International Journal of Sustainable Development (3 papers in press)

Regular Issues

• Measuring residential sustainability performance: an indexing approach  
  by Didem Dizdaroglu 
  Abstract: In recent years, numerous sustainability indicator frameworks have been developed at a wide range of geographical units. However, most of them raise challenges in terms of measurement owing to data unavailability at smaller scales. This research addresses this gap by introducing a GIS-based sustainability assessment model called Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX) to evaluate the environmental impacts of urban areas. MUSIX is designed as a policy-making support tool to highlight key environmental issues at the local level, which concentrates specifically on residential developments. MUSIX measures the sustainability performance of a residential area by generating a set of parcel-scale indicators. The model has been tested in a comparative study. In the light of model findings, the policy actions undertaken by different governmental institutions for sustainable urban development were evaluated. This paper provides a summary of the results and concludes with a discussion of the limitations and future research directions.
  Keywords: sustainable development; sustainability assessment; sustainability indicators; GIS-based spatial analysis.
  
  
• Practice and experience on deploying green datacentres for cloud computing  
  by Peng Xiao, Dongbo Liu 
  Abstract: As more and more cloud applications have been developed for solving large-scale problems, the energy consumption in cloud datacentres has become an important issue that needs to be addressed even before such a datacentre is constructed or deployed. Unfortunately, most of the current studies focused on inventing some novel energy-aware techniques on specified aspects, and few of them take efforts on how to integrate the available energy-efficient technologies into a real-world datacentre, or how to deploy them so as to improve the energy-efficiency of a non-trivial cloud-based datacentre. In this paper, we present our practice and experience on constructing and deploying a campus cloud-based datacentre, and the major goal is to improve the energy-efficiency related metrics for this datacentre as possible as we can. To do this, various available technologies have been adopted in designing our datacentre, and the experience can be referenced for those people who are planning to construct their own green-oriented IT infrastructures. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the energy-efficiency of our datacentre, and the results indicate that the approaches proposed in this paper are effective to construct or deploy green-oriented large-scale datacentres.
  Keywords: cloud computing; green computing; quality of service; energy-efficiency.
  
  
• Livelihood of ethnic minorities and sustainable development of buffer ones: a case study of the Chu Yang Sing National Park, the Central Highlands of Vietnam  
  by Nguyen Hoang Phuong, Dung T.N. Nguyen, Lien T.H. Pham, Thanh Duc Dang 
  Abstract: Buffer zones play a crucial role in protecting the ecological integrity of forests and maintaining the development of surrounding communities. If appropriate forest management strategies are not implemented, a booming population and intra-zone dynamics may pose many threats to their survival. The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of the local livelihood of ethnic minorities on the sustainable development of buffer zones in a developing country via a case study of the Chu Yang Sing National Park in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Results indicated that most of the livelihood of ethnic minorities was related to harvesting forest products and breeding animals. However, a large percentage of people in the community were still living much below the standard of the country at 2.6 million VND/year (approximately US$105) and were still facing famine regularly. Several reasons, such as low productivity of plants and the lack of market information, contributed to this poverty. Additionally, their uncontrolled exploitation behaviour resulted in negative impacts on the biodiversity of the national park; this then triggered backward effects on peoples income. Therefore, we suggest establishing a conservation strategy that encourages cooperation with local people to improve their livelihood in order to minimise negative impacts on biodiversity and to ensure the sustainable development of this important national park.
  Keywords: conservation; ethnic minority community; biodiversity; poverty; livelihood; Central Highlands of Vietnam; buffer zones.