scholarly journals Environmental load from use of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining in Russia

Author(s):  
Olga Chereshnia

With the increasing use of information technologies (IT) their opportunities to ensure environmental sustainability and the risks of their widespread adoption are growing. And if the possibilities have been studied well enough, then the risks have been paid attention to relatively recently. However, awareness of these risks is becoming increasingly important with the spread of technologies. Currently, there are already hundreds of cryptocurrencies, and the technological basis for many of these currencies is the blockchain—a digital ledger of transactions. This article has assessed the environmental burden of mining and supporting transactions in the cryptocurrency market in Russia using CO2-equivalent. For this, for the first time, the amount of electricity consumed to support cryptocurrency transactions in Russia was calculated, data on the largest cryptocurrency mining centres were collected and systematized, and the main factors for the placement of both large and small private farms were determined. Based on the collected data a map of the spread of mining centres in Russia was created. Our analysis showed that on average, 2.977 million tons of CO2 equivalent are emitted in Bitcoin production in Russia, and the total emissions from cryptocurrency mining in Russia are 4.466 million tons of CO2 equivalent. Based on our data on environmental damage, we believe that when deciding on the use of blockchain technology, not only its capabilities should be taken into account, but also an assessment of the ratio of potential benefits and impact on the environment. A systematic understanding of interrelated direct and indirect impacts is needed to make decisions on the use of blockchain, since the technology shows itself as potentially one of the most energy and resource intensive.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Dianne Frisko ◽  
Desi Arisandi

Induztrialization edge and economic growth bring some consequences to the society, such as pollution or environmental damage. The responsibility is not only lies in business sector but also contributed by society and public sector-government institution as their daily operational produce some waste material. One ofmaterial use in such organization daily activities is paper. Unproper use of paper will impact on cost inefficiency, as well as environmental damage due to the main material of producing paper taken from forest.Government as public service organization mostly deals with paper in their daily administrative business. While the othersites it also encouraged to put priority on budget efficiency included in paper consumption. This study aims to describe in what extend government efficiency initiative align in it environmental concerned. Specifically this study will explore the use of paper as one of most daily resource in government office using environmental management accounting (EMA)framework. The results convey that notion on some regulation pertaining with budget efficiency in Indonesia has similarity with the spirit and the benefit provided in term of EMA application. By implementing EMA properly, government may get information on cost efficiency along with environmental sustainability.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 1008-1016
Author(s):  
Priyanka ◽  
Ms Ipshita Bansal

Universities in the state are regarded as ‘small cities’ due to their large size, population, and the various complex activities taking place in campuses, which have some serious direct and indirect impacts on the environment. The current study focuses on the green practices in state universities of Haryana. The comparative analysis has been done between the multiple case studies and find out the best green practices being adopted in universities for moving towards making the green campus and recommend the area of improvement for making environment sustainable campus.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Enik Maslahah

<p>Purun is a typical plant that grow in peatland area that has important functions for people living in peatland area. The availability of purun is now decreasing due to changes in land management and environmental destruction. Almost all of the plantation commodities in the peatlands area, management of peatlands in the forestry, agriculture, plantation and fisheries sectors apply exploitative and pragmatic methods, while ignoring environmental sustainability. Furthermore, environmental damage also occurs due to disasters such as forest and land fires that often occur in peatland areas in Indonesia. One of the damages happen to peatland area is the damage and scarcity of purun. As users and beneficiaries of purun, women become the affected group that face  the impact of peatland destruction. This paper describes the experiences and efforts of women in peatland areas to restore land and restore the existence of purun in their villages.</p><p> </p>


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Thuy Thu Nguyen ◽  
Linh Thi Phuong Nguyen ◽  
Hoa Thi Thanh Phan ◽  
Anh Trong Vu

This empirical study proposed a comprehensive model testing the direct and indirect impacts of entrepreneurship extracurricular activities and entrepreneurship inspiration on students’ entrepreneurial intention. With the sample consisting of 640 students from 11 universities in Vietnam, the study used structural equation modeling analysis approach. The results revealed that entrepreneurship extracurricular activities and entrepreneurship inspiration are significantly related to students’ entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurship self-efficacy partially mediates these relations. The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention differs across the field of study. Technical students generally get more benefits from entrepreneurship educational activities than business and economics students do. The research findings recommended some implications for fostering graduates’ entrepreneurship in emerging countries.


Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 2677
Author(s):  
Anastasios Bastounis ◽  
John Buckell ◽  
Jamie Hartmann-Boyce ◽  
Brian Cook ◽  
Sarah King ◽  
...  

Food production is a major contributor to environmental damage. More environmentally sustainable foods could incur higher costs for consumers. In this review, we explore whether consumers are willing to pay (WTP) more for foods with environmental sustainability labels (‘ecolabels’). Six electronic databases were searched for experiments on consumers’ willingness to pay for ecolabelled food. Monetary values were converted to Purchasing Power Parity dollars and adjusted for country-specific inflation. Studies were meta-analysed and effect sizes with confidence intervals were calculated for the whole sample and for pre-specified subgroups defined as meat-dairy, seafood, and fruits-vegetables-nuts. Meta-regressions tested the role of label attributes and demographic characteristics on participants’ WTP. Forty-three discrete choice experiments (DCEs) with 41,777 participants were eligible for inclusion. Thirty-five DCEs (n = 35,725) had usable data for the meta-analysis. Participants were willing to pay a premium of 3.79 PPP$/kg (95%CI 2.7, 4.89, p ≤ 0.001) for ecolabelled foods. WTP was higher for organic labels compared to other labels. Women and people with lower levels of education expressed higher WTP. Ecolabels may increase consumers’ willingness to pay more for environmentally sustainable products and could be part of a strategy to encourage a transition to more sustainable diets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6280
Author(s):  
Jem Bendell ◽  
Katie Carr

This article synthesises the practice and rationale behind ways of facilitating gatherings on topics of societal disruption and collapse, which is argued to be useful for lessening damaging responses. The authors draw on first-person inquiry as facilitators of gatherings, both online and in person, in the post-sustainability field of ‘Deep Adaptation,’ particularly since 2018. This term describes an agenda and framework for people who believe in the probable, inevitable or unfolding collapse of industrial consumer societies, due to the direct and indirect impacts of human-caused climate change and environmental degradation. Some of the principles of Deep Adaptation facilitation are summarised, such as containment, to enable co-responsibility for a safe enough space for difficult conversations. Another key principle is welcoming radical uncertainty in response to the anxieties that people feel from their anticipation of collapse. A third principle is making space for difficult emotions, which are welcomed as a natural and ongoing response to our predicament. A fourth aspect is a curiosity about processes of othering and separation. This paper provides a review of the theories that a reason for environmental destruction is the process of othering people and nature as being less significant or meaningful. One particular modality called Deep Relating is outlined.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014920632199121
Author(s):  
Ruth V. Aguilera ◽  
J. Alberto Aragón-Correa ◽  
Valentina Marano ◽  
Peter A. Tashman

As corporations’ environmental impact comes under greater scrutiny by global financial, regulatory, and societal stakeholders, management scholars have increasingly focused on the role of corporate governance as a tool for driving environmental initiatives. Still, we lack a comprehensive and systematic understanding of this emergent body of inquiry and a holistic agenda for future research. To address this gap, our integrative framework relates the key corporate governance actors to environmental sustainability outcomes from the extant literature and highlights its main methodological approaches and theoretical arguments. Our framework provides a critical analysis of what we know and points to the knowledge gaps around owners, boards of directors, CEOs, top management teams, and employees as corporate governance actors. We then highlight limitations in the existing literature as significant opportunities for further research to resolve its ambiguous conceptualizations of environmental sustainability constructs, various methodological and theoretical challenges, incomplete engagement with the global dimension of environmental sustainability, and limited analysis of how corporate governance actors may interact to shape environmental sustainability outcomes. We conclude by proposing novel approaches for addressing these issues, which we believe could generate a better way forward on studying the corporate governance of environmental sustainability.


Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1018-1038
Author(s):  
Wesam Emad Saba ◽  
Salwa M. Beheiry ◽  
Ghassan Abu-Lebdeh ◽  
Mustafa S. AL-Tekreeti

Signalized urban intersections are key components of urban transportation networks. They are traditionally viewed and designed as primarily motorized traffic facilities, and thus their physical and operational designs have traditionally aimed at maximizing traffic throughput subject to constraints dictated by vehicular safety requirements and pedestrian crossing needs. Seen from a holistic viewpoint, urban intersections are hubs or effective centers of community activities of which traffic flow is only one. Those hubs have direct and indirect impacts on the overlapping traffic functionalities, the environment, public health, community wellbeing, and the local economy. This study proposes a new rating system, the Holistic Intersection Rating System (HIRS), aimed at appraising signalized intersections from a more inclusive viewpoint. This appraisal covers traffic functionality, sustainability, and public health and community wellbeing. This rating system can be used as a guide to conceive, plan, or design new intersections or revamp existing ones. HIRS rates signalized urban intersections based on the level of use of relevant enabling technologies, and the physical and operational designs that allow those intersections to operate holistically, thus leading to a more human-centric and sustainable operational performance. HIRS was validated using a panel of experts in construction, transportation, and public health. The Relative Importance Index (RII) method was used to weigh the HIRS features. The rating system was piloted on a sample of 20 intersections in different cities in the UAE. The results revealed glaring gaps in services to or the consideration of pedestrians, cyclists, and nearby households. The sample intersections scored a mean of 32% on the public health and community wellbeing section, 37% on the pedestrian subsection, and 15% on the cyclist subsection. Such relatively low scores serve as indicators of areas for improvements, and if mapped to their specific features and their relative weights, specific physical and operations designs and technology integration can be identified as actionable items for inclusion in plans and/or designs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1854) ◽  
pp. 20162302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan C. Fricke ◽  
Joshua J. Tewksbury ◽  
Elizabeth M. Wandrag ◽  
Haldre S. Rogers

The global decline of mutualists such as pollinators and seed dispersers may cause negative direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity. Mutualistic network models used to understand the stability of mutualistic systems indicate that species with low partner diversity are most vulnerable to coextinction following mutualism disruption. However, existing models have not considered how species vary in their dependence on mutualistic interactions for reproduction or survival, overlooking the potential influence of this variation on species' coextinction vulnerability and on network stability. Using global databases and field experiments focused on the seed dispersal mutualism, we found that plants and animals that depend heavily on mutualistic interactions have higher partner diversity. Under simulated network disruption, this empirical relationship strongly reduced coextinction because the species most likely to lose mutualists depend least on their mutualists. The pattern also reduced the importance of network structure for stability; nested network structure had little effect on coextinction after simulations incorporated the empirically derived relationship between partner diversity and mutualistic dependence. Our results highlight a previously unknown source of stability in mutualistic networks and suggest that differences among species in their mutualistic strategy, rather than network structure, primarily accounts for stability in mutualistic communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
I. E. Kharlampenkov ◽  
◽  
A. U. Oshchepkov ◽  

The article presents methods for caching and displaying data from spectral satellite images using libraries of distributed computing systems that are part of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, and GeoServer extensions. The authors gave a brief overview of existing tools that provide the ability to present remote sensing data using distributed information technologies. A distinctive feature is the way to convert remote sensing data inside Apache Parquet files for further display. This approach allows you to interact with the distributed file system via the Kite SDK libraries and switch on additional data processors based on Apache Hadoop technology as external services. A comparative analysis of existing tools, such as: GeoMesa, GeoWawe, etc is performed. The following steps are described: extracting data from Apache Parquet via the Kite SDK, converting this data to GDAL Dataset, iterating the received data, and saving it inside the file system in BIL format. In this article, the BIL format is used for the GeoServer cache. The extension was implemented and published under the Apache License on the GitHub resource. In conclusion, you will find instructions for installing and using the created extension.


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