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The purpose of this paper is to examine social sustainability effectiveness of eco-cities through the case of Masdar City’s strategy for urban sustainability in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Using a case study approach, the paper is an exploratory, qualitative analysis, which investigates the social, environmental and economic performance of Masdar City, a purported carbon-neutral, zero-waste urban development.

Though Masdar City substantively contributes to innovation in sustainable urban development within environmental and economic contexts and has been effective in capital circulation in green technology markets, the impetus as a commercially driven enterprise is most evident. Successful sustainable urban development requires greater consideration for the social imperative.

Eco-city mega-projects, such as Masdar City, have the potential to fuse achievements in innovation, technology and economic enterprise with the social imperative of functional urban habitats.

Eco-cities are of increasing interest given the growing need for sustainable, energy-efficient living. This paper contributes through a novel case study, exploring how the concept of the eco-city has been developed and understood in the Masdar City context and discusses successes and deficits in its strategic implementation.

By drawing on current reports, this paper positions that Homo sapiens could in the near future be faced with an increasingly uninhabitable planet. It emphasises the importance of adventure tourism and its associated activities as a means of supporting individuals to develop more outdoor survival skills.

This study applies a scenario narrative approach in exploring and presenting potential future ideas. The significance of narratives lies at the essential examination of current trends and drivers that could be shaping future scenarios. This paper, through the exploration of past and current trends supports the researcher in presenting future views. The scenario narratives in this research are established via desk-based research and inspection of academic journals, industry reports, ideas and knowledge.

If society is pushed to the brink of extinction due to a catastrophic event(s), people will require survival skills, similar to those shared by our hunter-gather nomad ancestor. Thus, this paper highlights the value and importance of the industry in encouraging soft and hard outdoor adventure in the coming years. It recognises how different adventure travel activities can support people in rekindling with our more basic instincts and ultimately, surviving in different natural environments.

This paper offers original theoretical knowledge within the adventure tourism literature. Offering original consideration to the value of exploring the past as a method of understanding the future, the paper presents an original spectrum of soft and hard skills-based adventure tourism activities.

The natural environment is facing unprecedented times owing to rising temperatures from carbon emissions, which travel-related industries contribute significantly towards. The recent global COVID-19 outbreak should be a wake-up call for the industry, as vulnerabilities have been laid bare. The current challenges should be used as a motivation to change the meaning of travel to support the global warming crisis. This paper aims emphasis that, by means of new stories, new values, beliefs and ultimately travel behaviours can be rewritten.

This study embraces a pragmatic approach to research. To ensure plausibility, credibility and relevance, the research carried out multi-disciplinary analysis of secondary data, information, knowledge and draws on current developing trends.

The travel community needs to take responsibility and start reducing its carbon footprint and as carbon neutrality is increasingly a global priority. Accordingly, this research considers potential future travel-related behaviours that could support more carbon-neutral travel. Significantly, it notes how the COVID-19 outbreak has offered insights into potential positive changes. To benefit from these changes, new stories for industry providers are necessary to encourage more carbon-neutral travel practices.

This paper offers timely and original discussions on the future of travel as a result of COVID-19 impacts. It draws on the power of storytelling as a means of achieving behavioural change in the travel community to support the challenge of climate change.

The paper provides a summary of the findings from GOOD Awaits – The Regenerative Tourism New Zealand (NZ) Podcast and envisions a regenerative future for tourism in Aotearoa.

This paper is based on the findings from the GOOD Awaits Podcast, a series of interviews with pioneers and practitioners of regenerative tourism. The podcast was created as a platform for the collective discovery of a new way forward for tourism in the wake of COVID-19, and the series provides a detailed summary of the regenerative tourism movement in NZ.

Through these interviews, a vision for a regenerative visitor economy in Aotearoa emerged. This new model is rooted in indigenous knowledge and living systems theory. It is a paradigm shift that allows us to see tourism as a living ecosystem and requires innovative economic models, such as social entrepreneurship, systems level changes to the way tourism operates and is governed, local tourism solutions with community thriving as the primary aim and much more collaboration both within tourism and across sectors.

Regenerative tourism is an emerging model and one that is rapidly gaining traction in NZ and globally. The GOOD Awaits podcast is a unique, thoughtful and practical demonstration of what this model could look like in Aotearoa. It demonstrates the potential and feasibility of regenerative tourism practice, and the response has shown the desire for these conversations at a national and international scale. This paper is an accessible summary of the podcast's first season and has value for anyone interested in the regenerative tourism movement in Aotearoa.

As the size of the population is growing and the capacity of the planet Earth is limited, human beings are searching for sustainable and technology-enabled solutions to support society, ecology and economy. One of the solutions has been developing smart sustainable cities. Smart sustainable cities are cities as systems, where their infrastructure, different subsystems and different functional domains are virtually connected to the information and communication technologies (ICT) and internet via sensors and devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), to collect and process real-time Big Data and make efficient, effective and sustainable solutions for a democratic and liveable city for its various stakeholders. This chapter explores the concepts and practices of sustainable smart cities across the globe and explores the use of technologies such as IoT, Blockchain technology and Cloud computing, etc. their challenges and then presents a view on business models for sustainable smart cities.

This paper examines the role of government procurement as a social policy mechanism within a multilateral open trading system. Government regulations globally are being transformed to foster more responsible business conduct in multinational enterprises (MNEs). Yet, concern that sustainability may present a discriminatory barrier to trade has stalled the progress of sustainable public procurement (SPP) at the international level, raising questions regarding the role and scope of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) to align taxpayer-funded contracts with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.

With a focus on social sustainability, this paper reviews the grey and academic literature to assess the changing landscape of public procurement policy and supply chain legislation in high-income countries.

Frontrunner nations are adopting a mandatory approach to sustainable public procurement and due diligence legislation is elevating supply chain risk from reputational damage to legal liability. While technological innovation and the clean, green production of manufactured goods dominates the sustainable public procurement literature, the social aspects of sustainability poverty, inequality and human rights remain underrepresented.

The scope of this paper is limited to the examination of government procurement covered by the WTO-GPA (2012). Smaller value contracts, under the WTO-GPA thresholds and the category of defence are beyond the scope of the paper.

The paper focusses on the underserved topic of social sustainability in business-to-government (B2G) – business to government – supply chains arguing that for responsible business conduct to become a competitive advantage, it must be more meaningfully rewarded on the demand-side of all taxpayer-funded contracts in organisation for economic co-operation and development countries. The paper introduces the idea of priceless procurement as a mechanism to build system capacity in the evaluation of non-financial sustainability objectives.

To build the capacity to stimulate competition based on social and environmental policy objectives, the paper introduces the concept of priceless procurement in B2G contracts.

Climate change is occurring around us and impacting on our daily lives, meaning that we have to deal with our cities in a different way. There is also increasing awareness of the need for daily contact with green spaces and the natural environment in order to live a happy, productive and meaningful life.

This reflective essay tells the narrative of how urbanisation has been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanisation, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to “repair” and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change.

Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. This essay explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities.