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The interaction between urban development and climate change significantly impacts local public health services. Unfortunately, cities and involved institutions often fail to prioritize and integrate spatial planning when dealing with these unprecedented future challenges. This study aims to offer Health Integrative Climate Resilience and Adaptation Future (HICRAF), an innovative planning framework that systematically operationalizes future climate risks and their impact on local public health services.

HICRAF is developed based on the intermix of explorative and normative scenario planning approaches. Mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative techniques were applied to develop and operationalize the local climate adaptation scenarios through stakeholder participation. The framework demonstrates how different methods and scales (spatial and temporal) can be linked to exhibit climate risk outcomes of different future pathways.

The practicality of HICRAF was demonstrated in Khon Kaen city, where it bridged the gaps between global climate trajectories and local climate adaptation scenarios. It also highlights the need to consider intertwining spatial and systemic risks in local infrastructure operations. Although HICRAF has gained political buy-in and fostered the establishment of stakeholder discourse on climate-resilient futures, further research is needed to enhance its robustness and replicability.

This paper proposes a novel planning framework, HICRAF, that can systematically operationalize the future challenges of unprecedented climate change and urban development changes for the local public health service. The demonstration of HICRAF in Khon Kaen city provides empirical evidence of its implementability and upscaling potential.

This paper aims to extend the concept of moral elevation from the individual level to the team/group level by introducing the notion of collective moral elevation (CME) and elucidating its emergence.

Drawing on social exchange theory and social capital arguments, this paper presents a conceptual framework that outlines the mechanisms through which moral norms, organizational symbols, social cohesion and repeated interactions facilitate the transition from individual internalization of norms to collective aggregation of moral elevation.

The proposed framework emphasizes the processual nature of CME, highlighting the importance of understanding sequences of events rather than merely examining static relationships between variables.

This paper is one of the pioneering academic works to offer a novel perspective on moral elevation, exploring its manifestation at the collective level and elucidating the dynamics of its emergence and evolution within teams and groups in organizational settings. Our proposed framework explicates how moral norms, organizational symbols, social cohesion, emulation and their iterations allow individuals to transition from individual internalization of norms to collective aggregation of moral elevation.

Flooding is China’s most frequent and catastrophic natural hazard, causing extensive damage. The aim of this study is to develop a comprehensive assessment of urban flood risk in the Hubei Province of China, focusing on the following three issues: (1) What are the factors that cause floods? (2) To what extent do these factors affect flood risk management? (3) How to build an effective comprehensive assessment system that can be used to reduce flood risk?

This study combines expert opinion and evidence from the extent literature to identify flood risk indicators across four dimensions: disaster risk, susceptibility, exposure and prevention and mitigation. The Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) and the Grey Relational Analysis (RA)-based Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) decision-making approach were applied to calculate the weighting of factors and develop a model of urban flood risk. Then, ArcGIS software visualizes risk levels and spatial distribution in the cities of Hubei Province; uncertainty analysis verified method accuracy.

The results show that there are significant differences in the level of urban flood risk in Hubei Province, with cities such as Tianmen, Qianjiang, Xiantao and Ezhou being at high risk, while cities such as Shiyan, Xiangyang, Shennongjia, Yichang, Wuhan and Huanggang are at lower flood risk.

The innovative method of combining CRITIC-GRA-TOPSIS reduces the presence of subjective bias found in many other flood risk assessment frameworks. Regional data extraction and uncertainty analysis enhance result reliability, supporting long-term decision-making and urban planning. Overall, the methodological approach developed provides an advanced, highly effective and efficient analysis and visualization of flood risk. This study deepens the understanding of flood risk assessment mechanisms and more broadly supports the development of resilient cities.

This study investigates drivers of local governments’ digitalization, focusing on contextual factors that can help explain the level of e-government development. Concretely, it examines financial, socioeconomic, and political factors that represent the local context where e-government initiatives are implemented.

A composite e-government index was used, adopting a holistic perspective to capture various features of e-government initiatives. The OLS estimator for linear regressions was used for the analysis based on a sample of Italian municipalities in 2023. The Tobit estimator was additionally implemented to check for the robustness of the results.

Empirical findings suggest that municipalities with higher indebtedness tend to show lower digitalization levels. Economic and social variables are also relevant factors, while the political orientation of the governing party is not significant. This indirectly documents that e-government initiatives play a strategic role despite the political ideology.

This study avoids referring to a technological determinism perspective and examines the role of the institutional and operational context, highlighting the need to unveil and explain differences among local governments rather than focusing on similarities.

Agriculture innovation systems (AIS) examine the complex socio-technical and institutional aspects affecting sustainable agriculture. However, it is predominantly constrained to the formal sector activities in the high-income countries (HICs). The informal sector actors play a major role in the agricultural sector of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), such as India, by innovating and disseminating grassroots innovations (GI). This study aims to explore the role of different GI, both by the informal and formal sectors, within an emerging AIS focused on seabuckthorn in Ladakh, India.

This study used a qualitative methodology, using semi-structured interviews and focused group discussions to gather data from the stakeholders involved in seabuckthorn value chain. The data was analysed using the AIS framework’sa priori themes and was validated through data triangulation with secondary sources.

This study reveals the existence of GI, by both the formal and informal sector actors, and their complex interaction within the seabuckthorn value chain. It highlights the importance of co-existence of these GI to make it a sustainable seabuckthorn AIS.

This study offers noteworthy perspectives for governments, policymakers and agricultural practitioners with respect to the assimilation of GI into AIS. These insights could help improve agricultural sustainability and viability, particularly in LMICs where the informal sector plays a significant role.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the role of GI within AIS and opens up research avenues for further inquiry in both LMICs and HICs.

Investment decisions hold immense significance for investors and eventually affect their portfolio performance. Investors are advised to weigh the costs and benefits associated with every decision in order to make rational investment decisions. However, behavioral finance research reveals that investors' choices often stem from a blend of economic, psychological and sociological factors, leading to irrationality. Moreover, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors, aligned with behavioral finance hypotheses, also sway opinions and stock prices. Hence, this study aims to identify how individual equity investors prioritize key determinants of investment decisions in the Indian stock market.

The current research gathered data from 391 individual equity investors through a structured questionnaire. Thereafter, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) was used to meet the purpose of the research.

Information availability, representative heuristics belonging to psychological factors and macroeconomic indicators falling under economic factors were discovered to be the three most prioritized criteria, whereas environmental issues within the realm of ESG factors, recommendations of brokers or investment consultants of sociological factors, and social issues belonging to ESG factors were found to be the least prioritized criteria, respectively.

Only active and experienced individual equity investors were surveyed in this study. Furthermore, with a sample size of 391 participants, the study was confined to individual equity investors in one nation, India.

This research has implications for individual investors, institutional investors, market regulators, corporations, financial advisors, portfolio managers, policymakers and society as a whole.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, no real attempt has been made to comprehend how active and experienced individual investors prioritize critical determinants of investment decisions by taking economic, psychological, sociological and ESG factors collectively under consideration.

Drawing on value cocreation, this study examines health-care customers’ perceptions of patient-centered care (PCC) in hospital and online primary care settings. This study aims to address how are the key principles of PCC related, how the relationships between key PCC principles and outcomes (subjective well-being and service satisfaction) vary depending on the channel providing the care (hospital/online primary care) and what differences are placed on the involvement of family and friends in these different settings by health-care customers.

This study comprises four samples of health-care customers (Sample 1 n = 272, Sample 2 n = 278, Sample 3 n = 275 and Sample 4 n = 297) totaling 1,122 respondents. This study models four key principles of PCC: service providers respecting health-care customers’ values, needs and preferences; collaborative resources of the multi-disciplinary care team; health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources; and health-care customers involving family and friends, explicating which principles of PCC have positive effects on outcomes: subjective well-being and service satisfaction.

Findings confirm that health-care customers want to feel respected by service providers, use their own resources to actively collaborate in their care and have multi-disciplinary teams coordinating and integrating their care. However, contrary to prior findings, for online primary care, service providers respecting customers’ values needs and preferences do not translate into health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources. Further, involving family and friends has mixed results for online primary care. In that setting, this study finds that involving family and friends only positively impacts service satisfaction, when care is provided using video and not voice only.

By identifying which PCC principles influence the health-care customer experience most, this research shows policymakers where they should invest resources to achieve beneficial outcomes for health-care customers, service providers and society, thus advancing current thinking and practice.

This research provides a health-care customer perspective on PCC and shows how the resources of the health-care system can activate the health-care customer’s own resources. It further shows the role of technology in online care, where it alters how care is experienced by the health-care customer.

Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) fruits are rich in bioactive components, specifically in anthocyanins. In this study, freeze-dried and powdered elderberry fruits were added to milk, yoghurt and kefir samples at ratios of 5, 10 and 15% (w/w) to fortify these dairy products at home scale, and final products were monitored to understand the behaviour of bioactive compounds.

The action of bioactive compounds was examined before and after in vitro gastrointestinal digestion by the analysis of total anthocyanin content, total phenolic content and antioxidant activity assays as well as the HPLC-PDA system on the first day of preparation. Moreover, the effect of three days of storage on individual phenolic compounds was evaluated.

Kefir samples exhibited the highest total anthocyanin content levels among prepared products (255±4-702±65 µmol cyanidin-3-glucoside eq/100 g), which is followed by yoghurt samples. Individual phenolics in samples prepared at the same concentrations behaved almost similarly with each other during gastric digestion phases (p > 0.05), whereas intestinal digestion phases caused significant differences, and phenolics in yoghurt samples exhibited higher values than others (p < 0.05). The stability of bioactive compounds in samples tended to decrease during storage; however, as observed during gastrointestinal digestion, yoghurt and kefir samples provided better matrices than milk to maintain the presence of bioactive compounds (p < 0.05).

Previous studies have indicated that elderberry fruits contain high levels of bioactive compounds, and these fruits have been used to fortify different food matrices. However, this research paper investigates the interaction between three selected dairy products and elderberry powder with each other for the first time.

We evaluate the effect of political connections on the stock valuation of emerging market firms following the announcement of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We further analyze the moderating roles of home and host market environments.

Our analysis of 361 Chinese cross-border M&A transactions during 2014–2018 employs an event-study methodology to assess the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) for acquirers. To test our hypotheses, we utilize a multiple regression model.

Politically connected firms experience a decrease in firm value following the announcement of cross-border M&As. However, this negative effect is weakened when the firm’s home region is more market-oriented, reflected by economic activity driven primarily by market mechanisms rather than government intervention. In contrast, the negative effect is strengthened when the host country exhibits higher governance quality, characterized by sound legal structures, labor regulations and developed capital markets.

Extending beyond previous studies on cross-border M&A performance, we analyze firm value based on signaling theory. Our findings reveal that market investors view cross-border M&As undertaken by politically connected firms from emerging economies with caution, resulting in a decline in acquirer value. Moreover, investors react more positively to cross-border M&As by politically connected acquirers in truly market-based regions. Conversely, investors expect that politically connected acquirers would encounter additional hurdles when executing cross-border M&As if the host country has high-quality governance.