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Even with the benefits of sustainability and climate change reporting, there is limited information on how municipalities are reporting on performance for external stakeholders in comparison with private sector organizations. The purpose of this research was to gain an understanding of the current state of sustainability and climate change reporting at the local level and to investigate the extent to which municipalities across Ontario, Canada, report. We used content analysis to identify the presence or non-presence of information on the websites of 38 municipalities and analyzed the results using descriptive statistics. Our analysis showed that the sample municipalities were not widely reporting on sustainability or climate change performance. Also, we identified a gap between the number of plans and reports produced by sample municipalities, with the latter being less common, indicating a need for an improved evaluation of plan implementation. Further, we found that a provincial regulation that required municipalities to make their energy conservation and demand management plans public did not guarantee publication of the plan on a municipality’s website. This study contributes to the growing field of sustainability and climate change planning and reporting by local governments and offers empirical evidence specific to Ontario, Canada.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing the success of real estate crowdfunding projects in Spain. This type of crowdfunding invests in real estate assets. We analyzed 60 projects published on the Housers platform, a kind of participative platform that uses the lending and equity crowdfunding modalities. These projects have involved around 36,623 investment decisions and have raised a total amount of almost 26 million euros. The empirical analysis is based on ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression. Our main findings reveal that success differs depending on the type of project; in fact, buy-to-sell projects are less successful than development loan projects. In addition, while total return has a positive impact on project success, in the case of risk level and project term, the impact is negative.

The 2022 announcement of the European Union- New Zealand Free Trade Agreement was seminal for both sides. For New Zealand, the deal is projected to be worth up to an extra NZ$1.8 billion per annum by 2035. What is less evident is the motivation for securing the deal for Europe – New Zealand is only the EU’s 50th most important trading partner and accounts for 0.2% of its total trade. This article outlines three major benefits for the EU. Firstly, it symbolises that the EU’s neoliberal trading agenda is continuing in the face of perceived increased protectionism. Second, the deal includes a seminal clause of holding each partner to account in climate change responsibilities – a detail that should garner support from EU citizens. Finally, closer EU cooperation with New Zealand may add to the EU’s legitimacy in the Indo-Pacific.

The aim of this study is to simulate the self-organized evolution mechanism of inner innovation of large-scale construction enterprises (LSCE) under different contexts. Based on NK stochastic combinatorial optimization model with two parameters (N, K), this study proposes three modules—ambidexterity, punctuated equilibrium, and automation—to simulate the change behaviors of the inner innovation system. Furthermore, this study analyses the influence of factor correlation on inner innovation performance under discusses nine different combination situations. The research results show that (a) regardless of how the relationship strength changes, fitness increases with an increasing K value; and (b) the comparison of optimization modes show that the punctuated equilibrium mode can guarantee the long- and short-term inner innovation performance LSCE. This study therefore reveals the mutual effects of the factors in the inner innovation system in LSCE and provides an effective model for internal systems analyses in the construction industry and in other sectors.

Historicamente e ainda nos tempos atuais, os tijolos são fáceis de serem fabricados devido aos vastos recursos geológicos, são versáteis como material de construção, suportam bem cargas e apresentam boa estética, no entanto, eles geram problemas ambientais devido ao descarte de resíduos sólidos, alto consumo de energia na construção com alta produção de CO2 e consumo de água na construção na fabricação de argamassas. Hipoteticamente, devido à produção artesanal e à mão de obra pouco qualificada no Brasil para a construção civil, principalmente a alvenaria, espera-se encontrar destinação inadequada de resíduos sólidos na construção civil. Portanto, o gerenciamento da destinação de resíduos sólidos da construção civil merece atenção especial e deve ser fiscalizado. Este trabalho mostrou que o descarte de resíduos sólidos em construção em pequenos centros urbanos do Sul de Minas Gerais ocorre de forma irregular em aproximadamente 89% dos casos, gerando problemas de obliteração de calçadas e redução de área de estacionamento com possível movimentação desses resíduos em vias públicas. Em linhas gerais, o armazenamento e a destinação inadequada de resíduos representam um problema e até mesmo um retrocesso nas ações de sustentabilidade na construção civil que não reflete o apelo da sociedade atual que busca melhorias para melhores condições de vida para o planeta. Devido ao pequeno quantitativo de amostragem e ao tipo (pequenos centros urbanos), mais estudos precisam ser realizados para verificar se o alto percentual de destinação de resíduos sólidos na construção civil ocorre desta forma também em outras regiões, e estudos em grandes centros urbanos. centros poderiam ser feitos para comparação de dados.

Since the turn of the century, there has been a growth in the use of e-business by both large and small companies worldwide, a trend that has been given further impetus by the move to online trading in the COVID-19 pandemic era. For small companies, there are the potential benefits of increased efficiencies and market share gain, associated with the re-engineering of selling and marketing processes; but in developing countries, such as Nigeria, research into how small businesses are using e-business systems and technologies is limited. This article builds upon earlier case study research in the Nigerian small business sector to develop a framework for e-business strategy development, implementation and review. Using an inductive approach, data was collected from six small businesses, using interviews and questionnaires, to profile the e-business operations of these companies. This study found that e-business strategy was generally lacking in these companies, but interview material was used to support the development and validation of the strategy framework, which provides a process and a checklist for small businesses pursuing e-business initiatives in developing world environments.

The recent implementation of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) in January 2005 created new financial risks for emitting firms. To deal with these risks, options are traded since October 2006. Because the EU ETS is a new market, the relevant underlying model for option pricing is still a controversial issue. This article improves our understanding of this issue by characterizing the conditional and unconditional distributions of the realized volatility for the 2008 futures contract in the European Climate Exchange (ECX), which is valid during Phase II (2008-2012) of the EU ETS. The realized volatility measures from naive, kernel-based and subsampling estimators are used to obtain inferences about the distributional and dynamic properties of the ECX emissions futures volatility. The distribution of the daily realized volatility in logarithmic form is shown to be close to normal. The mixture-of-distributions hypothesis is strongly rejected, as the returns standardized using daily measures of volatility clearly departs from normality. A simplified HAR-RV model (Corsi, 2009) with only a weekly component, which reproduces long memory properties of the series, is then used to model the volatility dynamics. Finally, the predictive accuracy of the HAR-RV model is tested against GARCH specifications using one-step-ahead forecasts, which confirms the HAR-RV superior ability. Our conclusions indicate that (i) the standard Brownian motion is not an adequate tool for option pricing in the EU ETS, and (ii) a jump component should be included in the stochastic process to price options, thus providing more efficient tools for risk-management activities.