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Utilising the resource dependency theory, this study investigates the impact of board interlocks (CEOs' interlocks, women board interlocks, independent board interlocks and total board interlocks) on carbon emissions performance in India.

This research applies varieties of regression methods comprising robust least squares, generalised method of moments and Heckman's regression on a final sample of 63 of India's top 200 Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) listed companies that voluntarily participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project's (CDP) Climate Change Program and disclose their climate change data for years 2013–2020.

We provide strong evidence for a strong negative association between CEOs' interlocks and women board interlocks on carbon emissions performance. Independent and total board interlocks are not found to significantly affect carbon emissions performance.

Our sample is restricted to the proportion of the top 200 BSE firms that voluntarily submit their carbon emissions data to CDP. Also, the study's focus is India, limiting the generalisation of our findings to other emerging economies.

The study's findings provide valuable insight for regulators and corporate board of directors on the important role of CEOs and women board who interlock with other firms in steering the carbon emissions reduction. Specifically, the corporate board of directors should encourage CEOs to build more networks through outside board memberships. The regulators should revisit the Companies Act, 2013 and the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) regulation to increase the number of multiple directorships of CEOs and women board of directors.

This study responds to the dearth of literature on the efficacy of board interlocks on carbon emissions performance in emerging economies.

Purpose: Due to technological developments, industrialisation, irregular urbanisation, rapid population growth, and unconscious consumption, environmental problems have been on the agenda of activists, not for profit organisations, businesses, and governments for the last 20 years. Global warming, climate change, and ozone layer depletion are among the environmental problems which are the most threatening to life on earth. What is underlying these three problems is greenhouse gases emitted into atmosphere. Carbon footprint is a measure of carbon emission. The amount of carbon footprint is closely related to consumption styles as well as production. Unconscious life styles and consumption habits of consumers increase the amount of carbon footprint produced. Together with the rise of environmental problems, the concept of sustainable consumption has become very important. In the most simple of terms, sustainable consumption means consumption without consuming natural resources and this will play an important role in reducing carbon footprint.

Aim: In this chapter, keeping in mind the context of sustainable consumption, the concept of carbon footprint is explained as well as the methods for reducing carbon footprint arising from consumption, in a bid to bring strong awareness of these issues to consumers.

Methodology: To do this a literature review was carried out and methods of reducing carbon footprint were examined and discussed.

Findings: Consumers play an important role in reducing the amount of carbon footprint arising from individual consumption.

Originality of the Study: Most studies are carried out on the carbon footprint resulting from businesses and on carbon footprint calculation and determination of carbon footprint of products. Therefore, this study is specific in that it focusses on the carbon footprint of consumers.

Implications: Studies show that one of the important factors increasing carbon footprint is the unconscious acts of consumers relating to the environment. As long as this unconscious consumption model continues, the amount of carbon footprint will also increase. Hence, consumers need to know which activities reduce the amount of carbon footprint.

Global warming is a process that takes place 11,500 years after the end of the last Ice Age. The main identified reason is the increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Since the nineteenth century, GHG evolution has recorded a quantum leap from the previous linear development. Human is the main factor behind this evolution, through industrialization and the exponential increase of population. Based on these, the chapter’s primary goal was to highlight an original method of predicting the future evolution of GHG emissions in the domains of Energy (including Transportation), Industry Processes and Product Use, Agriculture, and Waste Management. The novelty of the research consisted of testing several variants of functions (power, exponential, inverse trigonometric) to identify, from a group of variants. This optimal function would generate those predictions, which are closest to the real values. The causes that create GHG emissions in each of the four domains were the foundation for the analysis. This chapter focuses on two main subjects: first, the identification of a smooth function to predict the evolution of GHG emissions, and second, the function’s use to estimate the projections of GHG emissions in the coming years for the four domains: Energy (including Transportation), Industry Processes and Product Use, Agriculture, and Waste Management. An observation was that the weights of these four domains remain relatively the same despite the reductions in the total GHG emissions.

The purpose of this chapter is to ask and answer the question of what would happen if Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) plant materials were banned. We report on two studies – one with United States only ban and one with a global ban. We used a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), for the analysis. This model has been used in hundreds of published papers on trade, energy, land use, and environmental issues. Our use of the model was to estimate the crop yield benefits for the major GMO crops, and then to convert this to a loss if the GMO traits were banned. We then shocked the GTAP model with the yield losses and estimate economic, land use, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission impacts. We found that losing the GM technology would cause commodity and food prices to increase and also bring about a significant increase in GHG emissions. The increase in emissions is caused by the need to convert forest and pasture to compensate for the lost production. Another interesting conclusion of the global ban study is that economic well-being for the United States, the world’s largest GMO user, actually increases with a ban. Many regions that ban or use little GMO varieties like the European Union, India, China, and Japan all see economic well-being decrease. These counterintuitive results are driven mainly by trade patterns. Therefore GMO technology helps agriculture reduce its carbon footprint. Without this technology, agricultural land-use GHG emissions increase as do food prices. Some groups would like to see GMOs banned and also see GHG emissions fall. You cannot have it both ways.

Purpose – Dairy has been the backbone of agriculture in regional Norway, and the processing of milk has been dominated by co-operatives owned by milk farmers. During the social democratic order (1945–1979), productivist agriculture thrived, while a more multifunctional agriculture was developed after 1980. As a measure against overproduction, a quota system was introduced in 1983. The purpose of this study is to see if there are signs of a neo-productivism revival after climate change and other global shocks, like the food crisis, featured prominently on the political agenda.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter reviews the radical structural changes in Norwegian dairy production since the early 1960s, which reduced the number of milk farms radically from 148,000 in 1959 to almost 16,000 in 2009. According to the Agricultural Agreement between the Norwegian government and the farmers' organisations, the co-operatives are given an important semi-public role as market-price regulators and stock keepers. This Norwegian system may be described as a classical regulated dairy regime. The Norwegian dairy regime has been through several deregulations and re-regulations over the last 20 years, partly forced by internal pressures and partly inspired by liberalisation tendencies abroad.

Findings – After mid-1990s, there has been an increase in the number of joint dairy farms, where individual ownership of land is maintained while herds, buildings and machinery are merged. Three thousand six hundred thirty dairy farmers are now participating in 1,510 joint farming firms, producing 29 per cent of the milk in Norway. This rapid growth of joint farming is transforming the dairy sector in Norway. Analysis has shown that its evolution is closely tied to farmer socio-economic demands, including social benefits, such as increased leisure time, and security during illness. While there has been pressure to increase productivity, the food crisis changed attitudes, making the current policy of import tariffs and subsidies easier to defend.

Originality/value – This chapter shows that neo-liberalism in Norway was not pursued as far as in most other OECD countries, although some deregulation was taking place. Norwegian agricultural policies are still regulating the sector to a substantial degree, with the annual Agricultural Agreement negotiations serving as a centrepiece. Norway has ambitious climate goals, and by 2020 greenhouse gases emissions should be reduced to 30 per cent of the 1990 rate. A further goal is that Norway will be carbon neutral by 2030. As part of the implementation of its climate policy, a White Paper on agriculture and climate change was put forward in May 2009. For Norwegian food production as a whole, a change towards more grazing at the expense of crops would improve carbon storage and reduce the overall use of fertiliser. Such a shift in land use would benefit the dairy sector, in part because of easier access to domestically grown cow feed.

The chapter studies the functioning of the so-called “voluntary” carbon offset market, a market in which moral controversies take place. The analysis dwells on the theoretical framework that enables us to study the functioning of a contested market through particular devices. The chapter seeks to contribute to the literature on moral struggles within markets by focusing the attention on one specific device: relational work, including several dimensions like meeting between seller and buyer, establishing contracts and maintaining the relationship with clients in the long run. By studying relational work, the authors highlight how this basic market activity is a crucial device that makes it possible for a contested market to continue to exist.

A variety of gases, including water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), add to the radiative forcing of Earth's atmosphere, meaning that they absorb certain wavelengths of infrared radiation (heat) that is leaving the Earth and thus raise the temperature of its atmosphere. Since glass has the same effect on the loss of heat from a greenhouse, these gases are known as “greenhouse” gases. It is fortunate that these gases are found in the atmosphere; without its natural greenhouse effect, Earth's temperature would be below the freezing point, and all waters on its surface would be ice. However, for the past 100 years or so, the concentrations of CO2, CH4, and N2O in the atmosphere have been rising as a result of human activities. An increase in the radiative forcing of Earth's atmosphere is destined to cause global warming, superimposed on the natural climate cycles that have characterized Earth's history.