In the original publication of the article, affiliation 4 was published incorrectly as "Center for Far Eastern Studies,

Integrating urban green infrastructure (UGI) into cities is receiving increasing attention owing to its potential to provide various urban ecosystem services (UES). This review assesses the multifaceted services of UGI as benefits and co-benefits. By combining systematic and narrative review processes, we aim to synthesise existing knowledge along six current themes and identify research gaps. A total of 690 peer-reviewed articles published during 2000–2020 from Web of Science were selected, followed by bibliometric and full-text analysis. Based on the frequency of appearance in the network visualisation of keywords, six themes of current trends were identified, namely: (1) benefits of UGI as UES; (2) mitigating climate and urban climate impacts by UGI; (3) UGI contribution to sustainable development goals; (4) reconceptualising greenspaces as ‘safe havens’; (5) public acknowledgement and supportive governance for UGI; and (6) rethinking the operationalisability of UGI. The first two themes represent existing focus on categories of ecosystem services, the next two encompass broader emerging co-benefits and the last two focus on how to operationalise UGI and support widespread adoption and implementation. Within Theme 2, the most frequently discussed service with the largest number of research, we conducted a detailed analysis of the methods and content focus in the existing literature. Through a narrative review, we identified 15 research gaps throughout these 6 themes. This review provides a comprehensive overview for urban researchers and practitioners to inform the integration of urban green infrastructure into urban planning and management.

Globally, Indigenous people seek to develop sustainable livelihood options that enable them to practice their culture, look after their traditional estates and generate economic development outcomes for their wider community. Enterprise development can and may provide one such pathway. However, challenges can arise with regard to reconciling the core drivers of ‘economic development’ with aspirations to practice and preserve culture. Current enterprise development approaches and models do not always suit Indigenous contexts. In this paper, we present a practical tool to enable Indigenous leaders, their partners, and others, to consider enterprise development options grounded in culture that may generate multiple benefits including economic outcomes. Our tool combines critical review of alternative development models, with empirical research to outline a set of foundational principles, building blocks and potential enterprise development options. We apply the practical tool to a case study of a nascent enterprise from the northern Australia Indigenous-led bush products sector. The case study illustrates how enterprise development planning is integral and discussions should consider how to enable cultural governance, protection of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, potential benefits and sharing, access to resources, as well as the ‘building blocks’ for enterprise development and consideration of different enterprise approaches. The practical tool aims to ensure development pathways build on local economies and ecologies, do not compromise culture and recognise the influence of extra-local political economies on lived experiences and outcomes.

Abstract Evaluation plays a pivotal role in transdisciplinary (TD) research, often discussed during funding stages or when assessing project impacts. A few studies delve into the participant perspective when examining the quality of transdisciplinarity. Our work contributes to this area of assessment. Rather than providing a definitive definition of transdisciplinarity, we developed a questionnaire to evaluate a set of TD principles within a specific TD initiative. We collected insights from 100 individuals out of a pool of 200 participants engaged in a TD initiative since 2016. Given the long-term nature of the case study, our sample included both frequent and occasional participants. Using non-parametric statistical, we concluded that frequent participants express higher satisfaction with their involvement, identify more outcomes stemming from their participation, and assign greater importance to TD principles. These findings highlight the significant impact of investing in long-term TD initiatives. Additionally, our questionnaires featured open-ended questions to capture participants’ individual definition of the initiative, along with their perceived benefits and drawbacks. Through content analysis, we identified two distinct discourses: positivism and postpositivism. The positivist discourse predominantly features male participants over 60 years of age, primarily from the research community. These participants express lower satisfaction with their participation and assign less value to TD principles. We found no association between positivism/postpositivism and participation frequency (i.e., frequent/casual). This suggests that these two discourses can coexist and interact within a TD environment. Nevertheless, the perceived value of TD is not uniform across these groups, indicating that TD may not align with everyone’s objectives, even in complex contexts where the approach is considered essential.

Abstract Electric vehicle (EV) users who aim to become flexibility providers face a tradeoff between staying in control of charging and minimizing their electricity costs. The common practice is to charge immediately after plugging in and use more electricity than necessary. Changing this can increase the EV’s flexibility potential and reduce electricity costs. Our extended electricity cost optimization model systematically examines how different changes to this practice influence electricity costs. Based on the Prospect Theory and substantiated by empirical data, it captures EV users’ tradeoff between relinquishing control and reducing charging costs. Lowering the need to control charging results in disproportionally large savings in electricity costs. This finding incentivizes EV-users to relinquish even more control of charging. We analyzed changes to two charging settings that express the need for control. We found that changing only one setting offsets the other and reduces its positive effect on cost savings. Behavioral aspects, such as rebound effects and inertia that are widely documented in the literature, support this finding and underline the fit of our model extension to capture different charging behaviors. Our findings suggest that service providers should convince EV-users to relinquish control of both settings.

Abstract This paper assesses the environmental sustainability of Japan by applying the environmental sustainability gap (ESGAP) framework, which builds on the concepts of strong sustainability, critical natural capital, environmental functions, and science-based reference values. The assessment is carried out using two indices of environmental sustainability (Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (SESI) and Strong Environmental Sustainability Progress Index (SESPI)) that provide a snapshot and a trend perspective on environmental sustainability performance and on progress toward it. The results reveal that Japan has not experienced significant changes in terms of aggregate environmental sustainability throughout the 2011–2017 period, but this is primarily a consequence of the mutually offsetting movements of different indicators. The country performs best for the human health and other welfare indicators, but worst for the sink function indicators such as the per-capita CO2 emissions and the eutrophication of fresh water. The indices also expose the main policy areas that Japan needs to strengthen to improve its environmental performance. They include issues such as tropospheric ozone pollution, which has long been discussed in scientific literature but never been a primal policy focus of the government until very recently.