The talk with present the key results of the IPCC Working Group III 5th assessment report. Concluding four years of intense scientific collaboration by hundreds of authors from around the world, the report responds to the request of the world's governments for a comprehensive, objective and policy neutral assessment of the current scientific knowledge on mitigating climate change. The report has been extensively reviewed by experts and governments to ensure quality and comprehensiveness.

Climate change 2014 - Mitigation of climate change

Historically, management theory has ignored the constraints imposed by the biophysical (natural) environment. Building upon resource-based theory, this article attempts to fill this void by proposing a natural-resource-based view of the firm—a theory of competitive advantage based upon the firm's relationship to the natural environment. It is composed of three interconnected strategies: pollution prevention, product stewardship, and sustainable development. Propositions are advanced for each of these strategies regarding key resource requirements and their contributions to sustained competitive advantage.

A natural resource-based view of the firm

For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Towards Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future

Molecular modelers and cheminformaticians typically analyze experimental data generated by other scientists. Consequently, when it comes to data accuracy, cheminformaticians are always at the mercy of data providers who may inadvertently publish (partially) erroneous data. Thus, dataset curation is crucial for any cheminformatics analysis such as similarity searching, clustering, QSAR modeling, virtual screening, etc., especially nowadays when the availability of chemical datasets in public domain has skyrocketed in recent years. Despite the obvious importance of this preliminary step in the computational analysis of any dataset, there appears to be no commonly accepted guidance or set of procedures for chemical data curation. The main objective of this paper is to emphasize the need for a standardized chemical data curation strategy that should be followed at the onset of any molecular modeling investigation. Herein, we discuss several simple but important steps for cleaning chemical records in a database including the removal of a fraction of the data that cannot be appropriately handled by conventional cheminformatics techniques. Such steps include the removal of inorganic and organometallic compounds, counterions, salts and mixtures; structure validation; ring aromatization; normalization of specific chemotypes; curation of tautomeric forms; and the deletion of duplicates. To emphasize the importance of data curation as a mandatory step in data analysis, we discuss several case studies where chemical curation of the original “raw” database enabled the successful modeling study (specifically, QSAR analysis) or resulted in a significant improvement of model's prediction accuracy. We also demonstrate that in some cases rigorously developed QSAR models could be even used to correct erroneous biological data associated with chemical compounds. We believe that good practices for curation of chemical records outlined in this paper will be of value to all scientists working in the fields of molecular modeling, cheminformatics, and QSAR studies.

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Trust, But Verify: On the Importance of Chemical Structure Curation in Cheminformatics and QSAR Modeling Research

Environmental knowledge and other variables affecting pro-environmental behaviour: comparison of university students from emerging and advanced countries

Greening due to environmental education? Environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday pro-environmental activities of Hungarian high school and university students

The role of impact assessments in European Union decision-making has increased greatly over the past few years as a part of efforts to boost the Community’s economic performance through improvement of the regulatory environment. In the field of environmental legislation, however, such quantification and monetization efforts involve a number of theoretical and practical problems which could undermine the possibility of obtaining an unbiased outcome. This chapter examines the European Union’s environmental impact assessment practices using the example of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), the European Union’s new chemicals policy. As a highly significant piece of legislation the likely effects of REACH were subjected to thorough analysis by the European Commission as well as key stakeholders. It is shown that, while underpinning the expected positive overall outcome of the regulation, uncertainty involved in estimating the benefits results in limited applicability of the impact assessment’s findings in the decision-making process and contributes to the fact that REACH was finally adopted with substantially lower requirements than originally planned.

Impact Assessment in the European Union: The Example of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH)

This paper aims to contribute to the footprint debate by providing a systematic review of footprint concepts that can be used on the corporate or organizational level. This may take us one step further towards the conceptualization of lesser used footprints and their integration into sustainability management accounting. Based on the systematic review process seven different footprint concepts emerged that can be used at the organizational level (ecological, carbon, environmental, water, nitrogen, ethical and social footprints). These concepts are very diverse regarding scope and methodological explicitness, however, they offer an opportunity for organizations to tackle, monitor and communicate their sustainability performance on the organizational level. Five of the reviewed organizational footprint concepts are related to the environmental while two to the social domain of sustainability. As highlighted by the review, there seems to be no footprint concept going beyond one single dimension of sustainable development. This means that the interrelationships between the environmental, social and economic performance are not grasped by any of the introduced concepts, making them unsuitable for a comprehensive sustainability assessment. For this reason, integrating different corporate footprint concepts may be one important field of future research.

Corporate Sustainability Footprints—A Review of Current Practices

The paper summarises findings of research carried out by the Department of Environmental Economics and Technology at Corvinus University of Budapest (CUB) during Autumn 2008. Our survey focused on the pro-environmental consumer behaviour and lifestyle patterns of 436 university students. The main assumptions of the research were that: (1) impacts of environmental education are reflected in the consumer behaviour of students; (2) courses on sustainability and environmental issues offered by the university significantly enlarge students’ environmental knowledge base – however, their attitudes are also shaped by several other factors; (3) reported environmental awareness and actual behaviour of respondents are usually not consistent. The trend is obvious: students tend to overstate their environmental awareness opposed to their real actions. Main features of everyday environmental activities and lifestyle were identified by factor analysis, which functioned as a basis for clustering the respondents. Clusters show a variety of lifestyle patterns: there were only very few students whose behaviour can be regarded as consistently sustainable. Compensation behaviour is widespread: non-sustainable consumption patterns are often counteracted by proenvironmental activities of a different kind. It is a true challenge for environmental education to address the student groups with different consumption and lifestyle patterns in order to motivate them towards more sustainable consumer behaviour.

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Environmental Education and Pro-environmental Consumer Behaviour – results of a university survey

A vallalati fenntarthatosagi teljesitmenyertekelesre vonatkozoan szamtalan megkozelites es modszer letezik.
Ez a cikk a labnyomtipusu fenntarthatosagi mutatok vallalati teljesitmenyertekelesben betoltott szereperől
kivan osszegző attekintest nyujtani. A labnyomtipusu mutatok alkalmazasaval kapcsolatban szamos elmeleti modell es gyakorlati tapasztalat all rendelkezesre, ezek ugyanakkor kevesse foglalkoznak a labnyom-megkozelitesek szervezeti szintű alkalmazasaval, illetve annak rendszerszintű attekintesevel. E cikkben ezert a szerzők felvazolnak egy keretrendszert a vallalati fenntarthatosagi labnyom-indikatorok ertekelesere, amelyen keresztul megvizsgaljak a leggyakoribb labnyom-megkozelitesek vallalati fenntarthatosagi teljesitmenyertekelesben betoltott lehetseges szerepet.
A felvazolt modell kiterjed i) a teljesitmenyertekelesi folyamat tervezesenek, ii) az informaciogyűjtes
folyamatanak es iii) a teljesitmenyertekelesi rendszer felulvizsgalatanak es fejlesztesenek belső es kulső
szempontjaira. Az attekintes soran osszesen ot kulonboző vallalati labnyomtipust azonositottak, melyek szervezeti szinten is alkalmazhatoak (karbonlabnyom, okologiai labnyom, vizlabnyom, kornyezeti labnyom es nitrogenlabnyom).
Ezek tartalmukat es modszertani kidolgozottsagukat tekintve igen elterőek. Kozos jellemzőjuk, hogy a vallalatok es mas szervezetek szamara lehetőseget adnak a szervezeti szintű fenntarthatosagi teljesitmenyuk
nyomon kovetesere, kezelesere es kommunikalasara. Mivel a labnyomok a kozvetlen hatasok mellett a kozvetett hatasokrol is kepesek informaciot nyujtani, kulcsszerepet tolthetnek be a szervezeti fenntarthatosag mereseben.

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Anna Széchy

Papers

Greening due to environmental education? Environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday pro-environmental activities of Hungarian high school and university students

Impact Assessment in the European Union: The Example of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH)

Corporate Sustainability Footprints—A Review of Current Practices

Environmental Education and Pro-environmental Consumer Behaviour – results of a university survey

A fenntarthatósági lábnyom-megközelítések szerepe a vállalatok fenntarthatósági szempontú teljesítményértékelésében