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The UN statistics show that the world’s population is expected to be nine billion by the 2050. As a result, the food production must also be raised to 70 per cent or more. Vertical farming (VF) is an innovative and alternative approach to meet the challenges; however, its management will also be a challenge. This paper, therefore, shares the understanding of future food challenges and Building Information Modelling (BIM) and its application to manage the facility.

A conceptual digital prototype of a VF is developed in a BIM environment using design science. First, the data are collected from literature review and then analysed and simulated for optimum conditions in a BIM-enabled digital prototype.

The results showed that BIM to manage a VF has not been researched or explored yet. However, BIM has proven its numerous benefits to the architecture, engineering and construction and facility management industries, and it is a powerful solution to design and manage VF to solve future food production problems.

There is a very limited research on VF in the literature, and BIM for VF is also not discussed or researched yet. The originality and value of this research stems from both expanding BIM horizons and designing and managing VF.

As a response to global population growth and increasing demand for food, farmers have been complementing traditional agriculture practices with vertical farming (VF) and indoor hydroponic systems. To facilitate the growth of the VF industry, this paper aims to identify business model elements and their configurations that lead to high firm performance.

The research goals were met by conducting literature reviews coupled with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on five business model elements, “superior” OR “strong” performance as two possible outcomes, and the top-ranked global VF growers listed in the Crunchbase Database.

From the fsQCA results, it was observed that several business model configurations lead to strong firm performance. Vertical farms growing in urban settings and having strong customer engagement platforms, coupled with a presence of business-to-business (B2B) sales channels, are more consistently associated with superior performance. These results imply that the decision configuration of location, along with customer engagement activity and sales activity are differentiating factors between good firm performance and superior firm performance in the case of vertical farms.

This paper contributes to expanding the knowledge of business model theory, business model configurations and VF management, providing specific guidelines for vertical farm owners and investors related to decision-making for higher firm performance, as well as positive environmental, social and economic impact.

Marine species data are scattered across a series of heterogeneous repositories and information systems. There is no repository that can claim to have all marine species data. Moreover, information on marine species are made available through different formats and protocols. The purpose of this paper is to provide models and methods that allow integrating such information either for publishing it, browsing it or querying it. Aiming at providing a valid and reliable knowledge ground for enabling semantic interoperability of marine species data, in this paper the authors motivate a top level ontology, called MarineTLO and discuss its use for creating MarineTLO-based warehouses.

In this paper the authors introduce a set of motivating scenarios that highlight the need of having a top level ontology. Afterwards the authors describe the main data sources (Fisheries Linked Open Data, ECOSCOPE, WoRMS, FishBase and DBpedia) that will be used as a basis for constructing the MarineTLO.

The paper discusses about the exploitation of MarineTLO for the construction of a warehouse. Furthermore a series of uses of the MarineTLO-based warehouse is being reported.

In this paper the authors described the design of a top level ontology for the marine domain able to satisfy the need for maintaining integrated sets of facts about marine species and thus assisting ongoing research on biodiversity. Apart from the ontology the authors also elaborated with the mappings that are required for building integrated warehouses.

This paper seeks to focus on a combined waste (or: wastewater)/energy system in the deep green housing district named “EVA Lanxmeer” in Culemborg (The Netherlands). An innovative mixture of “red and green” development is presented, together with a concept of building integrated decentralized technologies for wastewater and organic waste treatment with energy and nutrients recovery. The concept is called sustainable implant.

The methodology of the research is based on Van Strien's “regulative cycle” in which theoretic parts, on the one hand, and practice‐related parts, on the other hand, are distinguished. The theoretical part concerns a flow analysis of existing and new sustainable technologies for preserving the (energy, water and waste) flows, an analysis of the different options for transportation, the accompanying technical infrastructure, and an analysis of possible levels or scales of implementation. The practice‐related part of the research consists of case studies and the final design of the sustainable implant for the district EVA Lanxmeer.

It is important to change the general attitude towards the different components of design, development, use and management of urban areas. A way to do so is the “interconnection” of different themes and cycles within cities. An example is the linking of sanitation to energy and food production. The paper shows the potentials of integrating solutions concerning energy and sanitation flows as near as possible to its origin of use and/or production. Introducing the analogy of the functioning of buildings (with respect to energy and sanitation flows) with that of a parasite.

The system layout and the dimensioning backgrounds are explained in this paper. Additional emphasis is put on maintenance, conservation and administration of the integrated whole, and the possible consequences for the district and its inhabitants. There are scale limitations concerning the proposed (and realized) systems. Besides that there is a matter of a unique situation with an “intentional community”.

Although two similar systems, however small, have been realized, no other project (in process of realization) can be found worldwide in which there is a linking of urban agriculture, waste(water) treatment and energy production at the scale of an urban district.

In the absence of new policies, global trends in energy supply and consumption are unsustainable all around. Today, roughly 2.6 billion people use fuelwood, charcoal, agricultural waste and animal dung to meet most of their daily energy needs for cooking and heating. There are 1.6 billion people in the world without electricity, equal to over a quarter of the world population. The purpose of this paper is to present pro‐poor solutions for addressing the crippling impacts of current global energy use on the world's poorest people.

The paper lays out scenarios for global energy demand and greenhouse‐gas emissions and highlights the impact of these trends on developing countries. Based largely on publications and research from the International Energy Agency, it shows that better targeted subsidies, capacity building, integrated policy approaches and improvements in data collection can help to alleviate the impacts of current energy use on health and the environment.

Decisive action is needed to expand energy access and to arrest the potential impacts of climate change in poor countries. It is demonstrated here that investments in programs that are tailored to promoting development and addressing climate change simultaneously can be successfully deployed.

There is an urgent need for policymakers in rich and poor countries to join together and tackle the global energy and climate challenges, and, as this paper shows, pro‐poor foresight is needed to ensure that these challenges are met in an equitable and sustainable way.

The goal of this paper is to develop a classification of traceability systems that will help academics and policymakers think of them as a tool for differentiation in agri-food value chains.

Based on the analysis of case studies and a literature review, the authors develop a conceptual framework to classify traceability systems based on two dimensions: their scope in the value chain (individual vs integrated) and the type of information they contain (basic vs advanced).

Integrated traceability systems provide a variety of benefits vis-à-vis individual systems as a tool to achieve greater product differentiation by meeting current and latent requirements from foreign countries' governments and consumers. Also they serve as a platform for including advanced (vis-à-vis basic) information into the system.

A series of studies would be required to quantify the relative costs of different traceability systems and compare them on a cost-benefit basis. Nevertheless, since integrated traceability systems are subject to coordination failures, significant public focus and efforts should be placed on the potential promotion of those systems.

This paper provides a novel classification of traceability systems that distinguishes them according to scope and information content.

The current era is characterized by hyperturbulence, population growth, attention to food security, the need to identify sustainable strategies to reduce pollution and poverty, and the disparity between developed and undeveloped economies. These circumstances force a global paradigm shift based on sustainable practices and processes that put people and the environment at the core of each activity, contributing to sustainable, social, and economic development and promoting well-being in the community.

In this spirit, a strong impulse can derive from the practices of Green Technology, considered here as that set of processes aimed at eco-sustainability that acquire undisputed relevance, especially for emerging economies.

This chapter focuses on the role that Green technology practices exert in generating local well-being in the world's fifth-largest country: Brazil. Dynamic growth and effective social policies lifted millions of people out of poverty in the 2000s, even if socio-economic development varies widely across the country. Brazil is a leading global agricultural, minerals, and oil producer. The natural environment represents the primary source of Brazil's development that deserves to be protected and push firms and citizens to find new sustainable solutions based on green policies. Drawing inspiration from a Brazilian case study, this chapter proposes a set of building blocks that foster sustainable business practices in emerging countries.

The chapter is organized as follows: the first part introduces the concept of green technology practices; the second highlights the opportunities of green technologies; the third focuses on a single case study.

The Domesday Project videodiscs are the first integrated database to be created for public dissemination. They incorporate data, presented as simple interactive graphics, pictures and text from an unprecedented array of subject areas. This paper describes how the BBC team solved major problems to combine data from nearly 45 different sources into a single database.

This paper aims to analyze 54 People Analytics (PA) conferences with a view to mapping the discussions around PA, industries/sectors that currently lead in PA practices and PA opinion makers.

A scoping approach was adopted to examine the emerging topic of PA. This is one of the first methodological attempts to analyze a number of business/management conferences together.

The findings illustrate a broad geography of existing PA knowledge hubs and the relative PA maturity of organizations from some sectors. Within organizations, discussion on PA takes place at the top levels. The results also indicate a growing interest in and readiness to embrace PA on the part of the professional community and enthusiasm among some management academics about making PA the center of the HR profession. The findings reveal the most frequently discussed conference topics, and those that are currently overlooked in extant published work, guaranteeing future research and practice.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first methodological attempt to analyze numerous PA-related business/management conferences together.