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The Forest Law and Forest Regulations in Turkey have been amended frequently over the past 20 years to meet the increasing demands for non-forestry use of forest land. This led to a significant increase in the non-forestry use of forest areas and the share of these utilizations in all forest areas reached 3,5%. Since the General Directorate of Forest does not release detailed information about these allocations to the public, it is not known how this kind of uses affects or will affect deforestation in the country. For this reason, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports were used for the first time in this study to obtain detailed information on these uses, and 1.311 investment project were analysed. Thus, results that could not be obtained through the limited data released by the General Directorate of Forestry (GDoF) were reached. Among these results, the distribution of the allocation of forests for non-forestry uses to sub-sectors in each sector and the distribution of allocations by region and province are important for shaping the policies to be followed in the future. Energy and mining sectors are prominent in terms of forest area utilisation. According to the findings of the study, it was determined that 72,7% of the energy projects and 64,6% of the mining projects that received EIA positive decision between 2014 and 2022 have forest area allocations. When the areal distribution of these projects is analysed, it is seen that 33,54% of the total area of energy projects and 31,3% of mining projects are located in forest areas. In other words, if these projects are realised, one third of the project areas will be in forests and these forest areas will be destroyed. At this point, managers have two choices in front of them. Either they will abandon the current and future projects that will destroy nature and create new projects that protect nature, or they will destroy nature in the name of economic growth and further accelerate the deforestation in the country. There is an urgent need for the country's administration to realise that such an economic growth approach is not sustainable and to abandon this approach and to start taking measures against deforestation and the dangers arising from it as soon as possible.

This paper delves into the crucial challenge of safeguarding data sensitivity and preventing security breaches, which can result in substantial losses, including significant financial costs and potential loss of lives. Notably, the United States faces the highest financial burden, with data breaches costing approximately USD 5.09 million. With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, enormous volumes of data are collected from diverse sources. However, the inherent limitations in computational power and memory of IoT devices render them susceptible targets for malicious attacks. This study focuses on fortifying the security of multimedia data, encompassing audio, video, and images, obtained from IoT devices. Cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain and quantum cryptography are explored as promising avenues to bolster multimedia security and preserve privacy. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) emerges as an alternative to classical encryption and key distribution methods, offering heightened data security. Simultaneously, blockchain leverages hash functions to augment the overall security posture. By harnessing the principles of quantum mechanics, QKD facilitates secure key exchange between involved parties for data encryption and decryption. Additionally, the paper introduces innovative methodologies to enhance the security, privacy, and anonymity of IoT devices.

In a digital world increasingly characterized by new business opportunities and challenges driven by the proliferation of pervasive digital technologies, companies are more than ever called to act entrepreneurially. This scenario has raised important questions at the intersection of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and digital technologies, as we currently lack a comprehensive understanding on the implications of digital technologies in CE strategy, related antecedents, processes, and outcomes. To fill this gap, our study takes stock of the extant literature on CE in the digital age. Through a review of 54 studies, we craft an integrative framework of CE in the digital age, articulated across six building blocks. Building on the proposed framework, we elaborate a research agenda for future research.

This study concentrates on how change can be effectively managed within the public sector to enhance sustainability. Public institutions are vital in promoting societal well-being and must be capable of adapting to changing circumstances while embracing sustainable practices. The study discusses the importance of digital development and inclusion in the public sector, highlighting the need for organizations to adapt to a changing world and prioritize information technology and user needs. The research methodology involves qualitative research, including semi-structured interviews with employees from the city of Reykjavík, Iceland. The findings emphasize the importance of leaders and middle managers being on board and taking ownership of the digital transformation process. The study also highlights the significance of sustainability in resource management and the innovation in service provision that comes with digital transformation. Overall, the study contributes to understanding change management and digital development in the public sector and provides insights for organizations that are seeking to promote sustainability and adapt to digital advancements.

Agriculture is a major contributor to the global environmental crisis. Natural ecosystems are being replaced by agricultural land, which leads to the extinction of species and the release of tons of carbon emissions. Global agricultural value chains (GVCs) have grown due to the intensification of international trade. While GVCs have undeniably created economic opportunities for the agriculture sector, they have also led to the escalation of local environmental issues. Several initiatives have been implemented to reduce the negative impacts of agriculture, including government regulations, sustainability certification labels, and voluntary sustainability commitments. However, the effectiveness of these initiatives has been questioned due to several reasons, including the mismatches between the scale of the problem and the solution, the lack of monitoring and verification of sustainability actions, and their weak enforcement. Sustainability initiatives are informed by studies assessing the impacts of agriculture that often only focus on local impacts, while disregarding larger-scale – telecoupled– dynamics that can trigger impacts across geographic and temporal scales. This thesis aims to help bridge these knowledge gaps by examining the impacts of agricultural GVCs across scales, studying the role of GVC’s configuration in modulating these impacts and investigating the role of GVC actors in mitigating sustainability risks across scales. The global cocoa value chain is used as a case study. Chapter 2 examines various impact assessment methods and their ability to capture the effects caused by telecoupled dynamics across different scales. The study concludes that no single method is sufficient to capture all telecoupled cross-scale dynamics and that the integration of different methods is necessary to bridge gaps between methods and complement their scope. Chapter 3 implements the recommendations outlined in Chapter 2 by analyzing the impacts caused by cocoa agroforestry and cocoa full-sun production in Ghana. Impacts on carbon, biodiversity stocks, and environmental pollution were analyzed within and beyond the farm-level. This chapter reveals that findings drawn from farm-level assessments can contradict those from landscape-level assessments. Decision-makers focused should be wary of extrapolating farm-level assessment results to larger scales. Chapter 4 expands the scope to the global scale by examining the role of the cocoa GVC configuration on the capacity of the sector to address sustainability challenges across scales. The chapter identifies different types of cocoa traders, their market dominance, and sustainability commitments. The chapter highlights that to address the telecoupled impacts of the cocoa GVC, coordinated action between traders is required, along with government interventions to balance power asymmetries. Chapter 5 measured the degree to which cocoa traders, as identified in Chapter 4, are exposed to deforestation and climate change. This chapter highlights that sustainability challenges in agricultural value chains cannot be resolved in isolation as farming systems are constantly interacting with other farming systems and land competing sectors. To avoid displacing negative impacts across scales, it is necessary to have a coordinated and collaborative effort from stakeholders and sectors involved in making decisions related to land use. This thesis shows that addressing the telecoupled impacts caused by agricultural value chains needs a good understanding of the cause-effect dynamics at play. This requires the quantification of impacts caused by agriculture across scales and the characterization of the GVC network of actors modulating these impacts. Interdisciplinary methods need to be leveraged and integrated to generate actionable insights. The findings of this thesis can assist decision-makers and private actors in devising customized sustainability strategies, prioritizing action, and addressing the most vulnerable hotspots while being mindful of global teleconnections and avoiding spillovers.

Nowadays, Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) is on the political agenda as one of the main objectives in order to respond to the increasing degradation processes affecting soils and territories. Nevertheless, proper implementation of environmental policies is very difficult due to a lack of the operational, reliable and easily usable tools necessary to support political decisions when identifying problems, defining the causes of degradation and helping to find possible solutions. It is within this framework that this paper attempts to demonstrate a new valuable web-based operational LDN tool as a component of an already running Spatial Decision Support System (S-DSS) developed on a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure (GCI). The tool could be offered to EU administrative units (e.g., municipalities) so that they may better evaluate the state and the impact of land degradation in their territories. The S-DSS supports the acquisition, management and processing of both static and dynamic data, together with data visualization and on-the-fly computing, in order to perform modelling, all of which is potentially accessible via the Web. The land degradation data utilized to develop the LDN tool refer to the SDG 15.3.1 indicator and were obtained from a platform named Trends.Earth, designed to monitor land change by using earth observations, and post-processed to correct some of the major artefacts relating to urban areas. The tool is designed to support land planning and management by producing data, statistics, reports and maps for any EU area of interest. The tool will be demonstrated through a short selection of practical case studies, where data, tables and stats are provided to challenge land degradation at different spatial extents. Currently, there are WEBGIS systems to visualize land degradation maps but—to our knowledge—this is the first S-DSS tool enabling customized LDN reporting at any NUTS (nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) level for the entire EU territory.

Wood vinegar is a by-product of the pyrolysis of organic raw materials. In this study, we investigated the chemical composition and biological activity of industrial wood vinegar derived from the pyrolysis of wood pruning waste. The composition of wood vinegar was characterized using liquid chromatography (LC) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Wood vinegar bioactivity was tested against Bactrocera oleae under field conditions in an olive grove for two years. Furthermore, wood vinegar was applied in a greenhouse experiment with strawberry plants and in a strawberry field infested with the nematode Meloidogyne incognita. Finally, a seed root length bioassay was performed to evaluate the phytotoxicity or biostimulation of wood vinegar on Eruca sativa, Lactuca sativa, Lens culinaryis, Lolium multiflorum, and Solanum lycopersicum. Our results showed that wood vinegar had a pH of 3.2, with high concentrations of acetic acid (27,840.16 mg L−1) and phenols (54.00 mg L−1). No repellent effect against B. oleae was observed when wood vinegar was applied as an aerosol in olive groves. On strawberry plants in greenhouse conditions, wood vinegar showed phytotoxic effects at high concentrations, resulting in a decrease in the total yield of the plants. In the field, at a 1% concentration, wood vinegar led to a significant 15% reduction in the infection caused by M. incognita in strawberry plants. Finally, in the in vitro crop bioassay, wood vinegar demonstrated remarkable phytotoxicity effects at high concentrations while promoting root growth when diluted. The efficacy of wood vinegar displayed considerable variability based on concentration and delivery system, emphasizing the need for careful evaluation when considering its application, particularly in diverse crops and production systems.