Tootfinder

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu will step down once its takeover by DoorDash takes effect; the deal is expected to close by October 2 (Yadarisa Shabong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-re…

Google will pay $30M to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it violated kids' privacy on YouTube by collecting data without parental consent for targeted ads (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

US targets steel, copper, lithium imports under Uyghur forced labor law (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/us-targets-steel-copper-lithium-imports-under-uyghur-forced-labor-law-2025-08-19/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250819/p53#a250819p53

Nice article about the importance of connecting data, harmony without orchestration of millions of small flexible energy actions, inspired by a post of mine.
https://nemlog.substack.com/p/sustainability-will-not-be-commanded

Sustainability Will Not Be Commanded; It Will Be Coded
How smarter signals, flexible habits, and open systems could turn energy abundance into everyday opportunity

US DNI Tulsi Gabbard says the UK has agreed to drop its mandate requiring Apple to provide a backdoor for accessing users' encrypted data (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

"California advances climate action with new legislation"
#California #Climate #ClimateChange

The US FTC sues Key Investment Group, operator of sites like TotalTickets.com, for skirting ticket limits to buy up and resell live event tickets at a markup (Jody Godoy/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

Improving the FAIRness and Sustainability of the NHGRI Resources Ecosystem
Larry Babb, Carol Bult, Vincent J. Carey, Robert J. Carroll, Benjamin C. Hitz, Chris J. Mungall, Heidi L. Rehm, Michael C. Schatz, Alex Wagner, NHGRI Resource Workshop Community
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13498

Improving the FAIRness and Sustainability of the NHGRI Resources Ecosystem
In 2024, NHGRI-funded genomic resource projects completed a Self-Assessment Tool (SAT) and interviews to evaluate their application of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and sustainability. Key challenges were identified in metadata tools, data curation, variant identifiers, and data processing. Addressing these needs, we engaged the community through webinars and discussions, leading to a two-day workshop in March 2025. The workshop developed targeted recommendatio…

Google will pay $30M to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it violated kids' privacy on YouTube by collecting data without parental consent for targeted ads (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Robots that Evolve with Us: Modular Co-Design for Personalization, Adaptability, and Sustainability
Lingyun Chen, Qing Xiao, Zitao Zhang, Eli Blevis, Selma \v{S}abanovi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11622

Robots that Evolve with Us: Modular Co-Design for Personalization, Adaptability, and Sustainability
Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants, who engaged with a modular robot co-design framework. Using components we provided as building blocks, participants combined, removed, and invented modules to envision how modular robots could accompany them from childhood through adulthood and into older adu…

Genuinely surprised the DoJ is following through on this given its new effort to marginalize disabled people.
“US sues Uber, alleges discrimination against disabled riders”
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

LUNDIsim: model meshes for flow simulation and scientific data compression benchmarks
Laurent Duval, Fr\'ed\'eric Payan, Christophe Preux, Lauriane Bouard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13636

LUNDIsim: model meshes for flow simulation and scientific data compression benchmarks
The volume of scientific data produced for and by numerical simulation workflows is increasing at an incredible rate. This raises concerns either in computability, interpretability, and sustainability. This is especially noticeable in earth science (geology, meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy), notably with climate studies. We highlight five main evaluation issues: efficiency, discrepancy, diversity, interpretability, availability. Among remedies, lossless and lossy compression techn…

Evaluating End-User Device Energy Models in Sustainability Reporting of Browser-Based Web Services
Maja H. Kirkeby, Timmie Lagermann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12566 https://

Evaluating End-User Device Energy Models in Sustainability Reporting of Browser-Based Web Services
Sustainability reporting in web-based services increasingly relies on simplified energy and carbon models such as the Danish Agency of Digital Government's Digst framework and the United Kingdom-based DIMPACT model. Although these models are widely adopted, their accuracy and precision remain underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study evaluating how well such models reflect actual energy consumption during realistic user interactions with common website categories. Energy use was mea…

Bites of Tomorrow: Personalized Recommendations for a Healthier and Greener Plate
Jiazheng Jing, Yinan Zhang, Chunyan Miao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13870 https://

Bites of Tomorrow: Personalized Recommendations for a Healthier and Greener Plate
The recent emergence of extreme climate events has significantly raised awareness about sustainable living. In addition to developing energy-saving materials and technologies, existing research mainly relies on traditional methods that encourage behavioral shifts towards sustainability, which can be overly demanding or only passively engaging. In this work, we propose to employ recommendation systems to actively nudge users toward more sustainable choices. We introduce Green Recommender Aligned…

Sustainable AI Training via Hardware-Software Co-Design on NVIDIA, AMD, and Emerging GPU Architectures
Yashasvi Makin, Rahul Maliakkal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13163 https://

Sustainable AI Training via Hardware-Software Co-Design on NVIDIA, AMD, and Emerging GPU Architectures
In particular, large-scale deep learning and artificial intelligence model training uses a lot of computational power and energy, so it poses serious sustainability issues. The fast rise in model complexity has resulted in exponential increases in energy consumption, increasing the demand for techniques maximizing computational efficiency and lowering environmental impact. This work explores environmentally driven performance optimization methods especially intended for advanced GPU architectur…

Energy Management and Wake-up for IoT Networks Powered by Energy Harvesting
David Ernesto Ruiz-Guirola, Samuel Montejo-Sanchez, Israel Leyva-Mayorga, Zhu Han, Petar Popovski, Onel L. A. Lopez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13825

Energy Management and Wake-up for IoT Networks Powered by Energy Harvesting
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) presents sustainability challenges such as increased maintenance requirements and overall higher energy consumption. This motivates self-sustainable IoT ecosystems based on Energy Harvesting (EH). This paper treats IoT deployments in which IoT devices (IoTDs) rely solely on EH to sense and transmit information about events/alarms to a base station (BS). The objective is to effectively manage the duty cycling of the IoTDs to prolong battery life a…

Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/major-us-online-retailers-remove-listings-…

A Knowledge Graph Informing Soil Carbon Modeling
Nasim Shirvani-Mahdavi, Devin Wingfield, Juan Guajardo Gutierrez, Mai Tran, Zhengyuan Zhu, Zeyu Zhang, Haiqi Zhang, Abhishek Divakar Goudar, Chengkai Li, Virginia Jin, Timothy Propst, Dan Roberts, Catherine Stewart, Jianzhong Su, Jennifer Woodward-Greene
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10965

A Knowledge Graph Informing Soil Carbon Modeling
Soil organic carbon is crucial for climate change mitigation and agricultural sustainability. However, understanding its dynamics requires integrating complex, heterogeneous data from multiple sources. This paper introduces the Soil Organic Carbon Knowledge Graph (SOCKG), a semantic infrastructure designed to transform agricultural research data into a queryable knowledge representation. SOCKG features a robust ontological model of agricultural experimental data, enabling precise mapping of dat…

Evaluating sugarcane bagasse-based biochar as an economically viable catalyst for agricultural and environmental advancement in Brazil through scenario-based economic modeling
Sebastian G. Nosenzo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12454

Evaluating sugarcane bagasse-based biochar as an economically viable catalyst for agricultural and environmental advancement in Brazil through scenario-based economic modeling
The increasing global demand for sustainable agricultural practices and effective waste management has highlighted the potential of biochar as a multifaceted solution. This study evaluates the economic viability of sugarcane bagasse-based biochar in Brazil, focusing on its potential to enhance agricultural productivity and contribute to environmental sustainability. While existing literature predominantly explores the production, crop yield benefits, and carbon sequestration capabilities of bio…

Energy-Aware 6G Network Design: A Survey
Rashmi Kamran, Mahesh Ganesh Bhat, Pranav Jha, Shana Moothedath, Manjesh Hanawal, Prasanna Chaporkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11289 ht…

Energy-Aware 6G Network Design: A Survey
6th Generation (6G) mobile networks are envisioned to support several new capabilities and data-centric applications for unprecedented number of users, potentially raising significant energy efficiency and sustainability concerns. This brings focus on sustainability as one of the key objectives in the their design. To move towards sustainable solution, research and standardization community is focusing on several key issues like energy information monitoring and exposure, use of renewable energ…

A US district judge rules Amazon violated consumer law by collecting Prime subscribers' billing info before disclosing terms, handing the FTC a partial win (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-ftc-wins-key…

Cork (Ireland), will host the 12th International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in 2027 with satellite gatherings in Covilha (Portugal) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania).
Cork 2027 | degrowth.info
https://degrowth.info/en/conference/cork-2027

Cork 2027
Coming in August 2027 the 12th Conference will take place in Ireland, with satellite gatherings in Covilha (Portugal) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). With a thematic focus on "policy, practice and culture" the event aims to help accelerate the decolonial momentum of the just transition, celebrating diverse, pluriversal voices from around the world and turning a critical eye on the extractivist policies.

Global treaty to end subsidies for destructive fishing takes effect https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/10/global-treaty-to-end-subsidies-for-destructive-fishing-takes-effect/

Global treaty to end subsidies for destructive fishing takes effect
A landmark global treaty to curb billions of dollars in government subsidies for overfishing took effect on Sept. 15, Mongabay contributor Elizabeth Fitt reported. The agreement marks the first time the World Trade Organization (WTO) has approved an environmental sustainability agreement in its 30-year history. The deal came into effect after Brazil, Kenya, Tonga and […]

Australia's ACCC says Google agreed pay a ~$36M fine over deals from 2019-2021 with Telstra and Optus to pre-install only Google Search on Android phones (Himanshi Akhand/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Sustainability Assessment of Future Accelerators
C. Bloise, E. Cennini, J. Gutleber, W. Kaabi, A. Klumpp, P. Koppenburg, Y. Li, B. List, R. Losito, B. Mandelli, E. A. Nanni, N. Neufeld, T. Schoerner-Sadenius, B. Shepherd, V. Shiltsev, S. Stapnes, M. Titov, L. Ulrici, H. Wakeling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11705

Sustainability Assessment of Future Accelerators
The Large Particle Physics Laboratory Directors Group (LDG) established the Working Group (WG) on the Sustainability Assessment of Future Accelerators in 2024 with the mandate to develop guidelines and a list of key parameters for the assessment of the sustainability of future accelerators in particle physics. While focused on accelerator projects, much of the work will also be relevant to other present and upcoming research infrastructures. The development and continuous update of such a frame…

CarAT: Carbon Atom Tracing across Industrial Chemical Value Chains via Chemistry Language Models
Emma Pajak, David Walz, Olga Walz, Laura Marie Helleckes, Klaus Hellgardt, Antonio del Rio Chanona
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10216

CarAT: Carbon Atom Tracing across Industrial Chemical Value Chains via Chemistry Language Models
The chemical industry is increasingly prioritising sustainability, with a focus on reducing carbon footprints to achieve net zero. By 2026, the Together for Sustainability (TfS) consortium will require reporting of biogenic carbon content (BCC) in chemical products, posing a challenge as BCC depends on feedstocks, value chain configuration, and process-specific variables. While carbon-14 isotope analysis can measure BCC, it is impractical for continuous industrial monitoring. This work presents…

Towards a Taxonomy of Sustainability Requirements for Software Design
Mandira Roy, Novarun Deb, Nabendu Chaki, Agostino Cortesi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08990 https://

Towards a Taxonomy of Sustainability Requirements for Software Design
Software systems are a significant contributor to global sustainability concerns, demanding that environmental, social, technical, and economic factors be systematically addressed from the initial requirements engineering phase. Although existing research provides various sustainability requirements (SRs), these contributions are often fragmented, specific to certain dimensions, or limited to particular application domains, resulting in a critical lack of a unified, comprehensive taxonomy for t…

#USA under #Drumpf insists on irksome negotiating table role as biggest obstacle to solving petty perennial #plastic #pollution

Tough U.S. stance casts gloom over plastics pollution deal after Geneva flop
A three-year global push to reach a legally binding treaty to curb plastic pollution harming the oceans and human health now appears adrift.

I wonder how Nazi Germany handled climate issues during the Holocaust. Do you think it was widely discussed at the time? https://mastodon.social/@Snoro/115179873107637672

From Canada's National Observer
Whistleblower Exposes How AI Fuels Big Oil Growth
"We realized we were basically working for an oil company," said Holly Alpine, a former Microsoft employee who quit her dream job on the company's sustainability team when she realized the company, like most tech companies, is helping fossil fuel companies extract more oil and gas."
#fossilfuels

Whistleblower exposes how AI fuels Big Oil growth
"We realized we were basically working for an oil company," said Holly Alpine, a former Microsoft employee who quit her dream job on the company's sustainability team when she realized the company, like most tech companies, is helping fossil fuel companies extract more oil and gas.

Surviving the Narrative Collapse: Sustainability and Justice in Computing Within Limits
Dave Guruge, Samuel Mann, Ruth Myers, Oliver Bates, Mikey Goldweber, Andy Williamson, Jon Lasenby, Ian Brooks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05992

Surviving the Narrative Collapse: Sustainability and Justice in Computing Within Limits
Sustainability-driven computing research - encompassing equity, diversity, climate change, and social justice - is increasingly dismissed as woke or even dangerous in many sociopolitical contexts. As misinformation, ideological polarisation, deliberate ignorance and reactionary narratives gain ground, how can sustainability research in computing continue to exist and make an impact? This paper explores these tensions through Fictomorphosis, a creative story retelling method that reframes contes…

A UK judge dismisses Wikimedia's Online Safety Act challenge over requiring Wikipedia to verify users and contributors, but says it can file further challenges (Sam Tobin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/so…

6G Resilience -- White Paper
Hirley Alves, Nurul H. Mahmood, Onel L. A. L\'opez, Sumudu Samarakoon, Seppo Yrj\"ol\"a, Matti Latva-Aho, Markku Juntti, Ari Pouttu, Armin Dekorsy, Arthur Sousa de Sena, Aydin Sezgin, Bho Matthiesen, Chafika Benzaid, Chathuranga Weeraddana, David Hutchison, Dileepa Marasinghe, Doganalp Ergenc, Eduard Jorswieck, Erkki Harjula, Falko Dressler, Harri Saarnisaari, Italo Atzeni, Jaap Van De Beek, Jacek Rak, Konstantin Mikhaylov, Lauri Loven, Madhus…

6G Resilience -- White Paper
6G must be designed to withstand, adapt to, and evolve amid prolonged, complex disruptions. Mobile networks' shift from efficiency-first to sustainability-aware has motivated this white paper to assert that resilience is a primary design goal, alongside sustainability and efficiency, encompassing technology, architecture, and economics. We promote resilience by analysing dependencies between mobile networks and other critical systems, such as energy, transport, and emergency services, and illus…

Heading to @SustainableBrands next week? It’s my favorite gathering for people reimagining business through purpose and profit.
Lately I’m hearing from execs who feel their sustainability work is plateauing—not for lack of heart, but because the system itself resists the kind of change we’re trying to create. What are _you_ noticing?
If that’s on your mind too, let’s grab 15 minutes at SB to trade notes. I promise you’ll walk away with at least one useful perspective you hadn’t c…

Join me at two events at the British Library later this month:
https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/knowledge-is-human
On 20 October, the British Library is joining forces with Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation to explore the impact of AI on ope…

Knowledge is Human: The Information Ecosystem in the age of AI
A summit to mark the role of human-created, open knowledge in the age of AI and our collective responsibility to safeguard knowledge integrity and sustainability.

Language of Persuasion and Misrepresentation in Business Communication: A Textual Detection Approach
Sayem Hossen, Monalisa Moon Joti, Md. Golam Rashed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09935

Language of Persuasion and Misrepresentation in Business Communication: A Textual Detection Approach
Business communication digitisation has reorganised the process of persuasive discourse, which allows not only greater transparency but also advanced deception. This inquiry synthesises classical rhetoric and communication psychology with linguistic theory and empirical studies in the financial reporting, sustainability discourse, and digital marketing to explain how deceptive language can be systematically detected using persuasive lexicon. In controlled settings, detection accuracies …

AI-Driven Collaborative Satellite Object Detection for Space Sustainability
Peng Hu, Wenxuan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00755 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

AI-Driven Collaborative Satellite Object Detection for Space Sustainability
The growing density of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) presents serious challenges to space sustainability, primarily due to the increased risk of in-orbit collisions. Traditional ground-based tracking systems are constrained by latency and coverage limitations, underscoring the need for onboard, vision-based space object detection (SOD) capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel satellite clustering framework that enables the collaborative execution of deep learning (DL)-based SOD tas…

Embedding Sustainability in Undergraduate Mathematics with Actionable Case Studies
Maria Kleshnina, Matthew Holden, Ryan Heneghan, Kate Helmstedt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07594

Embedding Sustainability in Undergraduate Mathematics with Actionable Case Studies
There is a growing need to integrate sustainability into tertiary mathematics education given the urgency of addressing global environmental challenges. This paper presents four case studies from Australian university courses that incorporate ecological and environmentally-conscious concepts into the mathematics curriculum. These case studies cover topics such as population dynamics, sustainable fisheries management, statistical inference for endangered species assessment, and mathematical mode…

"From Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage: How UK Plc’s sustainability leaders can respond to net-zero backlash"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Sustainability

We have raspberries growing. When we lived in Seattle we grew kale and picked wild blackberries. All were so much better than anything you get in a grocery store.
I don't eat a lot of fruit these days because its so disappointing to take a bite out of a bland or bitter berry from a plastic carton..
https://m…

SEER: Sustainability Enhanced Engineering of Software Requirements
Mandira Roy, Novarun Deb, Nabendu Chaki, Agostino Cortesi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08981 https://

SEER: Sustainability Enhanced Engineering of Software Requirements
The rapid expansion of software development has significant environmental, technical, social, and economic impacts. Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 compels developers to adopt sustainable practices. Existing methods mostly offer high-level guidelines, which are time-consuming to implement and rely on team adaptability. Moreover, they focus on design or implementation, while sustainability assessment should start at the requirements engineering phase. In this p…

Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability
Ana\"elle Beignon, Thomas Thibault, Nolwenn Maudet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08672 https://

Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability
Generative AI is being massively deployed in digital services, at a scale that will result in significant environmental harm. We document how tech companies are transforming established user interfaces to impose AI use and show how and to what extent these strategies fit within established deceptive pattern categories. We identify two main design strategies that are implemented to impose AI use in both personal and professional contexts: imposing AI features in interfaces at the expense of exis…

Next-Generation Sustainable Wireless Systems: Energy Efficiency Meets Environmental Impact
Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Omar Hashash, Kimia Ehsani, Walid Saad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02395

Next-Generation Sustainable Wireless Systems: Energy Efficiency Meets Environmental Impact
Aligning with the global mandates pushing towards advanced technologies with reduced resource consumption and environmental impacts, the sustainability of wireless networks becomes a significant concern in 6G systems. To address this concern, a native integration of sustainability into the operations of next-generation networks through novel designs and metrics is necessary. Nevertheless, existing wireless sustainability efforts remain limited to energy-efficient network designs which fail to c…

Eco Radio
Eco Radio explores some of the strategies at the forefront of the move toward sustainability...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/eco-radio/

Filing: the SEC settles a lawsuit accusing crypto exchange Gemini of failing to register the Gemini Earn lending program before offering it to retail investors (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

BcQLM: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Distilled Q-Gated Cross-Modal Fusion
Sike Xiang, Shuang Chen, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08715 https:…

BcQLM: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Distilled Q-Gated Cross-Modal Fusion
As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance, their large-scale architectures pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. In the age of large models, where energy efficiency, computational scalability and environmental sustainability are paramount, the development of lightweight and high-performance models is critical for real-world applications. As such, we propose a lightweight MLLM framework for end-to-end visual question answering. Our proposed approach centr…

The Carbon Footprint Wizard: A Knowledge-Augmented AI Interface for Streamlining Food Carbon Footprint Analysis
Mustafa Kaan Aslan, Reinout Heijungs, Filip Ilievski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07733

The Carbon Footprint Wizard: A Knowledge-Augmented AI Interface for Streamlining Food Carbon Footprint Analysis
Environmental sustainability, particularly in relation to climate change, is a key concern for consumers, producers, and policymakers. The carbon footprint, based on greenhouse gas emissions, is a standard metric for quantifying the contribution to climate change of activities and is often assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA). However, conducting LCA is complex due to opaque and global supply chains, as well as fragmented data. This paper presents a methodology that combines advances in L…

Embedding Sustainability in Software Engineering Curriculum: A Case Study
Ruzanna Chitchyan, Niki Mahmoudi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03321 https://arxiv.o…

Embedding Sustainability in Software Engineering Curriculum: A Case Study
Sustainability is increasingly recognized as a critical dimension of engineering education, yet its integration into Software Engineering curricula remains a challenge. This paper reports on a case study that examines how sustainability is being embedded across modules in the Software Engineering program at one university. The paper outlines the process through which academics and students co-identified opportunities for integration, guided by the five dimensions of the Sustainability Awareness…

Food Systems Overlooked in National Climate Plans, New Scorecard Shows https://vegconomist.com/sustainability-environment/food-systems-overlooked-national-climate-plans-new-scorecard-shows/

Food Systems Overlooked in National Climate Plans, New Scorecard Shows - vegconomist - the vegan business magazine
A new evaluation tool, the Food Systems NDC Scorecard, launched today by Mercy For Animals and its partners, assesses how countries are incorporating food

A Conceptual Model and Methodology for Sustainability-aware, IoT-enhanced Business Processes
Victoria Torres Bosch, Ronny Seiger, Manuela Albert Albiol, Antoni Mestre Gascon, Pedro Jose Valderas Aranda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05301

A Conceptual Model and Methodology for Sustainability-aware, IoT-enhanced Business Processes
The real-time data collection and automation capabilities offered by the Internet of Things (IoT) are revolutionizing and transforming Business Processes (BPs) into IoT-enhanced BPs, showing high potential for improving sustainability. Although already studied in Business Process Management (BPM), sustainability research has primarily focused on environmental concerns. However, achieving a holistic and lasting impact requires a systematic approach to address sustainability beyond the environmen…

"Urban heat relief: Trees need water and space to maximize cooling, study finds"
#Trees #Environment
https://

Urban heat relief: Trees need water and space to maximize cooling, study finds
Urban trees are often seen as natural allies in fighting summer heat waves. But how much they actually help to cool their surroundings depends heavily on how moist the soil is. This is the main finding of a new study led by environmental engineers at ETH Zurich and Eawag published in npj Urban Sustainability, which investigated several urban neighborhoods in Zurich.

Apple removes ICE tracking apps after pressure by Trump administration (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/apple-removes-ice-tracking-apps-after-pressure-by-trump-administration-2025-10-03/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251003/p50#a251003p50

SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting
Mohammed Ali, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Adam Jatowt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03000

SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting
The growing demand for corporate sustainability transparency, particularly under new regulations like the EU Taxonomy, necessitates precise data extraction from large, unstructured corporate reports. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, requires high-quality, domain-specific question-answering (QA) datasets to excel at particular domains. To address this, we introduce SustainableQA, a novel dataset and a scalable pipeline for generating a comprehensive …

Bridging Farm Economics and Landscape Ecology for Global Sustainability through Hierarchical and Bayesian Optimization
Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Graham Alexander Watt, Yuri Leonenko, Juan Moreno-Cruz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06386

Bridging Farm Economics and Landscape Ecology for Global Sustainability through Hierarchical and Bayesian Optimization
Agricultural landscapes face the dual challenge of sustaining food production while reversing biodiversity loss. Agri-environmental policies often fall short of delivering ecological functions such as landscape connectivity, in part due to a persistent disconnect between farm-level economic decisions and landscape-scale spatial planning. We introduce a novel hierarchical optimization framework that bridges this gap. First, an Ecological Intensification (EI) model determines the economically opt…

Sustainability Risks under Lotka-Volterra Dynamics
Yiren Wang, Tianhao Zhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04780 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04780

Sustainability Risks under Lotka-Volterra Dynamics
The record-breaking heat in recent years, along with other extreme weather conditions worldwide has not only warned us about the devastating effects of global warming but also revived our interest in studying sustainability risks on a broader scale. In this paper, we propose a generalised model of sustainability risks characterising the economic-environmental-social nexus (EVS) based on a classic Lotka-Volterra framework. Compared to the World3 model proposed by Meadows et al. (1972) in their l…

New York sues Zelle, claiming that security lapses led to $1B in consumer fraud losses; the US CFPB dropped a similar case in March (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Sprouting technology otherwise, hospicing negative commons -- Rethinking technology in the transition to sustainability-oriented futures
Martin Deron
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05860

Sprouting technology otherwise, hospicing negative commons -- Rethinking technology in the transition to sustainability-oriented futures
Due to its significant and growing environmental harms, both directly through its materiality and indirectly through its pervasive integration into unsustainable economic systems, ICT will need to be radically redirected to align with sustainability-oriented futures. While the role of ICT in such futures will likely diverge significantly from current dynamics, it will probably not be entirely disconnected from the present. Instead, such transition involves complex dynamics of continuity, adapta…

Integrating Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks for Sustainable 6G Operations: A Latency-Aware Multi-Tier Cell-Switching Approach
Metin Ozturk, Maryam Salamatmoghadasi, Halim Yanikomeroglu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10849

Integrating Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks for Sustainable 6G Operations: A Latency-Aware Multi-Tier Cell-Switching Approach
Sustainability is paramount in modern cellular networks, which face significant energy consumption challenges from rising mobile traffic and advancements in wireless technology. Cell-switching, well-established in literature as an effective solution, encounters limitations such as inadequate capacity and limited coverage when implemented through terrestrial networks (TN). This study enhances cell-switching by integrating non-terrestrial networks (NTN), including satellites (used for cell-switch…

Two authors file a proposed class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging Apple knowingly used a dataset of pirated books to train its AI models (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-…

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/microsoft-says-some-sharepoint-server-hackers-now-using-ransomware-2025-07-23/
Microsoft says some SharePoint server hack…

Maximising Energy Efficiency in Large-Scale Open RAN: Hybrid xApps and Digital Twin Integration
Ahmed Al-Tahmeesschi, Yi Chu, Gurdeep Singh, Charles Turyagyenda, Dritan Kaleshi, David Grace, Hamed Ahmadi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10097

Maximising Energy Efficiency in Large-Scale Open RAN: Hybrid xApps and Digital Twin Integration
The growing demand for high-speed, ultra-reliable, and low-latency communications in 5G and beyond networks has significantly driven up power consumption, particularly within the Radio Access Network (RAN). This surge in energy demand poses critical operational and sustainability challenges for mobile network operators, necessitating innovative solutions that enhance energy efficiency without compromising Quality of Service (QoS). Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), spearheaded by the O-RAN Alli…

Exclusive: US regulators cancel bank exams as Trump rollback gathers pace (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-regulators-cancel-bank-exams-trump-rollback-gathers-pace-2025-09-02/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250902/p11#a250902p11

Sustainability Evaluation Metrics for Recommender Systems
Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22520 …

Sustainability Evaluation Metrics for Recommender Systems
Sustainability-oriented evaluation metrics can help to assess the quality of recommender systems beyond wide-spread metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and satisfaction. Following the United Nations`s sustainable development goals (SDGs), such metrics can help to analyse the impact of recommender systems on environmental, social, and economic aspects. We discuss different basic sustainability evaluation metrics for recommender systems and analyze their applications.

Perspectives, Needs and Challenges for Sustainable Software Engineering Teams: A FinServ Case Study
Satwik Ghanta, Peggy Gregory, Gul Calikli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12466 ht…

Perspectives, Needs and Challenges for Sustainable Software Engineering Teams: A FinServ Case Study
Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) is slowly becoming an industry need for reasons including reputation enhancement, improved profits and more efficient practices. However, SSE has many definitions, and this is a challenge for organisations trying to build a common and broadly agreed understanding of the term. Although much research effort has gone into identifying general SSE practices, there is a gap in understanding the sustainability needs of specific organisational contexts, such as fi…

Funding AI for Good: A Call for Meaningful Engagement
Hongjin Lin, Anna Kawakami, Catherine D'Ignazio, Kenneth Holstein, Krzysztof Gajos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12455 htt…

Funding AI for Good: A Call for Meaningful Engagement
Artificial Intelligence for Social Good (AI4SG) is a growing area exploring AI's potential to address social issues like public health. Yet prior work has shown limited evidence of its tangible benefits for intended communities, and projects frequently face inadequate community engagement and sustainability challenges. Funding agendas play a crucial role in framing AI4SG initiatives and shaping their approaches. Through a qualitative analysis of 35 funding documents -- representing about $410 m…

Paxos applies to create a US national trust bank, which would allow it to manage and hold assets for customers, following applications by Circle and Ripple (Hannah Lang/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

(2020) Economic growth is incompatible with biodiversity conservation #environment

Economic growth is incompatible with biodiversity conservation
The increase in resource consumption and polluting emissions as a result of economic growth is not compatible with biodiversity conservation. However, most international policies on biodiversity and sustainability advocate economic growth. These are the main conclusions of the study "Biodiversity policy beyond economic growth," published this week in the scientific journal Conservation Letters. This contradiction became clear after a review of international scientific and policy work on the sub…

A UK judge dismisses Wikimedia's Online Safety Act challenge over requiring Wikipedia to verify users and contributors, but says it can file further challenges (Sam Tobin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/so…

What is required for a post-growth model?
Rob Van Eynde, Kevin J. Dillman, Jefim Vogel, Daniel W. O'Neill
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07974 https://arxi…

What is required for a post-growth model?
Post-growth has emerged as an umbrella term for various sustainability visions that advocate the pursuit of environmental sustainability, social equity, and human wellbeing, while questioning the continued pursuit of economic growth. Although there are increasing calls to include post-growth scenarios in high-level assessments, a coherent framework with what is required to model post-growth adequately remains absent. This article addresses this gap by: (1) identifying the minimum requirements f…

Some Bollywood stars sue YouTube, seeking the removal of AI videos infringing their IP, and want safeguards to stop other AI models from training on such videos (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

Google is the first company to be designated with special status in the UK under new digital laws; the designation does not introduce any immediate requirements (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Sustaining Research Software: A Fitness Function Approach
Philipp Zech, Irdin Pekaric
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10085 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10085

Sustaining Research Software: A Fitness Function Approach
The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by leveraging the concept of fitness functions from evolutionary architecture. Fitness functions are automated, continuously evaluated metrics designed to ensure that software systems meet desired non-functional, architectural qualities over time. We define a set …

"Why the future of sustainable furniture is pre-loved"
#Furniture #Sustainability
https://www.

Crypto exchange Gemini launches an Australian arm, Gemini Intergalactic Australia, to offer its services in the country after registering with regulator AUSTRAC (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-…

New York City sues Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and ByteDance, accusing them of fueling a mental health crisis among children by addicting them to social media (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

A US federal judge preliminarily approves Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement with authors (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-j…

"Millions of buildings at risk from sea level rise, analysis finds"
#Climate #ClimateChange
https://ph…

Millions of buildings at risk from sea level rise, analysis finds
Sea level rise could put more than 100 million buildings across the Global South at risk of regular flooding if fossil fuel emissions are not curbed quickly, according to a new McGill-led study published in npj Urban Sustainability.

The Carbon Cost of Conversation, Sustainability in the Age of Language Models
Sayed Mahbub Hasan Amiri, Prasun Goswami, Md. Mainul Islam, Mohammad Shakhawat Hossen, Sayed Majhab Hasan Amiri, Naznin Akter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20018

The Carbon Cost of Conversation, Sustainability in the Age of Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and BERT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet their environmental costs remain dangerously overlooked. This article critiques the sustainability of LLMs, quantifying their carbon footprint, water usage, and contribution to e-waste through case studies of models such as GPT-4 and energy-efficient alternatives like Mistral 7B. Training a single LLM can emit carbon dioxide equivalent to hundreds of cars driven annually, while data centr…

State Department cable: Marco Rubio orders diplomats in Europe to lobby against the DSA, arguing it imposes free speech restrictions and high compliance costs (Humeyra Pamuk/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc…

Source: President Trump plans to sign the TikTok deal on Thursday (Nandita Bose/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/trump-will-sign-tiktok-deal-thursday-source-says-2025-09-24/…

Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability: Bundle the Needs from Industry
Markus Funke, Patricia Lago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20774 https://

Towards an Architectural Perspective for Sustainability: Bundle the Needs from Industry
Sustainability is increasingly recognized as an emerging quality property in software-intensive systems, yet architects lack structured guidance to address it effectively throughout the software design phase. Architectural perspectives-an architectural knowledge artifact composed of concerns, activities, tactics, pitfalls, and checklists-offer a promising approach to tackle such emerging quality properties across architectural views and are also independent of architecture frameworks and indust…

Linda Yaccarino is named CEO of digital health platform eMed Population Health less than a month after stepping down as CEO of X (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-reg…

Towards Sustainability Model Cards
Gwendal Jouneaux, Jordi Cabot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19559 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19559

Towards Sustainability Model Cards
The growth of machine learning (ML) models and associated datasets triggers a consequent dramatic increase in energy costs for the use and training of these models. In the current context of environmental awareness and global sustainability concerns involving ICT, Green AI is becoming an important research topic. Initiatives like the AI Energy Score Ratings are a good example. Nevertheless, these benchmarking attempts are still to be integrated with existing work on Quality Models and Service-L…

Two authors file a proposed class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging Apple knowingly used a dataset of pirated books to train its AI models (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-…

Elon Musk alleges Apple is violating antitrust laws by "making it impossible" for any AI firm but OpenAI to top its App Store, says xAI will take legal action (Surbhi Misra/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustaina…

OpenAI asks a US judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it hired away xAI employees to steal trade secrets, calling the case part of Musk's "ongoing harassment" (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/bo…

FCC Chair Brendan Carr says major US online retailers have removed several million listings for prohibited Chinese electronics as part of the agency's crackdown (David Shepardson/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainab…

The EU's General Court sides with Meta and TikTok in their legal dispute with the EC over the DSA's 0.05% supervisory fee, saying the EU's methodology is flawed (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustai…

Indonesia raises taxes on crypto sellers, from 0.1% to 0.21% in domestic exchanges, and from 0.2% to 1% in overseas exchanges, but removes VAT on buyers (Stefanno Sulaiman/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

The US makes it harder for Samsung, SK Hynix, and Intel to produce chips in China by revoking waivers for the use of US equipment in their Chinese operations (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

The UK Supreme Court denied Uber's appeal in a case over VAT, forcing Uber to pay a 20% VAT on fares outside London while rival private taxi operators pay none (Sam Tobin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sus

Germany-based Makersite, which helps clients like Microsoft improve product sustainability during the design process, raised a €60M Series B (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)
https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/07/german

A US federal judge preliminarily approves Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement with authors (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-j…

The EU launches an antitrust probe into SAP over its ERP software maintenance and support services, with a potential fine of ~10% of its annual global sales (Makini Brice/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Source: President Trump will sign the TikTok deal on Thursday (Nandita Bose/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/trump-will-sign-tiktok-deal-thursday-source-says-2025-09-24/

Filing: CFPB scrapped a 2024 Apple credit card settlement implemented under Biden, ending oversight requirements years early; Apple had already paid a $25M fine (Christian Martinez/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

A US judge dismisses a lawsuit accusing Intel of defrauding shareholders by hiding problems in its foundry unit, news of which led to a $32B one-day stock fall (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

Microsoft says the "Storm-2603" group is now deploying ransomware via vulnerable SharePoint server versions, as the estimated number of victims hits 400 (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/…

The DOJ says it will no longer target developers who create decentralized crypto platforms without criminal intent, as part of a regulatory retreat on crypto (Chris Prentice/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…