Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices developed by Brazilian companies: an exploratory study

In a world where companies have major influence over the economy, politics, and environment, they must be held accountable for their actions. With this in mind, the publication of sustainability reports is in a company’s best interest, since the disclosure of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainable practices can bring enormous advantages, largely related to a company’s image. The amount of information presented in sustainability reports turns them into valuable sources for research data, allowing analyses related to CSR and management practices, stakeholder relations, language used, among others. However, there is no a paper in the literature that analyzes theses information jointly for the Brazilian companies, and then we decided to explore this theme. This research aimed to identify advances and gaps of CSR practices performed by Brazil companies, through the analysis of 30 sustainability reports published between 2014 and 2015. The main findings indicate that, in general, the analyzed companies are experienced in sustainability reporting; however, there is still room for improvements, including a better mapping and reporting of practices involving the integration of CSR to organizational structure, stakeholder engagement, and continuous improvement practices.     

Sustainability of Nations

SUMMARY

A method is presented to interrelate the development of economy, environment and social quality in communities. Economy and environment, in initial development stages, oppose each other. Social welfare and economy generally develop simultaneously. To assess overall progress in sustainable development, an integrated and quantifiable framework is presented which defines five levels of sustainability. Increasing sustainability is characterized by growing responsibility for the impacts of man's actions in space and time. Through increased eco-efficiency and changed awareness, nations and companies arrive at a synergistic relationship between environment and economy. It is indicated that social security benefits expenditure increases by a factor 3.5 and carbon dioxide emissions per capita decreases by a factor 3 at each higher level of sustainability. Quantified differences in sustainability levels of 24 nations are shown. Priorities for improving and safeguarding sustainability are indicated.     

Integrating blue: How do we make nationally determined contributions work for both blue carbon and local coastal communities?

Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCEs) help mitigate and adapt to climate change but their integration into policy, such as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), remains underdeveloped. Most BCE conservation requires community engagement, hence community-scale projects must be nested within the implementation of NDCs without compromising livelihoods or social justice. Thirty-three experts, drawn from academia, project development and policy, each developed ten key questions for consideration on how to achieve this. These questions were distilled into ten themes, ranked in order of importance, giving three broad categories of people, policy & finance, and science & technology. Critical considerations for success include the need for genuine participation by communities, inclusive project governance, integration of local work into national policies and practices, sustaining livelihoods and income (for example through the voluntary carbon market and/or national Payment for Ecosystem Services and other types of financial compensation schemes) and simplification of carbon accounting and verification methodologies to lower barriers to entry.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-022-01723-1.     

Knowledge Production and Learning for Sustainable Landscapes: Seven Steps Using Social–Ecological Systems as Laboratories

There are multiple challenges regarding use and governance of landscapes’ goods, functions and intangible values for ecosystem health and human well-being. One group of challenges is to measure and assess principal sustainability dimensions through performance targets, so stakeholders have transparent information about states and trends. Another group is to develop adaptive governance at multiple levels, and management of larger geographical areas across scales. Addressing these challenges, we present a framework for transdisciplinary research using multiple landscapes as place-based case studies that integrates multiple research disciplines and non-academic actors: (1) identify a suite of landscapes, and for each (2) review landscape history, (3) map stakeholders, use and non-use values, products and land use, (4) analyze institutions, policies and the system of governance, (5) measure ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability, (6) assess sustainability dimensions and governance, and finally (7) make comparisons and synthesize. Collaboration, communication and dissemination are additional core features. We discuss barriers bridges and bridges for applying this approach.     

Coupling Socioeconomic and Lake Systems for Sustainability: A Conceptual Analysis Using Lake St. Clair Region as a Case Study

Applying sustainability at an operational level requires understanding the linkages between socioeconomic and natural systems. We identified linkages in a case study of the Lake St. Clair (LSC) region, part of the Laurentian Great Lakes system. Our research phases included: (1) investigating and revising existing coupled human and natural systems frameworks to develop a framework for this case study; (2) testing and refining the framework by hosting a 1-day stakeholder workshop and (3) creating a causal loop diagram (CLD) to illustrate the relationships among the systems’ key components. With stakeholder assistance, we identified four interrelated pathways that include water use and discharge, land use, tourism and shipping that impact the ecological condition of LSC. The interrelationships between the pathways of water use and tourism are further illustrated by a CLD with several feedback loops. We suggest that this holistic approach can be applied to other case studies and inspire the development of dynamic models capable of informing decision making for sustainability.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-013-0432-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Science–policy processes for transboundary water governance

In this policy perspective, we outline several conditions to support effective science–policy interaction, with a particular emphasis on improving water governance in transboundary basins. Key conditions include (1) recognizing that science is a crucial but bounded input into water resource decision-making processes; (2) establishing conditions for collaboration and shared commitment among actors; (3) understanding that social or group-learning processes linked to science–policy interaction are enhanced through greater collaboration; (4) accepting that the collaborative production of knowledge about hydrological issues and associated socioeconomic change and institutional responses is essential to build legitimate decision-making processes; and (5) engaging boundary organizations and informal networks of scientists, policy makers, and civil society. We elaborate on these conditions with a diverse set of international examples drawn from a synthesis of our collective experiences in assessing the opportunities and constraints (including the role of power relations) related to governance for water in transboundary settings.     

Sustainability assessment of entire forest value chains: Integrating stakeholder perspectives and indicators in decision support tools

The optimization of value chains is an important process to promote sustainable development, since value chains are closely linked to the satisfaction of human needs and combine different driving forces for environmental change. This article presents a methodological approach for the participatory development of value-chain wide sustainability indicator sets and their integration into a decision support tool in the specific case study of the chain “construction and refurbishment with wood”. There are numerous indicator sets for sustainable development of forests and sustainable forestry available at different levels, ranging from local, regional and national to global scale assessments. Some efforts were also made to integrate later production stages of forest value chains (such as wood processing) in the assessment scope (e.g. for chain-of-custody certification). However, no indicator set has so far been available covering environmental, social and economic aspects for the entire value chain of building with timber. This gap was closed through applied sustainability research in the project “Holzwende 2020: Sustainable future markets for wood in the building sector”.     

Ecological limitations and appropriation of ecosystem support by shrimp farming in Colombia

Shrimp farming in mangrove areas has grown dramatically in Asia and Latin America over the past decade. As a result, demand for resources required for farming, such as feed, seed, and clean water, has increased substantially. This study focuses on semiintensive shrimp culture as practiced on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. We estimated the spatial ecosystem support that is required to produce the food inputs, nursery areas, and clean water to the shrimp farms, as well as to process wastes. We also made an estimate of the natural and human-made resources necessary to run a typical semiintensive shrimp farm. The results show that a semiintensive shrimp farm needs a spatial ecosystem support—the ecological footprint—that is 35–190 times larger than the surface area of the farm. A typical such shrimp farm appropriates about 295 J of ecological work for each joule of edible shrimp protein produced. The corresponding figure for industrial energy is 40:1. More than 80% of the ecological primary production required to feed the shrimps is derived from external ecosystems. In 1990 an area of 874–2300 km² of mangrove was required to supply shrimp postlarvae to the farms in Colombia, corresponding to a total area equivalent to about 20–50% of the country’s total mangrove area. The results were compared with similar estimates for other food production systems, particularly aquacultural ones. The comparison indicates that shrimp farming ranks as one of the most resource-intensive food production systems, characterizing it as an ecologically unsustainable throughput system. Based on the results, we discuss local, national, and regional appropriation of ecological support by the semiintensive shrimp farms. Suggestions are made for how shrimp farming could be transformed into a food production system that is less environmentally degrading and less dependent on external support areas.