Environment Development and Sustainability

About Environment Development and Sustainability

Environment, Development and Sustainability — Journal Profile

Environment, Development and Sustainability is an international, multidisciplinary journal published by Springer (Springer Nature) that examines the environmental consequences of socio-economic development and searches for workable routes to sustainability in every sphere of human activity. Few journals state their problem as plainly as this one does: development changes environments, environments constrain development, and the journal exists to study that two-way relationship with scientific, technical, economic, ethical and policy tools. Since its first volume in 1999 it has grown from a specialist outlet into one of the largest and most heavily read journals in the sustainability field, publishing monthly issues that draw contributions from environmental science, agriculture, energy research, geography, economics, law and many neighbouring disciplines. This profile is anchored to the journal recorded under ISSN 1387-585X (print) and 1573-2975 (electronic) — the identifiers carried on this Journals World record — and to the aims, scope and journal information published by Springer itself.

At a Glance

• Full title: Environment, Development and Sustainability
• Publisher: Springer (Springer Nature)
• Print ISSN: 1387-585X
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-2975
• First volume: 1999 (publication coverage 1999 to the present, as carried in this record)
• Publishing model: Hybrid — subscription publication with an optional open access route (Springer's Open Choice) for authors who want it
• Article types welcomed: Scientific research papers, review papers and discussion papers
• Fields: Environmental science, sustainability studies, development studies, agriculture, energy, water and soil sciences, geography, economics, politics and law
• Journal Impact Factor: 4.9 (2025), as reported on Springer's own journal pages
• Submission to first decision (median): 21 days, as reported by Springer
• Downloads: 3,257,393 in 2025, as reported by Springer — a useful indicator of how widely the journal is read

What the Journal Is About

Springer's own description defines the journal by a question rather than by a single discipline. Environment, Development and Sustainability covers all aspects of the environmental impacts of socio-economic development, and it is equally concerned with the complex interactions that run in the opposite direction — how environmental change, resource limits and ecological damage reshape what development is possible. Its stated purpose is to seek ways and means of achieving sustainability in all human activities aimed at development. That framing matters for authors: a paper that reports an environmental measurement without connecting it to development, or a development study that treats the environment as background scenery, is a weaker fit than a paper that works on the connection itself.

The journal also states, in its own scope text, that it particularly welcomes papers that highlight more than one dimension of sustainable development. A study that is simultaneously technical and economic, or ecological and social, or local in its evidence and global in its implications, speaks the journal's native language. Single-dimension work is not excluded — the journal publishes a great deal of it — but the editorial centre of gravity is interdisciplinary, and manuscripts are read by reviewers and readers who expect the sustainability connection to be argued, not merely asserted in the final paragraph.

Scope in Detail

The subject list published by Springer is long, and it repays careful reading because it functions as a map of what editors consider in scope. The journal covers the mutual interactions among society, development and environment, and their implications for sustainable development; the technical, economic, ethical and philosophical aspects of sustainable development; global sustainability, including the obstacles to it and the ways those obstacles might be overcome; local and regional sustainability initiatives, their practical implementation and their relevance in a wider context; the development and application of indicators of sustainability; and the development, verification, implementation and monitoring of policies for sustainable development.

Resource-focused work is equally central. The scope includes the sustainable use of land, water, energy and biological resources in development; the impacts of agriculture and forestry activities on soil and aquatic ecosystems and on biodiversity; the effects of energy use and global climate change on development and sustainability; and the impacts of population growth and human activities on food and other resources essential for development. Institutional and cultural themes complete the picture: the role of national and international agencies and of international aid and trade arrangements in sustainable development; the social and cultural contexts of sustainable development; the role of education and public awareness; the role of political and economic instruments; and — unusually honest for a scope statement — the shortcomings of sustainable development and its alternatives. A critical paper arguing that a fashionable sustainability framework fails in practice is therefore not out of place here, provided the argument is evidenced.

Springer notes that contributions arrive from fields as different as the biological sciences, agriculture, geology, meteorology, energy, food sciences, soil and water sciences, geography, nutrition, the physical sciences, politics, economics and law. In recent volumes that breadth is visible on the contents page: a single issue can move from groundwater sustainability over the Arabian Peninsula aquifers to climate impacts on Kenyan agriculture, from hydropower risk management to soil acidity in Ethiopian farmland, and from urban ecosystem services in a Chinese coastal city to farm-household food security in northern Ghana. Issue sizes have grown accordingly; a recent January issue carried well over a hundred articles, which gives a realistic sense of the journal's present scale.

History and Development

The journal began publication in 1999, at the end of a decade in which sustainable development had moved from conference language — the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and the long follow-up to the Brundtland report — into a research programme that needed dedicated outlets. Existing environmental journals tended to privilege either natural-science measurement or policy commentary; Environment, Development and Sustainability was built to hold the two together under one title. Its volume numbering preserves that history straightforwardly: volume 23 corresponds to 2021 and volume 26 to 2024, counting back to volume 1 in 1999.

Over the following quarter-century the journal's growth tracked the growth of the field itself. Sustainability science professionalised, funding programmes multiplied, and the journal's author base became strikingly international, with particularly strong contributions from Asia, Africa and Latin America alongside its original European readership. That geography is not incidental to the journal's identity. Because its subject is development as much as environment, the questions it publishes are often the questions of economies in rapid transition — industrial water use, land conversion, energy access, food security — and authors working in those settings have made the journal one of the standard places where such research appears.

Article Types and Topical Collections

Springer states that the journal welcomes scientific research papers, review papers and discussion papers. Research papers form the bulk of each issue and follow the normal expectations of empirical scholarship: a defined question, a defensible method, data that others can interrogate, and conclusions tied to the evidence. Review papers synthesise a literature — recent examples have reviewed blackwater anaerobic digestion for resource recovery, inorganic nano-adsorbents for removing heavy metals from water and wastewater, and the obstacles to putting oil-and-gas produced water to external use — and they perform well in this journal when they end with a research agenda rather than a summary. Discussion papers give room to conceptual and critical argument, including argument about the sustainability concept itself.

Alongside regular issues, the journal runs topical collections (special issues) assembled by guest editors around a defined theme. A representative example is the collection on pathways to carbon neutrality, which invited technological, economic, financial and policy analyses of decarbonisation, including city-level neutrality, international cooperation and the health and environmental impacts of neutrality strategies. Collections are a practical route into the journal for authors whose work matches an announced theme, because the fit question is settled in advance — but the peer review standard is the journal's own, and a collection invitation is not an acceptance guarantee.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Manuscripts are submitted through Springer's online submission system (Editorial Manager, reached from the journal's home page via the "Submit manuscript" route), and the journal applies Springer's standard editorial workflow: an initial editorial assessment for scope and quality, external peer review for manuscripts that pass it, and revision cycles before any acceptance. Springer reports a median submission-to-first-decision time of 21 days for this journal, which is brisk for a title of this size — but authors should read a median correctly. It means half of decisions arrive faster and half slower, and a carefully reviewed interdisciplinary paper can take considerably longer, particularly when editors must find reviewers across two disciplines.

Because the journal is multidisciplinary, the most common avoidable problem is a manuscript written for only one audience. An econometric study whose environmental mechanism is hand-waved, or an ecology paper whose development implications are a closing sentence, invites reviewers from the neglected side to ask for the missing half. Authors improve their odds materially by writing the sustainability connection into the research design itself: state which dimension of sustainable development the paper advances, which indicators it uses or proposes, and what a policy reader could do differently after reading it.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

Springer reports a Journal Impact Factor of 4.9 for 2025 for this journal, alongside 3,257,393 article downloads in 2025 — the downloads figure is in some ways the more telling number, because it reflects practitioner and policy readership as well as academic citation. The journal's stored bibliographic record on this site also lists an h-index of 112, an aggregator-style figure consistent with a large, long-running title whose older papers have had decades to accumulate citations. Figures of this kind should always be quoted with their source and year attached, as they are here: impact metrics move annually, and a number without a vintage is not information but decoration.

The journal is one of Springer's established environmental titles and is indexed in the major scholarly discovery services that cover Springer journals, including Scopus and the Web of Science family of indexes; researchers who need the current, authoritative indexing list for a tenure file or a funder report should take it from the journal's page on the Springer site or from the index providers directly, because coverage lists change and secondary summaries lag behind them. What can be said without qualification is that the journal is a mainstream, subscription-era Springer title with a twenty-five-year continuous run — not a new, untested or marginal outlet — and its hybrid model means library readers worldwide encounter it as a normal part of the Springer catalogue.

Publishing Model and Open Access

Environment, Development and Sustainability is a hybrid journal. The default route is conventional subscription publication at no charge to the author; authors who want their article openly accessible to everyone can choose Springer's Open Choice option, which makes the article open access on payment of an article processing charge, with the exact charge and any institutional or funder arrangements confirmed on the journal's pages at the time of acceptance. Many authors are covered by Springer Nature's transformative agreements through their institutions, which can meet the open access charge centrally — the time to check is before submission, not at proof stage. Which route an author chooses has no bearing on peer review, and readers should not read an open access article in this journal as either stronger or weaker than a subscription one; the same editorial process produced both.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The journal is a strong fit for researchers whose work joins an environmental question to a development question with real evidence on both sides: sustainability indicator studies; land, water and energy resource studies with explicit development framing; agricultural and food-security research that measures environmental effects; climate adaptation and mitigation studies tied to livelihoods or policy; environmental policy design, verification and monitoring; and critical or philosophical work on sustainable development itself. It is also a natural home for comparative and regional studies — a provincial panel-data study of environmental regulation in China, or a watershed erosion assessment in Kashmir, sits comfortably here because the scope explicitly values local and regional initiatives read for their wider relevance.

It is a weaker fit for purely technical work with no sustainability framing (a specialist engineering or chemistry journal will review it faster and read it more expertly), for purely theoretical development economics that never touches environment or resources, and for local case reports that make no attempt to say what travels beyond the case. Authors in doubt should perform the simplest scope test the journal itself suggests: if the paper highlights more than one dimension of sustainable development, it probably belongs here; if it highlights none, it probably does not.

Practical Guidance for Authors

Prepare the manuscript to Springer's standard journal instructions, which are linked from the journal home page: structured abstract, keywords that use the vocabulary of both of the paper's home disciplines, and references formatted to the house style. Declare funding, data provenance and any competing interests at submission; sustainability research frequently involves field sites, communities and government data, and ethics or permission statements relevant to that material should be included from the start rather than added under editorial pressure. For review papers, state the review method — databases searched, period covered, inclusion rules — because an unsystematic review is the single most common reason review manuscripts stall here and in comparable journals.

Finally, verify the journal itself before submitting, as with any title: submit only through the submission link on the journal's genuine Springer page (journal code 10668 in the Springer address), check that any email invitation you respond to comes from the publisher's systems, and confirm the ISSNs on this profile — 1387-585X and 1573-2975 — against the masthead of a recent issue. Impersonation of large, high-volume journals by fraudulent lookalike sites is a known hazard in scholarly publishing, and a journal receiving this much traffic is a plausible target. The genuine journal charges nothing for subscription-route publication, so any unexpected "submission fee" demanded by a site claiming to be this journal is a decisive warning sign.

Readership and Reach

The readership mirrors the authorship. With more than three million downloads reported by Springer in a single recent year, the journal is read well beyond the citation graph: by environmental managers, agricultural and water professionals, development practitioners and graduate students who may never cite the papers they use. That has a practical consequence for authors. Papers in this journal are frequently the version of a study that a ministry analyst, a non-governmental organisation's programme officer or a consultant actually encounters, which rewards clear abstracts, honest statements of limitation, and conclusions written in language a non-specialist decision-maker can act on. Authors who write only for the two reviewers who assessed the manuscript undersell work published in a venue with this kind of applied audience, and editors know it — one reason the journal's scope statement gives education, public awareness and the instruments of policy the same standing as technical measurement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Environment, Development and Sustainability a legitimate peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is a long-running Springer title, published continuously since 1999, with named editorial structures, standard Springer peer review and a Journal Impact Factor reported by the publisher (4.9 for 2025).

Is it open access? It is hybrid: subscription publication is the default, and authors may optionally choose open access through Springer's Open Choice route.

How fast is a first decision? Springer reports a median of 21 days from submission to first decision. Individual manuscripts, especially interdisciplinary ones needing reviewers from two fields, can take longer.

Does the journal publish special issues? Yes, as topical collections led by guest editors under the journal's own review standards; a past example addressed pathways to carbon neutrality from technological, economic, financial and policy angles.

What is the fastest way to judge fit? Compare your abstract against Springer's published subject list, reproduced in the Scope section above. If your paper speaks to several items on that list at once, fit is likely strong.

Sources consulted for this profile include Springer's official journal pages for Environment, Development and Sustainability (aims and scope, volumes and issues, and journal metrics as reported by the publisher), the journal's bibliographic record carried on this site, and aggregator summaries used only for attributed secondary figures. Metric values are quoted with source and year and should be re-checked on the publisher's site for any formal use.