Full article: Sustainability through landscapes: natural parks, satoyama, and permaculture in Japan

Prada Group has signed what is billed as the first business loan in the luxury goods sector linking the annual interest rate to practices that help the environment. Prada said Tuesday that the five-year, 50 million-euro ($55-million) loan with Credit Agricole Group will see interest rates lowered based on “achievement of ambitious targets related to sustainability.”

Designers and brands in Norwegian Presence exhibition call for an industry-wide shift towards recycled and recyclable objects, as part of a circular economy…

Automobile dependency in cities negatively impacts people and the environment directly (i.e., air and noise pollution), indirectly (i.e., cardiovascular and respiratory disease), and accumulatively define automobile dependence, as “a situation in which a city develops on the assumption that automobile use will predominate so that it is given priority in infrastructure and the form of urban development.”  Sustainable urban mobility (SUM), by contrast, rebalances the priorities of transportation modes in cities. Transitioning towards SUM necessitates limiting the usage of the private automobile and its associated infrastructure, promoting public and non-motorized transport modes, reducing the need to travel, shortening distances, as well as using renewable energy sources (such as biofuels, solar, etc.) to power vehicles.

Canada is set to model its own ban on the policy brought in by the E.U. earlier this year. Here’s how it works.