COVID, resilience, and the built environment

A knowledge framework for the design of built environment supportive of resilient internal logistics in hospitals

Internal logistics is crucial for hospitals, occurring within facilities that pose constraints and opportunities, demanding resilient performance (RP) to adapt to dynamic conditions and balance safety and efficiency pressures. However, the role of the built environment (BE) to support RP is not explicitly analysed in the hospital logistics literature, which is usually limited to discuss BE in terms of layout and routing issues. To address this gap, this study presents a knowledge framework of BE supportive of RP in internal hospital logistics. The framework was developed based on a study in a large teaching hospital, encompassing 11 service flows of people and supplies between an intensive care unit and other units. Data collection was based on 38 interviews, documents such as floor plans, and observations of logistics activities. Seven BE design principles developed in a previous study, concerned with RP in general but not focused on logistics, were adopted as initial themes for data analysis. Results of the thematic analysis gave rise to a knowledge framework composed of seven design prescriptions and 63 practical examples of BE supportive of RP in hospital internal logistics. The paper discusses how these prescriptions and examples are connected to resilience management. The framework is new in the context of internal hospital logistics and offers guidance to both BE and logistics designers.

Metro travel and perceived COVID-19 infection risks: A case study of Hong Kong

The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted unprecedented impacts on travel behaviors because of people's increased health precautions and the presence of various COVID-19 containment measures. However, little research has explored whether and how people changed their travel with respect to their perceived local infection risks across space and time. In this article, we relate elasticity and resilience thinking to the changes in metro travel and perceived infection risks at the station or community level over time. Using empirical data from Hong Kong, we measure a metro station's elasticity as the ratio of changes in its average trip length to the COVID-19 cases' footprints around that station. We regard those footprints as a proxy for people's perceived infection risks when making trips to that station. To explore influencing factors on travel in the ups and downs of perceived infection risks, we classify stations based on their elasticity values and examine the association between stations' elasticities and characteristics of stations and their served communities. The findings show that stations varied in elasticity values across space and different surges of the local pandemic. The elasticity of stations can be predicted by socio-demographics and physical attributes of station areas. Stations serving a larger percentage of population with higher education degrees and certain occupations observed more pronounced trip length decrease for the same level of perceived infection risks. The number of parking spaces and retail facilities significantly explained variations in stations' elasticity. The results provide references on crisis management and resilience improvement amid and post COVID-19.

Towards building resilient cities to pandemics: A review of COVID-19 literature

With the global prevalence of COVID-19 disease, the concept of urban resilience against pandemics has drawn the attention of a wide range of researchers, urban planners, and policymakers. This study aims to identify the major dimensions and principles of urban resilience to pandemics through a systematic review focused on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and comparing different perspectives regarding resilient urban environments to such diseases. Based on the findings, the study proposes a conceptual framework and a series of principles of urban resilience to pandemics, consisting of four spatial levels: housing, neighborhoods, city, and the regional and national scales, and three dimensions of pandemic resilience: pandemic-related health requirements, environmental psychological principles, and general resilience principles. The findings show that resilient cities should be able to implement the pandemic-related health requirements, the psychological principles of the environment to reduce the stresses caused by the pandemic, and the general principles of resilience in the smart city context. This framework provides scholars and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of resilience on different scales and assists them in making better-informed decisions.

Promoting the Sustainable Recovery of Hospitality in the Post-Pandemic Era: A Comparative Study to Optimize the Servicescapes

As COVID-19 spread throughout the world, the hospitality and tourism sectors were hard hit as no other industry. For this reason, the UNWTO developed the One Planet Vision as a response to a sustainable recovery of the tourism sector. At present, when people are starting to travel and stay at hotels again, it is important to analyze what their expectations are of hotels to move forward in the post-pandemic era. For instance, empirical research has been developed to examine people's sentiments toward servicescapes, and a comparative study is presented between 2020 and 2022. Findings contribute to the research by identifying new servicescape attributes during a health crisis. These also lead to practical implications by proposing a scale to evaluate customers' perceptions and to increase their wellbeing and resilience. The current research is one of the first studies to collaborate with the One Planet Vision by empirically proposing improvements in the servicescapes of hotels for a responsible recovery.

Lessons learnt for enhancing hospital resilience to pandemics: A qualitative analysis from Italy

The COVID-19 pandemic has outlined the need to strengthen the resilience of healthcare systems. It has cost millions of human lives and has had indirect health impacts too. Hospital buildings have undergone extensive modifications and adaptations to ensure infection control and prevention measures, and, as it is happened following past epidemics, the COVID-19 experience might change the design of hospital buildings in the future. This paper aims to capitalise on the knowledge developed by the stakeholders directly involved with the hospital response during the pandemic to generate new evidence that will enhance resilience of hospital buildings to pandemics. The research adopted qualitative research methods, namely literature review and interviews with Italian experts including doctors and facility managers to collect data which were analysed through a thematic analysis. The findings include the identification of new needs for hospital buildings and the related actions to be taken or already performed at hospital building and service level which are viable for long term implementation and are aimed at improving hospital resilience to pandemics. The results specify how to improve resilience by means of structural modifications (e.g. placing filter zones among different wards, ensuring the presence of airborne infection isolation rooms at least in the emergency departments), technological changes (e.g. oversizing capacity such as medical gases, information technology improvement for delivering healthcare services remotely), and operational measures (e.g. assessing the risk of infection before admission, dividing acute-care from low-care assets). The needs discussed in this paper substantiate the urge to renovate the Italian healthcare infrastructures and they can be considered useful elements of knowledge for enhancing hospital resilience to pandemics in the extended and in the post-COVID-19 era.

Community resilience to pandemics: An assessment framework developed based on the review of COVID-19 literature

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2019 and the challenges it posed to communities around the world, demonstrated the necessity of enhancing the resilience of communities to pandemics. In this regard, assessment frameworks can play an essential role and guide resilience-building efforts. However, the lack of a comprehensive assessment framework has led to a focus on sectoral evaluation. This study aims to propose an integrated framework for assessing the pandemic resilience of communities. For this purpose, we rely on a systematic review of literature indexed in major academic databases. We have thoroughly analyzed a total number of 115 related documents to extract relevant criteria. Findings show that many criteria and factors affect community resilience to pandemics. By inductive content coding in MAXQDA software, we have categorized these criteria into five dimensions of Institutional, Social, Economic, Infrastructural, and Demographic. Good leadership and management, insurance and governmental support, planning and preparation, expertise and labor, and available equipment and technologies are the most important institutional criteria. Communication and collective identity, mutual support, public safety and protection, public awareness, and social justice are the influential social criteria. Economic sustainability and resource availability are criteria of economic resilience. Sufficiency of services, public spaces, housing tenure, and transportation system are the main criteria related to the built environment and infrastructural dimension. Finally, demographic resilience includes physical health, psychological well-being, life quality, and hygiene. Based on these criteria, this study develops an integrated evaluation framework that researchers can implement along with conventional assessment and ranking methods to determine the level of community resilience to pandemics.

From War to Change, from Resistance to Resilience: Vicariance, Bricolage and Exaptation as New Metaphors to Frame the Post COVID-19 Era

In complex societal contexts, resilience seems the only way to survive and prosper. This is even truer when considering the present COVID-19 pandemic and its detrimental effects on global health systems and on every aspect of life. The impact was so deep that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global emergency on 30 January 2020. Accordingly, governments declared border closures, travel restrictions, and quarantines in the world’s largest economies, also giving rise to socio-economic recessions. There is wide literature on the pandemic’s impacts on people’s minds and societies, yet still few studies have investigated this topic holistically, examining how language shapes both human and social sides of COVID-19’s impacts. To fill this gap, this work discusses the need for new metaphorical clusters—bricolage, vicariance, and exaptation—as social sense makers to reframe a positive socially resilient response after COVID-19.

Smarter and Greener Cities After COVID-19: An Integrated Decision-Making Framework to Prioritize Investment Alternatives

Locking down cities to curb the transmission of coronavirus brought the global economy to a grinding halt. Cities are like engines of growth; when they stop, so does the growth. Therefore, it becomes paramount to build cities that continue to function and do not collapse amidst any crisis. Since economic recovery is underway, this paper examines priority areas for investment to expedite recovery and build back stronger cities. These areas are evaluated based on their contribution to revitalizing public health, economic, social, energy, and environmental sectors. For the analysis, analytical network process (ANP) and fuzzy-VIKOR are applied. ANP obtains the relative importance of sectors and their respective critical factors after solving a complex relationship among them. The economic sector has the highest weight of 25.8% among the five sectors, while job creation has the highest weight of 10.3% among the fifteen factors. Fuzzy-VIKOR is used to evaluate different areas and it is found that renewable energy has a greater contribution to the sustainable recovery of major sectors and the long-term aim of building inclusive green and resilient cities. These insights shall contribute to the conversations already ongoing among city governments, urban planners, civil society organizations, and city dwellers seeking practical solutions to unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic.

Is Team Resilience More Than the Sum of Its Parts? A Quantitative Study on Emergency Healthcare Teams during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency healthcare workers have come under even more pressure than before, threatening the workers' mental health and the continuity of care delivered by their teams. This study aims to investigate what conditions increase individual and team resilience, referring to the ability to "bounce back" from stressful situations. We also assess whether team resilience is the sum of the individual resilience of team members, or whether other conditions enhance team resilience and thus continuity of care, despite limited individual resilience. We collected survey data from 129 emergency healthcare team members in the Netherlands to examine to what extent transformational leadership and team familiarity influence the level of team resilience, either directly or mediated by individual resilience, accounting for psychological characteristics and social support. The results show two distinct pathways to enhance team resilience, directly by familiarizing team members with each other and by mobilizing family support, and indirectly but with a much weaker effect, by encouraging team members' individual resilience through transformational leadership and staffing optimistic team members with high levels of self-efficacy.

Work from home in the post-COVID world

The working standard of shared office spaces has evolved in recent years. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have instituted work from home (WFH) policies in accordance with public health guidelines in order to increase social distancing and decrease the spread of COVID-19. As the pandemic and WFH-related policies have continued for more than a year, there has been a rise in people becoming accustomed to the remote environments; however, others are more enthusiastic about returning to in-person work environments, reflecting the desire to restore pre-pandemic environments. As working from home is related to transportation issues such as changing commuting patterns and decreased congestion, motorized trips, and emission, there is a need to explore the extent of public attitudes on this important issue. This study used unique open-source survey data that provides substantial information on this topic. Using an advanced categorical data analysis method known as cluster correspondence analysis, this study identified several key findings. Not having prior WFH experiences, being eager to interact with colleagues, difficulties with adapting to virtual meeting technologies, and challenges with self-discipline while WFH were strongly associated with individuals who refused to continuously WFH at all after the pandemic. Individuals holding a strong view against the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic were also largely associated with never choosing WFH during and after the pandemic. For individuals with some prior WFH experiences, the transition to WFH every day in response to the outbreak was much easier, compared to those without prior experiences. Moreover, being forced to WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic positively influences the choice of WFH after the pandemic. The findings of this study will be beneficial to help policymakers and sustainable city planners understand public opinions about WFH.

A Perspective towards Multi-Hazard Resilient Systems: Natural Hazards and Pandemics

The concept of resilience has been used extensively across the sciences in engineering and the humanities. It is applied to ecology, medicine, economics, and psychology. The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed an extraordinary challenge to the resilience of healthcare systems, communities, and nations and has profoundly altered our previous day-to-day operations. This paper presents a discussion of the definitions and characteristics of resilient systems. Scenarios are utilized to qualitatively explore key relationships, responses, and paths for recovery across different system types. The purpose is to develop an integrated approach that can accommodate simultaneous threats to system resilience, in particular, impacts from a natural hazard in conjunction with COVID-19. This manuscript is the first to advocate for more in-depth and quantitative research utilizing transdisciplinary approaches that can accommodate considerations across our built environment and healthcare system infrastructures in pursuit of designing systems that are resilient to both natural hazards and pandemic impacts.

Privacy and housing: research perspectives based on a systematic literature review

Grounded in psychological and social constructs, the need for privacy is reflected in human socio-spatial behaviour and in our own home. To discuss housing privacy, this article presents a systematic literature review (SLR) that identified theoretical and methodological aspects relevant to the topic. The research was based on consolidated protocols to identify, select and evaluate articles published between 2000 and 2021 in three databases (Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scielo), with 71 eligible articles identified for synthesis. The results showed a concentration of studies in the American, European and Islamic context, and the increase in this production since 2018. This was guided by the inadequacy of architectural and urban planning projects, by new forms of social interaction and, recently, by the COVID-19 pandemic. From a theoretical point of view, the SLR demonstrated the importance of investigating privacy in housing from a comprehensive perspective, observing its different dimensions (physical, social and psychological) and characterizing the issues involved and the context under analysis. Methodologically, the main instruments identified were: (i) to behavioural analysis, questionnaires, interviews and observations; (ii) to built environment evaluation, in addition to the previous ones, space syntax analysis, architectural design and photographs analysis; (iii) for the general characterization of users, the data collection regarding the socio-demographic and cultural context and the meanings attributed to spatial organizations; (iv) to characterize the participants of the investigations, the analysis of personality traits, the ways to personalize the space, user satisfaction/preferences and the influence of social interactions on these perceptions.

The Built Environment Influence on Resilient Healthcare: A Systematic Literature Review of Design Knowledge

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to develop built environment (BE) design knowledge to support resilient healthcare by systematically reviewing the evidence-based design (EBD) literature.

BACKGROUND

Although the EBD literature is vast, it has not made explicit its contribution to resilient healthcare, which is a key component of the highly complex health service.

METHOD

This review followed the steps recommended by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses method. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 43 journal papers were selected. The papers were analyzed in light of five guidelines for coping with complexity, allowing for the development of BE design knowledge that supports resilient healthcare.

RESULTS

The design knowledge compiled by the review was structured according to four levels of abstraction: five design-meta principles, corresponding to the five complexity guidelines, seven design principles, 21 design prescriptions, and 58 practical examples. The design knowledge emphasizes the interactions between the BE as physical infrastructure and the functions that it supports.

CONCLUSIONS

The design knowledge is expected to be useful not only to architects but also to those involved in the functional design of health services as they interact with the BE. Furthermore, our proposal provides a knowledge template that can be continuously updated based on the experience of practitioners and academic research.

Gardening can relieve human stress and boost nature connection during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted social life. Gardens and yards have seemingly risen as a lifeline during the pandemic. Here, we investigated the relationship between people and gardening during the COVID-19 pandemic and what factors influenced the ability of people to garden. We examined survey responses (n = 3,743) from gardeners who reported how the pandemic had affected personal motivations to garden and their use of their gardens, alongside pandemic-related challenges, such as food access during the first wave of COVID-19 (May-Aug 2020). The results show that for the respondents, gardening was overwhelmingly important for nature connection, individual stress release, outdoor physical activity and food provision. The importance of food provision and economic security were also important for those facing greater hardships from the pandemic. While the literature on gardening has long shown the multiple benefits of gardening, we report on these benefits during a global pandemic. More research is needed to capture variations in public sentiment and practice - including those who do little gardening, have less access to land, and reside in low-income communities particularly in the global south. Nevertheless, we argue that gardening can be a public health strategy, readily accessible to boost societal resilience to disturbances.

The Urban Future: Relating Garden City Ideas to the Climate Emergency

Climate emergency, landscape connectivity and rapid urbanization are among the major challenges of the 21st century. This paper discusses ways in which cities can respond to the changing climate and put in place a sustainable vision. It uses the garden city concept as a vehicle to investigate the future of our cities in relation to the climate emergency and the elements that urban centres need to provide. Cities and their wider regions are recognised as key actors in supporting systemic change and climate change governance, and therefore the scope of this paper is to explore contemporary models of garden cities and the ways in which these might be able to address climate emergency as well as the concepts of zero carbon and sustainability. The study uses the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize, which was based on a garden city question. Taking an environmental perspective on the delivery of future cities, and using the competition essays and masterplans, this study produces analytical drawings aiming to unpack the concepts of sustainability and low carbon. This research concludes that the garden city concept can support the future needs of our settlements, but a 21st century approach needs to be developed. The social and economic ideas originally introduced at the end of the 19th century need to be updated as a holistic vision, including nature and biodiversity, climatic conditions, climate emergency adaptation and mitigation processes as well as community health and wellbeing, to be able to fully respond to the needs of the future.

Organisational resilience in the COVID-19: A case study from China

The sudden outbreak of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) sparked widespread concern about organisational resilience in the management domain. The resources, operations and practices of organisational resilience have to be considered in particular contexts at different stages and in relation to numerous inputs, processes and outputs. Selected as one example, the preparation, response and development of a retail supermarket's management and operations in China is examined through an empirical case study. Supply chain and digital construction, improvisational ability, system management and corporate social responsibility all played a positive role in this organisation's response to the outbreak of COVID-19 (2019–2020) in the Chinese management context. Organisational resilience is reflected in the case study organisation's self-interested and altruistic policies and practices. The case provides valuable insights on efficacious management practices for organisational resilience building in the retail industry.

Methodological Perspective for Assessing European Consumers’ Awareness of Cybersecurity and Sustainability in E-Commerce

The increasing European consumer awareness of cybersecurity and sustainability issues in e-commerce is raising key methodological concerns. In a field like this, still unexplored by scholars, it is crucial to identify reliable data as well as to choose the modalities of combining primary and secondary data. As the robustness of the outcome of a study on a complex issue is highly sensitive to the quality of the data used, this paper is a communication that aims to complement and support previously published empirical research. This communication describes the methodological path to collect, integrate, and process data from different sources to interpret European consumers’ attitudes towards cybersecurity and sustainability during e-commerce. In fact, COVID-19 has driven many users to shop online, raising concerns especially about the security of digital transactions. Scientific studies analyzing these effects are still lacking in the literature and therefore this paper aims to fill this gap. The limits of a rigid dataset such as Eurostat’s are overcome by integrating the results of European citizens’ behavior during online purchases, with a survey that involved some experts appropriately selected by the research team. The combination of primary and secondary sources of data and the application of a hybrid methodological approach using MCDA (multi-criteria decision analysis) and a Likert scale allowed new information that fills some gaps in the literature to be extracted from the data. How European citizens correlate e-commerce with cybersecurity and sustainability emerged, thus providing important insights for decision-makers.

Intensive Care Unit Built Environments: A Comprehensive Literature Review (2005-2020)

BACKGROUND

The intensive care environment in hospitals has been the subject of significant empirical and qualitative research in the 2005-2020 period. Particular attention has been devoted to the role of infection control, family engagement, staff performance, and the built environment ramifications of the recent COVID-19 global pandemic. A comprehensive review of this literature is reported summarizing recent advancements in this rapidly expanding body of knowledge.

PURPOSE AND AIM

This comprehensive review conceptually structures the recent medical intensive care literature to provide conceptual clarity and identify current priorities and future evidence-based research and design priorities.

METHOD AND RESULT

Each source reviewed was classified as one of the five types-opinion pieces/essays, cross-sectional empirical investigations, nonrandomized comparative investigations, randomized studies, and policy review essays-and into nine content categories: nature engagement and outdoor views; family accommodations; intensive care unit (ICU), neonatal ICU, and pediatric ICU spatial configuration and amenity; noise considerations; artificial and natural lighting; patient safety and infection control; portable critical care field hospitals and disaster mitigation facilities including COVID-19; ecological sustainability; and recent planning and design trends and prognostications.

CONCLUSIONS

Among the findings embodied in the 135 literature sources reviewed, single-bed ICU rooms have increasingly become the norm; family engagement in the ICU experience has increased; acknowledgment of the therapeutic role of staff amenities; exposure to nature, view, and natural daylight has increased; the importance of ecological sustainability; and pandemic concerns have increased significantly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Discussion of the results of this comprehensive review includes topics noticeably overlooked or underinvestigated in the 2005-2020 period and priorities for future research.

Impact of Plant-Based Meat Alternatives on the Gut Microbiota of Consumers: A Real-World Study

Eating less meat is increasingly seen as a healthier, more ethical option. This is leading to growing numbers of flexitarian consumers looking for plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) to replace at least some of the animal meat they consume. Popular PBMA products amongst flexitarians, including plant-based mince, burgers, sausages and meatballs, are often perceived as low-quality, ultra-processed foods. However, we argue that the mere industrial processing of ingredients of plant origin does not make a PBMA product ultra-processed by default. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a randomised controlled trial to assess the changes to the gut microbiota of a group of 20 participants who replaced several meat-containing meals per week with meals cooked with PBMA products and compared these changes to those experienced by a size-matched control. Stool samples were subjected to 16S rRNA sequencing. The resulting raw data was analysed in a compositionality-aware manner, using a range of innovative bioinformatic methods. Noteworthy changes included an increase in butyrate metabolising potential-chiefly in the 4-aminobutyrate/succinate and glutarate pathways-and in the joint abundance of butyrate-producing taxa in the intervention group compared to control. We also observed a decrease in the Tenericutes phylum in the intervention group and an increase in the control group. Based on our findings, we concluded that the occasional replacement of animal meat with PBMA products seen in flexitarian dietary patterns can promote positive changes in the gut microbiome of consumers.

Superposed Natural Hazards and Pandemics: Breaking Dams, Floods, and COVID-19

Within the engineering domain, safety issues are often related to engineering design and typically exclude factors such as epidemics, famine, and disease. This article provides a perspective on the reciprocal relationship and interaction between a natural hazard and a simultaneous pandemic outbreak and discusses how a catastrophic dam break, combined with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, poses a risk to human life. The paper uses grey- and peer-reviewed literature to support the discussion and reviews fundamentals of dam safety management, potential loss of life due to a dam break, and the recent evolution in dam risk analysis to account for the COVID-19 outbreak. Conventional risk reduction recommendations, such as quick evacuation and sheltering in communal centers, are revisited in the presence of a pandemic when social distancing is recommended. This perspective manuscript aims to provide insight into the multi-hazard risk problem resulting from a concurring natural hazard and global pandemic.

COVID-19, the Built Environment, and Health

BACKGROUND

Since the dawn of cities, the built environment has both affected infectious disease transmission and evolved in response to infectious diseases. COVID-19 illustrates both dynamics. The pandemic presented an opportunity to implement health promotion and disease prevention strategies in numerous elements of the built environment.

OBJECTIVES

This commentary aims to identify features of the built environment that affect the risk of COVID-19 as well as to identify elements of the pandemic response with implications for the built environment (and, therefore, for long-term public health).

DISCUSSION

Built environment risk factors for COVID-19 transmission include crowding, poverty, and racism (as they manifest in housing and neighborhood features), poor indoor air circulation, and ambient air pollution. Potential long-term implications of COVID-19 for the built environment include changes in building design, increased teleworking, reconfigured streets, changing modes of travel, provision of parks and greenspace, and population shifts out of urban centers. Although it is too early to predict with confidence which of these responses may persist, identifying and monitoring them can help health professionals, architects, urban planners, and decision makers, as well as members of the public, optimize healthy built environments during and after recovery from the pandemic. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP8888.

The ERNCIP survey on COVID-19: Emergency & Business Continuity for fostering resilience in critical infrastructures

Among the many repercussions of the COVID-19 emergency to be assessed, those on critical infrastructures and the associated businesses and professions are certainly important ones. In this paper, we document the conception, implementation and outcome of a survey organized by European Commission's Joint Research Centre and entitled "COVID-19: Emergency & Business Continuity". This was conducted in April-May 2020 with the participation of critical infrastructure experts (including professionals from the academia and research institutions, infrastructure operators and industry representatives, public authorities and members of security agencies), involved as stakeholders in the European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (ERNCIP). Themes explored through this study include an assessment of the business continuity status and the evaluation of emergency management and disaster recovery aspects, as experienced from the perspective of different sectors, organization types and personal perceptions of the respondents.

E-Commerce Calls for Cyber-Security and Sustainability: How European Citizens Look for a Trusted Online Environment

The pandemic has changed the citizens’ behavior, inducing them to avoid any real contact. This has given an incredible impulse to e-commerce; however, the complexity of the topic has not yet been adequately explored in the literature. To fill this gap, this study has a twofold purpose: (1) to investigate how European countries comparatively perform in e-commerce, and (2) to describe what are the most important challenges for the further expansion of e-commerce. To this end, we adopted a hybrid methodology based on multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and a Likert scale survey. The first method allows to us rank the e-commerce performance of different European countries, while the second one looks at the problems and barriers that characterize online shopping. The results of the study show that European countries have different sensitivities to the issue of cyber-security, and among them it is possible to identify three groups with different levels of attention to the critical issues of e-commerce. The Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark belong to the group of countries most responsive to e-commerce. This request is part of a broader framework of transition toward sustainable development, i.e., a reliable digital environment where citizens and businesses can exercise their rights and freedoms in complete security. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, this paper adds a new baseline to the literature on the state of the art of e-commerce in Europe that addresses the effects of the pandemic. From a managerial point of view, decision makers can find in the results of this analysis a support for the setting of business strategies for the expansion of firms in certain markets and guidance for public authorities when defining regulatory policies for e-commerce.

The intersection of climate change with the era of COVID-19

The purpose of this integrative review is to examine recent literature on the intersection of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 novel coronavirus) and climate change that will lead to a greater understanding of the complexities of the urgent pandemic linked with the emerging climate crisis. A literature search for peer-reviewed, English language, literature published since the pandemic emerged was conducted using Cumulated Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, and the Cochrane Library. The final sample yielded a total of 22 commentaries, editorials, discussion papers, and a research study that explicitly addressed the intersection of COVID-19 and climate change. Sixty articles emerged in the initial review of the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change with the final yield of 22 articles deemed valid for inclusion after full text review. With the emergence of COVID-19 and scholarly discourse that addresses the intersection of the pandemic with climate change, key issues emerged that intersect with policy /advocacy, social justice, and nursing's public health role in clinical practice, education, policy/advocacy, and research/scholarship. Five themes that emerged included the role of public health in COVID-19 and climate change efforts; global approach addressing human-environment issues; intersection of COVID-19 and climate change from a community and global perspective; impacts of COVID-19, climate change and the environment and professional associations and specialty organizations' views and responsibilities with a lens on COVID-19 and climate change. Despite the importance of addressing racial inequities as well as systemic and structural racism that impacts those most affected by climate change and pandemics such as COVID-19, no literature addressed this topic. Public health nursing has a critical role in addressing climate change and the pandemic response to COVID 19 in the 21st century.

How Might the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect 21st Century Urban Design, Planning, and Development?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to transform lives and ways of living across the globe, it is becoming increasingly clear that adaptations involving both physical and institutional infrastructure are warranted. Cities are at the forefront of these adaptive changes as dense urban environments are particularly vulnerable to the spread of contagious airborne diseases such as the novel coronavirus. This paper considers how COVID-19 might influence where and how people live, work, recreate, and move about the city, and how these changing patterns might in turn shape future development trajectories. We also discuss how cities are currently responding to the public health threat posed by COVID-19, and how they might use planning and design strategies to improve resilience in the face of future pandemics.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Resilience to COVID-19 Crisis: An Empirical Study of Chinese Firms

Resilience captures firm capability to adjust to and recover from unexpected shocks in the environment. Being latent and path-dependent, the manifestation of organizational resilience is hard to be directly measured. This article assesses organizational resilience of firms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic with pre-shock corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance as a predictor that positively influences the level of organizational resilience to the external shock caused by the pandemic. We develop three theoretical mechanisms based on stakeholder theory, resource-based theory, reputation perspective and means-end chain theory to explain how CSR fulfillment in the past could help firms maintain stability to adapt to and react flexibly to recover from the crisis. We examine the relationship in the context of the systemic shock caused by COVID-19, using a sample of 1597 listed firms in China during the time window from 20 January 2020 to 10 June 2020. We find that companies with higher CSR performance before the shock will experience fewer losses and will take a shorter time to recover from the attack.

Salience, Credibility and Legitimacy in a Rapidly Shifting World of Knowledge and Action

We are in a rapidly changing world where new dynamics are stressing the knowledge-action landscape: a greater understanding that cross-scale interactions are critical; increasing pressure to more fully address issues of equity in sustainable development challenges; rapidly transforming digital technologies; and the emergence of a “post-truth world”. These stressors are ripening at a time in which there is increased urgency in linking knowledge to action to solve some of the earth’s most pressing human-environment problems. This paper explores to what degree one model of knowledge-action may be useful in the face of these stressors. This model relies on co-production of knowledge across boundaries, and the importance of knowledge in meeting criteria of salience, credibility and legitimacy. Tentative explorations suggest utility of this model in responding to the changing knowledge-action landscape.

Living in a Multi-Risk Chaotic Condition: Pandemic, Natural Hazards and Complex Emergencies

Humans are living in an uncertain world, with daily risks confronting them from various low to high hazard events, and the COVID-19 pandemic has created its own set of unique risks. Not only has it caused a significant number of fatalities, but in combination with other hazard sources, it may pose a considerably higher multi-risk. In this paper, three hazardous events are studied through the lens of a concurring pandemic. Several low-probability high-risk scenarios are developed by the combination of a pandemic situation with a natural hazard (e.g., earthquakes or floods) or a complex emergency situation (e.g., mass protests or military movements). The hybrid impacts of these multi-hazard situations are then qualitatively studied on the healthcare systems, and their functionality loss. The paper also discusses the impact of pandemic's (long-term) temporal effects on the type and recovery duration from these adverse events. Finally, the concept of escape from a hazard, evacuation, sheltering and their potential conflict during a pandemic and a natural hazard is briefly reviewed. The findings show the cascading effects of these multi-hazard scenarios, which are unseen nearly in all risk legislation. This paper is an attempt to urge funding agencies to provide additional grants for multi-hazard risk research.

COVID-19 Could Leverage a Sustainable Built Environment

The health system’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has involved research into diagnoses and vaccines, but primarily it has required specific treatments, facilities and equipment, together with the control of individual behaviour and a period of collective confinement. The aim of this particular research, therefore, is to discover whether COVID-19 is capable of changing the built environment (BE) and leveraging specific solutions for sustainable buildings or urban areas. Some historical reviews of infectious pandemics have highlighted the development of new solutions in the BE as an additional contribution towards preventing the spread of infection. The BE has an important role to play in supporting public health measures and reducing the risk of infections. The review of potential COVID-19 measures shows the existence of well-referenced solutions, ranging from incremental alterations (organisation of spaces, erection of physical barriers) to structural alterations (windows, balconies) with different timeframes and scales (ranging from changes in building materials to the design of urban areas). A critical exploratory assessment makes it possible to identify measures that may help not only to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission (or even prevent it), but also to increase resilience, improve air quality and lower energy requirements or the use of materials, and thus potentially increase the sustainability of the BE. COVID-19 measures challenge us to rethink buildings and urban areas and potentially leverage sustainable BE solutions with win-win outcomes (minimalist design and other solutions). The specific composition of this set of measures must, however, be further researched.