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Retirement system sustainability is defined as the ability of plan boards and managers to be responsible investors, active stewards, and allocators of capital to economic activities with desirable social and environmental outcomes. In this paper, we examine the policy frameworks and important structural variables pertinent to private retirement systems in Australia, the UK, and the US. By analyzing various reports, interviewing experts, and using data from the Principles of Responsible Investment as well as national pension and retirement authorities, we identify key structural challenges within national retirement systems. These include market fragmentation, principal-agent conflicts in personal pensions, and the role of service providers. Our results provide insight into how, or whether, retirement systems can facilitate desirable economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

This article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of papers addressing the topic of climate change impacts on beach loss and degradation, and its relation to tourist behaviour (destination choice, willingness to re-visit, expenditure and willingness to pay). The main aim is to identify values that can be used in future research works in the context of island tourism. We found that the strong specialisation and fragmentation of data and methods limit the transferability potential of previous research analysing climate-induced effects on beaches and tourist behaviour. Researchers from different fields bring their own conceptual models which often address similar problems but use different lenses and measurement units. Among the available studies, the ones with usable potential in a value transfer context are related to willingness to pay for adaptation measures. Overall, findings confirm that a greater transparency in the methodologies used to elicit values and a multidisciplinary approach are needed to ensure a more sustainable use of the information in order to fill knowledge gaps that still hinder the study of climate change.

International audience; An important yet largely unexamined issue is how the interaction between deforestation and pollution affects economic and environmental sustainability.This article seeks to bridge the gap by introducing a dynamic model of pollution accumulation where polluting emissions can be mitigated and the absorption efficiency of pollution sinks can be restored. We assume that emissions are due to a production activity, and we include deforestation both as an additional source of emissions and as a cause of the exhaustion of environmental absorption efficiency. To account for the fact that the switching of natural sinks to a pollution source can be either possible, and in such a case even reversible, or impossible, we consider that restoration efforts can be either independent from or dependent on environmental absorption efficiency, i.e., state-independent versus state-dependent restoration efforts. We determine (i) whether production or deforestation is the most detrimental from environmental and social welfare perspectives, and (ii) how state-dependent restoration process affects pollution accumulation and deforestation policies and the related environmental and social welfare consequences.

Sustainability in electronics has a growing importance due to, e.g. increasing electronic waste, and global and European sustainability goals. Printing technologies and use of paper as a substrate enable manufacturing of sustainable electronic devices for emerging applications, such as the multi-layer anti-counterfeit label presented in this paper. This device consisted of electrochromic display (ECD) element, NFC (near field communication) tag and circuitry, all fully roll-to-roll (R2R) printed and assembled on plastic-free paper substrate, thus leading to a sustainable and recyclable device. Our setup uses harvested energy from HF field of a smartphone or reader, to switch an electrochromic display after rectification to prove authenticity of a product. Our novelty is in upscaling the manufacturing process to be fully printable and R2R processable in high-throughput conditions simulating industrial environment, i.e. in pilot scale. The printing workflow consisted of 11 R2R printed layers, all done in sufficient quality and registration. The printed antennas showed sheet resistance values of 32.9±1.9 mΩ/sq. The final yield was almost 1500 fully printed devices, and in R2R assembly over 1400 labels were integrated with 96.5% yield. All the assembled tags were readable with mobile phone NFC reader. The optical contrast (ΔE*) measured for the ECDs was over 15 for all the printed displays, a progressive switching time with a colour change visible in less than 5 s. The smart tag is ITO-free, plastic-free, fully printed in R2R and has a good stability over 50 cycles and reversible colour change from light to dark blue.

In recent years, greater attention has been given to developing metrics that measure more than a country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Similarly, greater consideration has been given to more than just the financial performance of commercial enterprises; corporations are now expected to conduct business in ways that are responsible and sustainable, giving attention to a triple bottom line where the planet and people are prioritized along with profits. Taking French government policy and the performance of French multinational corporations as a case in point, this article explores the ways in which emerging indicators and instruments on business and human rights are relevant to the impact of business on well-being. This article examines which reporting frameworks and ranking systems best capture human rights and sustainability risks that could compromise well-being. Specifically, the article analyzes the frameworks and indicators used to measure human rights performance and the impact of rights rankings on business management. It also reviews responses by corporations to rights rankings as indicia of how measurements might be perceived as likely to result in changes in investor and consumer behavior or place brand reputation at risk.

Research Summary In this study, we replicate and expand Hawn et al.’s study (Strategic Management Journal, 2018, 39, 949–976) that used Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI) events to measure variations in firms' Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)‐activism and examined their effect on a firm's stock price. We use DJSI events to capture variations in firms' CSR visibility, holding CSR activism constant by restricting our analyses to CSR‐equivalent firms. First, we find similar results on stock price (i.e., no impact) and on trading volumes. Second, because professional market participants pay more attention to CSR‐oriented firms and use visible cues such as DJSI events, we study and find that additions to DJSI lead to more analysts following a firm, and that continuations on the DJSI lead to an increase in equity being held by long‐term investors. Managerial Summary We replicate and complement a recent study that showed that the events of a firm's addition, continuation, or deletion in a major sustainability index (DJSI) had little impact on stock market reactions (Hawn et al. Strategic Management Journal, 2018, 39, 949–976). We redefine the comparison set that was previously used and compare across observationally equivalent firms in terms of CSR orientation in order to isolate the visibility effect of DJSI events. We find that these events do not significantly impact stock price and trading volumes. However, we expand the analysis and find that sustainability events attract more attention from financial analysts and lead to an increase in the percentage of shares held by long‐term investors indicative of a trend that professional investors pay more attention to CSR‐visible firms over time.

Recent contributions in the domains of governance and regulation elucidate the importance of rule-intermediation (RI), the role that organizations adopt to bridge actors playing regulatory or “rule-making” (RM) roles, and those adopting target or “rule-taking” (RT) roles. Intermediation not only enables diffusion and translation of regulatory norms, but also allows for the representation of different actors in policy-making arenas. While prior studies have explored the roles that such RIs adopt to facilitate their intermediation functions, we have yet to consider how field-level structuring processes influence (and are influenced by) the various and changing roles adopted by RIs. In this study, we focus on the mutually constitutive relations between field-level change processes and the evolving roles of RIs by studying the rise of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives/Local Governments for Sustainability), an RI serving as a bridge for sustainable urban development policies between the United Nations and urban authorities. Using ICLEI as an illustrate case, we theorize four different processes of regulatory field consolidation and fragmentation including: problematization, role specialization, marketization and orchestrated decentralization. We discuss their implications for the RI roles in the field and further theorize the changing dynamics of trickle-up intermediation processes as an RI gains power and influence. This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Bothello, J. and Mehrpouya, A. (2018), Between regulatory field structuring and organizational roles: Intermediation in the field of sustainable urban development. Regulation & Governance, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12215. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.

International audience; The conservation and sustainable use of forests in the twenty-first century pose huge challenges for forest management and policy. Society demands that forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, from timber products, raw materials and renewable energy to sociocultural amenities and habitats for nature conservation. Innovative management and policy approaches need to be developed to meet these often-conflicting demands in a context of environmental change of uncertain magnitude and scale. Genetic diversity is a key component of resilience and adaptability. Overall, forest tree populations are genetically very diverse, conferring them an enormous potential for genetic adaptation via the processes of gene flow and natural selection. Here, we review the main challenges facing our forests in the coming century and focus on how recent progress in genetics can contribute to the development of appropriate practical actions that forest managers and policy makers can adopt to promote forest resilience to climate change. Emerging knowledge will inform and clarify current controversies relating to the choice of appropriate genetic resources for planting, the effect of silvicultural systems and stand tending on adaptive potential and the best ways to harness genetic diversity in breeding and conservation programs. Gaps in our knowledge remain, and we identify where additional information is needed (e.g., the adaptive value of peripheral populations or the genetic determinism of key adaptive traits) and the types of studies that are required to provide this key understanding.

International audience; Promoting tropical forest sustainability among corporate players is a major challenge. Many tools have been developed, but without much success. Southeast Asia has become a laboratory of globalization processes, where the development and success of agribusiness transnationals raises questions about their commitment to environmental concerns. An abundance of literature discusses what determines the behavior of Asian corporations, with a particular emphasis on cultural factors. Our hypothesis is that financial factors, such as ownership structure, may also have a fundamental role. We analyzed the audited accounts of four major Asian agribusiness transnationals. Using network analysis, we deciphered how the 931 companies relate to each other and determine the behavior of the transnationals to which they belong. We compared various metrics with the environmental commitment of these transnationals. We found that ownership structures reflect differences in flexibility, control and transaction costs, but not in ethnicities. Capital and its control, ownership structure, and flexibility explain 97% of the environmental behavior. It means that existing market-based tools to promote environmental sustainability do not engage transnationals at the scale where most of their behavior is determined. For OPEN ACCESS Forests 2015, 6 1455 the first time, the inner mechanisms of corporate governance are unraveled in agricultural and forest sustainability. New implications such as the convergence of environmental sustainability with family business sustainability emerged.