Certifying the sustainability of herding practices in Mongolia
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Balancing sustainability goals and treatment efficacy for PFAS removal from water
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are emerging water contaminants with significant environmental and health impacts, posing challenges in water treatment due to their high stability and persistence. With increasing regulations, a critical need remains in understanding the sustainability of PFAS treatment technologies. Our review examines the environmental, economic, and social impacts of current PFAS treatment technologies across different water types and contexts. Additionally, we propose a framework for future sustainability studies to enable more holistic technology evaluations under specific conditions.
Exploring corporate social responsibility practices in the telecommunications, broadcasting and courier sectors: a comparative industry analysis
This study aims to dissect and understand the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) endeavours of organisations within Malaysia’s telecommunications, broadcasting, postal and courier services sectors, particularly those holding licenses from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). These sectors were chosen for this study due to their crucial role in Malaysia’s economy and society, their notable environmental influence, the regulatory and public attention they receive as well as the distinct challenges and opportunities they face in implementing CSR. Employing a qualitative methodology, the study utilises a semi-structured interview protocol to gather rich, detailed insights from top management across eight listed and non-listed companies. This approach ensures a comprehensive exploration of CSR types, practices and their implementation within the target sectors. Purposive sampling was adopted to select informants with specific expertise, ensuring that the data collected was relevant and insightful. The findings of this study underscore that while telecommunications firms actively participate in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, their efforts predominantly benefit the broader society, with less emphasis placed on shareholders. Additionally, it was observed that environmental issues receive relatively minimal attention from these organisations. This diversity highlights the necessity for a more equitable CSR approach that caters equally to the needs of all stakeholders, including the environment. Such a strategy is crucial for cultivating a sustainable and ethically sound business environment. The implications of this research are manifold. For companies, it emphasises the critical nature of adopting an all-encompassing CSR strategy that fosters competitive advantage while promoting sustainable development. The study advocates for a paradigm shift towards CSR practices that are not only philanthropic but also prioritise environmental stewardship and value creation.
Assessing the effectiveness of interdependent corporate sustainability choices
Lowering the environmental externalities of business operations while preserving firms’ value is a challenging task that involves complex sustainability decisions. These decisions require navigating highly interconnected choices of actions and goals that characterise companies’ sustainability behaviour. Here, we develop an empirical framework to investigate the implications of choice interdependence on companies’ integrated financial and environmental performance. Our results suggest that the sustainability choices of companies in energy and energy-intensive sectors emerge from effective decision-making processes and have a larger impact on performance than random allocation of actions. However, comparing the behaviour of companies in our sample with hypothetical quasioptimal (“satisficing”) choices, we observe a considerable under-performance, a low choice differentiation across the population, a significant over-investment in risk mitigation activities, and under-investment in developing innovation capabilities. Overall, our study provides a framework for evaluating companies’ contribution to a sustainable low-carbon transition and highlights critical gaps in corporates’ environmental actions.
Conceptualizing space environmental sustainability
Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the capabilities for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM), to develop infrastructure in orbit and on the surface of celestial bodies. This progress is a departure from the traditional sustainability paradigm focused solely on Earth, highlighting the urgent need to define and operationalize the concept of “space sustainability” along with the development of an evaluation framework. The expansion of human activity into space, particularly in low-earth orbit, cis-lunar space, and beyond, underscores the critical importance of considering sustainability implications. Leveraging space resources offers economic growth and sustainable development opportunities, while reducing pressure on Earth’s ecosystems. This paradigm shift requires responsible and ethical utilization of space resources. A space sustainability assessment framework is essential for guiding ISAM capabilities, operations, missions, standards, and policies. This paper introduces an initial framework encompassing (1) pollution, (2) resource depletion, (3) landscape alteration, and (4) space environmental justice, with potential metrics (resources use and emissions, midpoint, and endpoint indicators) to measure impacts in the four domains.
Management practices and manufacturing firm responses to a randomized energy audit
Increasing the efficiency of industrial energy use is widely considered important for mitigating climate change. We randomize assignment of an energy audit intervention aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing energy expenditures of small- and medium-sized metal processing firms in Shandong Province, China, and examine impacts on energy outcomes and interactions with firms’ management practices. We find that the intervention reduced firms’ unit cost of electricity by 8% on average. Firms with more developed structured management practices showed higher rates of recommendation adoption. However, the post-intervention electricity unit cost reduction is larger in firms with less developed practices, primarily driven by a single recommendation that corrected managers’ inaccurate reporting of transformer usage at baseline, lowering their electricity costs. By closing management-associated gaps in awareness of energy expenditures, energy audit programmes may reduce a firm’s unit cost of energy but have an ambiguous impact on energy use and climate change.
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