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The consequences of the extractive and disconnected relationship with nature that has dominated past and current sustainability approaches are now being witnessed. A harmonious relationship with nature needs to be reestablished to guide how we can live, act and respond to the global climate emergency. Regenerative development has emerged as a process which enables the reconnection between human and natural systems to create the necessary conditions for a healthy and thriving future. While several frameworks and tools have been developed to support the implementation of regenerative development practices, few deal specifically with decision-making and its associated challenges and opportunities. Responding to this, the purpose of this paper is to present the development of a novel decision-making framework for regenerative precinct development. It is an evidence-based framework established from the key findings of a qualitative case study investigation into the decision-making approaches of regenerative precinct developments. It is a visual guiding framework that poses challenging questions to enable decision-makers to structure and align their thinking, decisions and actions with the fundamental principles of regenerative development. This paper discusses the framework’s development, its key features and theoretical basis, and its potential to influence decision-making practices towards regenerative development.

This paper aims to examine whether and to what extent overconfident CEOs affect Australian real estate investment trusts’ (A-REITs) property investment activities during their tenure as the CEO of A-REITs, covering the period 2000–2019. A-REITs’ property investment and disposal activities are separately modelled against CEOs shares in their companies (an indicator of CEO overconfidence), as well as other controlled variables. We found that around 68% of A-REIT CEOs are overconfident over the study period. However, our empirical results also indicated that CEO overconfidence did not have a profound impact on A-REITs’ investment activities, either property acquisitions or disposals. This could be explained by high corporate governance of A-REITs. Specifically, Australian construction and property companies are the leading market players in sustainability. As publicly quoted companies, listed property and construction companies, particularly A-REITs could be exposed to various managerial issues, including corporate CEO overconfidence and its influence on the investment decision-making process. However, this managerial issue could be minimized via an enhancement of corporate governance that is a key pillar of sustainability. The mitigation of corporate overconfidence and implementation of corporate governance mechanisms makes REITs more accountable to their investors. The implications of the findings have also been discussed.

Adaptation and mitigation to the adverse impacts of rising weather and climate extremes require businesses to respond with adequate marketing strategies promoting sustained economic development. Unfortunately, the connections exploring such relationships have not been extensively investigated in the current body of literature. This study investigated the five marketing categories relating to sustainable practices (sustainable marketing, social marketing, green marketing, sustainable consumption and ecological marketing) within core research themes of climate change, global warming and sustainability from a bibliometric approach using the Scopus API. Additional topic modelling was conducted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) unsupervised approach on downloaded abstracts to distinguish ideas communicated in time through research and publications with co-occurrences of major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports and Google search queries. The results confirmed marketing strategies aligned with the theme of sustainability with little work from small developing island nations. Additionally, findings demonstrated that research exploring business strategies through green marketing directed to green consumers with sustainable supply chain management had been dominantly increasing in the literature over recent years. Similarly, social marketing associated with green consumers was a common concern for the public and academics, rising over the years with strong influence from the published IPCC Assessment Reports. This study did not explore other published databases, including climate change-related meeting transcripts and published speeches from corporate and world leaders.

Economic crises stress trade-offs between costs and sustainability for environmentally orientated firms impacting supply-chain management decisions. Inspired by the disruption to supply caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore supplier selection during a financial crisis, studying the impact of psychological distance on the cost–environmental performance trade-off. Across three experiments (N = 420), we examine the choice between a low-cost and an environmental supplier at close and far psychological distances. Study 1 and Study 2 demonstrate that closer spatial and social distances, respectively, increase the preference for the environmental supplier. Study 3 extends these studies by showing that distance influences perceptions of the firm’s objectives, mediating supplier preference. In contrast, Study 4 shows that a far temporal distance increases the preference for selecting the environmental supplier, differing from spatial distance, due to a reversal in the appraisal of the firm’s objectives. Taken together, our results provide a greater understanding of the cognitive influences on sustainable procurement decision-making during the COVID-19 crisis.

Climate change influences urban mortality. The magnitude of such influences differs from locality to locality and is fundamentally driven by a facet of factors that include changes in local climatic conditions, demographics, and social-economic factors. Here, we employ regression and clustering methods to study linkages between mortality and local climatic changes in Seoul. Personal factors of the deceased (e.g., age and gender), social-economic factors (i.e., education level), and outdoor climatic factors, including heatwaves (HWs) and the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon are considered in the analysis. We find that, among many elements of outdoor weather factors considered, the apparent temperature mostly correlated to daily mortalities; the mortality risk to apparent temperature exposure is more heightened for males (RR = 0.40, 95% CI; 0.23–0.54) than females (RR = 0.05, 95% CI; −0.10–0.20) at higher apparent temperatures (i.e., 60 °C). Furthermore, the influence of HWs on mortality is more apparent in the “Male” gender group and the “Above 65” age group. The results are useful in identifying vulnerable demographics amid the changing climate, especially in urban areas, and are fundamental in developing policies that promote climate resilience and adaptation.

The COVID-19 epidemic has caused unprecedented impacts on the travel and tourism industry. The current study traced the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism in Iran using an “Impact Pathway (IP)” approach to identify impacts and possible mitigation strategies. The results illustrate two main impact pathways: negative impacts along the economic-institutional and socio-cultural dimensions, and positive impacts along the physical-environmental dimension. Using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and ANP (analytic network process) models, we identified defensive and review strategies as optimal for increasing resilience against the impacts of COVID-19. These strategies control the threats and weaknesses of negative impacts and enhance the opportunities and strengths emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic for tourism. We use this information to identify optimal strategies for dealing with the impacts of this crisis on tourism. Most prominently among them is the development of an integrated management system that improves the coordination of the response of local government to crisis and that better orchestrates the combined efforts and integration of non-governmental organizations.

Rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and sorghum are the five major crops in China, which account for 92% of the country’s total grain production and 33% of its water consumption. Combining water footprint analysis tools with sustainability assessment tools, the water sustainability of the five major crops can be analyzed. Based on ecological economics theory, this paper constructs a sustainability evaluation system of China’s five major crops’ water footprints and analyzes the national and provincial diversity of the sustainability of the five major crops’ water footprints using three dimensions: scale, distribution, and equity. We find that the interprovincial distribution equity sustainability divergence is the key bottleneck factor that restricts sustainability (more than scale and configuration). One key strategy is to arrange grain production at the national level, on the basis of considering the differences of water-resource endowment between different provinces to break through the bottleneck of the water-resource distribution sustainability of these five major food crops. This paper determines a general management model that can improve the sustainability of water resource management at the interprovincial level by comparing and analyzing the most sustainable and least sustainable provinces for the water footprint production of these five major crops.