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Dr. Luca Marrucci

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Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Institute of Management, Piazza Martiri della Libertà 33, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Interests: proactive environmental strategies; environmental regulation and competitiveness; sustainable supply chain management; eco-innovation and green markets; climate adaptation and mitigation; sustainable consumption and production; circular economy; integrated pollution prevention and best available techniques; environmental footprint, performance, and LCA; industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis; industrial clusters and eco-industrial parks; green public procurement
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

For millennia, we have used the world’s natural resources to sustain us, but it is only logical that these resources are finite. Scarcity can lead to price rises, hardship, and conflict. It also leads to increased efforts to find new resources, often with further or different consequences. Our increasing and inefficient use of resources has knock-on effects, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, poor health, and poverty. These issues are interlinked and in turn often exacerbate each other.

The scale of the environmental/social challenge is enormous. We need to fundamentally change the ways things are done to achieve sustainable development. This will need to go beyond resource efficiency to changing the way things are used and made, including cradle-to-cradle processes, dematerialization, and moving from products to services.

A circular economy makes use of various strategies, such as reducing, reusing, and recycling that together eliminate waste, lower material and resource consumption, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is a link between the circular economy and climate mitigation, and transitioning to a circular economy can arguably mitigate carbon dioxide emissions that emerge from extractive industries, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and other sectors.

Through this Special Issue, we aim to collect studies, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as best practices and experience descriptions, which focus on sustainability and environmental management considering all its aspects that can prove the strong linkages between circular economy and climate change.

We aim at providing a 360-degree perspective of sustainability and environmental management considering its nano (product), micro (organizations, consumers), meso (industrial parks, etc.), and macro (cities, countries, etc.) level. In addition to these aspects, we also aim to publish studies connected to climate change and circular economy.

In the framework described above, this Special Issue invites authors to contribute to all the aspects of sustainability and environmental management in order to provide the most comprehensive overview of this important topic.

Dr. Luca Marrucci
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

circular economy
closed-loop economy
sharing economy
circular business model
SCP tools
environmental management system
EMAS
ISO14001
ecolabel
LCA
PEF
GPP
eco-design
waste management
greenwashing
green marketing
closed-loop supply chain
industrial symbiosis
industrial ecology
eco industrial park
reputation
competitiveness
collaborative consumption
recyclability
reusability
upgradability
reparability
durability
circular city
urban symbiosis
eco-efficient services sustainable development goals
carbon footprint
water footprint
consumer behavior
management
climate change
GHG emission
decarbonization

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

27 pages, 1210 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Institutional Drivers of Voluntary Carbon Reduction Target Setting—Evidence from Poland and Hungary

by Anna Doś, Joanna Błach, Małgorzata Lipowicz, Francesco Pattarin and Elisa Flori

Sustainability 2023, 15(14), 11155; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151411155 - 17 Jul 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1457

Abstract

Governments worldwide have launched climate policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). These policies aim to enhance businesses to be active actors in the process of decarbonisation. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to identify the drivers of voluntary corporate decarbonisation illustrated by climate target-setting practices. In particular, this paper aims at diagnosing whether European Union (EU)-wide and country-level policies foster material corporate commitment to mitigating the carbon footprint in two countries that are exceptionally heavily dependent on fossil fuels: Poland and Hungary, which are characterised by a specific political-economic situation. This analysis focuses on policies related to the EU sustainable finance initiative that enhances companies to voluntarily reduce their GHG emissions: (1) sustainable financial sector, (2) corporate disclosure, and (3) corporate governance policy. At the country level, the national policies for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are analysed. The empirical research is conducted based on the financial and economic data for a group of Polish and Hungarian publicly listed companies exposed to these regulations. The exposure to certain policies is approximated through selected corporate characteristics. Logistic regression analysis is applied to firm-level data gathered from Refinitive and corporate reports. The dataset covers the period 2014 to 2021, with 214 data-points. The response variable is a binary indicator of whether a company sets emission targets. The empirical research proved that state ownership, belonging to the financial sector, and performance-oriented corporate governance factors have a significantly negative impact on the probability of a company setting target emissions. On the other hand, the company’s size and leverage have a strong positive impact on the probability of setting emission targets. Also, it was confirmed that after 2020 the frequency of corporate target-setting in Poland and Hungary increased. Additionally, it was observed that Polish firms are more willing to set climate targets than Hungarian ones. Therefore, from the analysed policies, only the corporate sustainability disclosure policy proved to have a positive impact on the practices of setting climate targets in Polish and Hungarian firms. The policies related to the sustainable financial sector and to state-owned enterprises proved to have a negative impact on the probability of setting climate targets, while for the corporate governance policy, the results are mixed. In this vein, it was shown that, by a majority, policies to stimulate voluntary corporate commitment to decarbonisation are counter-effective in countries characterised by exceptional fossil fuel dependence and particular institutional features. The original value of this study stems from the applied methodology focusing on a mix of policies addressing the deep decarbonisation process in the specific country settings. The presented research contributes to an on-going debate on the drivers of voluntary corporate decarbonisation, in particular the impact that policy mixes framed under the sustainable finance agenda may have on material commitments to GHG emission reduction targets. In this context, the main findings are important for policymakers who are responsible for creating and implementing policy measures devoted to the deep decarbonisation process. It is recommended that policymakers should consider national specificities while designing policies for a Europe-wide net-zero transition and account for potential tensions arising from different goals as they may have impact on the effectiveness of the decarbonisation process. Future research may focus on the verification of the observed relationships between variables on a larger sample of the European firms to identify the key drivers of deep corporate decarbonisation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainability and Environmental Management: How Can Circular Economy Contribute to Fight Climate Change?)

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