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The crucial role evaluation can play in the co-development of project design and its implementation will be addressed through the analysis of a case study, the Green Communities (GC) project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment within the EU Interregional Operational Program (2007-2013) "Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency". The project's broader goals included an attempt to trigger a change in Italian local development strategies, especially for mountain and inland areas, which would be tailored to the real needs of communities, and based on a sustainable exploitation and management of the territorial assets. The goal was not achieved, and this paper addresses the issues of how GC could have been more effective in fostering a vision of change, and which design adaptations and evaluation procedures would have allowed the project to better cope with the unexpected consequences and resistances it encountered. The conclusions drawn are that projects should be conceived, designed and carried out as dynamic systems, inclusive of a dynamic and engaged evaluation enabling the generation of feedbacks loops, iteratively interpreting the narratives and dynamics unfolding within the project, and actively monitoring the potential of various relationships among project participants for generating positive social change.

Abstract This study aims to assess the efficiency of the fossil fuel taxation scheme currently in effect in Switzerland. To this end, the concept of implicit CO2 prices is introduced, based on which prices for different fossil fuel uses are derived. Implicit CO2 prices are defined as the difference between actual prices paid by consumers and efficient domestic fuel prices. Efficient domestic fuel prices, in turn, consist of private production costs, a uniform value added tax and only local external costs, not including external costs due to CO2 emissions and global climate change. The resulting prices differ substantially, which suggests that there is considerable cost-saving potential in reducing CO2 emissions in Switzerland. For passenger cars and air traffic, the implicit prices are negative. For these uses, higher fuel charges would therefore be beneficial from a purely domestic perspective, i.e., without considering the negative repercussions of global warming.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century we saw a resurrection of the writings of Matlhus. In their new guise we are told that instead of war, pestilence and famine, the earth has decreasing biodiversity, loss of species, loss of natural resources and water shortages, to name but a few, to look forward too. Population growth today, as it was two hundred years ago, is portrayed as Public Enemy number one. There is little doubt that the Neo-Malthusian argument has made an impact on policy, indeed, probably moreso than did its namesake. The newly clad argument shares much with its namesake, not least, its significant faults. The argument is two hundred years old, and the inaccuracies share that age. Malthus' predictions never reigned true because he made the fundamental error of not taking account of technical progress, or the ability of human ingenuity to adapt to change. This paper looks at the evolution of both sides of the population argument, and argues that this year's World Summit in Johannesburg should not fall foul to the dangerous generalisations invoked by the Neo-Malthusian school of thought. This paper is an attempt to lay the blame for environmental degradation not on the increasing population of the Third World, but on the consumption patterns and lifestyles of the First World. Affluence consumes energy and produces waste at a far higher rate than poverty. In looking at the environmental debate only an integrated approach, and not one that is concerned solely with ‘demonising’ population growth, can result in success.

Much of New South Wales and southern Queensland suffered from extreme drought from 2017 to 2019. This study models drought and bushfires impacts using VU‐TERM, a multi‐regional, dynamic CGE model. Prolonged drought pushed national real GDP to 0.7 per cent or more below base in 2018–2019 and 2019–2020. NSW’s real GDP fell relative to forecast by 1.1 per cent or $6.9 billion in 2018–2019 and 1.6 per cent or $10.2 billion in 2019–2020. These impacts reflect a severe diminution of farm output, given that agriculture accounts for around 1.6 per cent of NSW’s income. Bushfires exacerbated 2019–2020 losses. We assume that there is a full recovery in seasonal conditions in 2020. However, prolonged drought and bushfire destruction deplete farm capital through depressed investment and diminished herd numbers. Consequently, the income earning capacity of farms in recovery remains below that of a no drought base. The net present value of the national welfare loss is $63 billion, split between $53 billion in losses from drought and $10 billion from bushfires. The latter excludes any valuation of human lives lost, flora, fauna or forestry destruction. In the longer term, adaptation and policy responses will need to reflect the expectation of increased frequency of adverse climatic events.

AbstractEmbedding sustainability in day‐to‐day operations necessitates employees' proactiveness beyond compliance with standardised management practices. Exchanging information on safety and environmental issues is acknowledged as a component of workers' proactive behaviours for sustainability embeddedness, which is hardly promoted by codified procedures. Accordingly, identifying leverages to stimulate information exchange is a primary objective for academics and practitioners. The study investigates drivers of information exchange on safety and environmental near misses by examining five situation‐related antecedents: rewards/reinforcements, organisational boundaries, social proactiveness, stakeholder salience and connectedness. The study relies on a mixed method approach, by combining social network analysis and a questionnaire survey conducted among four large Italian companies. The findings partially support the hypothesis of the study, highlighting rewards/reinforcements and connectedness as relevant antecedents of information exchange, while organisational boundaries only partially relate with information exchange. Surprisingly, stakeholder salience and social proactiveness do not emerge as significant drivers of information exchange. The study contributes to the debate on extra‐role pro‐sustainability behaviours and provides implications for managerial practice.

Much of the debate on sustainability is predicated on the belief that environmental demands lead to the production of sustainable technologies that induce environmental benefits. This fails to account for the influential ways technologies are used in practice, and the interactions between users and technologies that shape their environmental effects. This article uses the example of how cars and their drivers together accomplish the practice of driving through their interactions with each other, and explores the implications this has for generating environmental outcomes. We draw on a body of literature that argues how together, users and technologies participate in carrying out practices that actively shape outcomes, and we show how and why this applies to sustainability. The article presents the case of the Toyota Prius, analyzing Toyota’s intent in designing a sustainable car and contrasting it with the perspectives of thirty-eight of its drivers. We find that the possibility for fuel and carbon reduction is coproduced and is a result of complex interactions between technology, drivers, and driving practice.

This paper analyzes the interplay of policy dilemma in the areas of food security, agricultural subsidies, energy consumption, and the environment in the “glocalization” process of Sri Lanka. It demonstrates that the domestic agricultural and food sector is intricately interconnected with the global economy and world market forces. While this paper gives a primary focus on domestic rice production and wheat import policies, it further examines the environmental consequences and public health issues that are associated with the process of “glocalization” as part of globalization. This “glocalization” has led to a series of intended and unintended externalities for Sri Lanka whose economic integration is irreversibly linked to agricultural and subsidy policies of other food exporting and producing countries of Asia and the United States.

In this work, we consider the practical issues of resource allocation problem in OFDMA two-way relay networks: the inaccuracy of channel-state information (CSI) available to the transmitters. Instead, only the estimated channel status is known by the transmitters. In this context, a joint optimization of subcarrier pairing and allocation, relay selection and transmit power allocation is formulated in the OFDMA two-way amplify-and-forward relay networks. Moreover, to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement, the energy consumption must be minimized without compromising the QoS. Therefore, by applying convex optimization techniques, energy efficient algorithms are developed with the objective to minimize the total transmit power while guaranteeing the required data rates. Through simulation studies, energy consumption performance of the systems under the proposed schemes are investigated. It is shown that the proposed scheme can improve the energy consumption performance without scarifying the QoS.