Sustainability Ranking Research Articles

One-pot hydroformylation/O-acylation of propenylbenzenes for the synthesis of polyfunctionalized fragrances

A process involving the hydroformylation/O-acylation of propenylbenzenes with a phenolic group is described for eugenol, isoeugenol, chavicol, propenyl guaethol, 2-allylphenol, and 2-allyl-6-methylphenol. The reactions occur in parallel, under the same reaction conditions in anisole, a solvent with an impressive sustainability rank comparable to those of ethanol and water. The products contain formyl and acetoxy moieties, both established olfactory groups in flavor and fragrance industry, and present potential as new fragrance components with less allergenic properties. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a one-pot process involving hydroformylation combined with further functionalization in a remote site is described.

An Analysis of Current Sustainability of Mexican Cities and Their Exposure to Climate Change

The increasing demand for goods and services in cities around the world due to a rapidly growing urban population is pushing the socioecological systems that support them to their limits. The complexity of urban socioeconomic and environmental systems and their interactions generate a challenging multidimensional decision problem. In response, governments around the world are currently generating a variety of measurements that aim to portrait the main factors that are related to the level of sustainability that a city shows. While the objective of these efforts is to help in the process of urban policy making, these measures are often hard to interpret and do not lend to discover underlying characteristics that may be common among a group of cities. Moreover, these measures are typically focused on describing the current state and omit future challenges such as climate change, which may significantly affect any evaluation of urban sustainability. Recently, the Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) of Mexico produced a dataset of 36 sustainability related variables for over 100 cities that has the objective of helping federal and state level governments defining sustainable urban strategies. Here we use multivariate statistical techniques to (1) decrease the dimensionality of the dataset and find indices that could be more useful to decision makers; (2) find commonalities among cities include in the dataset in order to help in designing urban strategies for cities with similar characteristics; (3) cities are ranked in terms of their sustainability and characteristics and; (4) the sustainability ranking is compared to estimates of how much the current climate in each of these cities is expected to change during this century, which would add further challenges to maintain or improve urban sustainability.

Industrial system prioritization using the sustainability‐interval‐index conceptual framework with life‐cycle considerations

AbstractThis study aims to develop a sustainability‐interval‐index (SII) conceptual framework with life‐cycle considerations which can incorporate the opinions/preferences of multiple stakeholders in the complex decision‐making processes and address the decision‐making matrix composed by multiple types of data for multiactor life cycle ranking of industrial systems. The multiactor fuzzy best‐worst method which allows multiple groups of stakeholders to use fuzzy numbers to express their opinions and preferences was developed for determining the weights of the indicators in life cycle sustainability assessment. A multicriteria decision‐making method under hybrid information was developed for addressing the decision‐making matrix composed by multiple types of data. Five hydrogen production pathways were studied, and the results reveal that the developed SII is feasible for sustainability ranking of industrial systems in life cycle perspective.

The effect of aggregation on city sustainability rankings

Abstract Although sustainability is a multifactorial concept, many sustainability indexes use weighted additive aggregation of sets of different indicators to derive a single index which can be used to rank different cities. One of the limitations of this approach is that a poor or low rating in one area can be compensated by a strong or high rating in another area. However sustainability cannot be measured linearly. There is at least a triple bottom line: environmental, social and economic. To be truly sustainable, a city must be sustainable in all areas. A deficiency in one area is likely to have a negative effect in larger proportion than suggested by the magnitude of the deficiency. Conversely, a strong result in an indicator is likely to have less effect on overall sustainability than its magnitude suggests. The concept of constraint and maximisation indicators has been proposed to represent this property of sustainability. We investigate the effect on city rankings of using aggregations that aim to represent the constraint and maximisation properties of sustainable development indicators, compared to the commonly used arithmetic (linear) aggregation. Three such aggregation methods (geometric, harmonic and an adjustable compensation method) can cause difficulties with ranking if one or more of the individual indices have a zero normalised value. We show that the use of a small offset can avoid this problem and enable practical use of these aggregation methods to better capture the nature of sustainability. We also formulate a similarity score for different ranking systems that compare a large number of cities.

Sustainability Ranking of Desalination Plants Using Mamdani Fuzzy Logic Inference Systems

As water desalination continues to expand globally, desalination plants are continually under pressure to meet the requirements of sustainable development. However, the majority of desalination sustainability research has focused on new desalination projects, with limited research on sustainability performance of existing desalination plants. This is particularly important while considering countries with limited resources for freshwater such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as it is heavily reliant on existing desalination infrastructure. In this regard, the current research deals with the sustainability analysis of desalination processes using a generic sustainability ranking framework based on Mamdani Fuzzy Logic Inference Systems. The fuzzy-based models were validated using data from two typical desalination plants in the UAE. The promising results obtained from the fuzzy ranking framework suggest this more in-depth sustainability analysis should be beneficial due to its flexibility and adaptability in meeting the requirements of desalination sustainability.

Sustainability assessment and decision making of hydrogen production technologies: A novel two-stage multi-criteria decision making method

A novel two-stage multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method is proposed with the aim to select the most sustainable hydrogen production technology (HPT) by considering the preference information on both attributes and alternatives. In the first stage of the method, the initial sustainability ranking of the alternative HPTs was achieved by using the FBWM (Fuzzy Best-Worst Method) to determine the weights of the criteria and the fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method to prioritize the sustainability of alternative HPTs. While, in the second stage, a novel Preference Ranking Linear Programming Method (PRLPM) was used to acquire the final sustainability ranking according to the alternative preference information by following the principle of the outranking method. The proposed method was illustrated by a case study with 8 HTPs, demonstrating that the developed two-stage MCDM method can reflect the alternative preference of the decision-maker more accurately for selecting the most preferred alternative among various HTPs.

Sustainable city rankings, benchmarking and indexes: Looking into the black box

City rankings, benchmarking and indexes are a global phenomenon as public and private institutions across the world foster city performance measures. These tools are allegedly useful to guide and evaluate policies implemented by local authorities in diverse fields, but are especially prominent in the field of sustainability. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge about the real methodological basis of this type of tool. The purpose of this study is to analyze and evaluate the measurement and monitoring practices of 21 urban sustainability rankings, benchmarks and indexes paying special attention to methodological issues — i.e. shedding light into the black box of the practices. The findings indicate that these tools for urban measurement tend to neglect complex causalities and they lack transparency in relation to data collection, weighting and the aggregation process in their design. Similarly, these tools tend to be biased and as a result, they tend to ignore badly ranked cities and reinforce existing stereotypes. Implications for scholars, practitioners and public decision makers are discussed.

The Role of UI GreenMetric as a Global Sustainable Rankings for Higher Education Institutions

The Role of UI GreenMetric as a Global Sustainable Rankings for Higher Education Institutions

Corporate Sustainability and CEO–Employee Pay Gap—Buster or Booster?

There is a general agreement that extensive remuneration gaps may cause pressing environmental, social, and economic problems. Thus, a critical question to be answered is what is the effect of being at the forefront of corporate sustainability on the CEO–employee pay gap. This paper addresses the question by examining empirical evidence from 415 constituents of the S&P 1500 index over the years 2006–2016. For the above period, we found a positive relationship between a strong commitment to sustainable development at the firm level and the CEO–employee pay differential. Additionally, firms characterized by higher performance, growth potential, and financial robustness constituted more dispersed salary distribution environments. The findings also suggest that CEO gender has a significant effect on the pay gap with a moderating influence of female CEOs. The paper contributes to the literature by shedding additional light on the urgent need for the implementation of a limit capping the CEO–worker pay ratio at a certain, responsible level as one of screening criteria used by sustainability ranking providers. Furthermore, it also shows that leading corporations in the area of sustainability do not implement any serious solutions in the above area on their own accord.

Siliceous Concrete Materials Management for Sustainability Using Fuzzy-TOPSIS Approach

Concrete manufacturing, a high energy and natural resources demanding process, can play a vital role in sustainable development by offering solutions to environmental and socio-economic issues. Concrete manufactured with siliceous materials can extend concrete life and reduce costs, and judicious management of siliceous utilization can make concrete manufacturing sustainable. A number of industrial and agro-based by-products, waste products, and new engineered materials are being use as siliceous material in concrete. The present research aims to implement the Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach, a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique, for the orderly management of siliceous materials based on sustainable criteria, namely, technical, environmental, social, and economic aspects. The present research adopts twenty indicators of sustainability to evolve a comprehensive model for a sustainability ranking of concrete siliceous materials and to provide siliceous materials management. The present research also provides a methodology for the systematic ranking of sustainable criteria and indicators along with a siliceous materials sustainability order for enhanced sustainable development and management. It can be concluded that the proper material management of siliceous concrete materials, especially nano-engineered materials in construction industry, will help in the conservation of basic concrete materials and environmental protection without direct impact on social development.

Assessment of the sustainability of façade refurbishment

Dominant share of the residential stock in the European countries has an exploited service life and is in a need for fa?ade refurbishment. This paper contributes with an establishment of a tool for assessment of the sustainability of design options for buildings` fa?ade refurbishment. The tool is based on a multicriteria system, assessing four design criteria, relevant to the process of fa?ade refurbishment. The criteria are evaluated by several surveyed participants by utilizing the Analytic-Hierarchic Process (AHP).The tool is applied on several fa?ade refurbishment design proposals assessment on a case-study of a residential building situated in Skopje, Western Balkans, Europe. Each of the fa?ade proposals is assessed regarding their energy performance, CO2 emissions, investment costs and return of investment. Further, the results of the LCA analysis of the applied materials shows the contribution of each of them to the overall sustainability performance. The results of this research show that the use of wood and modified wood products as fa?ade elements used for buildings` fa?ade refurbishment can substantially decrease the greenhouse emissions and contribute to the carbon offset. However, due to the higher investment costs, the return of the investment is longer, leading to lower sustainability assessment ranking. It is concluded that the refurbishment of the fa?ade with a conventional contact fa?ade has the highest ranking on sustainability, followed by fa?ade refurbishment with contact fa?ade combined with only roof refurbishment/glazing refurbishment or both. Also, the modified wood wall types show high sustainability ranking regarding their refurbishment potential.

The impact of corporate social responsibility transparency on the financial performance, brand value, and sustainability level of IT companies

AbstractThe companies are aware of the impact that disseminating their corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance has on how shareholders or investors perceive them. This work analyses if disseminating CSR results affects their economic–financial results, their scores in open‐access sustainability ranking, their brand values, and also the credit ratings that agencies S&P and Moody's confer them. For this purpose, the only 13 companies of the IT sector occupying a top 100 brand rankings position were selected. The results reveal that large companies come over as being more transparent in terms of sustainability, but this transparency is not related to their financial behaviour. Brand rankings collect socio‐economic and environmental information, but only the transparency in social and environmental aspects explains the public‐access CRS rankings. Finally, the results also show that this transparency affects credit ratings.

Exploring Organizational Sustainability: Themes, Functional Areas, and Best Practices

Most of the sustainability management models proposed in the literature are based on conceptual designs, which limits their potential to be applied in practice. In order to develop a holistic tool for organizational sustainability management, it is imperative to account for, and integrate, the sustainability best practices in the conceptual models. The primary objective of this work is to explore the organizational sustainability themes, functional areas, and the corresponding best practices of the most sustainable organizations. Based on the results, we aim to propose a framework which can support the theoretical models. The starting set of 100 most sustainable organizations is obtained through a well-defined sustainability ranking, Global 100. A systematic method is developed and applied to screen the organizational reports between 2012 and 2016. As a result, 61 reports of 20 organizations are selected for review. We used grounded mechanism to conduct the review. The results of the review indicate that the most sustainable organizations rely on the following nine themes to advance their sustainability performance: (i) resource optimization and minimization of waste and emissions; (ii) business and operational excellence; (iii) corporate citizenship and social development; (iv) research and innovation; (v) procurement, supply chain, and logistics; (vi) governance; (vii) sustainability management tools; (viii) employee relations; and (ix) health, wellness, safety, and security. In addition, there are around 38 functional areas which are of great significance to sustainability managers from an applied perspective and to researchers for constructing sustainability management models.

Exploring the Merits of Sustainability Ranking Lists: Do They Matter?

Sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) are designed to provide stakeholders with trustworthy and credible information on a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. However, the s...

Sustainable desalination process selection: Decision support framework under hybrid information

Desalination technology has been recognized as a promising solution for mitigating the pressure caused by water shortage. In order to help the decision-makers to select the most sustainable desalination process/technology, a multi-criteria decision analysis method under hybrid information was proposed for sustainability ranking of alternative desalination processes. The interval AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method was employed to determine the weights of the evaluation, and the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) under hybrid information was employed to determine the sustainability ranking of the alternative desalination processes. Comparing with the previous studies about desalination process selection, the proposed method can achieve desalination selection based on the decision-making matrix composed by multiple types of data (i.e. crisp numbers, interval numbers and fuzzy numbers). Accordingly, the challenges of uncertainties and the quantification on the soft criteria can be successfully solved. The results based on the developed model can facilitate the decision-makers to select the most sustainability desalination technology with the considerations of economic, environmental. Technological and social pillars simultaneously. Four alternative desalination processes including multi-stage flash system (MSF), low temperature multi-effect distillation (LT-MED), reverse osmosis (RO), and vapor compression distillation (VCD) were studied by the proposed method in this study, and the closeness degree (CD) of LT-MED which represents its integrated sustainability performance is 0.6984, followed by the CDs of MSF (0.5602), VCD (0.5381) and RO (0.4116), respectively. Thus, the sustainability ranking from the best to the worst is LT-MED, MSF, VCD and RO. The results were validated by the sum weighted method, and sensitivity analysis was also carried out. The results reveal that the selection of LT-MED as the most sustainable is robust.

Multidimensional sustainability benchmarking for smart megacities

This paper is focused on sustainability assessment for some of the most prominent global megacities: London, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. The alternative city rankings are compared and linkages between different sustainability and smart city dimensions are explored. The paper applied ELECTRE III multi-criteria decision aid tool to a panel of twenty indicators. The proposed approach allowed considering performance under four different policy priorities: environmental, economic, social and smart, changing the focus of the sustainability assessment. The results have shown that Singapore dominates the sustainability rankings under environmental policy priorities. Tokyo leads under economic and social priorities, and London and Tokyo – under smart city priorities. The worst performing cities were Shanghai, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. The paper examines the innovative sustainability strategy and new governance structures that led Singapore to become the most sustainable city under environmental priorities and offers recommendations for the lower-ranking cities of Shanghai, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. The assessment could be a valuable tool for policy makers and investors, and could help identify linkages between different sustainability dimensions, highlighting best practices as well as strategic opportunities in cities with sustainability potential.

Does an improved type of reporting lead to a better financial performance?

Research question: Is there a link between the type of report that a company publishes and its financial performance? Motivation: I draw on previous research that analyses the impact of integrated reporting on the firm’s valuation (Arguelles et al., 2015; Lee & Yeo, 2016; Barth et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2017; Cosma et al., 2018) conducted mainly on South African samples (where integrated reporting is a mandatory practice) in order to develop an idea for future research based on early practices, a wider geographical distribution and an industry frequently eliminated from this type of studies. Idea: This paper aims to examine whether there is an association between publishing an improved type of report (e.g. integrated report) and financial performance indicators. Data: There were considered the 2013 and 2014 reports of 22 insurance companies listed to a stock exchange. Tools: There were applied different regressions with various variables (report type, integrated report, company size, leverage, return on assets, return on equity, Tobin’s Q and sustainability ranking) using the data sourced manually from the companies’ reports. Findings: Naming the 2013 report as “integrated” leads to changes in firm valuation (a positive and significant association between integrated report variable and Tobin’s Q), but does not cause improvements in terms of profitability (ROA or ROE). Contribution: This study contributes to the literature that examines the benefits of integrated reporting, without considering only mandatory cases and in the context of an influential industry, often eliminated from other studies.

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL LAND USE IN THE POST-SOCIALIST CAMP COUNTRIES: MONITORING AND EVALUATION

The purpose of the article – to carry out the monitoring and evaluation of agricultural land use sustainability in the post-socialist camp countries. Methodology. During the study, the following methods were used: dialectical, abstract and logical, system analysis, index, and graphical comparison. Monitoring and evaluating of the agricultural land use sustainability involves periodic tracking relevant indicators based on available official statistics, central authorities’ information, local authorities and carrying out, on the basis of monitoring, the ranking in the postsocialist camp countries by comparing the obtained results with their best values. Monitoring and evaluating of the agricultural land sustainability conducted to monitor the process of sustainable agricultural development goals implementation, problems’ identification of regions agricultural land use and their causes, improving the efficiency of administrative decisions of central executive authorities, local authorities and the land market actors. Elements of scientific innovation. Existing methods for determining the integral indicator for comparing the land use sustainability and own method was suggested, by which the relevant calculations and conclusions were made. The proposed methodology ensures the implementation of appropriate objectives and indicators for monitoring the Global Sustainable Development Goals 2016–2030 achievement in Ukraine. Practical significance. The availability of the integral environmental and economic indicators at the macro level is ideal for people who make decisions in terms of consideration of the environmental factors on the country’s development. The main goal of an integral indicator for comparing the sustainability of land use development in the regions of Ukraine creating is to ensure the possibility of ranking these regions in order of their total potential decreasing and thus defining “depressed” for providing the state aid to them. Conclusions. According to the given methods, it has been proved that agricultural land use in the countries of the post-socialist camp has a positive dynamics but the sustainability indicators for all indicators have not achieved yet. It has been defined that Estonia, Latvia, and Slovenia got the first three places; and Croatia, Lithuania, and Romania got the last places in the ranking of sustainability of the agricultural land use for the countries of the post-socialist camp. In accordance with settlements for solving the problems in the area of agricultural land use, the state should focus on less developed regions where the environmental situation is difficult, productivity and land return reduced, slowed population growth, and which have an excessive migration.

Assessing the Sustainability of High-Value Brands in the IT Sector

Nowadays, companies have more freedom on how they can report their corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions and outcomes, despite them being increasingly important for how investors and shareholders can obtain knowledge about companies’ non-financial aspects. This is why more importance is being attached to sustainability rankings as an additional tool to seek excellence and distinguish between companies. The main objective of the present research was to analyze the degree of similarity in sustainability valuations among the most important open-access sustainability rankings that have appeared in the last decade (Green Ranking, RepTrack, Global 100 most sustainable corporations, and Finance Yahoo Sustainability). The secondary objective was to study whether these rankings incorporated the most de facto prestigious brands, and the third objective was to learn of the influence of the level of controversy in Finance Yahoo Sustainability scores in technological companies. Our results reveal wide variability among open-access CSR rankings. Not all the most valued brands appear in the sustainability rankings, which indicates the differences between the rankings of brands and CSR rankings. Finally, the level of controversy was found to be an important aspect in companies’ CSR scores.

Ranking of socio-cultural sustainability of tourism based on VIKOR model: Case study of tourism target villages of Noor city

Ranking of socio-cultural sustainability of tourism based on VIKOR model: Case study of tourism target villages of Noor city