Kiilerichskovsgaard7718

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis, one which also influences the ways sustainability is being taught at universities. This paper undertakes an analysis of the extent to which COVID-19 as a whole and the lockdown it triggered in particular, which has led to the suspension of presence-based teaching in universities worldwide and influenced teaching on matters related to sustainable development. By means of a worldwide survey involving higher education institutions across all continents, the study has identified a number of patterns, trends and problems. The results from the study show that the epidemic has significantly affected teaching practices. The lockdowns have led to a surge in the use of on-line communication tools as a partial replacement to normal lessons. In addition, many faculty teaching sustainability in higher education have strong competencies in digital literacy. The sampled higher education educations have-as a whole-adequate infrastructure to continue to teach during the lockdowns. Finally, the majority of the sample revealed that they miss the interactions via direct face-to-face student engagement, which is deemed as necessary for the effective teaching of sustainability content. The implications of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, it describes how sustainability teaching on sustainable development has been affected by the lockdown. Secondly, it describes some of the solutions deployed to overcome the problem. Finally, the paper outlines the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic may serve the purpose of showing how university teaching on sustainability may be improved in the future, taking more advantage of modern information technologies.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. It was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China, and has resulted in an ongoing pandemic. As of 5 July 2020, more than 11.1 million cases have been reported across 188 countries and territories, resulting in more than 528,000 deaths. More than 6.03 million people have recovered. The entire world population currently faces enormous challenges (i.e., social, environmental, health, and economic) due to the impact of COVID-19. In this regard, the affected countries are now trying to slow down the virus's transmission through social-distancing, lockdowns, increasing the number of tests and treatment facilities. There have been four lockdowns (25 March 2020-31 May 2020), and two unlock periods (1 June-31 July 2020) in India. Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) has been analyzed using MODIS satellite data during various phases of lockdowns over India. With the implementation of lockdown steps, AOD values dropped significantly over various regions. A significant reduction in AOD over the North-Central regions (up to -50%) compared to the regions in the South or Northeast India. The AOD over these regions was significantly affected by the lock/unlock phases. It was also observed that there was a considerable buildup of AOD during the pre-lockdown period in the year 2020 as compared to the past two years.Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is one of the biggest public health issues in the last years. The WHO has reported more than 50,000 confirmed cases and more than 1,000,000 confirmed deaths around the world. Early diagnosis is essential for an appropriate patient care and infection control, so laboratory where molecular tests are held plays a main role. However, laboratory facilities for testing are limited in rural areas. Therefore, it is important to have an effective and practical point-of-care diagnostic system in order to be implemented in developing countries with limited energy access. The objective of this research is to develop an energetically autonomous point-of-care diagnostic system for molecular detection of SARS-CoV-2. This design consists of a retractable system with an area of 15.79 m2 and 3 well-distributed interior areas to guaranty appropriate sample processing. mTOR activator Our point-of-care diagnostic system can be installed at a fixed place (stationary), and it can also be transported to various strategic places (itinerant). The off-grid photovoltaic system feasibility was evaluated using the PVsyst software, presenting an installed capacity of 2.79 KWp, consisting of 4 monocrystalline photovoltaic modules, a 45 A charge regulator and 4 batteries (6 V, 453 Ah). The results showed a performance ratio of 0.522, with higher losses by the full battery (31.77%). This research determines that the proposed point-of-care diagnostic system meets all requirements to set and operate molecular techniques to diagnose infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, with good laboratory conditions, secure and eco-efficient energy, supporting the health scheme to prevent and control the spread of the virus.We examined the effect of environmental disclosure on environmental performance for listed mining companies in China. Our analysis used China's Environmental Information Disclosure Degree (EIDD) and the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission's disclosure guidelines to propose the Environmental Information Disclosure Index. Majority of previous studies on environmental disclosures focused on a particular company or city or province. Few studies considered a whole sector of a country. Among the few studies that considered a whole industry, none of such studies considered the mining industry. In addition, our study employed a recent environmental disclosure index and modified a recent index for environmental performance for the empirical analysis making our study unique. We also employed vigorous reliability and robustness test to ensure that our findings are valid and can be used by policy-makers. Using panel data for thirty-four mining companies from both Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange for the period 2000-2018, our cointegration estimation analysis concluded that corporate environmental performance and environmental information disclosure has a positive and significant relationship at a 1% level. Trend analysis revealed that mining companies comply with environmental information disclosure in China. This was seen from the great improvement in the environmental disclosure for mining companies between 2008 and 2010 after the enforcement of EIDD. Our results contribute to the previous literature and open the way for further studies on industry level in other countries.