About Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental

Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental

Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental is a Brazilian peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (UNISUL), in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. It carries the ISSN 2238-8753 and publishes research on environmental management and environmental sustainability, with a strong record of work on solid waste, sanitation, water and wastewater, environmental education, and the management of sustainability inside organisations and public institutions. Its DOI registrations use the prefix stem rgsa attached to the journal, with earlier articles registered under the 10.19177 prefix and later articles appearing under a 10.59306 prefix, a change that readers tracing references should be aware of. Volume numbering visible in its published articles runs from volume 1 in 2012 through volume 9 in 2020 and volume 11 in 2022, which places the journal in its second decade of publication and shows an annual volume rhythm in that period.

The journal's title translates as Journal of Environmental Management and Sustainability, and that translation describes its centre of gravity well: it is a management-and-environment journal rather than a natural-science journal. Its characteristic papers take an environmental problem that an organisation, a municipality, a farm, a university or a public agency has to manage, and study how that management is actually done, measured or improved. The original Journals World listing for the title summarised its most visible research topics as environmental sustainability and education, municipal solid waste management, and waste management and recycling, and the journal's published contents bear that summary out.

Quick facts

Identity first: a title that shares an abbreviation with another journal

This journal needs a careful identity note, because Brazilian environmental management publishing contains two different journals that both shorten to RGSA. This profile is about Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental, ISSN 2238-8753, published by the Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina. A separate journal, Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental, based in São Paulo and also abbreviated RGSA, is a different publication with a different publisher, a different ISSN and its own DOI pattern. Citations, database records and web pages for the two titles are easy to cross, and researchers have cited both in the same bibliographies. The reliable separators are the ISSN, 2238-8753 for this journal, the publisher, UNISUL, and the full title. Any record that gives the São Paulo social and environmental management title should not be merged into this profile, and any metric attached to the other RGSA should not be quoted for this one. This profile was anchored to the Journals World record carrying ISSN 2238-8753 before any research began, and every fact below was checked against that identity.

History in outline

The journal's published record begins at volume 1 in 2012. Early articles from that first volume are still cited in the sustainability-in-higher-education literature, for example work on socio-environmental management and sustainability in higher education institutions published in volume 1, issue 2, in 2012. By volume 5 in 2016 the journal was publishing studies such as assessments of environmental management systems in industry, including work evaluating the use of ISO 14001 as a tool for improving business environmental performance in São Paulo state industry. Volume 9, in 2020, carried work ranging from carbon capture configuration for thermoelectric plants to feeding studies in fish farming, showing how wide the applied end of the journal's scope had become. Volume 11, in 2022, included studies of waste management on family dairy farms in southern Brazil. This steady annual volume sequence, and the continued citation of its articles in later Brazilian scholarship, are the clearest public evidence of the journal's continuity; a fuller institutional history, including editorial succession, is not publicly disclosed in the sources located for this profile, and this profile does not invent one.

The university behind the journal, UNISUL, is a large private university institution headquartered in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, with campuses across the southern part of that state. A university-published journal of this kind typically serves two purposes at once: it gives the institution's own graduate programmes in environmental sciences, production engineering, administration and related areas a refereed outlet close to home, and it offers researchers elsewhere in Brazil, especially those working on southern Brazilian environmental problems, a Portuguese-language venue whose review and reading community understands the local regulatory and ecological context. The journal's contents reflect exactly that dual role.

Scope and characteristic topics

Environmental management in organisations

A central strand is how organisations manage their environmental responsibilities: environmental management systems, the adoption of standards such as ISO 14001, cleaner production, sustainable production processes, and the management of industrial residues. Papers in this strand typically use case studies of firms or sectors, evaluate a management tool in practice, and draw conclusions for managers as well as for researchers. The journal's 2016 article on ISO 14001 implementation in São Paulo industry is a representative example of the strand.

Solid waste management and recycling

The original listing identified municipal solid waste management and waste management and recycling as leading topics, and the published record supports that strongly. Brazil's National Solid Waste Policy, instituted in August 2010, created the legal backdrop for much of this work, and the journal has published studies of urban solid waste management, inadequate disposal and its effects on air, soil and water, health-service waste, and agricultural and agro-industrial residues, including the management of bovine waste from dairy farming in a free-stall system on a family property in Rio Grande do Sul. For researchers working on Brazilian waste policy implementation, this journal is one of the Portuguese-language places where municipal and farm-level evidence accumulates.

Water, sanitation and wastewater

Sanitation is a persistent theme: domestic wastewater treatment, the toxicity of wastewaters at different treatment stages assessed with seed bioindicators, effluent treatment in industry, and water resource questions. These papers sit between environmental engineering and management, usually emphasising what a treatment stage, a plant operator or a municipality should do with the findings.

Environmental sustainability and education

The listing's first-named topic, environmental sustainability and education, reflects a real strand of the journal: sustainability in higher education institutions, environmental education, and the attitudes and knowledge of students and organisations toward sustainability. The journal's own first volume contributed to the Brazilian debate about sustainable universities, and later bibliometric and review work in the field continues to cite it. This strand connects the journal to Brazil's large community of researchers studying how universities practise, as well as teach, sustainability.

Sustainability assessment and indicators

Assessment studies form another strand: evaluations of sustainability at farms, firms, universities and public bodies, sustainability indicators, carbon-related studies including carbon capture for power generation, and work on biofuels and biorefineries, where microalgae production and the economics of turning residues into energy are recurring subjects. These papers are typically applied and quantitative, reporting measurements from a specific site and generalising cautiously from it.

Applied environmental studies in production systems

Finally, the journal publishes applied studies from production systems whose environmental performance matters: aquaculture feeding trials designed to reduce environmental impact, agricultural residue use, and studies of how production choices affect local environments. The 2020 fish-farming article evaluating Malaysian rubber seed in tambacu diets, published in volume 9, is an example of work that a purely managerial journal would not carry and a purely biological journal might find too applied; it illustrates the journal's willingness to take environmental questions where they arise in production.

Publishing character

The journal is a university periodical, published in Portuguese as its main language, with some articles appearing in English and with the bilingual habits common in Brazilian scholarly publishing, where titles and abstracts are routinely presented for international discovery. Its articles carry DOIs built on the journal's rgsa stem; readers following older references will meet the form 10.19177/rgsa followed by volume and article information, while newer articles appear with the 10.59306 prefix and the same rgsa stem. That prefix change is a registration detail, not a change of journal, and both forms belong to this title when the ISSN and publisher match. Brazilian national evaluation systems have listed the journal in their periodical classifications; a CAPES Qualis listing located during research placed the title, under ISSN 2238-8753, in the B4 stratum for the 2013-2016 quadrennium in the architecture and urbanism evaluation area. Qualis strata vary by evaluation area and by quadrennium, so that listing should be read as historical evidence of national recognition rather than as a current grade.

Practical submission details, including the journal's current issue schedule, article processing arrangements, if any, and its present editorial team, are matters the journal's own portal controls and can change. They were not publicly disclosed in a single stable source that could be verified for this profile, so they are deliberately not asserted here. Authors considering the journal should open its current official periodicals page, confirm the submission system in use, the languages accepted, the article formats required and any charges, and only then prepare a manuscript. That caution is normal for Brazilian university journals, several of which have migrated between portal platforms in recent years.

Metrics and standing

The original Journals World listing recorded an h-index of 13 for this title, a figure consistent with a mid-sized national journal whose articles are cited mainly within Brazilian and Lusophone scholarship. Readers should not confuse this journal's metrics with those of the other RGSA, the São Paulo social and environmental management journal, whose citation profile belongs to a different ISSN. Nor should figures for the similarly named Revista de Gestão Ambiental e Sustentabilidade, published in São Paulo by a different university and carrying ISSN 2316-9834, be attributed here; three Brazilian titles in this neighbourhood have overlapping names and distinct identities. The honest summary of standing is that this is an established, decade-plus-old national journal with a defined applied niche, nationally classified in Brazil's evaluation system in the period checked, and cited in its field's Portuguese-language literature.

Who should read it, and who should submit

Readers who will get most from this journal are those working on Brazilian environmental management in practice: municipal waste managers and researchers, sanitation professionals, scholars of sustainability in higher education, and anyone needing Portuguese-language primary studies of how Brazilian firms, farms, universities and public bodies handle waste, effluents, environmental systems and sustainability assessment. Its case-study density is its strength; a reader looking for how a policy such as the National Solid Waste Policy played out in a specific municipality or sector is more likely to find evidence here than in an international theory journal.

Authors who should consider it are those with applied environmental management research grounded in Brazilian or comparable contexts, especially work with clear management implications: a waste system evaluated, a treatment stage tested, a management standard implemented and assessed, a sustainability indicator set applied to a real institution. Authors should write for a readership that values the management conclusion as much as the measurement, should situate the work in Brazilian regulation where that regulation shapes the problem, and should check the journal's live portal for current submission rules before preparing the manuscript. Authors whose work is purely theoretical ecology, or whose subject is the other RGSA's social management focus, will find better-fitting homes elsewhere.

Reading the journal as evidence about Brazil

Taken as a whole, the journal's back run is useful evidence about how environmental management developed in Brazil in the decade after the country's modern waste and sanitation framework was put in place. The National Solid Waste Policy of 2010 obliged municipalities to plan for collection, recycling and the closure of open dumps, and obliged producers and traders to think about reverse logistics for the products they placed on the market. Papers in this journal show those obligations being translated, unevenly and practically, into municipal plans, cooperative recycling arrangements, farm residue systems and company procedures. A researcher who reads across several volumes can therefore see the distance between a national policy text and local practice, which is exactly the distance at which management journals earn their keep.

The same is true for sanitation and water. Brazil's sanitation debate in this period concerned treatment coverage, the quality of effluents returned to rivers, and the capacity of smaller municipalities to operate treatment systems at all. The journal's wastewater and effluent papers, often built around a single plant, a single treatment stage or a single receiving environment, give that debate empirical texture. They are rarely the last word on a technology, but they record what was measured, in a named place, at a named time, and that record is what later reviewers and meta-analysts need. Readers should use the journal in that spirit: as a source of situated, dated, applied evidence, checked against the regulation in force when each study was done.

For citation practice, two habits will prevent most errors with this title. Always cite the full title rather than the abbreviation alone, because the abbreviation is shared. And always include the DOI where one exists, because the DOI's rgsa stem, together with the volume and year, resolves to a single article even when a database has shortened or translated the journal name in its own record.

Frequently asked questions

What does Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental publish?

Peer-reviewed research on environmental management and environmental sustainability, especially solid waste management and recycling, water and wastewater, sanitation, environmental education, sustainability assessment, and environmental management inside firms, farms, universities and public institutions.

Who publishes it?

The Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (UNISUL), a university institution headquartered in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The ISSN that identifies this journal is 2238-8753.

Is it the same journal as RGSA, Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental?

No. That is a different journal, based in São Paulo, with a different publisher and ISSN, which happens to share the RGSA abbreviation. Check the ISSN and publisher before attributing any article or metric to either title.

When did the journal start?

Its published volumes begin with volume 1 in 2012, and volume numbering continued annually at least through volume 11 in 2022, based on the dated articles located for this profile.

What language does it publish in?

Mainly Portuguese, as a Brazilian university journal, with some articles appearing in English. Authors should confirm the current language policy on the journal's portal.

How are its DOIs formed?

Articles carry DOIs using the journal's rgsa stem. Earlier articles were registered under the prefix 10.19177, as in the journal's volume 9 articles from 2020, and later articles appear under the prefix 10.59306, as in volume 11 articles from 2022. Both belong to this journal when the title, ISSN and publisher match.

What topics appear most often?

The original listing highlighted environmental sustainability and education, municipal solid waste management, and waste management and recycling. Its contents add sanitation and wastewater treatment, environmental management systems such as ISO 14001 in practice, sustainability assessment, and applied studies from agriculture and aquaculture.

Has the journal been classified in Brazil's Qualis system?

A Qualis listing located during the research for this profile recorded the title under ISSN 2238-8753 at the B4 stratum for the 2013-2016 quadrennium in one evaluation area. Qualis strata differ by area and period, so readers should consult the current CAPES listings for any present-day grade.

Where should authors check submission rules and charges?

On the journal's current official periodicals portal. Those operational details were not publicly disclosed in a single verifiable summary for this profile and can change when a university migrates its journals between platforms, so the live portal is authoritative.

Summary

Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental, ISSN 2238-8753, is UNISUL's Brazilian journal of environmental management and sustainability: publishing since volume 1 in 2012, centred on solid waste, sanitation, environmental education, sustainability assessment and the practical management of environmental responsibilities in firms, farms, universities and municipalities, and written mainly in Portuguese for the community that manages Brazil's environment in practice. Its identity must be kept separate from the other RGSA and from similarly named São Paulo titles, a separation that the ISSN and the UNISUL imprint make straightforward for any reader who checks them.