Sustainable Change: Education for Sustainable Development in the Business School

This paper examines the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) within a business school. ESD is of growing importance for business schools, yet its implementation remains a challenge. The paper examines how barriers to ESD's implementation are met through organisational change as a sustainable process. It evaluates change brought about through ESD in a UK-based business school, through the lens of Beer and Eisenstat's three principles of effective strategy implementation and organisational adaptation, which state: 1) the change process should be systemic; 2) the change process should encourage open discussion of barriers to effective strategy implementation and adaptation; and 3) the change process should develop a partnership among all relevant stakeholders. The case incorporates, paradoxically, both elements of a top-down and an emergent strategy that resonates with elements of life-cycle, teleological and dialectic frames for process change. Insights are offered into the role of individuals as agents and actors of institutional change in business schools. In particular, the importance of academic integrity is highlighted for enabling and sustaining integration. Findings also suggest a number of implications for policy-makers who promote ESD, and for faculty and business school managers implementing, adopting and delivering ESD programmes

The environmental effects of peak hour air traffic congestion: the case of London Heathrow Airport

This paper was presented for publication in the journal Research in Transportation Economics and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2016.04.012© 2016 Elsevier Ltd.The commercial air transport sector currently faces the serious and seemingly incompatible challenge of meeting growing consumer demand for flight whilst reducing its environmental impact and meeting increasingly stringent international emissions targets. Growing demand for air travel combined with improvements in environmental performance in other industrial sectors means that commercial aviation has become a key focus for tackling climate change. The aim of this paper is to quantify the impacts of capacity-induced airport congestion using the case of London Heathrow Airport. The paper quantifies the environmental effect of airborne delays to inbound aircraft at the heavily constrained London Heathrow Airport on emissions and local air quality. The findings reveal that the additional CO2 and NOx emissions resulting from airborne delays are significant and will increase if capacity constraints on the ground are not addressed. The results are analysed in the context of Heathrow's climate change targets and current debates surrounding expansion and the challenge of reconciling environmental sustainability with aviation growth

Climate-ready conservation objectives: a scoping study

AbstractAnticipated future climate change is very likely to have a wide range of different types of ecological impact on biodiversity across the whole of Australia. There is a high degree of confidence that these changes will be significant, affecting almost all species, ecosystems and landscapes. However, because of the complexity of ecological systems and the multiple ways climate change will affect them, the details of the future change are less certain for any given species or location. The nature of the changes means that the multiple ways biodiversity is experienced, used and valued by society will be affected in different ways. The likely changes present a significant challenge to any societal aspiration to preserve biodiversity in its current state, for example, to maintain a species in its current abundance and distribution. Preserving biodiversity ‘as is’ may have been feasible in a stationary climate (one that is variable but not changing), but this will not be possible with the widespread, pervasive and large ecological changes anticipated under significant levels of climate change. This makes the impacts of climate change quite unlike other threats to biodiversity, and they challenge, fundamentally, what it actually means to conserve biodiversity under climate change: what should the objectives of biodiversity conservation be under climate change? And what are the barriers to recalibrating conservation objectives?Based on key insights from the scientific literature on climate change and biodiversity, the project developed three adaptation propositions about managing biodiversity:Conservation strategies accommodate large amounts of ecological change and the likelihood of significant climate change–induced loss in biodiversity. Strategies remain relevant and feasible under a range of possible future trajectories of ecological change.Strategies seek to conserve the multiple different dimensions of biodiversity that are experienced and valued by society. Together these propositions summarise the challenge of future climate change for biodiversity conservation, and define a new way of framing conservation we called the ‘climate ready’ approach. In the near term, conservation strategies may be able to include some consideration of these propositions. However, under significant levels of climate change many of the current approaches to conservation will become increasingly difficult and ineffective (e.g. maintaining community types in their current locations). This challenge is fundamentally different from that posed by other threats to biodiversity, and the climate-ready approach is akin to a paradigm shift in conservation.The project used a review of 26 conservation strategy documents (spanning scales from international to local) and four case studies with conservation agencies to test and refine the climate-ready approach. The project found the approach to be robust and highly relevant; in the majority of situations, if adopted, it would lead to significant changes in the objectives and priorities of conservation. There were also many ‘green shoots’ of elements of the new approach in existing conservation practice. However, the project found there are currently substantial barriers to fully adopting a climate-ready approach. These include the need for: further development of ecological characterisation of ecosystem health and human activities in landscapesmuch better understanding of how society values different aspects of biodiversity, including ecosystems and landscapesdevelopment of policy tools to codify and implement new ecologically robust and socially endorsed objectives.  Anticipated future climate change is very likely to have a wide range of different types of ecological impact on biodiversity across the whole of Australia. There is a high degree of confidence that these changes will be significant, affecting almost all species, ecosystems and landscapes. However, because of the complexity of ecological systems and the multiple ways climate change will affect them, the details of the future change are less certain for any given species or location. The nature of the changes means that the multiple ways biodiversity is experienced, used and valued by society will be affected in different ways. The likely changes present a significant challenge to any societal aspiration to preserve biodiversity in its current state, for example, to maintain a species in its current abundance and distribution. Preserving biodiversity ‘as is’ may have been feasible in a stationary climate (one that is variable but not changing), but this will not be possible with the widespread, pervasive and large ecological changes anticipated under significant levels of climate change. This makes the impacts of climate change quite unlike other threats to biodiversity, and they challenge, fundamentally, what it actually means to conserve biodiversity under climate change: what should the objectives of biodiversity conservation be under climate change? And what are the barriers to recalibrating conservation objectives?Based on key insights from the scientific literature on climate change and biodiversity, the project developed three adaptation propositions about managing biodiversity:Conservation strategies accommodate large amounts of ecological change and the likelihood of significant climate change–induced loss in biodiversity. Strategies remain relevant and feasible under a range of possible future trajectories of ecological change.Strategies seek to conserve the multiple different dimensions of biodiversity that are experienced and valued by society. Together these propositions summarise the challenge of future climate change for biodiversity conservation, and define a new way of framing conservation we called the ‘climate ready’ approach. In the near term, conservation strategies may be able to include some consideration of these propositions. However, under significant levels of climate change many of the current approaches to conservation will become increasingly difficult and ineffective (e.g. maintaining community types in their current locations). This challenge is fundamentally different from that posed by other threats to biodiversity, and the climate-ready approach is akin to a paradigm shift in conservation.The project used a review of 26 conservation strategy documents (spanning scales from international to local) and four case studies with conservation agencies to test and refine the climate-ready approach. The project found the approach to be robust and highly relevant; in the majority of situations, if adopted, it would lead to significant changes in the objectives and priorities of conservation. There were also many ‘green shoots’ of elements of the new approach in existing conservation practice. However, the project found there are currently substantial barriers to fully adopting a climate-ready approach. These include the need for: further development of ecological characterisation of ecosystem health and human activities in landscapesmuch better understanding of how society values different aspects of biodiversity, including ecosystems and landscapesdevelopment of policy tools to codify and implement new ecologically robust and socially endorsed objectives. Please cite this report as: Dunlop M, Parris, H, Ryan, P, Kroon, F 2013 Climate-ready conservation objectives: a scoping study, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 102

The development of absorptive capacity-based innovation in a construction SME

Traditionally, construction has been a transaction-oriented industry. However, it is changing from the design-bid-build process into a business based on innovation capability and performance management, in which contracts are awarded on the basis of factors such as knowledge, intellectual capital and skills. This change presents a challenge to construction-sector SMEs with scarce resources, which must find ways to innovate based on those attributes to ensure their future competitiveness. This paper explores how dynamic capability, using an absorptive capacity framework in response to these challenges, has been developed in a construction-based SME. The paper also contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity and innovation by showing how the construct can be operationalized within an organization. The company studied formed a Knowledge Transfer Partnership using action research over a two-year period with a local university. The aim was to increase its absorptive capacity and hence its ability to meet the changing market challenges. The findings show that absorptive capacity can be operationalized into a change management approach for improving capability-based competitiveness. Moreover, it is important for absorptive capacity constructs and language to be contextualized within a given organizational setting (as in the case of the construction-based SME in the present study)

Canadian Indigenous female leadership and political agency in climate change

The Canadian federal election of 2015 was a watershed moment for women’s political agency, indigenous activism and climate justice in Canada. Since 1990, skyrocketing fossil fuel extraction, especially in the Alberta tar sands, had generated escalating environmental crises on First Nations territories. Extreme weather events due to climate change were impacting communities across the country, with particular implications for women’s caring and other unpaid work. Ten years of attacks on women’s organizations and priorities by the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper had angered female voters. In response, indigenous and settler women’s organizing on climate and environmental justice, fossil fuel extraction and voting rights was an important factor in Harper’s October 2015 defeat. Justin Trudeau, elected on promises to address climate change, indigenous rights and gender equity, now faces the challenge of delivering on both distributive and procedural climate justice. This story of extraction, climate change, weather, unequal impacts, gender and political agency in a fossil fuel-producing country in the Global North has implications for gender and climate justice globally. Canada contains within its borders many examples of environmental racism stemming from fossil fuel extraction and climate change, paralleling global injustices. The politics of addressing these inequities is key to a successfully managed energy transition away from fossil fuels. In the Canadian case at least, women’s leadership – especially indigenous women’s leadership – is emerging as crucial.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082 and SSHRC File #: 895-2013-1010 Project period: 01-April-14 to 31-Mar-2

The Implications of the new Polytechnics Act, 2007 (Act 745), for Curriculum Development and Review in Ghanaian Polytechnics

Change is inevitable, and as an educational institution in a dynamic global environment, Polytechnics face the challenge of responding to the constant flux of changes in its environment in order to remain relevant. This paper presents a case of change for Ghanaian Polytechnics and highlights the need for response. The change is that until the passage of the new Polytechnics Act, (Act 745) in 2007, the National Board for Professional and Technician Examination (NAPTEX) under the NAPTEX Act, (Act 492), 1994, as part of its oversight responsibilities for non-University tertiary institutions, had the mandate for curriculum leadership in Polytechnics. This system, though well-intentioned, had its own drawbacks. With academic autonomy, however, this responsibility reverts to the Polytechnics, vested in the Academic Board. What become necessary for discussion are the implications of this change and the need for appropriate responses. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of this change for curriculum leadership – the planning, coordinating, implementation, evaluation and review of curriculum – in Polytechnic under the new Act. Keywords: change, curriculum, curriculum development, Polytechnic

Subtleties of witnessing quantum coherence in non-isolated systems

Identifying non-classicality unambiguously and inexpensively is a long-standing open challenge in physics. The No-Signalling-In-Time protocol was developed as an experimental test for macroscopic realism, and serves as a witness of quantum coherence in isolated quantum systems by comparing the quantum state to its completely dephased counterpart. We show that it provides a lower bound on a certain resource-theoretic coherence monotone. We go on to generalise the protocol to the case where the system of interest is coupled to an environment. Depending on the manner of the generalisation, the resulting witness either reports on system coherence alone, or on a disjunction of system coherence with either (i) the existence of non-classical system-environment correlations or (ii) non-negligible dynamics in the environment. These are distinct failure modes of the Born approximation in non-isolated systems.Comment: 16pp, 2 figs, 5 thms. v2: typos corrected, references added and small change to title to reflect that of published versio

DPSIR-Two decades of trying to develop a unifying framework for marine environmental management?

© 2016 Patrício, Elliott, Mazik, Papadopoulou and Smith. Determining and assessing the links between human pressures and state-changes in marine and coastal ecosystems remains a challenge. Although there are several conceptual frameworks for describing these links, the Drivers-Pressures-State change-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework has been widely adopted. Two possible reasons for this are: either the framework fulfills a major role, resulting from convergent evolution, or the framework is used often merely because it is used often, albeit uncritically. This comprehensive review, with lessons learned after two decades of use, shows that the approach is needed and there has been a convergent evolution in approach for coastal and marine ecosystem management. There are now 25 derivative schemes and a widespread and increasing usage of the DPSIR-type conceptual framework as a means of structuring and analyzing information in management and decision-making across ecosystems. However, there is less use of DPSIR in fully marine ecosystems and even this was mainly restricted to European literature. Around half of the studies are explicitly conceptual, not illustrating a solid case study. Despite its popularity since the early 1990s among the scientific community and the recommendation of several international institutions (e.g., OECD, EU, EPA, EEA) for its application, the framework has notable weaknesses to be addressed. These primarily relate to the long standing variation in interpretation (mainly between natural and social scientists) of the different components (particularly P, S, and I) and to over-simplification of environmental problems such that cause-effect relationships cannot be adequately understood by treating the different DPSIR components as being mutually exclusive. More complex, nested, conceptual models and models with improved clarity are required to assess pressure-state change links in marine and coastal ecosystems. Our analysis shows that, because of its complexity, marine assessment and management constitutes

FERC Anti-Manipulation Enforcement and the Barclays Proceeding: What Factors Should Regulated Entities Consider before Deciding to Follow Barclays\u27 Path to Federal Court?

Energy regulation is not a new topic, but after the Enron scandal, Congress made significant changes. The changes were embodied in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. One major change was to FERC\u27s ability to hand down penalties for market manipulation. Recently, FERC has been aggressively enforcing its power and anticipates anti-manipulation enforcement will be a point of emphasis in the future. The first entity to challenge FERC\u27s power in federal court is Barclays. The Barclays case, other recent enforcement actions, and the regulations FERC has promulgated provide a guide to regulated entities about how and when they should challenge FERC in federal court. The outcome of the Barclays case will have an immense impact on future FERC enforcement actions

Coordinated Control of Energy Storage in Networked Microgrids under Unpredicted Load Demands

In this paper a nonlinear control design for power balancing in networked microgrids using energy storage devices is presented. Each microgrid is considered to be interfaced to the distribution feeder though a solid-state transformer (SST). The internal duty cycle based controllers of each SST ensures stable regulation of power commands during normal operation. But problem arises when a sudden change in load or generation occurs in any microgrid in a completely unpredicted way in between the time instants at which the SSTs receive their power setpoints. In such a case, the energy storage unit in that microgrid must produce or absorb the deficit power. The challenge lies in designing a suitable regulator for this purpose owing to the nonlinearity of the battery model and its coupling with the nonlinear SST dynamics. We design an input-output linearization based controller, and show that it guarantees closed-loop stability via a cascade connection with the SST model. The design is also extended to the case when multiple SSTs must coordinate their individual storage controllers to assist a given SST whose storage capacity is insufficient to serve the unpredicted load. The design is verified using the IEEE 34-bus distribution system with nine SST-driven microgrids.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure