Urban blight functions inversely to city development and often leads to cities’ deterioration in terms of physical beauty and functionality. While the underlying causes of urban blight in the context of the global north are mainly known in the literature to be population loss, economic decline, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation, there is a research gap regarding the root causes of urban blight in the global south, specifically in prime areas.

UNESCO and the United Nations have recently identified cultural heritage (CH) as a key enabler of sustainability by incorporating it into several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Accurate and efficient reporting on CH is considered fundamental despite known limitations due to the lack of sufficient and harmonized data. This paper presents a spatially enabled web application for urban CH monitoring for the city of Thessaloniki in Northern Greece.

The expansion of oil palm plantation has caused adverse impacts on the ecosystem. It has been associated with deforestation, biodiversity loss, disturbances to environmental services and livelihood change. The government of Indonesia has made an effort to control the negative effects by issuing relevant policies. One of the policies is Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO)’s sustainability standards to which large-scale plantations and smallholders are obliged to adhere.