The recent global pandemic has caused unimaginable pain for so many people, great sorrows for so many families, and untold social and economic damages for so many communities across the globe. The recent advances in the development of vaccines have created new hope in fighting against this disease and hopefully the international efforts led by World Health Organization through its COVAX programme will help to end the suffering from this pandemic in the near future.
The thought leaders within many science and engineering disciplines have been quick to draw comparison between the common challenges in the battle against COVID and climate change, which has led to the question ‘are there any lessons that could be gained from fighting COVID for the battle against climate change?’. In this context, the initial analysis of such comparison has pointed to some intriguing observations:
The worldwide agreement on no one is safe, unless everyone is safe has reaffirmed the common belief that climate change does not respect borders. In this context, the aspirational visions of ‘our common future’ and ‘global citizenship’, which had started to gain significant popularity prior to pandemic, now firmly appear to be an unquestionable and inevitable destination.
The mobilisation of international research and development community through global planning and coordination of efforts and investments as well as seamless sharing of data and knowledge has proven to have the potential for incredible achievements within an astonishingly short timeframe and has renewed hope in our ability to address global ‘grand challenges’.
The politics of united we stand, divided we fall and being involved in multinational cross-governments initiatives for a ‘greater good’ make much more socioeconomic sense nowadays and has an ever-growing number of followers.
The significant drop in global generation of greenhouse gases and reported improvement in air quality within many large urban areas during this pandemic has created the belief that innovative thinking and difficult lifestyle changes, such as working from home if feasible, newly formed habits for walking and cycling, and reducing business related air travels are not only achievable but also more practical and sensible if supported by appropriate infrastructure and technological advances.
The significant opportunities presented by the reluctance to move back to ‘old times’ and desire to move forward towards the proposed ‘new normal’ concept could (and should) be utilised as the green shoots of ‘manufacturing a sustainable future’ for global population.
The terrible discomfort of having to spend months within confined spaces has created a much deeper appreciation for the ‘great outdoors’ and has refocused many minds on the impact of our lifestyle on natural environment and the need to safeguard this against irreversible damages for our future generations.
Finally, this pandemic has consolidated the desire by younger generation to take control of their future, and thanks to the ‘Greta Thunberg effect’ there is now a global togetherness and demand for actions. Unsurprisingly, it appears that key decision makers in the world of politics and commerce have clearly realised the very high price of ‘inactions’ and are now racing to become the global leaders and contributors to a vision of a ‘sustainable future’ for all.
Inevitability with these exciting and positive developments come even greater responsibilities for Sustainable Engineering community to ensure that any additional emerging global resources is carefully directed at the most needed impactful changes, to share the new findings and technologies for immediate largescale global adoption and to train the future academic and industrial leaders, capable of implementing these changes to achieve our common goals.
Operational changes in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (IJSE)
It is in this context of the urgency for immediate and widescale dissemination of research results that the IJSE publisher and editors have decided to adopt an ‘Open Access’ (OA) model (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-open-access/), which is increasingly demanded by research organisations as a condition of funding and by academic organisations through seamless inclusion of their staff publications within institutional repositories. The many advantages of OA include wider access to most recent research results without the need for a subscription, the dissemination of new knowledge rapidly and widely which could in turn result in more real-life impacts, trigger new research directions, and be used as an ‘open educational resource’. It could also contribute to a knowledge economy and provide a much-needed economic boost within both developed as well as developing countries. In addition, both IJSE publisher and editors have taken every step to ensure that Author Processing Charges (APC) do not become a prohibiting factor for publication of high-quality papers through introduction of a very competitive pricing scheme as well as setting up a APC discount or waiver initiative (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-open-access/requesting-an-apc-waiver/).
Every IJSE submissions will continue to be subject to the usual vigorous reviewing process, and to help with this process, I am delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Antonella Petrillo and Professor Sekar Vinodh as the new Associate Editors of IJSE. Antonella obtained a Mechanical Engineering degree and her PhD on multi-criteria decision-making from University of Cassino and is currently a professor at the Department of Engineering of University of Napoli. Vinodh obtained a PhD in Manufacturing Engineering from Anna University in Chennai and currently is an associate professor in the Department of Production Engineering at National Institute of Technology in Tiruchirappalli. We have also invited new members to join the IJSE Editorial Board and will be recruiting more members based on the areas of growth in OA submissions.
Remaining printed issues of IJSE throughout 2021
All accepted papers prior to conversion to OA model will be printed in the remaining four issues of IJSE throughout 2021. These issues include significantly larger number of papers than our standard issues and are purposely arranged to highlight emerging research areas within Sustainable Engineering.
This third issue of the volume 14 contains 26 papers, focusing on the impact of emerging digital technologies and Industry 4.0 standards, in particular intelligent decision support algorithms and models, to support very complex assessment and selection procedures within sustainability applications. It also includes papers on the rapidly growing area of circular economy and concludes with several papers on how to address the predicted energy gap through renewable sources.