From eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness: The policy-performance paradox

The internalisation level of sustainability issues varies among topics and among countries. Companies give up less internalised issues for more internalised ones. Discrepancies between legal, market and cultural internalisation lead to different escape strategies: firms develop a high level environmental management system and they have nice sustainability policy and reports. These achievements cover the fact that their total emission keeps increasing and they do not proceed in solving the most crucial global community or corporate governance problems. ‘Escaper’ firms are often qualified as ‘leading’ ones, as a current stream of research is also ‘escapist’: it puts too much emphasis on sustainability efforts as compared to sustainability performance. Genuine strategies focus on hardcore sustainability issues and absolute effects rather than on issues easily solved and having high PR effects. They allow for growth in innovative firms, if they crowd out less efficient or more polluting ones. They produce positive environmental value added when sector average eco-efficiency is used as benchmark and do not accelerate market expansion and consumerism

Environmental Management Accounting - Estimating the Benefit Side

The presentation focuses on estimating benefits of environmental projects and achievements like image improvement, gaining an environmental award, profit from environmentally benign products, risk reduction benefits, etc. The paper integrates the results and experience gained in three different fields: EMA, evaluation of natural resources and working as a consultan

The Mismanagement of Environmental Conflicts

During the Communist regime, companies' conflicts with the public were hidden. The public did not have the right to express their objection. Recent Hungarian law, however, supports people's right to influence decisions that have an impact on their lives, but attitudes change slowly. In this article, I show the typical methods of companies' mismanagement of environmental conflicts. The first part of the article concentrates on strategic issues, and the second one emphasizes mistakes in communication with local communities. There are signs that Hungarian companies have already started to learn their lesson, but they also need help to face the new situation of the post-Communist era. Conflict theory and conflict resolution techniques may help them to deal with communication problems and to reach win-win solutions. Although not unknown, facilitation is not a common technique in Hungary yet. This means that there is potential for its development

Spirituality and sustainable lifestyle

The paper aimed to provide additional insights into the wide and partly uncovered area of interactions among spirituality, happiness, life satisfaction and sustainability, supported by a survey representing the Hungarian society. As results reflect, spirituality definitely proves to matter in pro-environmental behaviour, sustainable consumption, happiness and life satisfaction

The calculation of dynamic ecological footprint on the basis of the dynamic input-output model

The Leontief input-output model is widely used to determine the ecological footprint of consumption in a region or a country. It is able to capture spillover environmental effects along the supply change, thus its popularity is increasing in ecology related economic research. These studies are static and the dynamic investigations are neglected. The dynamic Leontief model makes it possible to involve the capital and inventory investment in the footprint calculation that projects future growth of GDP and environmental impacts. We show a new calculation method to determine the effect of capital accumulation on ecological footprint. Keywords: Dynamic Leontief model, Dynamic ecological footprint, Environmental management, Allocation metho

Sustainable consumption: from escape strategies towards real alternatives

Better sustainability policy is supposed to lead to better sustainability performance. Nonetheless, recent research predicts further growth of the ecological footprint and stable ecological deficit in Europe and North America despite their impressive policy efforts (Lenzen et al. 2007) [1]. Similarly, individual strategies result in somewhat reduced load for committed consumers, but this reduction cannot offset the total impact of the socio-economic configuration: consumers in higher income countries tend to pollute more. Comitted consumers "offset" a part of their environmental load by carrying out green purchases. A radical change assumes a change in lifestyle (Shove, 2004) [2]. The conference paper is the first step of the study that aims at measuring the significance of attitude elements as compared to the significance of the socio-economic system on different elements of consumption and environmental aspects This paper focuses on measuring the ecological footprint impacts of consumption in different product groups as well as in different income groups of the society

A környezeti terhek számbavétele a vállalatok tulajdonosváltásánál

A tanulmány rövid áttekintést kíván adni a környezeti terhek meghatározásával, értékelésével, a kockázatok megosztásával és a környezeti terhek feltárásáva1 kapcsolatos problémakörökről. Nem vállalkozik az érintett területek részletes elemzésére, célja inkább csak az ingatlanok vagy vállalatok tulajdonváltozásánál felmerülő problémák feltérképezése