Search Results (927)

This study compares environmental goal-setting and monitoring priorities of EMAS-registered and non-EMAS organizations in the European Union. Using a dataset of 847 organizations and exploratory factor analysis, it examines differences in the structure of environmental objectives and indicators. The results show that EMAS-registered organizations prioritize operational performance and continuous improvement, while non-EMAS organizations focus more on regulatory compliance, awareness-building, and external communication. EMAS participation is associated with a more integrated and strategic approach to environmental management, linking objectives with measurable performance indicators. In contrast, non-EMAS organizations often adopt more symbolic or externally oriented practices driven by legal and reputational concerns. To isolate the effects of formal verification and transparency, ISO 14001 certification is not treated separately; instead, EMAS organizations are compared with all non-EMAS entities. The findings provide new empirical evidence on how voluntary environmental schemes shape organizational behavior by improving alignment between goals and indicators. They also offer practical guidance for organizations preparing for the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), highlighting EMAS as a model for credible, performance-based environmental reporting. Full article

As the Italian hop industry undergoes consolidation, assessing the environmental pressure of diverse cultivation and processing models is essential for sustainable growth. This study characterizes the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) of Italian hop production through a multi-case analysis of eight representative farms. A primary data collection tool was utilized to quantify resource inputs, including water management, nutritional strategies, and phytosanitary defense. Following a rigorous thermodynamic consistency screening of the field data to eliminate unrepresentative parameters, the life cycle inventory focused on two validated regional anchor cases. The findings reveal a high degree of management heterogeneity, with dry cone yields ranging from 400 to 1673 kg of dry matter per hectare. Two functional units were defined: 1 kg of fresh hop cones (FU1) to assess cultivation impacts, and 1 kg of processed products (FU2) at the brewery gate to evaluate the full supply chain. Integrating deterministic life cycle impact outputs with a probabilistic Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis, the results indicate that the environmental impact varies significantly across commercial formats: Cryogenic Powder (2.33 ± 0.34 mPt/kg) represents the most resource-intensive format, while Raw Bales and T90 Pellets from high-yield models exhibit scores as low as 1.36 and 1.55 mPt/kg, respectively. The study identifies the agricultural phase as the primary environmental hotspot, driven predominantly by water deprivation. To address these burdens, a Sustainable Italian Hop (SIH) integrated scenario was developed. By combining precision irrigation, thermal decarbonization via biomass valorization, and a direct-to-pellet processing flow, this model achieved a 70% total reduction in the environmental footprint score (0.465 ± 0.076 mPt/kg) and an 86% reduction in water use impacts. Finally, the socio-technical and financial barriers to implementing the SIH framework are qualitatively evaluated. These results provide actionable benchmarks for aligning the emerging Italian hop supply chain with European Union climate neutrality objectives. Full article

Global population growth and the demand for sustainable food systems have pushed microalgae into the spotlight as promising novel food resources. They are rich in protein, omega-3 fatty acids, and bioactive pigments including astaxanthin and phycocyanin. Unlike conventional farming, microalgae cultivation can be conducted on non-arable land and may reduce direct competition with conventional food crops for land resources, depending on the production system used. Regulatory progress in China, the European Union (EU), and the United States has resulted in the authorization or approval of several microalgal species and microalgae-derived ingredients for specific food and nutritional applications, including dietary supplements, infant nutrition products, and alternative protein ingredients. Despite these advances, broader commercial adoption remains constrained by several challenges, such as off-flavors and the dark green color, high production costs from closed photobioreactors and energy-intensive downstream purification, fragmented regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions and limited long-term data on bioavailability, allergenicity, safety, and dose–response relationships for some emerging strains. This review focuses on microalgae as novel food resources, covering regulatory approvals, strain selection, high-value utilization, and market translation, synthesizes evidence on nutritional evaluation, application scenarios, and global regulatory differences, analyzes key bottlenecks, and proposes pathways to bridge fundamental research with industrial practice. It also highlights unresolved knowledge gaps to guide future research and policy. Full article

Introduction: Fish species represent 25% of all vertebrates across the globe and are one of the most threatened animal groups. At least 40% of the fish fauna occurs in rivers for part of their life cycle. European rivers are home to more than 600 fish species, while also being some of the most impaired and altered ecosystems. Objective: The objective was to assess the vulnerability of freshwater fish communities in European river basins. Methodology: Using RivTool and the CCM2 database, we developed the River Restoration Units (R2Us), a set of spatial units that takes into account river network functioning and allows a higher spatial discretisation than river basins. We developed RivFish, a database about the presence of native freshwater-dependent fish in 1556 Europeans river basins. For this, we collected data from 77 references and validated synonyms and scientific names for 667 species. We used the latest International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessment to define species distributions in European rivers. After intersecting with the R2U layer, we curated and validated species names and spatial occurrence using RivFish. To map the vulnerability of freshwater fish communities, we used the Habitats Directive (HD) and the IUCN datasets. These consider a distinct number of species and assess conservation status differently: the HD evaluated 165 species, while the IUCN evaluated 516 species. The HD data allowed calculating the composite indicator of Conservation Status, whereas the IUCN data enabled calculating the vulnerability index. Results: Both ana-lyses show higher richness in central Europe, particularly in the Danube basin. Spatially, both highlight southern Europe as the area where fish communities have the highest vulnerability. However, the HD analysis also indicates the Danube and the western Atlantic basins as having high vulnerability. The IUCN analysis shows the Anatolian and Mediterranean biogeographical regions as those with the highest vulnerability values. Conclusions: Southern Europe’s higher vulnerability is likely associated with restricted distribution ranges and high levels of endemicity in Mediterranean fish communities. Overall, these findings improve current knowledge and show that input data may be key to effort allocation towards the management and conservation of European freshwater fish communities. Full article

Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly participate in decision-making processes that affect individuals, markets, and public administration. Their growing autonomy complicates the attribution of legal responsibility, particularly within regulatory frameworks that were designed around identifiable human actors and relatively stable products. Although European Union instruments such as the GDPR, the AI Act, and the revised Product Liability Directive address specific dimensions of risk and compliance, they do not fully resolve how responsibility should be allocated across the lifecycle of complex AI systems. The difficulty does not lie so much in the absence of legal rules. Rather, it reflects the structural tension between traditional liability models and the distributed architecture of contemporary AI development and deployment. By examining how existing EU regulatory instruments interact, the paper identifies fragmentation in responsibility allocation that may weaken institutional accountability. It then proposes a tiered model of legal responsibility based on meaningful control at different stages of system design, deployment, and operational oversight. Rather than introducing new forms of legal personhood, the model seeks to clarify how existing doctrines can be interpreted and coordinated in order to maintain regulatory coherence and socially intelligible accountability in digitally mediated environments. The model allocates responsibility according to meaningful control within distributed systems, offering a structurally coherent alternative for EU governance. Full article

Road transport is one of the most significant sources of environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions; therefore, the development of sustainable mobility is becoming an important direction of urban transport policy. The objectives of the European Union’s transport policy encourage cities to plan and implement measures that reduce the environmental impact of transport, improve transport conditions, and increase the availability of mobility alternatives. The aim of this study is to evaluate the planning of sustainable mobility development in Lithuanian cities by analysing sustainable urban mobility plans, the measures proposed in them, and their links to the needs of urban transport systems. The study applied descriptive statistics, comparative analysis, and document content analysis methods. The urban plans of Lithuanian cities were evaluated according to the following criteria: the time scope and relevance of the plan, the completeness of the analysis of the existing transport system, the assessment of the environment and quality of life in cities, and the compliance of the planned sustainable mobility measures with the needs of the city. The results of the study show that only a portion of Lithuanian cities have prepared sustainable urban mobility plans, and their contents and analytical bases differ. Some of the plans do not provide a sufficiently detailed and relevant analysis of the current situation; therefore, the need for the selected measures is not always clearly justified. The cities analysed generally envisage or apply measures to improve public transport, develop pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, regulate traffic, create electric vehicle infrastructure, and promote multimodality. It was concluded that sustainable mobility planning in Lithuanian cities is uneven, and its assessment depends not only on the diversity of the envisaged measures but also on the analytical quality of planning documents, the justification of measures, and the consistency of envisaged implementation measures. The study highlights the need to strengthen data-based sustainable mobility planning and to more clearly link the measures envisaged in the plans with the specific challenges of urban transport systems. Full article

The global regulatory landscape is shifting from voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting to mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure, yet whether this transition drives substantive corporate environmental change or merely symbolic compliance remains empirically contested. This study investigates the causal impact of mandatory ESG disclosure on firm value and operational carbon intensity, drawing on an unbalanced panel of 9682 firm-year observations for 1626 listed firms from the European Union (EU-27) and Japan covering the period 2018 to 2024. The EU serves as the treatment group, where mandatory disclosure requirements escalated substantially from 2021 onward through the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive proposal. Japan serves as the control group, representing a developed economy with sophisticated capital markets and high ESG awareness that maintained a voluntary disclosure environment throughout the study period. A Difference-in-Differences framework with firm- and year-fixed effects is employed, and causal identification is validated through a dynamic event study analysis. Three principal findings emerge. First, mandatory ESG disclosure is not associated with a statistically significant improvement in firm value in the EU–Japan comparative context, a result that is interpreted as descriptive rather than causal given evidence of pre-existing valuation divergence between the two groups. Second, mandatory disclosure is associated with a significant and progressive reduction in Scope 1 and 2 carbon intensity, indicating substantive operational decarbonization rather than symbolic compliance. Third, this emissions-reducing effect is significantly amplified among firms with dedicated CSR sustainability committees, while the board independence policy indicator yields no significant moderating effect, a finding attributed to data limitations. These results carry direct implications for policymakers designing climate-related disclosure frameworks and for scholars examining the boundary conditions under which mandatory transparency translates into genuine environmental performance. Full article

Although the European Union positions the bioeconomy at the core of its sustainability transition and the European Green Deal, the cross-country distribution of bioeconomy value-added associated with mission-oriented public R&D support remains highly uneven. This paper investigates how national researcher capacity (as a proxy of absorptive capacity) shapes the macroeconomic effectiveness of bioeconomy-oriented public R&D support, and how societal climate-oriented environmental concern acts as a direct structural driver of bioeconomy value-added. Using a panel dataset of 27 EU Member States from 2008 to 2020, the study constructs an original bioeconomy-specific measure of government budget appropriations for R&D (GBARD) and estimates two-way fixed-effects models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors to account for cross-sectional dependence. The findings reveal a clear capacity-dependent conditional moderation effect: public R&D support is significantly associated with higher bioeconomy value-added only when a critical mass of researcher capacity is present. Sectoral disaggregation demonstrates that business enterprise researcher capacity acts as the primary transmission channel linking public funds to the market, whereas higher-education capacity shows no statistically significant short-to-medium-term moderating effect, consistent with the academic research commercialisation time lags documented in the literature. Additionally, societal climate-oriented environmental concern is positively associated with bioeconomy value-added in the baseline models, consistent with its role as a demand-side factor fostering receptive conditions for bio-based transitions. The study concludes that increasing mission-oriented R&D funding alone is likely insufficient; to successfully cross the “valley of death,” public R&D should be accompanied by complementary policies that build private-sector absorptive capacity and cultivate green market demand. Full article

In recent years, non-financial reporting has become a central regulatory instrument for integrating environmental considerations into corporate accountability frameworks in the European Union. This study examines regional variation in mandatory environmental disclosures contained in corporate sustainability reports prepared under the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The analysis adopts a regional perspective, assuming that more economically developed regions are associated with greater environmental pressures and therefore exhibit more comprehensive environmental reporting practices. Regions are classified at the NUTS 2 level using GDP per capita in purchasing power standards (PPSs), enabling a systematic comparison between more and less developed regions across the EU. The empirical analysis relies exclusively on publicly available corporate sustainability reports and is deliberately limited to legally mandated environmental disclosures. A structured qualitative content analysis is applied to 20 companies operating across multiple EU Member States, with firms assigned to regions based on the location of their registered headquarters. The results provide exploratory evidence of a positive association between regional economic development (GDP per capita at the NUTS 2 level) and the comprehensiveness of mandatory environmental disclosures. The results provide empirically grounded insights into the strengths and limitations of mandatory sustainability reporting as a governance mechanism and contribute to ongoing debates on the capacity of the CSRD to enhance sustainability-oriented corporate accountability across diverse regional contexts within the EU. Full article

The European Union (EU) and national governments have set clear targets to reduce agricultural emissions, including ammonia from manure spreading practice, with regulations such as the Ambient Air Quality (AQ) and Clean Air Directives, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and the Green Deal, with implication for ecosystem services and landscape planning, reflecting broader environmental sustainability objectives including those addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Informative Inventory Reports (IIRs) are critical tools within the EMEP/EEA framework for monitoring long-range transboundary air pollution. They utilize three distinct methodological tiers (Tiers 1, 2, and 3) to estimate emission data across Europe. Despite the availability of Earth Observation (EO) data and products from the Copernicus Programme current estimation methods still rarely integrate EO information to produce spatially explicit estimates. This paper reviews current methodologies for estimating ammonia in IIRs and in scientific literature, including advanced methods not yet implemented in official inventories but potentially capable of supporting more spatially explicit and process-oriented estimation. A Medium Effort Methodology (MEM) is identified among those reviewed as a representative methodological pathway for integrating EO information with Tier 3 approaches. Building on this, the paper explores the association between specific EO data and Copernicus products, and input variables required by MEM, identifying opportunities and barriers for environmental monitoring with potential relevance to sustainable agriculture. Full article

Monitoring biodiversity in coastal and marine ecosystems is essential for supporting conservation strategies, sustaining ecosystem services, and meeting policy commitments at multiple scales, including the European Union’s Habitats Directive, Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14, Life Below Water), and the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). However, many benthic habitats remain insufficiently mapped or monitored due to the spatial, temporal, and logistical limitations of traditional field-based approaches. Optical Remote Sensing (ORS), based on the use of optical sensors to retrieve spectral information from shallow-water environments, has emerged as a powerful tool for mapping and monitoring these ecosystems. This study presents a systematic review aimed at providing a comprehensive synthesis of above-water ORS applications for benthic biodiversity and habitat monitoring over the period 2014–2023. A total of 179 peer-reviewed studies were analyzed to identify temporal trends, geographic patterns, target ecosystems, and methodological workflows. The review considered observation platforms including satellite, airborne, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and field spectrometry systems, together with key preprocessing procedures required for reliable benthic detection, such as atmospheric correction, water column correction, and sunglint removal, alongside validation using independent measurements. The analysis reveals a rapid expansion of ORS applications, with a strong geographic concentration in tropical and subtropical regions. Studies focusing on specific benthic groups predominantly target coral reefs and seagrass ecosystems, although many adopt integrative benthic habitat classifications that incorporate multiple benthic components at the habitat level. However, significant limitations persist, including inconsistent preprocessing workflows, limited reporting transparency, and the underrepresentation of several ecologically important taxa (e.g., annelids, mollusks, echinoderms). Despite these challenges, ORS has become a cornerstone of large-scale and repeatable coastal monitoring. By analyzing methodological practices, ecological targets, and geographic biases, this review provides a critical foundation for improving the robustness, scalability, and global applicability of ORS in benthic habitat mapping, biodiversity monitoring, and ecosystem-based management. Full article

Digital resilience has become an increasingly important concept in information systems research due to growing dependence on digital infrastructures, escalating cyber threats, and the emergence of regulatory frameworks that formalize resilience obligations. This study provides a systematic literature review of how digital resilience is conceptualized, operationalized, and aligned with emerging European Union (EU) regulatory frameworks. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, a systematic search was conducted across Scopus, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore databases. Fifty-three peer-reviewed studies published between 2006 and 2026 were analyzed using a structured analytical coding framework capturing conceptual clarity, dimensional structure, methodological maturity, and regulatory alignment. The results reveal significant conceptual fragmentation across the literature. While governance, ICT risk management, incident response, and third-party risk management emerge as recurring resilience dimensions, definitional and structural convergence remains limited. Measurement approaches are dominated by maturity models and qualitative assessment frameworks, with relatively few studies proposing validated indicator-based models. Regulatory alignment with EU frameworks such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) remains partial and inconsistent. The study identifies a structural alignment gap between regulatory resilience requirements, conceptual resilience models, and operational measurement approaches, providing a foundation for developing regulator-compatible digital resilience assessment frameworks. Full article

This narrative review develops fermentation-oriented viticulture as an agronomic-oenological framework linking vineyard environment, management and must ecology to fermentation performance. The literature from 2010 to April 2026 was synthesized through structured searches in PubMed and Google Scholar, complemented by targeted searches in MDPI, Frontiers, Nature, ScienceDirect, OENO One, PNAS and European Union regulatory sources, with emphasis on 2020–2026 publications and retention of older foundational sources. Current evidence indicates that must microbiota is not a linear derivative of soil or berry surfaces, but a network outcome of connected habitats spanning the viticultural biotope and grapevine-associated biocenosis (soil, rhizosphere, phyllosphere, berry, insect, atmospheric and winery). Climate warming, drought, altered phenology, soil fertility, nitrogen nutrition, crop-protection programs and bio-based inputs jointly modify berry chemistry, yeast-assimilable nitrogen (YAN), microbial inocula and pre-fermentative selection pressures. The review distinguishes fermentation-oriented viticulture from descriptive microbial terroir by defining practical endpoints: fermentation onset and completion, sluggish or stuck fermentation risk, microbial stability, spoilage taxa, volatilome development and wine typicity. It also proposes operational indicators and a decision matrix for integrating vineyard and winery management. The framework supports future multi-vintage studies combining climate, soil, agronomic metadata, YAN, microbiome profiling and microvinification outcomes. Full article

The digital transformation of agriculture is rapidly turning the sector into a highly data-intensive domain. The European Union has responded with a broad horizontal framework encompassing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Data Governance Act (DGA), the Data Act, the PSI Directive and the AI Act. However, this framework remains sector-neutral: it does not define ‘agricultural data’ as a legal category, nor does it explicitly recognize the specific position of farmers as data providers. This article pursues three objectives: (i) to map the EU legal and policy framework on data and AI as it applies to agriculture and identify regulatory gaps; (ii) to synthesize key concerns from the literature on agricultural data governance, with particular attention to the position of farmers and data spaces; and (iii) to develop an outline of a Spanish ‘Law on Agricultural Data and Digital Agricultural Services’ as an example of sectoral data legislation. The proposed Act—structured around a Preliminary Title and seven substantive Titles—would define agricultural data, recognize farmers as data providers, establish mandatory contractual protections, govern agricultural data spaces and cooperatives, introduce sector-adapted AI rules, address data sovereignty, and set up an institutional framework and graduated sanctions. The analysis argues that sectoral data law can complement EU horizontal rules, enhance legal certainty, and empower farmers without fragmenting the internal market. The article employs a doctrinal legal analysis and normative design-oriented methodology, drawing on secondary literature, policy documents, and EU and Spanish law; it does not rely on original empirical fieldwork. Full article

The present Brief Report examines the role of data governance and regulatory complexity in shaping the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors in asset management and corporate reporting within the European Union. As sustainable finance expands, ensuring the transparency, comparability, and reliability of ESG information remains a key challenge. The study adopts a qualitative and analytical approach, drawing on academic literature, institutional reports, and EU regulatory frameworks, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), the EU Taxonomy, and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). Through a documentary and comparative analysis, it assesses the consistency and interoperability of European and international sustainability frameworks. The findings highlight persistent challenges such as data fragmentation, lack of standardization, and regulatory complexity, while emphasizing the role of ESRS and robust data governance in enhancing data quality and transparency. The present Brief Report therefore provides potentially useful insights for stakeholders such as policymakers and regulators, managers and institutional investors, corporate issuers and academicians. Strengthening governance structures and regulatory alignment is hence essential not only to foster investor trust and improve access to sustainable finance, but also to support evidence-based policy reform and long-term creation across European capital markets. Full article