In the recent years, the rapid growth of the tourism industry has risen to prominence as a global concern. Tourism empowers communities and uplifts the economy. However, it poses social and environmental challenges, which in turn draws attention to tourism patterns. Sustainable tourism promises protection of the environment and the social-cultural elements of any given destination. Hence, this study aims to understand the complex relationship between sustainability policy, management, and tourist behavior. Thus, we examined the relationships between sustainable tourism policy and destination management, destination social responsibility, and tourist value orientation with sustainable tourism development. We recruited participants at managerial level coming from 163 Malaysian companies and conducted a cross-sectional quantitative study, using partial least square structural equation modeling. We propose that sustainable tourism policy and destination management and destination social responsibility significantly impact sustainable tourism development. Moreover, destination social responsibility partially mediates the relationship between sustainable tourism policy destination management and sustainable tourism development.

It is vital to enforce the distinguished assimilation of sustainability entities in higher education (HE) and establish an academia-wide collective curriculum on sustainability in an efficient manner, in order to disseminate and stimulate thoughts with forthcoming generations. The remit of this paper is to document the available literature and map the research landscape into a coherent taxonomy. This research adds to the available literature; moreover, it could also aid in the community comprehension of education in sustainable development (ESD) implementation and/or integration into higher education institutions (HEIs). We perform an attentive search in relation to education sustainable development (ESD) in three relevant electronic databases, namely, Web of Science (WoS), ScienceDirect and IEEE Xplore. The result of the review is a taxonomy that includes 148 articles published between early 2014 and mid-2019 that were then categorized into six classes, namely, the accomplishment of SD, awareness and commitment, evaluation and commentary, structural transformation, course coordination and university management. Additionally, we acknowledge varied involvement from different levels of communities supporting and promoting education to achieve sustainable development (SD).

This study reviewed some of the challenges faced by local authorities in disaster management, especially flood disasters that occurred in Malaysia. Flood disasters are the most frequent disasters in Malaysia, especially during the monsoon seasons. The hard structure developed by Malaysia’s National Security Council (MKN) under ‘Directive 20’ is used to manage disasters in the country. Although Malaysia has become more skillful in managing flood disasters, the frequent climate changes along with weakness in implementing flood risk management plans resulted in much losses and damages throughout the country. Therefore, this study explored the gaps and weaknesses in flood risk management (FRM) in Malaysia by reviewing the available literature to recommend better flood management. This study revealed four main issues which are weaknesses in terms of (i) coordination and communication, (ii) manpower and assets, (iii) public awareness, and (iv) power and authority among local authorities to implement flood management plans. The capacity of local authorities and individuals in charge of disaster management is inadequate, especially for flood risk preparedness and management. Hence, responsible individuals are also in a vulnerable situation to implement management plans or rescue operations when flood disasters occur since they are also flood victims. Thus, the National Disaster Management Agency (NADMA) which acts as the main coordinator of disaster management in Malaysia should re-examine the flood management plan to ensure that it can be implemented efficiently and effectively, especially at the local level as they are the first respondents on the scene when the disaster occurs. The combination of both structural and non-structural measures might require in many cases the management of flood disasters; however, the disaster risk preparedness and management of individuals via customized training is a must to prevent flood disasters as well as minimize their impact. The flood management plan should also incorporate natural-based approaches at the whole-river-basin level for the long-term solution and sustainable development, not only focusing to manage the localized flood problem at the specific area.

Total aboveground carbon (TAC) and total soil carbon stock in the agroforestry system at the Balung River Plantation, Sabah, Malaysia were investigated to scientifically support the sustaining of natural forest for mitigating global warming via reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Agroforestry, monoculture, and natural tropical forests were investigated to calculate the carbon stock and sequestration based on three different combinations of oil palm and agarwood in agroforestry systems from 2014 to 2018. These combinations were oil palm (27 years) and agarwood (seven years), oil palm (20 years) and agarwood (seven years), and oil palm (17 years) and agarwood (five years). Monoculture oil palm (16 years), oil palm (six years), and natural tropical forest were set as the control. Three randomly selected plots for agroforestry and monoculture plantation were 0.25 ha (50 × 50 m), respectively, whereas for the natural tropical forest it was 0.09 ha (30 × 30 m). A nondestructive sampling method followed by the allometric equation determined the standing biomass. Organic and shrub layers collected in a square frame (1 × 1 m) were analyzed using the CHN628 series (LECO Corp., MI, USA) for carbon content. Soil bulk density of randomly selected points within the three different layers, that is, 0 to 5, 5 to 10, and 10 to 30 cm were used to determine the total ecosystem carbon (TEC) stock in each agroforestry system which was 79.13, 85.40, and 78.28 Mg C ha⁻¹, respectively. The TEC in the monoculture oil palm was 76.44 and 60.30 Mg C ha⁻¹, whereas natural tropical forest had the highest TEC of 287.29 Mg C ha⁻¹. The forest stand had the highest TEC capacity as compared with the agroforestry and monoculture systems. The impact of planting systems on the TEC showed a statistically significant difference at a 95% confidence interval for the various carbon pools among the agroforestry, monoculture, and natural tropical forests. Therefore, the forest must be sustained because of its higher capacity to store carbon in mitigating global warming.

Agenda 2030 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 9 and 11 recognizes tourism as one of the central industries to global development to tackle global challenges. With the transformation of information and communication technologies (ICT), e-tourism has evolved globally to establish commercial relationships using the Internet for offering tourism-related products, including giving personalised suggestions. The contextual suggestion has emerged as a modified recommendation system that is integrated with information-retrieval techniques within large databases to provide tourists with a list of suggestions based on contexts, such as location, time of day, or day of the week (weekdays or weekends). This study surveyed literature in the field of contextual suggestion and recommendation systems with a focus on e-tourism. The concerns linked with approaches used in contextual suggestion and recommendation systems are highlighted in this systematic review, while motivations, recommendations, and practical implications in e-tourism are also discussed in this paper. A query search using the keywords “contextual suggestion system”, “recommendation system”, and “tourism” identified 143 relevant articles published from 2012 to 2020. Four major repositories are considered for searching, namely, (i) Science Direct, (ii) Scopus, (iii) IEEE, and (iv) Web of Science. This review was carried out under the protocols of four phases, namely, (i) query searching in major article repositories, (ii) removal of duplicates, (iii) scan of title and abstract, and (iv) complete reading of articles. To identify the gaps in current research, a taxonomy analysis was exemplified into categories and subcategories. The main categories were highlighted as (i) review articles, (ii) model/framework, and (iii) applications. Critical analysis was carried out on the basis of the available literature on the limitations of approaches used in contextual suggestion and recommendation systems. In conclusion, the approaches used are mainly based on content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, preference-based product ranking, and language modelling. The evaluation measures for the contextual suggestion system include precision, normalized discounted cumulative, and mean reciprocal rank, while test collections comprise Internet resources. Given that the tourism industry contributed to the environmental and social-economic development, contextual suggestion and recommendation systems have presented themselves to be relevant in integrating and achieving SDG 9 and SDG 11 in many ways such as web-based e-services by the government sector and smart gadgets based on reliable and real-time data and information for city planners as well as law enforcement personnel in a sustainable city.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) is at its maturity level for real practical exercises amongst many fields of studies, especially in the virtual walkthrough exploration system of cultural heritage (CH). However, this study remains scattered and limited. This work presents a systematic review that maps out the usability and accessibility issues that are challenging in using VR in CH. We identified 45 challenges that are mapped into five problem groups: system design, development process, technology, assessment process and knowledge transfer. This mapping is then used to propose 58 recommendations to improve the usability and accessibility of VR in CH that are categorized in three different recommendation groups namely, discovery and planning, design and development, and finally the assessment factors. This analysis identified the persistence in certain accessibility and usability problems such as there is a limit in navigating the view and space that constraint the users’ free movement and the navigation control is not ideal with the keyboard arrow button. This work is important because it provides an overview of usability and accessibility based challenges that are faced in applying, developing, deploying and assessing VR in the usage of digitalizing CH and proposed a great number of constructive recommendations to guide future studies. The main contribution of this paper is the mapping of usability and accessibility challenges into categories and the development of recommendations based on the identified problems.