Environments

About Environments

About Environments

Environments is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of environmental science, published monthly online by MDPI in Switzerland. Its ISSN is 2076-3298 — the single electronic ISSN carried on this Journals World record, which also correctly stores MDPI, in its full form Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, as the publisher. No ISSN or publisher conflict was found for this post: the record, the journal's own site and MDPI's announcements all agree. Founded in 2014, Environments belongs to the generation of open-access journals created specifically for the interdisciplinary environmental literature — work that crosses ecology, environmental chemistry, engineering, resource management, public health and policy, and that older, discipline-bound journals often handled awkwardly.

MDPI describes the journal as an international, cross-disciplinary, open-access journal focusing on advances, issues and challenges related to environmental systems, providing an open space for scientists and engineers to publish and discuss experimental, theoretical and practical results, with particular focus on shared responsibility and sustainable approaches to resource use and ecosystem management. That description is worth taking literally, because it defines both the journal's breadth and its test of fit. A paper belongs in Environments when its environmental system — an ecosystem, a watershed, a city, an industrial process, a coastline, a body exposed to pollutants — is the real subject, and when the work speaks to how that system is understood, monitored, managed or protected. Purely disciplinary work with only a decorative environmental framing is a weaker fit than work in which disciplines genuinely meet around an environmental problem.

The journal is led by its editor-in-chief, Professor Dr. Sergio Ulgiati, affiliated with Parthenope University of Naples in Italy and Beijing Normal University in China. Ulgiati is known for work on energy and systems analysis, emergy evaluation and sustainability assessment, and his editorship shapes the journal's systems orientation: Environments has a documented interest in footprint methods, ecosystem approaches, life-cycle thinking and multicriteria sustainability assessment alongside its monitoring, pollution and ecology literatures. In a recent editorial the editor-in-chief announced six new sections for the journal, designed to create focused domains for deeper exploration of environmental and societal dynamics and to advance multicriteria and multidimensional approaches to sustainability design — an explicit statement that the journal intends its breadth to be organised, not formless.

Scope in Detail

The journal's section structure gives the most concrete map of its scope. Its section on environmental monitoring and management focuses on innovative monitoring tools and management systems and on advanced analytical approaches to human–environment interactions, including the environmental modelling that increasingly allows researchers to observe processes, detect emerging change and support data-driven management and policymaking. Around that core, the journal's demonstrated territory includes the following areas, each of which supports full research articles, reviews and special issues.

Environmental monitoring, assessment and remediation. Measurement of air, water and soil quality; monitoring of coastal and marine ecosystems; remote sensing and geospatial analysis; detection and analysis of emerging contaminants; and the assessment and clean-up of polluted sites. Special issues on monitoring and assessment of environmental quality in coastal ecosystems illustrate the pattern: defined environment, defined pressures, measurement-led papers.

Ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem management. Ecosystem structure and function, conservation, biodiversity change, ecosystem services and the management of terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems — the category in which the journal's CiteScore standing is highest, as the metrics section below explains.

Sustainability, resources and life-cycle approaches. Sustainable resource use, waste and recycling, circular-economy analysis, footprint methods, life-cycle assessment of energy and production systems, and environmental assessment and management built on ecosystem approaches. A special issue balancing energy and environment through a life-cycle lens lists the texture of this territory precisely: renewable energy technologies, solar and wind, hydrogen systems, waste-to-energy, bioenergy and feedstocks, thermochemical conversion, biofuels, energy efficiency, storage and batteries, carbon capture and storage, combined heat and power, and the socioeconomic and policy dimensions of energy-system assessment.

Environmental health, pollution and society. Human exposure and health-relevant environmental quality, data science and artificial intelligence in environmental health, pollution and its governance, and the societal dynamics — behaviour, policy, planning — that determine whether technical knowledge changes outcomes. The journal's own framing of shared responsibility runs through this area: environmental problems are treated as jointly scientific and social.

Article types follow the MDPI pattern: original research articles, review articles and short communications are invited for regular and special issues, and accepted papers are published continuously in the journal as soon as they are accepted, then collected in monthly issues and in special-issue listings. Special issues, led by guest editors, are a major organising device — prospective authors should read live special-issue calls on the journal site, because a well-matched special issue provides both a thematic home and guest-editor oversight suited to the topic.

Open Access, Charges and Publication Speed

Environments is fully open access: articles are free for readers, and publication is funded by an article processing charge paid by authors or their institutions. The charge documented on the journal's own special-issue and submission pages is 1,800 CHF (Swiss francs). As with other MDPI journals, authors should confirm the current charge on the journal's official pages at the moment of submission, since charges are set by the publisher and can be revised; but 1,800 CHF is the figure the journal itself publishes for this title, and it is materially lower than the charges of MDPI's largest flagship journals, which is part of this journal's positioning for broad international authorship. Discounts through MDPI's institutional open-access arrangements may apply depending on the author's institution, and reviewers who deliver timely, high-quality reports receive a discount voucher toward a future MDPI publication, as the journal notes in its reviewer-recognition policy.

Speed is a defining feature of the journal's offer, and MDPI publishes the numbers. For papers published in the first half of 2026, the journal reports a median time to first decision of approximately 18.6 days after submission, and a median of 3.5 days from acceptance to publication. Those are publisher-reported medians for a defined period, quoted here with that attribution and period attached; individual manuscripts will vary, and a fast first decision can be a request for major revision as readily as an acceptance. Peer review is single-anonymized — reviewers know the authors' identities; authors do not know the reviewers' — following the process described on the journal's submission pages, with all submitted manuscripts that pass pre-check sent for review. Submitted work must not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere, conference-proceedings papers excepted, in line with the journal's stated rules.

For authors weighing the journal, the honest summary of the model is this: the journal trades the subscription barrier for an author-side charge, and trades long review queues for a fast, structured process. Whether that trade suits a given paper depends on funding for the charge, on the authors' need for speed, and on fit with the journal's systems-oriented readership — considerations the fit section below takes up directly.

Indexing and Metrics

MDPI lists Environments as indexed within Scopus, the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science, PubAg, AGRIS, GeoRef and other databases. That combination is informative: Scopus and ESCI provide the general scholarly discovery and citation infrastructure; AGRIS and PubAg reflect the journal's agricultural and land-related literature; GeoRef reflects its earth-science and geoscience content. The journal sits within MDPI's environmental-science journal grouping alongside titles such as Sustainability, Land and Clean Technologies, and MDPI names Eco-Environmental Sciences as its companion journal.

The headline metrics published by the journal are an Impact Factor of 4.3 (2025) with a five-year Impact Factor also of 4.3 (2025), a Journal Citation Reports standing of Q2 in Environmental Sciences, and a CiteScore standing of Q1 in Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics. The history behind those numbers is documented by the publisher: Environments received its first Impact Factor, 3.7, in the Journal Citation Reports released in June 2023 — the first year Clarivate extended Impact Factors to ESCI-indexed journals — and in the same season its 2022 CiteScore rose to 5.9, ranking it 104th among 687 titles and in the first quartile of the ecology category. The movement from a first Impact Factor of 3.7 in 2023 to 4.3 in the 2025 figures is the publisher-documented trajectory of a young journal consolidating its citation position. Two cautions belong with any metric. Quartiles are category-relative, so the Q2 and Q1 labels describe standing within two different category systems, not a contradiction. And metrics describe the journal's recent citation average, not the fate of any individual paper; authors should weigh scope fit and readership alongside the numbers.

Who Publishes Here, and How to Judge Fit

The journal's authorship is international and institutionally mixed: university environmental-science and engineering groups, agricultural and earth-science institutes, public-health and exposure researchers, and applied teams working on monitoring, waste, water and energy systems. The editor-in-chief's own dual affiliation in Italy and China hints at the journal's European–Asian authorship axis, and its indexing in agricultural and geoscience services reflects author communities well beyond general environmental science. Reviewers are drawn from the same breadth, and the journal actively recruits them with the voucher recognition described above.

A manuscript is likely to fit Environments when it does three things. It defines an environmental system or problem precisely — a place, a medium, a population, a process. It brings method to bear on that system in a way another environmental researcher could reuse: a monitoring design, an analytical technique, a model, an assessment framework, a management intervention with measured outcomes. And it draws the management, sustainability or policy meaning out of the results rather than leaving the reader to infer why the work matters. Manuscripts are less likely to fit when the environmental connection is a single framing sentence around otherwise disciplinary work, when a local case study makes no attempt to state what generalises, or when a sustainability claim is asserted without the footprint, life-cycle, ecosystem or monitoring evidence the journal's sections are built to publish. The six-section reorganisation announced by the editor-in-chief is a useful fit instrument: if an author cannot say which section a paper belongs in, the paper's relationship to the journal probably needs more thought.

Practical preparation matters as well. Manuscripts should be well formatted and written in good English, as the journal instructs; MDPI offers an English editing service that authors may use before publication or during revision. Figures, supplementary data and clear methods reporting carry unusual weight in a journal whose readers intend to reuse measurements and models. Authors proposing reviews should note that reviews are a valued form here, particularly where they organise a monitoring field, a contaminant literature or an assessment method for a mixed disciplinary audience.

Standing and Context

Environments should be understood as part of the wider change in how environmental science is published. The field's questions — climate pressures, pollution, biodiversity loss, resource limits — do not respect departmental boundaries, and a monthly, open-access, section-organised journal with fast decisions is a deliberate institutional answer to that fact. Its Impact Factor trajectory and its first-quartile CiteScore category standing show that the model has found a citing readership, particularly in ecology-adjacent environmental science. Its lower-than-flagship charge and its agricultural and geoscience indexing show a deliberate reach toward applied and regional research communities whose work might not travel through the most expensive general journals. None of that exempts an author from the ordinary checks: verify the journal through its own site and through Scopus and Web of Science title lists, confirm the charge at submission, and read recent issues in the intended section to see the standard and style expected. Carried out on the official sources, those checks return a consistent picture for this title, which is why this profile can state its main facts — publisher, ISSN, editorship, charge, indexing and metrics — directly, each with its source and, where the figure is time-bound, its period.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Environments? 2076-3298, an electronic ISSN for an online journal. It matches this record exactly.

Who publishes Environments? MDPI, in Basel, Switzerland. The journal is published monthly online and is fully open access.

Who is the editor-in-chief? Professor Dr. Sergio Ulgiati of Parthenope University of Naples, Italy, and Beijing Normal University, China, as stated by MDPI.

What does it cost to publish? The article processing charge published by the journal is 1,800 CHF, paid by authors or their institutions after acceptance. Confirm the current figure on the journal site when submitting.

What is its Impact Factor? 4.3 for 2025, with a five-year Impact Factor of 4.3, as published by MDPI; the journal received its first Impact Factor, 3.7, in 2023. Its CiteScore category standing is Q1 in Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, and its Journal Citation Reports category standing is Q2 in Environmental Sciences.

How fast is it? Publisher-reported medians for the first half of 2026 are about 18.6 days to first decision and 3.5 days from acceptance to publication. Peer review is single-anonymized.

Where is it indexed? Scopus, ESCI in Web of Science, PubAg, AGRIS, GeoRef and other databases, per MDPI's journal description.

When was it founded? In 2014.

Verification Notes

This profile is based on the journal's own MDPI pages — its journal description, indexing and metrics presentation, section announcement by the editor-in-chief, and special-issue submission pages stating the article processing charge and review process — together with MDPI announcements documenting the journal's first Impact Factor in 2023 and its place in the publisher's environmental-science grouping. Time-bound figures are quoted with their periods attached. No fact in this profile rests on a secondary aggregator where an official MDPI source was available, and the two similarly named but distinct journals that appear in general web searches — Environment and Environment International, both published by other houses — were explicitly excluded from the evidence for this MDPI title.

A Note on Names: Not Environment, Not Environment International

Authors and librarians should handle this journal's name with unusual care, because two other well-known journals differ from it by a single letter or a single word, and general web searches mix the three freely. Environment, without the final s, is a long-established magazine of science and policy published by Taylor and Francis in the United States, with its own separate history and metrics. Environment International is a large Elsevier journal of environmental science and health, again entirely separate, with substantially higher citation metrics that belong to it alone and must never be quoted for the MDPI title. Environments, with the final s, ISSN 2076-3298, published by MDPI and edited by Sergio Ulgiati, is the journal profiled here. The reliable disambiguator in every case is the ISSN together with the publisher: if a metric, charge or indexing claim is attached to 2076-3298 and to MDPI, it belongs to this journal; if it is attached to any other ISSN or publisher, it does not, however similar the title sounds. This profile applied that rule to its own evidence throughout, discarding search results that described the Taylor and Francis and Elsevier titles even where they appeared prominently in results for the MDPI name. Authors citing the journal should use the full title Environments and, in reference lists where ambiguity is possible, include the DOI of the specific article, which resolves to the correct title unambiguously. The point may look pedantic; in tenure files, accreditation reports and systematic reviews, exactly this one-letter distinction has real consequences, and a directory profile is the right place to state it plainly.

Finally, a word on trajectory. A journal founded in 2014 that earned its first Impact Factor only in 2023, when its index category first became eligible for one, and that then rose from 3.7 to 4.3 in the publisher's reported figures, is still defining its ceiling. Its section reorganisation, its companion-journal relationship and its place inside a large environmental cluster all point to a publisher investing in the title's structure rather than treating it as static. Authors deciding today should therefore judge it on its present official facts — scope, editorship, indexing, charge and speed as documented above — while understanding that the metrics of a young, still-consolidating journal describe a direction of travel as much as a settled rank.