Leveraging Environment and Climate Change Initiatives for Corporate Excellence

This paper reviews selected initiatives taken by Asian countries to comply with emerging global sustainability standards, reporting, and management systems, and tracks the response of Asian businesses to global environmental concerns, examines market based innovations including new regulations that augmented corporate excellence, and identifies future directions for business that lead low carbon society. It recommends governments and business to join forces in supporting low carbon initiatives, drawing upon market mechanisms through reconfiguring national environmental policies and strategies

The verticality of policy mixes for sustainability transitions: A case study of solar water heating in China

Climate change and sustainable development are the defining challenges of the modern era. The field of sustainability transitions seeks systematic solutions for fundamental transformations of socio-technical systems towards sustainability, and exploring the role of policy mixes has been a central research agenda within the field. In the extant literature, there exists a lack of both conceptual and empirical research on the vertical dimension of policy mixes for sustainability transitions. This study provides a multilevel and evolutionary interpretation of the vertical interactions of policy mixes in the process of industrial path development towards sustainability transitions. An exemplary case of solar water heating (SWH) technology in Shandong Province in China is presented, capturing both the bottom-up and top-down processes of interactions. On the one hand, urban-level policy initiatives can inform higher-level policymaking; on the other hand, national-level priorities can greatly configure policy strategies for lower-level governments. Moreover, as the industry matures, the interactions of multilevel policy mixes evolve from simpler, unidirectional patterns to more complex, bidirectional ones through a vertical policy-learning feedback mechanism. This study generates two important policy implications that extend beyond the Chinese context: first, dynamic vertical interactions between multilevel governments indicate the need to develop more nuanced perspectives on the design of policy mixes; second, policy makers need to hold a more dynamic view of policy mixes by recognizing their temporal and coevolutionary nature through the policy learning process

Road freight energy efficiency and CO2 emissions in the Nordic countries

Nordic countries have committed to improve the energy efficiency and decrease the CO2 emissions of freight transport. The aim of this paper is to compare the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions in the road industry for the Nordic countries in 2010, in order to identify the key factors and their impact on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. A joint analysis method was developed to compare data. Quantitative data was used to conduct a decomposition analysis for several sectors, taking several indicators into account. Statistics from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden include continuous road haulier surveys, national account data and fuel consumption data. The CO2 emissions of road freight transport in the Nordic countries vary from 1.14 Mt in Denmark to 2.27 Mt in Sweden. While the size of the economy, measured in gross value added (GVA), is a major determinant for the emissions, the differences in transport intensity and energy efficiency also have a significant effect on the total emissions. This study is the first of its kind for the Nordic countries. Our research can be used as a first step in a continuous evaluation of the determinants of road freight CO2 emissions in the European countries. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved