Search results

The primary objective of this research is to chronicle how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other United States Federal Government Agencies (USFGA) agencies have played a role in shaping the trajectory of financial reporting for sustainability, with a particular emphasis on triple bottom line (TBL). This exploration extends to other indexes reporting sustainability data encompassed within financial, social and environmental reporting.

This study adopts an illustrative methodology, utilizing data sourced from governmental, business and international organizational documents.

Sustainability accounting predominantly finds its place within the framework of TBL. However, it is crucial to note that sustainability reporting remains voluntary rather than mandatory. Nevertheless, accounting firms and professional accounting societies have embraced it as a supplementary facet of financial accounting reporting.

The research highlights the historical evolution of sustainability within the USFGA and corporate entities. Corporations’ interest in accounting for sustainability performances has significantly contributed to the emergence of voluntary sustainability accounting rules, as embodied by the TBL.

This paper delves into cross-border E-business, unraveling its intricate dynamics and forecasting its future trajectory.

This paper projects the prospective market size of cross-border E-business in China for the year 2023 using the GM (1,1) gray forecasting model. Furthermore, to enhance the analysis, the paper attempts to simulate and forecast the size of China’s cross-border E-business sector using the GM (1,3) gray model. This extended model considers not only the historical trends of cross-border E-business but also the growth patterns of GDP and the digital economy.

The forecast indicates a market size of 18,760 to 18,934 billion RMB in 2023, aligning with the consistent growth observed in previous years. This suggests a sustained positive trajectory for cross-border E-business.

Cross-border e-commerce critically shapes China’s global integration and traditional industry development. The research in this paper provides insights beyond statistical trends, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the pivotal role played by cross-border e-commerce in shaping China’s economic future.

This paper aims to provide an examination of the use of the concept of resilience and its use in service organisation, ecosystem-related literature and the wider social sciences.

This paper provides a critical review and commentary on the resilience literature in the social and business sciences and its relevance to service organisations.

Two main approaches towards resilience are identified (engineering and socio-ecological resilience) with each having different assumptions about the nature of resilience with corresponding implications for policymaking, indicator selection and application in a service context. These approaches operate at different scales and possess different properties with respect to the likelihood of enacting transformative service marketing.

Different conceptualisations of resilience have profound implications for resilience-related policymaking as well as understanding change and adaptation in service ecosystems and organisations.

The transformative possibilities of resilience are connected to the active enhancement and construction of social capacity by service organisations and the persistent resilience of the resilience concept.

This paper highlights the importance of clearly defining the resilience concept and its implications for research and transformative service organisations.

In this article, the authors analyse a complex social process affecting historic public paths in rural areas in southern Spain. Despite the fact that urban populations are demanding the enhancement of this type of natural heritage for tourism, sports and recreational use, some parts of the network have been abandoned or usurped.

The study is multidisciplinary, comprising three interlinked studies. The cartographic study comprises an inventory of public paths in rural areas based on administrative sources. The legal study analyses local, regional and national regulations governing agricultural, environmental, heritage, sports and tourism uses of the infrastructure. The sociological study analyses social discourses on the uses of public paths, and identifies conflicts between farmers, landowners, environmentalists, sportspeople and tourists.

The preliminary results identified an important public paths network in Andalusia, approximately 160,000 km. The legal study found that there are laws regulating use, although local authorities do not monitor compliance or provide solutions to enhance management. The sociological study determined the attribution of environmental, cultural and economic value to public paths, but also the existence of conflicts between rural and urban populations.

Given that this is ongoing research, only state of the art and some preliminary albeit sufficiently consistent results are presented.

The results could help to guide public policy and governance of public paths.

Public paths promote rural development and a green/sustainable economy.

The research results and conclusions are original.

This study aims to explore the unique and synergistic effects of green human resource management (GHRM) and corporate environmental ethics (CEE) on the environmental performance (EP) of manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Yemen, a less developed country (LDC).

Through a cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 262 manufacturing SMEs in Yemen and analyzed using “hierarchical regression analysis” via PROCESS Macro.

The empirical results showed that GHRM and CEE positively affect EP and, more importantly, that CEE and GHRM have a synergistic effect on EP.

This study makes a theoretical contribution by integrating GHRM, CEE and EP into a single framework, taking into account the perspectives of the resource-based view and the ethical theory of organizing. The results corroborate the unique and synergistic effects of GHRM and CEE on EP of SMEs in the manufacturing sector.

The results of this study offer valuable insights for SME managers/decision-makers, who are anticipated to become more interested in integrating environmental ethics into their companies. This has implications that with the consideration of CEE, SMEs can benefit from GHRM practices to improve their EP.

The study highlights the positive economic and social impact of SMEs adopting eco-friendly practices like GRHM. In today’s economy, it is not sufficient to simply strive for economic growth. It is possible for SMEs to achieve well-rounded performance by implementing the recommended framework that emphasizes the importance of social and environmental well-being.

This study advances the existing work on the impact of GHRM on EP by demonstrating the crucial role of CEE in predicting EP of manufacturing SMEs in LDCs like Yemen. Previous research on GHRM has mainly been conducted on SMEs in developed nations, which may not be entirely applicable to LDCs. It is crucial to understand this aspect in the context of LDCs so that SMEs can adopt environmental practices effectively in the future: how SMEs conserve the environment through their environmental practices.

Environmental degradation resulting from human activities may adversely affect human health in multiple ways. Until now, policies aimed at mitigating environmental problems such as climate change, environmental pollution and damage to biodiversity have failed to clearly identify and drive the potential benefits of these policies on health. The conducted study assesses and demonstrates how specific environmental policies and instruments influence perceived human health in order to ensure input for a data-driven decision process.

The study was conducted for the 2004–2020 period in European Union (EU) countries with the use of dynamic panel data modeling. Verification of specific policies' impact on dependent variables allows to indicate this their effectiveness and importance. As a result of the computed dynamic panel data models, it has been confirmed that a number of significant and meaningful relationships between the self-perceived health index and environmental variables can be identified.

There is a strong positive impact of environmental taxation on the health index, and the strength of this relationship causes effects to be observed in the very short term, even the following year. In addition, the development of renewable energy sources (RES) and the elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix exert positive, although milder, effects on health. The reduction of ammonia emissions from agriculture and reducing noise pollution are other health-supporting factors that have been shown to be statistically valid. Results allow to identify the most efficient policies in the analyzed area in order to introduce those with the best results or a mix of such measures.

The results of the authors' research clearly indicate the health benefits of measures primarily aimed at improving environmental factors, such as environmental taxes in general. The authors have also discovered an unexpected negative impact of an increase in the share of energy taxes in total taxes on the health index. The presented study opens several possibilities for further investigation, especially in the context of the rapidly changing geopolitical environment and global efforts to respond to environmental and health challenges. The authors believe that the outcome of the authors' study may provide new arguments to policymakers pursuing solutions that are not always easily acceptable by the public.

The study aims to identify and discuss influential aspects of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) literature, including key streams, themes, authors, keywords, journals, affiliations and countries. This review also constructs agendas for future CED research.

Using a bibliometric review approach, the authors reviewed 560 articles on CED from 215 journals published between 1982 and 2020.

The authors' insights are three-fold. First, the authors identified three core streams of CED research: “legitimization of environmental hazards via environmental disclosures,” “the role of environmental accounting in achieving corporate environmental sustainability” and “integrating environmental social and governance (ESG) reporting into the global reporting initiatives (GRI) guidelines”. Second, the authors also deployed a thematic map that classifies CED research into four themes: niche themes (e.g. institutional theory and environmental management system), motor themes (e.g. stakeholder engagement), emerging/declining themes (e.g. legitimacy theory) and basic/transversal themes (e.g. voluntary CED, environmental reporting and corporate social responsibility). Third, the authors highlighted important CED authors, keywords, journals, articles, affiliations and countries.

This study assists researchers, journal editors and consultants in the corporate sector to comprehensively understand various dimensions of CED research and practices and suggests potential emerging research areas. Although this paper appears to have been thoroughly conducted, using authors' keywords to identify themes was a key limitation. Thus, the authors call upon using a more comprehensive data mining technique that uses keywords in abstracts, titles and the whole body of papers and then identifies inclusive trends in CED literature.

The authors contribute to the extant accounting literature by investigating the organizational-level CED, both mandatory and voluntary, using a systematic and bibliometric literature review model to summarize the key research streams, themes, authors, journals, affiliations and countries. By doing so, the authors construct a future research agenda for CED literature.

This study aims to assess the spread of environmental literacy graduation requirements at public universities in the USA, and to highlight factors that mediate the adoption of this curriculum innovation.

The author analyzed the undergraduate general education curriculum requirements at all 549 public BA-granting higher education institutions in the USA between 2020 and 2022.

The study found that only 27 US public universities out of 540 have an environmental literacy graduation requirement, which represents 5% of universities and is substantially lower than previous estimates.

First, this study provides a more complete, more reliable and more current assessment of the graduation requirement’s presence at US tertiary institutions, and shows the number of universities that have implemented this innovation is lower than was estimated a decade ago. Second, it draws from the scholarship on the infusion of sustainability into the university curriculum to provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that mediate the pursuit and implementation of the graduation requirement. As well, it identifies factors that played a key role in one pertinent case.

The universities of applied sciences (UASs) in Finland play a significant role in providing skilled professionals with higher education degrees to meet the needs of the labor market and society as a whole. The purpose of this study is to determine what the staff in these universities consider the role of UASs in promoting sustainable development (SD) to be.

The qualitative research data were collected from a survey distributed among UAS staff in the spring of 2021. The data consisted of 831 responses to an open-ended question on how UASs could promote SD and a sense of responsibility for it. The method used for the data analysis was theory-led content analysis.

Staff at UASs are actively promoting SD in higher education and have many ideas on how to do this, which is encouraging. With further processing of these ideas and support from management, UASs can play a more important role in sustainability work and set an example for how to build a sustainable future.

The promotion of SD is a timely topic, and examples of SD implementation and good practices can promote discussion of the role of higher education institutions in SD promotion and highlight collective ways to promote it.