Submissions of manuscripts for the Special Issue on Achieving the SDGs through Environmental Sustainability are now open. This SI is one of the culminating outputs of the NERPS Conference 2023 in partnership with Elsevier’s Current Research in Environmental Sustainability. The SI is open access, but the Article Processing Charge (APC) will be waived for selected papers that are accepted before 31 December 2023.
The submission deadline is 30 June 2023. Click here for author instructions and the submission portal.
Note: Authors need to choose “VSI: Environment and SDGs” from the “Select Article Type” drop-down menu in the submission site to be considered for the SI.
Aims and Scope of the SI
The world has experienced many socioeconomic and environmental challenges over the past few decades. Such challenges were caused by various drivers including industrialization, rapid urbanization, and exponential population growth. For instance, the world population has increased from about 1.6 billion people at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 7.9 billion in 2023. Over the same period, the share of world urban population has increased from about 16% to over 57% according to the United Nations. This is projected to reach about 66% by 2050.
These rapid changes have prompted an increase in demand for finite world resources such as land, energy, and water, leading to major environmental impacts in many parts of the world. Among other things, the increasing demand by human societies and unregulated economic growth have resulted in deforestation, depletion of groundwater resources, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Given the scale of human impacts on Earth’s ecosystem, some scientists argue that we have now entered a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. Related to this, research shows that we have already crossed several planetary boundaries related to ‘climate change’, ‘loss of biosphere integrity’, ‘land-system change,’ and ‘altered biogeochemical cycles’. Unless urgent actions are taken to reverse these trends, the implications for human well-being and prosperity could be catastrophic.
Since the 1980’s, various efforts have been made to address these challenges. The most notable one is the Brundtland report on Our Common Future which emphasized the need to prioritize sustainable development to ensure that current and future generations can meet their demands. More recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched by the UN to address environmental challenges and related issues such as global poverty, food insecurity, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts by 2030.This special issue aims to contribute to informing action toward achieving SDGs through innovative and solution-oriented research articles, review articles, graphical reviews, and perspectives that elaborate on the linkages between environmental sustainability and the SDGs. It will include invited extended papers from the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) 2023 Conference that was held from February 28-March 3, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand (https://nerps.org/thailand_nerps2023/). Authors who have not attended the conference are also welcome to submit their work to this special issue.
Guest Editors: Ayyoob Sharifi (Managing Guest Editor), Dahlia Simangan, and Shinji Kaneko