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In the face of climate change, environmental impact assessment (EIA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) are expected to translate global or national mitigation and adaptation targets to project and plan levels of decision-making. This paper aims to examine how to transform China’s EIA procedures to accommodate consideration of climate change and what constraints might be for doing so.

The main methodology used in this paper is doctrinal research, which is the primary legal methodology to find the law and interpret and analyse the document. Theoretical research is applied to analyse the ideas and assumptions of the mainstreaming approach. Comparative research is done to consider relevant international experiences.

Despite well-founded rationale for the mainstreaming approach, entrenched institutional, legal and technical obstacles cannot be neglected in the context of China. Urgent needs to fix existing EIA/SEA loopholes and improve the general enabling environment are also highlighted as a fundamental aspect of mainstreaming.

The potential of mainstreaming climate change into China’s EIA procedures remains largely unexplored. As a ground-breaking work from China’s perspective, the findings of this paper can serve as an important foundation for future research from legal and other perspectives.

Research into climate change adaptation measures has resulted in the identification of 155 such adaptation measures that contribute to making the built environment more climate resilient. These measures mainly focus on new construction. This paper assesses the feasibility of the measures for the existing social housing stock in the Netherlands.

Interviews were conducted with 12 property managers and policy staff members from Dutch housing associations. The interviewees judged 21 measures that were designed to adapt dwellings to heat‐related problems caused by climate change, and they also answered questions regarding their awareness of climate change and regarding the feasibility of the measures.

Low awareness of climate change adaptations, the financing of the measures and the technical complexity of adaptation measures are perceived barriers to implementation. Several possibilities to remove these barriers are discussed.

The sample of 12 interviewees provides valuable insight into the opinions of a select group of policymakers from housing associations. The judgements were made based on the personal experiences and expectations of the interviewees.

This paper provides valuable insight into the opinions of policy makers and decision makers in Dutch housing associations on climate change adaptation measures in the existing building stock. These insights will be of use for policy making at the local and national levels directed towards creating a resilient building stock.

Legislation plays an essential role in addressing climate change in China. However, many barriers to formulating national legislation to address climate change have so far prevented its enactment. The bottom-up approach adopted in the international climate regime sets a good example. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional legislation to address climate change in China through exploring the following two questions: whether it is necessary to enact climate change legislation at regional level first and whether it is feasible to develop such regional legislation in the absence of national climate change law.

This paper analyses the necessity and feasibility of regional legislation to address climate change. Section 2 introduces the current legislative framework on climate change in China. Section 3 investigates whether it is better to push the legislative agenda at regional, rather than national level. Section 4 analyses the feasibility of establishing regional legislative systems. Section 5 explores the key issues in formulating and promoting regional legislation.

This paper concludes that it is necessary and feasible to pilot regional legislation before enacting national legislation. Under these circumstances, local governments can take the initiative to begin formulating regional legislation.

Addressing climate change needs immediate action and effective measures. It is, thus, necessary to reconsider the approach that China should adopt when developing legislation on climate change. This paper contributes to broadening current knowledge of regional climate change legislation in China.

Climate change poses risks to society and the demand for carbon literacy within small and medium-sized enterprises is increasing. Skills and knowledge are required for organizational greenhouse gas accounting and science-based decisions to help businesses reduce transitional risks. At the University of Copenhagen and the University of Northern British Columbia, two carbon management courses have been developed to respond to this growing need. Using an action-based co-learning model, students and business are paired to quantify and report emissions and develop climate plans and communication strategies.

This paper draws on surveys of businesses that have partnered with the co-learning model, designed to provide insight on carbon reductions and the impacts of co-learning. Data collected from 12 respondents in Denmark and 19 respondents in Canada allow for cross-institutional and international comparison in a Global North context.

Results show that while co-learning for carbon literacy is welcomed, companies identify limitations: time and resources; solution feasibility; governance and reporting structures; and communication methods. Findings reveal a need for extension, both forwards and backwards in time, indicating that the collaborations need to be lengthened and/or intensified. Balancing academic requirements detracts from usability for businesses, and while municipal and national policy and emission targets help generate a general societal understanding of the issue, there is no concrete guidance on how businesses can implement operational changes based on inventory results.

The research brings new knowledge to the field of transitional climate risks and does so with a focus on both small businesses and universities as important co-learning actors in low-carbon transitions. The comparison across geographies and institutions contributes an international solution perspective to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a solid understanding, policy and action recommendations to motivate and capacitate more cities to start such urban vulnerability processes and to guide them in their first steps in a direction which will more easily allow the direct use of vulnerability assessments for subsequent adaptation and resilience planning.

The methodology adopted for this assessment builds on several years of ICLEI's international experience in climate change adaptation work. It specifically draws on the urban vulnerability component of the ICLEI ACCCRN process, a toolkit developed with support from Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network program, by ICLEI South Asia in partnership with ICLEI Oceania. A participatory approach that includes all key stakeholders and builds on past or ongoing relevant work in the city, as well as draws on existing data sources were adopted in view of the limited timeframe of this study (five months). A stakeholder consultation methodology referred to as Shared Learning Dialogues (SLDs) was adopted to engage not only various departments within the city government but also other local stakeholders. SLDs facilitate multi dimensional information sharing with everyone contributing information and experiences, and everyone learning from the exchanges as well.

The critical impacts have been identified through a series of participatory learning processes which were corroborated with existing secondary data and baseline studies, where available. During SLD process, a timeline exercise was carried out and the consequences of those climatic hazards were also chalked out. Subsequently, these identified impacts were justified broadly with the available data and studies. These are saline water intrusion, loss of assets and infrastructure, health impacts – increased morbidity, water supply contaminated, sanitation and drainage systems disrupted, heightened threat situation (fear of embankment breach), in-migration, increasing siltation in the canals, river bank encroachment, livelihood change, biodiversity loss.

The resilience interventions identified by the stakeholders can be assessed for potential linkages with existing or planned schemes, followed by supporting sectoral and pre-feasibility studies, resulting finally in the identification of financing options. These actions can be focussed on the vulnerable areas within the cities, especially hotspots, and social groups identified and their adaptive capacities were assessed.

The resilience interventions identified by the stakeholders provides a focussed starting point for further discussion in terms of refinement of these actions as well their prioritization according to resilience and feasibility (economic, social, environmental) criteria.

Many good sustainability entrepreneurial ideas and projects fail to reach their objectives due to problems with feasibility. This chapter investigates the effectiveness of methods used to evaluate the feasibility of entrepreneurial ventures in the context of sustainable urban development. Traditional methods and tools based on cost–benefit analysis could provide some guidance for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs when evaluating sustainability strategies. Yet, such methods rely on restrictive assumptions, which cast doubt on their suitability for real-world sustainability applications. Traditional methods are far from really enabling entrepreneurs to make informed optimal decisions. New integrated methods are necessary for drawing conclusions vis-a-vis the practicality of entrepreneurial ideas by quantifying and analyzing the benefits and costs of all options in a given scenario. This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of current feasibility study methods and their suitability for sustainable urban planning and development. It surmises that caution is advised concerning their reflection of real-life applications, given the complexity and dynamicity of solving sustainability-related problems. It is shown that such methods can arguably be a useful tool when evaluating the viability of investing in innovation and sustainability if they are enriched with advanced modelling techniques, such as system dynamics and optimization methods. For this purpose, an entrepreneurial venture for promoting sustainable mobility via information and communication technology (ICT) is used as a case study. The proposed integrated ‘Sustainability Entrepreneurship’ approach for evaluating feasibility can prove to be very useful for entrepreneurs when assessing the efficacy of complex sustainable-related ventures.

This paper aims to examine how social and environmental issues were accounted for and traded off within decision-making for Australia’s largest seawater desalination plant. This is done through an investigation of disclosures contained within key publicly available documents pertaining to the project.

The study deploys content analysis to initially identify relevant disclosures. Themes and subthemes are based on definitions of social and environmental accounting adapted from prior research. Relevant information was used to develop “silent accounts” to identify and analyse accountability issues in the case.

It was found that a number of claims made throughout reporting were unsupported or insufficiently explained. At the same time, it is found that various forms of basic measurements used to describe social and environmental issues conveyed the rationale of decision makers. It is concluded that many of the claims were asserted rather than evidenced; yet, the manner and context of their presentation gave them the appearance of being incontestable truths. Further, it is argued that the portrayal of social and environmental issues through measurable means is emblematic of values associated with contemporary neoliberal and public sector reforms.

The findings and conclusions of this study are contextually bound and therefore limited to this case.

This paper illustrates problems with the reporting of non-financial information and strengthens our understanding of the use of “silent accounting”. It illustrates the value of this approach to research examining accounting and accountability issues.

The findings contribute to the literature on social and environmental accounting by providing unique empirical analysis of non-financial disclosures within publicly available reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the feasibility and design of zero-energy buildings (ZEBs) in cold and semi-arid climates. In this study, to maximize the use of renewable energy, energy consumption is diminished using passive solar architecture systems and techniques.

The case study is a residential building with a floor area of 100 m² and four inhabitants in the cold and semi-arid climate, northeast of Iran. For thermal simulation, the climate data such as air temperature, sunshine hours, wind, precipitation and hourly sunlight, are provided from the meteorological station and weather databases of the region. DesignBuilder software is applied for simulation and dynamic analysis of the building, as well as PVsyst software to design and evaluate renewable energy performance.

The simulation results show a 30% decrease in annual energy consumption of the building by complying with the principles of passive design (optimal selection of direction, Trombe wall, shade, proper insulation selection) from 25,443 kWh to 17,767 kWh. Then, the solar energy photovoltaic (PV) system is designed using PVsyst software, taking into account the annual energy requirement and the system’s annual energy yield is estimated to be 26,291 kWh.

The adaptive comparison of the values obtained from the energy analysis indicated that constructing a ZEB is feasible in cold and semi-arid conditions and is considered an effective step to achieve sustainable and environmentally friendly construction.

Climate and environment-related financial risks could significantly and negatively impact the financial sector in future, particularly its financing to those sectors adversely impacted by the climate-related risks, low-carbon policies and the transition from traditional energy sources-based economy to a more sustainable system with alternative energy sources. The participatory countries of the Paris Agreement agreed to align finance flows with a low-emission, low-carbon and climate-resilient growth, in order to facilitate achieving the long-term climate goals. The financial sector, therefore, needs to play a proactive role in aligning financial flows. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to study low-carbon finance and climate-related financial risks. This chapter examine how climate change can affect the financial sector. It discusses the concept, nature, measurement of climate risks and climate-related financial risks and associated prospects and challenges in the assessment and the measurement of these risks. It also presents the green financing initiatives and role of central banks and supervisory authorities and their monetary and financial policies in enhancing green financing and redirecting finance to low-carbon activities. In the financial sector, the insurance industry is highly vulnerable to such risks. The banking sector is yet to witness the serious impact of these risks. With the slowing of global economic growth, appropriate policies are needed to encourage banks to provide increased green finance with an adequate profitability. Studies recommend that climate-related risk has a strong potential impact on banks’ loan default rate as well as on the financial stability, there is hence a need to incorporate climate-related criteria and the systemic risk arising out of climate change into banks’ decision-making process and risk modelling and management. There is a need for developing an appropriate methodology for assessing and reducing these risks. Moreover, observers also anticipate a need for cooperation between banking regulators and banks to develop and adopt best practices in the management of environmental risks. The environment-related risks will call forth a multi-country, or regional, research office to collect and compile the required data and undertake analysis to enhance the banking sectors’ understanding of, and capacity to address, potential systemic environmental risks. What is needed is to test the feasibility of incorporating forward-looking scenarios for assessing potential impacts of providing credit to environmentally unsustainable or sustainable activities on financial stability.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for estimating the costs of adaptation to climate change impacts on ecosystems.

While existing studies on costing adaptation base themselves on either the financial flows on conservation or the costs of specific adaptation measures at the global level, the methodology presented here takes into account the impacts on ecosystems, the identification of vulnerable areas, and adaptation options at a more regional level.

The framework is then applied to forest ecosystems in India. The authors find that the total adaptation costs for forest ecosystems in India until 2085 are in the range of $1.34‐2.32 billion.

The key contribution of this paper is the proposal that for any robust estimation of adaptation costs, people should take into account the regional level impacts and the multiple adaptation options linked to those impacts.