Search results

This study aims to explain the existing adaptation practices in an urbanized sub-region in the lower Chao Phraya River basin (CPRB) across different scales and dimensions. It offers an overview of water hazards in urban areas along the river basin to discover ways to deal with and recover from hazards via understanding the implications of existing and potential practice for the mitigation of hydrological hazards.

First, this study collected current adaptation strategies and measures from interview, focus group discussion, workshop organization, etc. to get the current adaptation strategies/measures for the whole CPRB and each specific area. Second, this study identified a set of criteria for evaluation from review of current publications and official reports. Then, the current adaptation strategies/measures were examined through a set of criteria to obtain the current situation of existing practices. Finally, analysis of key challenges and opportunities was done to propose supporting guidelines to reduce hydrological risks and incorporate further adaptation measures needed to boost resilience in the area.

Adaptation methods should focus on mixed adaptation, which integrates structural, social, organizational and natural adaptation, and to develop multi-dimensional collaboration. The adaption strategy has restricted the usage of some technologies and technical know-how, particularly in the area of climate change. As a result, intentional adaptation to become more inventive is required, to reduce hazards and improve disaster-response capacity. The various adaptation measures should be more integrated or more adaptive and to achieve greater cohesion and mutual benefit of individual measures, such as community-based adaptation or community-driven slum upgrading.

Hydrological risks are wreaking havoc on social, economic and environmental elements, particularly river flood, flash flood and drought in the Asia-Pacific region. Twenty-two existing adaptation options were evaluated with evaluation criteria such as scales of risks/impacts reduction, benefits of environmental and socio-economic and institutional aspects. The findings highlight the current situation of existing practices, key challenges and opportunities, which emphasized on natural-based solutions, raising knowledge and awareness and lessons learned on adaptation of hydrological risks. The existing adaptation measures will be suggested as supporting guidelines and master plans to minimize the hydrological risks.

Quantitative and spatial-explicit flood risk information is of great importance for strengthening climate change adaptation and flood resilience. Shanghai is a coastal megacity at large estuary delta with rising flood risks. This study aims to quantify the overall economic-societal risks of storm flooding and their spatial patterns in Shanghai.

Based on multiple storm flood scenarios at different return periods, as well as fine-scale data sets including gridded GDP, gridded population and vector land-use, a probabilistic risk model incorporating geographic information system is used to assess the economic-societal risks of flooding and their spatial distributions.

Our results show that, from 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed assets will increase from USD 85.4bn to USD 657.6bn, and the direct economic losses will increase from USD 3.06bn to USD 52bn. The expected annual damage (EAD) of assets is around USD 84.36m. Hotpots of EAD are mainly distributed in the city center, the depressions along the upper Huangpu River in the southwest, the north coast of Hangzhou Bay, and the confluence of the Huangpu River and Yangtze River in the northeast. From 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed population will rise from 280 thousand to 2,420 thousand, and the estimated casualties will rise from 299 to 1,045. The expected annual casualties (EAC) are around 2.28. Hotspots of casualties are generally consistent with those of EAD.

In contrast to previous studies that focus on a single flood scenario or a particular type of flood exposure/risk in Shanghai, the findings contribute to an understanding of overall flood risks and their spatial patterns, which have significant implications for cost-benefit analysis of flood resilience strategies.

Climate-related disasters are the most representative in terms of recurrence and impacts. To reduce them, risk transfer is a key strategy for climate risk management. However, this approach does not consider the socioeconomic vulnerability of each population group, limiting its effectiveness. The objective of this paper is to improve and increase the usefulness of risk transfer through the Differential Risk Transfer (DRT) approach.

A comprehensive and systematic review of the state of the art on Differential Approach (DA) is presented, and its connection with existing models of vulnerability to disasters is analysed. Through epistemic deliberations, an operational definition of Differential Risk Transfer (DRT), as well as its advantages are discussed. Finally, general guidelines are presented for the implementation of the DRT in a specific context.

The results confirm that DA presents a clear relation with the models for the study of disaster vulnerability. The small group discussions agree with the usefulness of DRT for improving climate-related risk management.

This paper argues for the inclusion of the DRT approach in the climate risk management strategies aiming to fill the disaggregated data gaps that limit the potentiality and accuracy of risk transfer schemes worldwide.

This innovative approach improves the accuracy of the risk transfer mechanisms through the recognition of the differences of ethnicity, gender and life cycle that increase socioeconomic vulnerability to climate-related disasters.

This study aims to explore customers’ green hotel revisit behaviors, proposing the theory of repeat purchase behavior.

An empirical study is conducted through a questionnaire survey method, using personal interview survey approach in Bangladesh. In all, 401 usable data is collected from participants who have visited green hotels before. The following data are analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using Smart PLS 3.3.3.

Results of the study have raveled that habitual attachment and emotional attachment are significantly related to green hotel revisit intentions (behavioral intention) and revisiting a green hotel (actual behavior). The result also has uncovered that green hotel revisit intentions significantly impacted revisiting a green hotel. Moreover, the study results exert that green hotel revisit intentions partially mediate the relationship between habitual attachments, emotional attachment, and revisiting a green hotel.

The current study enriches green hospitality literature by uncovering the integrated effects of habitual attachment and emotional attachment on customers’ revisit intentions and behaviors in the green hotels’ context.

The consideration of alternative sources of material for construction is imperative to reduce the environmental impacts as two-fifths of the carbon footprint of materials is attributed to the construction industry. One alternative material with improved biodegradable attributes which can contribute to carbon offset is bamboo. The commercialisation of bamboo in modern infrastructures has significant potential to address few of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) itemised by the United Nations, namely SDG 9 about industry, innovation and infrastructure. Other SDGs covering sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production and climate action are also indirectly addressed when utilising sustainable construction materials. Being a natural material however, the full commercialisation of materials such as bamboo is constrained by a lack of durability. Besides fracture mechanisms arising from load-induced cracks and thermal modification, the durability of bamboo material is greatly impaired by biotic and abiotic factors, which equally affect its natural rate of degradation, hence fracture behaviour. In first instance, this chapter outlines the various factors leading to the durability limitations in bamboo material due to load-induced cracks and natural degradation based on recent findings in this field from the author's own work and from past literature. Secondly, part of this chapter is devoted to a new approach of processing the surge of information about the varied aspects of bamboo durability by considering the powerful technique of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically the artificial neural network (ANN) for prediction modelling. Further use of AI-enabled technologies could have an impactful outcome on the life cycle assessment of bamboo-based structures to address the growing challenges outlined by the United Nations.

The concept of business process (BP) as a service is a new solution in enterprises for the purpose of using specific BPs. BPs represent combinations of software services that must be properly executed by the resources provided by a company’s information technology infrastructure. As the policy requirements are different in each enterprise, processes are constantly evolving and demanding new resources in terms of computation and storage. To support more agility and flexibility, it is common today for enterprises to outsource their processes to clouds and, more recently, to cloud federation environment. Ensuring the optimal allocation of cloud resources to process service during the execution of workflows in accordance with user policy requirements is a major concern. Given the diversity of resources available in a cloud federation environment and the ongoing process changes required based on policies, reallocating cloud resources for service processing may lead to high computational costs and increased overheads in communication costs.

This paper presents a new adaptive resource allocation approach that uses a novel algorithm extending the natural-based intelligent water drops (IWD) algorithm that optimizes the resource allocation of workflows on the cloud federation which can estimate and optimize final deployment costs. The proposed algorithm is implemented and embedded within the WokflowSim simulation toolkit and tested in different simulated cloud environments with different workflow models.

The algorithm showed noticeable enhancements over the classical workflow deployment algorithms taking into account the challenges of data transfer. This paper made a comparison between the proposed IWD-based workflow deployment (IWFD) algorithm with other proposed algorithms. IWFD presented considerable improvements in the makespan, cost and data transfer in most situations in the cloud federation environment.

An extension for WorkflowSim to support the implementation of BPs in a federation cloud space regarding BP policy. Optimize workflow execution performance in Federated clouds by means of IWFD algorithm.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created heavy pressure on firms, by increasing the challenges and disruptions that they have to deal with on being sustainable. For this purpose, it is aimed to reveal the role of the smart circular supply chain (SCSC) and its enablers towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for post-pandemic preparedness.

Total interpretive structural modelling and Matrice d'Impacts Croises Multipication Applique' a un Classement (MICMAC) have been applied to analyse the SCSC enablers which are supported by the natural-based resource view in Turkey's food industry. In this context, industry experts working in the food supply chain (meat sector) and academics came together to interpret the result and discuss the enablers that the supply chain experienced during the pandemic for creating a realistic framework for post-pandemic preparedness.

The results of this study show that “governmental support” and “top management involvement” are the enablers that have the most driving power on other enablers, however, none of them depend on any other enablers.

The identification of the impact and role of enablers in achieving SDGs by combining smart and circular capabilities in the supply chain for the post-pandemic.

Composites based on fiber are commonly used in high-performance building materials. The composites mostly use petrochemically derived fibers like polyester and e-glass, due to their advantageous material features like high stiffness and strength. All the same, these fibers also have important shortcomings related to energy consumption, recyclability, initial processing expense, resulting health hazards, and sustainability. Increasing environmental awareness and new sustainable building technologies are driving the research, development, and usage of “green” building materials, especially the development of biomaterials.

In this chapter, the natural fiber evaluation approach is applied, which covers a diverse set of criteria. Consequently, the comparative assessment of diverse natural fiber types is applied through the use of an expert decision system approach. The best performing fiber choice is made by comparatively evaluating the materials related to green building. The proposed fiber can be used and applied by green building material manufacturing companies in various countries or locations as a reference when selecting the fiber with the best performance.

The purpose of this study is to establish a suitable procedure for dyeing and multifunctional finishing on 100% cotton using extracts of eucalyptus leaves in an eco-friendly manner.

Box–Behnken design of experiments and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to optimise the conditions of extraction, dyeing and finishing. Phytochemical analysis was performed to determine the chemical constituents of the extracts. Colour strength, fastness properties were evaluated for dyed fabric samples. The effectiveness of eucalyptus leaves extract as an insect repellent, aroma, antibacterial finishing agent, was assessed. Pre-soaking and padding method was used for the application of active essential oil on the fabric.

Essential oil extracted from Eucalyptus globulus leaves have great repellent rate for insects to the extent of 90% and aroma intensity of 72% and antibacterial effect of 100% bacterial reduction up to five washings. The use of citric acid as cross-linking agent helps increase the durability of the finish. Natural dyeing to get light yellow shade is possible with extracts made with water, possessing good fastness properties.

Scaling up the extraction process and soaking larger quantities of fabrics in extracted essential oil solution before the pad applications are considered limitations of this study. However, smaller pieces of fabrics can conveniently be handled in this process. It has tremendous potential for practising industrially, to get yellow-shaded multifunctional finished cotton textiles.

Protection against insects, including mosquitoes, bacteria with additional aroma on cotton will be of great use in day-to-day life for the wearer.

Eco-friendly, renewable sources of ingredients from the plant were used to obtain protection against pathogenic or odour-causing microorganisms using this hygiene finish with multiple end uses.

This original work enables conducting dyeing and multifunctional finishing together in a single stage, which otherwise takes a number of steps, consuming large quantities of water, chemicals and energy to impart similar effects on cotton.