Sustainability Trade-offs Research Articles

Greater adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is associated with lower diet-related greenhouse gas emissions but higher costs.

Few studies have evaluated the sustainability of popular diet patterns in the US, which limits policy action and impedes consumer efficacy to make sustainable dietary changes. This study filled this gap by evaluating the relationship between diet quality, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), and diet cost for plant-based, restricted carbohydrate, low grain, low fat, and time restricted diet patterns. Dietary data were retrieved from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2011-2018, n = 8,146) and linked with data on GHGE and food prices from publicly available databases. Diet quality was measured using the Healthy Eating Index-2015. The present study (1) compared the mean diet quality, GHGE, and diet cost between diet patterns, (2) evaluated the association of diet quality to GHGE and diet cost for each diet pattern, and (3) estimated the contribution of food sources to GHGE and diet cost for each diet pattern. Higher diet quality was associated with lower GHGE for the general population and for most diet patterns (p < 0.01) except for the plant-based and time restricted diet patterns (p > 0.05). Higher diet quality was associated with higher cost for the general population and for all dietary patterns (p < 0.01) except the time restricted diet pattern (p > 0.05). Protein foods, mostly beef, accounted for the largest share of GHGE (29-40%) and diet cost (28-47%) for all diet patterns except plant-based. Higher diet quality was associated with lower GHGE but was often accompanied by higher diet cost. These sustainability trade-offs can help inform major policy discussions in the US and shed light on further research needs in the area of food systems transformation.

Sustainability and climate resilience metrics and trade-offs in transport infrastructure asset recovery

Sustainability and climate resilience metrics and trade-offs in transport infrastructure asset recovery

Tilapia aquaculture systems in Egypt: Characteristics, sustainability outcomes and entry points for sustainable aquatic food systems

The future demand for fish and other aquatic foods requires the sustainable intensification of related production systems. However, policy and investment decisions for the sustainable intensification of aquaculture systems are usually hindered by the lack of benchmarking data about their actual sustainability performance, often resulting in poorly developed and implemented interventions that ignore potential sustainability trade-offs. This is a reality in many of the leading aquaculture producers in the developing world like Egypt. In this study we analyzed farm-level data from 402 aquaculture producers in the Kafr El Sheikh governorate in Egypt, to characterize and benchmark the performance of tilapia production systems against key sustainability outcomes. For the analysis we used a combination of statistical tools such as ordinary least square regressions, simultaneous quantile regressions and propensity score matching. We focussed on how the production characteristics and practices of different tilapia production systems intersect with economic, food security, and environmental outcomes that cover multiple dimensions of sustainability. We found that differences in these production characteristics and practices were significantly associated with the sustainability performance of tilapia production systems. In particular, our results show that yields in monocultural systems (10,460.5 ton/ha) were significantly higher than in polyculture systems (8404.7 ton/ha). Furthermore, despite the generally positive economic, food security, and environmental outcomes of several of the studied systems, some trade-offs emerge both between and within these sustainability dimensions.

Sustainability trade-offs in animal husbandry: Consumers’ choice when they can't have it all

Abstract This paper investigates consumer choices in the presence of conflicting goals, with and without information making conflicts salient. An experimental online study was conducted with a sample of German consumers, focusing on pig farming. The results show that personal health benefits outweigh animal welfare considerations, while the latter still weigh more than environment-related sustainability attributes. Providing information can have ambiguous effects, depending on the sustainability trade-off being investigated and the type of information provided. The findings reveal that consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences for different protected goods, and these differences can be attributed to psychographic and socio-demographic factors.

O36 Herbivore nutrition, ecosystems and nature-based solutions – what are the sustainability opportunities and trade-offs?

O36 Herbivore nutrition, ecosystems and nature-based solutions – what are the sustainability opportunities and trade-offs?

Developing an indicator-based assessment framework for assessing the sustainability of urban water management

Currently, Metropolitans throughout the globe are confronting crucial obstacles to accomplishing water management sustainability, encompassing climate change, explosive urbanization, and swelling populations. This study proposes a framework to evaluate the sustainability of urban water management (UWM), underscoring the significance of expert engagement in identifying appropriate indicators. The study adopts a novel two-step procedure for screening over 300 candidate indicators. A two-stage procedure was followed initially, underpinned by SMART criteria. In the second stage, 24 fit-to-purpose indicators were selected through the fuzzy Delphi method. The framework is subsequently finalized by categorizing the final indicators into seven categories, namely “Water Security,” “Water Quality,” “Drinking Water,” Sanitation and Reuse, “Financial Management,” “Governance,” and “Risk and Disaster Management,” thus facilitating better understanding and linking of UWM practices among diverse stakeholders. The paper demonstrates its application in Mashhad City as a real case. The rapid adoption of the proposed framework in Iran underscores its efficacy in facilitating stakeholders to cultivate collective commitment. This indicator-based framework can assist in identifying essential sustainability trade-offs. In addition, it can also be a practical approach for recognizing water-related priorities to achieve urban water management sustainability. The suggested framework can inspire further expansion of indicator-based frameworks for UWM.

Sustainable economy trade-offs and conflicts in and with the forest (Research Trend)

Sustainable economy trade-offs and conflicts in and with the forest (Research Trend)

Sustainability Performance Frontiers

When the concept of strategic trade-offs was introduced by Skinner in 1969, an intense academic debate followed. On one hand, World Class Manufacturing proponents rejected the idea whilst others recommended the careful consideration of trade-offs when designing production systems. Today, history repeats itself, and the same debate exists in the field of sustainable operations management, with some researchers documenting trade-offs between economic and environmental performance, and others rejecting this view. This paper shows how this debate has profound implementation implications: the first view calls for incremental improvements, whereas the latter calls for radical innovation. This paper combines the behavioural theory of the firm with Schmenner and Swink's (1998) theory of performance frontiers to define sustainability performance frontiers. These frontiers define legitimate managerial boundaries for searching for sustainability and remove the perceived conflict between the two views of sustainability trade-offs.

Greenhouse gas emissions, cost, and diet quality of specific diet patterns in the United States

BackgroundMajor policy agendas are calling for accelerated investment in research that addresses the impact of diet patterns on multiple domains of sustainability. ObjectivesTo evaluate the comparative greenhouse gas emissions, diet cost, and diet quality of plant-based, low-grain, restricted carbohydrate, low-fat, and time-restricted diet patterns on a daily per capita basis. MethodsDietary data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2013–2016, n = 4025) were merged with data on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs) and food prices from multiple databases. The Healthy Eating Index-2015 was used to measure diet quality. ResultsThe plant-based diet pattern had the lowest GHGEs [3.5 kg carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq); 95% confidence interval (CI): 3.3, 3.8 kg CO2eq] and among the lowest diet cost ($11.51; 95% CI: $10.67, $12.41), but diet quality (45.8; 95% CI: 43.3, 48.5) was similar (P > 0.005) to most other diet patterns. All of the sustainability impacts of the low-grain diet pattern were intermediate. The restricted carbohydrate diet pattern had the highest diet cost ($18.46; 95% CI: $17.80, $19.13) but intermediate diet quality (46.8; 95% CI: 45.7, 47.9) and moderate-to-high GHGEs (5.7 kg CO2eq; 95% CI: 5.4, 5.9 kg CO2eq). The low-fat diet pattern had the highest diet quality (52.0; 95% CI: 50.8, 53.1) and intermediate GHGEs (4.4 kg CO2eq; 95% CI: 4.1, 4.6 kg CO2eq) and diet cost ($14.53; 95% CI: $13.73, $15.38). The time-restricted diet pattern had among the lowest diet quality score (42.6; 95% CI: 40.8, 44.6), had GHGEs similar to most other diet patterns (4.6 kg CO2eq; 95% CI: 4.2, 5.0 kg CO2eq), and low-to-moderate diet cost ($12.34; 95% CI: $11.38, $13.40). ConclusionsMost diet patterns are associated with sustainability trade-offs. The nature of these trade-offs can help inform discussions on food and nutrition policy in the United States, including the National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, and future Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Integrating Multi-Criteria Techniques in Life-Cycle Tools for the Circular Bioeconomy Transition of Agri-Food Waste Biomass: A Systematic Review

Agri-food waste biomass (AWB) is consolidating as a relevant bioresource for supplying material products and energy in a circular bioeconomy. However, its recovery and sustainable processing present trade-offs that must be understood. The integration of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) into life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools has emerged as a novel way to address this challenge. This paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review to critically synthesize how MCDA has been integrated into LCA in an assessment framework and how helpful it is in AWB’s circular bioeconomy transition. The literature shows that the most studied AWBs are rice husk, sugarcane bagasse, and household food waste. These are processed through the technologies of composting, anaerobic digestion, and pyrolysis for applications such as biofuels, bioenergy, and soil amendment. Environmental LCA (E-LCA) is the most widely used LCA tool, while both the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for ordering preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) are the most applied techniques for MCDA. The current trend of integrating MCDA into LCA does not fully cover the LCA phases, favoring solely the impact assessment phase and indicating that the other phases are overlooked. The potential and involvement of the stakeholders are partially explored. Although there are holistic sustainability assessments, the social implications are rarely considered. The number of MCDA/LCA studies is expected to increase, assessments at the micro-, meso-, and macro-scales to become more articulated, and the impact of the results to become more aligned with government and company goals.

Quartet trade-off for regional water resources allocation optimization with multiple water sources: A decentralized bi-level multi-objective model under hybrid uncertainty

Multiple uncertainties from water resource allocation have posed new challenges to balanced regional development. On the one hand, in the context of global water shortage crisis, groundwater, as an important water supply module, is facing severe risk of shortage. On the other hand, the regional authorities need to coordinate the contradictory water demand brought by the heterogeneous water use objectives from multiple water use levels, and these demands are also subject to complex uncertainties. How to mitigate the risks posed by uncertainties, ensure regional water security and balance participants, is attracting the keen attention of decision-makers around the world. Therefore, this study establishes a decentralized bi-level multi-objective regional water resources allocation (RWRA) optimization model under hybrid uncertainty, aiming at an optimal quartet trade-off of equity, sustainability, equilibrium, and efficiency. To deal with the hybrid uncertainty in the model, water demand is set as a random fuzzy number, and the groundwater constraint is combined with fuzzy chance-constrained programming (FCCP). Then, the decentralized bi-level multi-objective model is solved by the bi-level interactive method based on the satisfactory solution incorporated with the chaotic-particle swarm optimization (CPSO) algorithm. The proposed model and solution approach are then applied to the Dongjiang River Basin in Guangdong Province of China to verify the validity and utility of the model. The results show that (1) the model can effectively meet the different objectives requirements of regional authority and sub-areas; (2) groundwater constraint parameters has a significant impact on the model results, especially the Gini coefficient decreases by 13.6% when groundwater is used as a water source supplement; (3) from single-level model to decentralized bi-level model, the satisfactory balance of the two levels increases from 0.1457 to 0.793, which indicates that the decentralized bi-level model makes the two levels more balanced than the single-level model. Based on the results, some management recommendations for participants are finally provided.

Global land-use and sustainability implications of enhanced bioenergy import of China

Most ambitious climate change mitigation pathways indicate multifold bioenergy expansion to support the energy transition, which may trigger increased biomass imports from major bioenergy-consuming regions. However, the potential global land-use change and sustainability trade-offs alongside the bioenergy trade remain poorly understood. Here, we apply the Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM) to investigate and compare the effects of different increasing bioenergy import strategies in line with the 1.5℃-compatible bioenergy demand in China, which is projected to represent 30% of global bioenergy consumption by the middle of the century. The results show that sourcing additional bioenergy from different world regions could pose heterogeneous impacts on the local and global land systems, with implications on food security, greenhouse gas emissions, and water and fertilizer demand. In the worst cases under strict trade settings, relying on biomass import may induce up to 25% of unmanaged forests converted to managed ones in the supplying regions, while in an open trade environment, increasing bioenergy imports would drastically change the trade flows of staple agricultural or forestry products, which would further bring secondary land-use changes in other world regions. Nevertheless, an economically optimized biomass import portfolio for China has the potential to reduce global overall sustainability trade-offs with food security and emission abatement. However, these benefits vary with indicator and time and are conditional on stricter land-use regulations. Our findings thus shed new light on the design of bioenergy trade strategies and the associated land-use regulations in individual countries in the era of deep decarbonization.

Stakeholder perspectives on cocoa’s living income differential and sustainability trade-offs in Ghana

Policy responses to balance the trade-offs between nature conservation and socioeconomic development have recently come to the fore in Ghana – the world’s second largest producer of cocoa. In 2019, the Government of Ghana introduced the Living Income Differential (LID), which requires buyers to pay an additional US$400 per ton of cocoa on top of the floor price. With low farmer incomes identified as a critical driver of multiple sustainability issues in Ghana’s cocoa sector, this differential is meant to be directly transferred to cocoa farmers in response to the persistent challenge of poverty in cocoa farming communities. Using the Q methodology, we engaged over 50 stakeholders from various levels (international policy experts, cocoa sector stakeholders in Ghana, and cocoa farmers) to understand how the LID is perceived, including its potential to transform the rural poverty complex embedded in Ghana’s cocoa supply chain. While the LID is lauded for increasing producer price across the board, our findings indicate that the lack of regard for farmer diversity (i.e., tenure rights, sharecroppers, and caretakers), farm size, and land management strategies (agroforestry versus clearing forest to establish farms) risks undermining the ability of this pricing mechanism to reduce farmer poverty. Further, the LID is siloed from on-going sustainability governance efforts in the sector, such as zero deforestation cocoa. If the LID is delivered to farmers across the board without any quid pro quo for how cocoa is produced, the policy’s unintended consequences may include increasing deforestation in the short term, while lowering the world market price of cocoa in the long term as cocoa supply increases. We conclude with policy implications on why different perspectives matter in managing sustainability trade-offs in deforestation frontiers.

Navigating sustainability trade-offs in global beef production

Navigating sustainability trade-offs in global beef production

The EU regulation of sustainable investment: The end of sustainability trade-offs?

The EU regulation of sustainable investment: The end of sustainability trade-offs?

Linking bioenergy production by agricultural residues to sustainable development goals: Prospects by 2030 in China

Large-scale bioenergy production utilizing agricultural residues (ARs) in multi-paths has potential energy, environmental, economic and social (EEES) impacts. If, how and to what extent these impacts integratively bring sustainability contributions at regional scale remains to be explored. Herein, the EEES impacts quantified based upon a multi-resource-technology-output life cycle framework are reflected as 17 indicators, and linked to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their sub-goals to explore the sustainability contributions and trade-offs in 31 Chinese provincial regions by 2030 in three scenarios of ARs availability. Results indicate that the ARs can contribute to 1.86 billion GJ net energy output and 32.1 billion yuan net profit by 2030 in the complete scenario with the highest ARs availability. Attributed to open burning avoidance and fossil energy offset, there are mitigation effects on 11 out of 13 life cycle environmental impact categories, however intensification effects on Freshwater eutrophication and Marine eutrophication. Regional sustainability score closely depends on ARs availability, while does not strictly parallel it. The ARs-abundant regions, such as Heilongjiang, Henan and Jilin, benefit outstandingly from bioenergy production to enhance regional sustainability (especially on SDG1, SDG7 and SDG13). The findings can provide decision-makers with references to soundly boosting agricultural bioenergy development to consolidate regional sustainability.

Sustainability trade-offs in the steel industry – A MRIO-based social impact assessment of bio-economy innovations in a belgian steel mill

Current developments show that the true magnitude of global sustainability problems is often underestimated. In order to tackle these global problems, fundamental changes in consumption and production processes are needed. The steel industry is one of the main emitters of CO 2 and changes in production processes bear a potential for climate change mitigation. Sustainability assessments often focus on the environmental dimension, while social impacts associated with such changes remain under-researched. The present study examines potential social impacts of production changes (bio-economy transition) in a steel mill in Belgium using a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis. Within this paper three indicators are presented: workers' compensation, employment and vulnerable employment. The results show that the demand for labour in Belgium increases in the scenario studied, while reductions in employment and compensation are to be expected for the majority of other regions. This emphasizes that such transitions can have both positive and negative impacts and that a ‘big picture’ is needed. Improvements in one aspect (e.g., environment) can lead to negative impacts in another (e.g., social), resulting in so-called sustainability trade-offs. It is crucial to consider impact dimensions in an integrated manner to enable the identification and discussion of sustainability trade-offs of transition pathways.

Navigating sustainability and health trade-offs in global seafood systems

Seafood is expected to play a key role in improving access to healthy diets while providing food products with relatively low rates of greenhouse gas emissions. However, both nutrients and carbon footprints vary among species and production methods, and seafood consumption is further influenced by price and consumer preference, such that it is unclear which species are best placed to provide low-emissions nutritious seafood. Here, we use seafood production data to assess the nutritional value, carbon emissions, sustainability, affordability, and availability of seafood available to UK consumers. Globally, most seafood products are more nutritious and emit lower greenhouse gases than terrestrial animal-source foods, particularly small pelagic fishes and bivalves that contributed to recommended intakes for 3–4 essential dietary nutrients at the lowest emissions. For seafood products relevant to UK markets and consumers, Atlantic mackerel had the highest availability (i.e. landings) of all wild-caught UK seafood and lowest carbon footprint of all finfish, with one fillet portion exceeding recommended intakes of three nutrients (selenium, vitamins B12 and D). We found that price and sustainability of UK seafood, both factors in consumer demand, had considerable trade-offs with nutrients, carbon footprint, and availability. Farmed salmon, for example, were produced in large volumes but were relatively more expensive than other seafood, whereas highly nutritious, low-emissions farmed mussels had limited production volumes. The UK’s seafood system is therefore not currently optimised to produce nutritious, low-emissions seafood in large amounts. Policies that promote local consumption of affordable species already produced in high volumes, such as mackerel, could improve intakes of nutrients that are deficient in the UK population at relatively low environmental cost.

Sustainable decision making for chemical process systems via dimensionality reduction of many objective problems

AbstractRecent global events and the rise of sustainable investing have made clear that the chemical and energy industry must consider sustainability goals beyond profit maximization to remain competitive. Multiobjective optimization provides an ideal framework for analyzing sustainability tradeoffs, but when four or more objectives are considered, the ability to rigorously solve problems and interpret results is lost. This necessitates an approach to systematically reduce the dimensionality of many objective problems to three or fewer objectives. In this work, an algorithm to group objectives based on their correlating nature a priori to solving the full space problem is proposed. It utilizes community detection on a novel weighted objective correlation graph to identify two or three groups of correlated objectives. Results from three representative case studies demonstrate that objective groupings obtained from this algorithm minimize the amount of tradeoff information lost and outperform intuitive groupings by economics or the environment.

An exergy based assessment of the efficiency of nuclear fuel cycles

As energy systems worldwide change to mitigate against climate change, the sustainability of electricity production methods is becoming increasingly relevant. Nuclear energy is constrained by the need for the efficient conversion of uranium to electricity to define itself as sustainable. The thermodynamic measure of available energy of work – exergy – is used to analyse nuclear fuel cycle processes by accounting for material and energy flows over whole conversion chains. This study proposes that a more comprehensive definition of nuclear exergy is needed to account for the additional exergy released in nuclear decay. This allows the extension of nuclear exergy analysis to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle and novel decay heat applications. Furthermore, nuclear decay exergy is shown to add approximately 10% to previous definitions of the exergy of fissile isotopes which accounts for the additional energy released by fission products in decay. To aid future research an evaluation of this nuclear decay exergy is performed for 3000+ nuclear isotopes. The new definition of nuclear exergy is employed in investigating the sustainability of advanced nuclear fuel cycles. This analysis uses quantitative exergy efficiency metrics and Sankey diagrams to represent certain sustainability trade-offs numerically and visually.