibility—on the investment preferences of Chinese urban and rural residents for residential photovoltaic (PV) systems, as well as the moderating effect of policy transparency. The results indicate that, within the sustainability dimension, environmental value significantly and positively drives willingness to invest and investment amount. In the accessibility dimension, clear property rights significantly enhance residents’ willingness to invest, while commercial loans and policy-based low-interest loans do not show significant effects compared to own funds for investment amount. In the affordability dimension, the cost-to-income ratio exhibits an asymmetric effect: a reduction in cost significantly increases the likelihood of investment, whereas an increase in cost leads to a strong aversion. Further analysis reveals that policy transparency dynamically amplifies the positive synergistic effects of environmental value and financing instruments, yet its direction is significantly moderated by cost burden contexts. The realization of energy justice requires coordinated institutional design to bridge the preference gap between urban and rural residents. This study provides theoretical underpinnings and empirical support for encouraging resident participation in value co-creation and just energy transitions.

Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly promoted for urban stormwater management, but its adoption remains limited. This paper investigates the Rockcliffe-Smythe Riverine Flood Mitigation Project (RRFMP) in Toronto, where a naturalised channel was eschewed in favour of a traditional, grey concrete channel. Through project document and interview content analysis, we find that the planning process unfolded through a fundamentally grey infrastructure framework, which prioritised technical feasibility, cost-efficiency, and stormwater conveyance over ecological and social co-benefits that would accrue to flood-affected communities. Infrastructure evaluation criteria excluded equity considerations and applied a loss-minimising lens that devalued GI’s additional co-benefits. Our contribution shows how political and institutional barriers to GI implementation that perpetuate traditional grey thinking and impede greening end up maintaining social and environmental inequities underlying flood vulnerabilities. We argue that integrating equity considerations, valuing co-benefits, and including multidisciplinary expertise can enable socially and ecologically just GI implementation for flood mitigation.

Cities and their representatives around the world are sharing and seeking policy information to address climate change. This study enhances the understanding of city-to-city learning by examining how knowledge related to climate change policy is acquired and applied. While city representatives often develop new understanding about climate change policies (individual learning), they utilize this new knowledge less frequently in organizational practices (organizational learning). Guided by the central question, “What key conditions influence city-to-city learning on climate change policy at the individual and organizational levels?”, the study draws on a large n-survey and advanced statistical analysis. Results revealed that power delegation and trust significantly influence individual learning, while organizational learning is driven by policy alignment, communication strategy, and leadership. Individual characteristics, however, were not found significant at either level. These insights highlight the need to further explore multi-level dynamics and offer practical recommendations to enhance learning practices on climate change.

Forests provide essential ecological and socio-economic benefits, yet forest restoration efforts often overlook how people perceive and engage with these ecosystems. Understanding public perceptions is crucial for designing effective restoration strategies, particularly in Europe, given its social, and ecological diversity. While previous research has recorded forest and restoration benefits, less is known about how individuals perceive these benefits, engage with forests, and participate in restoration efforts. We conducted structured key informant interviews with twenty individuals from selected regions in Sweden, Scotland, Germany, Serbia/Croatia, and Spain. Thematic analysis revealed two predominant perspectives on forests: one as “encompassing everything” and the other as “unique places.” Furthermore, results indicate that past restoration efforts often prioritised biodiversity conservation and hazard mitigation, while other forest benefits and uses were less integrated into these efforts. These findings highlight the need for inclusive restoration that reflects societal attitudes and aligns with community values.

Corporate environmental compliance has become a critical priority in China. Using a dataset of Chinese listed firms spanning from 2006 to 2021, we analyze the relationship between CEO reputation and corporate environmental compliance through firm-year fixed effects regression models. Our findings suggest that a strong CEO reputation is associated with a reduced probability of the firm committing environmental violations. Further analysis demonstrates that this effect is particularly pronounced in industries with high pollution levels, regions with poor air quality, firms led by CEOs with significant decision-making authority, and firms under intense media exposure. These results highlight the importance of CEO reputation as a strategic asset for firms, promoting not only reduced regulatory penalties but also a signal to sustainable environmental practices.

The environmental justice (EJ) movement has highlighted the importance of identifying and investing in communities that experience disproportionate environmental burdens. This review article aims to evaluate indices that have been developed to identify environmental justice communities and to outline an approach to creating a comprehensive EJ index. This review identified three distinct categories of EJ indicators that are commonly used to characterize EJ communities and proposes a conceptual approach for developing a more comprehensive EJ index. This approach includes the use of environmental pollution and socioeconomic data, along with indicators related to governance, civic engagement, and quality of life. Moreover, information must be available at the community level to ensure that the conditions of the population are accurately reflected. This approach also highlights the importance of engaging the community throughout the process of developing the EJ index used to evaluate the presence of environmental injustice.

In the realm of climate change, agricultural extension services are pivotal in overcoming obstacles to sustainable agriculture when accessed by farmers. However, existing research lacks a comprehensive understanding of their impact on farmers’ adaptation. This study, conducted in Rugao City, employs structured questionnaires and face-to-face interviews to explore the influence of agricultural extension services on farmers’ adoption of climate-smart technology. Utilizing propensity score matching, a two-stage instrumental variable-probit model, and mediation analysis, this study explores agricultural extension services for farmers’ direct effects and indirect effects from climate-smart technology adoption behavior as well as distribution effects. Our findings demonstrate a significant and direct positive effect of these services on technology adoption, persisting even after addressing model robustness and endogeneity concerns. Mechanism analysis reveals that agricultural extension services indirectly foster adoption by increasing farmers’ perceived adaptation efficacy as well as perceived market and technology risks while reducing their perception of natural risks. Moreover, heterogeneity analysis indicates that distributional effects of agricultural extension services are evident across different age and socioeconomic groups. Our findings highlight the necessity of inclusive policies to improve extension service accessibility and promote climate-smart technology adoption tailored to diverse efficacy and risk perceptions as well as demographic characteristics in rural China and other developing countries.

Mixed crop-livestock farming is often presented as a lever to conciliate agricultural production and the provision of environmental services. This paper examines the opportunity cost of providing environmental services in mixed crop-livestock farming to investigate conditions under which the double objective is achievable. To do this, we develop an analytical framework to estimate production possibility frontiers, which includes both agricultural production and environmental services, while relaxing the traditional non-negativity assumption of the opportunity costs of environmental services. Using a French dataset, we find that the opportunity costs of environmental service indicators (biodiversity and carbon sequestration) are mostly negative. In addition, econometric estimations show that the share of grasslands, high labor intensity, labeling, and direct payments could increase the probability of having non-positive opportunity costs. These results suggest that although the double objective can be pursued voluntarily by farmers (non-positive opportunity costs), it is labor-intensive and can be enhanced through subsidization and labeling.

Due to the worsening issues related to resources and the environment, industrial green transformation (IGT) has emerged as an unavoidable solution in the present stage. Likewise, renewable energy technology innovation (RETI) is indispensable in driving the industrial development path toward green transformation. Initially, this study measures the current status of RETI and IGT and then applies fixed effects models and dynamic panel threshold models to analyse the underlying mechanism between RETI and IGT utilising China’s regional data from 2006 to 2019. The results support a significant positive association between RETI and IGT. It also shows that China’s IGT is low with significant rough development characteristics, while RETI yields progressive trends. Besides, RETI significantly contributes to IGT in eastern and central areas of China, while western areas of China produce insignificant effects. Manifestly, RETI possesses a non-linear effect on IGT, which implies that the positive effect of RETI on IGT gradually strengthens when R&D investment intensity and industrial development level crosses a specific threshold value. Similar results are endorsed using alternative instruments, proxies, and estimators, offering reliable outcomes and recommendations.