Issue #1 (Volume 10 2019)

Littering has been a subject of inquiry by environmental economists, as well as social and environmental psychologists, each using a different theoretical and analytical toolkit. While economists see littering as an externality problem or a market failure, psychologists see it as a social behavior problem. Regardless of the discipline, both theories have a common goal: What factors affect littering behavior and how can it be curtailed? This paper, therefore, adopts theory-triangulation approach to review theories concerning littering. It concisely reviews the economist’s and the psychologist’s approaches to littering and their respective solutions. The finding from this review is that the psychological approaches to litter control are narrower in coverage than the economic approaches in that the former are applicable to smaller environmental settings or areas, such as school premises, office places, factories, and market places, as opposed to such lager settings as cities, states or the country at large to which economic instruments are usually applied. Despite the plethora of research extolling the virtues of economic approaches to litter control, their real-world application has not caught on. One of the factors responsible for this is the implementation costs and difficulty involved. The economic instruments are costlier than the psychological instruments, because the former cover a larger setting and entail a lot of bureaucracies. To better understand littering and find appropriate solutions to it, studies on littering should consider looking at littering holistically from this interdisciplinary perspective. Both the economist’s and the psychologist’s approaches to litter control should be synthesized for sustainable waste management. However, policymakers need to consider the available financial resources and the multifarious views of litter in policies relating to litter. An option for policymakers is to minimize those costs associated with implementing economic instruments.

This paper is devoted to the investigation of environmental, social and governance investment (investment with ESG criterion) normative base in the context of standardization process in sustainable economy financing. Complexity of such standardization and the lack of commonly accepted regulations, indexes metrics are under discussions of scholars, which encourage the need for clear guidance in ESG investment. 651 sustainability rating products and more than 300 investment policy instruments in different countries show the need for classifying the ESG standards. The solution of this scientific and practical task is based on the developed ESG investment standards system classifications. Proposed classification incorporates such criteria as level of standards adoption, mandatory degree, sectorial specificity, degree of companies’ awareness of responsible activity, ensuring transparency and the benchmarks formation, creating the institutional support of the ESG investment standardization process in sustainable economy and making more grounded investment and regulatory decisions.

Households’ consumption patterns and behaviors have profound influence on natural resources and environmental quality. This paper explores whether environmental behaviors and willingness to pay (WTP) in the household domains transport, energy consumption and water consumption are substitutes or complements. Using a cross-country data set from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Survey on Environmental Attitudes and Behavior from 2008, a random-effects (ordered) probit model is used to answer this question for the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, Italy, and South Korea. It is found that in most countries, actual environmental behaviors are substitutes, while WTP for environmental public goods in different domains is mostly complementary. Grounding in these results, policies aiming to encourage overall environmentally friendly lifestyles should therefore be all-encompassing of several public domains, instead of individual ones, to avoid the risk of negative spillovers.

Considering the rapid development of oceanic logistics, the maritime traffic is one of the worst offenders for air and water pollution. This paper primarily aims to explore the key concepts and terms applied to denote the sustainability issues in maritime transport and main challenges for the shipping industry. The present study investigates the existing sustainability frameworks on the relationship between sustainability and maritime industry. Also the author proposes to use modelling approaches to measure the relationship between oil prices, exchange rate, services export and ocean transport value added. The empirical findings indicate that growth rate of the crude oil prices has negative impact on ocean transport value added growth, and it can be traced that the oil industry has a strong influence on value creation in maritime clusters and their competitiveness, especially on the shipping sector. The analysis also sheds light on the impacts of relationship between environmental pollution and maritime cluster activity (through the validation of the EKC hypothesis in Norway). The current paper reveals that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions. The empirical evidences show that the links between CO2 emissions and ocean transport value added are more significant than with energy consumption indicator. It can be assumed that, due to the energy efficiency policy and technological leadership in the shipping industry, the environmental impact of energy use (renewable energy) has improved.

Agro-ecology is now considered as an alternative model to the industrial agricultural model. Faced with the limitations of conventional production models, agro-ecology is emerging today as a possible response to the challenges of the 21st century: food security, circularity, respect for the environment, and development of employment. More generally, the adoption of circular principles aims to decouple environmental pressure from agricultural productivism. Agro-ecology is a relevant research topic because it aims to ensure sustainable and resilient agricultural production, to empower local farmers, to protect the environment and to fight against climate change. This article focuses on the French Oasis projects, as part of the “Hummingbird movement” initiated by Pierre Rabhi, and which represent a successful agro-ecological experience, in economic, social and environmental terms. Different data were collected by compiling information available on the website of 76 Oasis projects across France: people living in the community; lodging possibilities; availability of a school; and direct relationship with local farmers. Then, a social factorial correspondence analysis and an environmental factorial correspondence analysis were realized to evaluate the impacts of environmental Oasis projects. The results show that profitable organizations seem to conduct more social and environmental activities in an agro-ecology context, and they put in place more actions than those who have no profitable aims.

The paper aims to highlight the status of the circular economy implementation in the EU and Ukraine, as well as to determine the advantages, challenges, opportunities and barriers to transition to circular supply chains. The main problems of waste management in Ukraine are explored, including faulty legislation, underinvestment, state policies and enlightenment regarding the circular economy, formal approach to the implementation of programs and strategies that should improve economic conditions, dominance of most waste-generative – extractive – industries in the economic structure of Ukraine. It is found out that the legislative framework for circular- and bio-economics in Ukraine does not meet the global challenges and requirements of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU and needs urgent improvement measures. Studying the EU experience allowed describing the advantages and challenges of a circular economy that emerge in Ukraine. The article presents a mathematical model aimed at describing the peculiarities of a circular economy in the countries with low and high levels of industrial ecologization as well as understanding conditions for resource conservation during production processes. An econometrical model of the correlation between the solid waste generation, GDP and capital investment into environmental protection in Ukraine is used to demonstrate the absence of the latter’s influence on the waste generation at the current technological level of the national industries. The research results allow developing recommendations for state policy for the industrial sector and environmental protection that may be implemented at the current stage to achieve Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

The article is devoted to the issues of forming the institutional basis for “green growth” of the Ukrainian Nature Reserve Fund territories in the context of aligning the society’s social, environmental, and economic interests. The methodological approaches to forming the institutional basis for “green growth” of the Ukrainian Nature Reserve Fund territories in conditions of the need to transform the approaches regarding the interaction with small and medium-sized businesses were developed. The main focus is on the issues of studying the existing institutional risks, institutional “traps,” and ensuring the stakeholders’ functional interaction. The proposed scheme for managing and planning the spatial development of the Nature Reserve Fund territories is based on business planning, “micro-K modeling” method, strategic monitoring method. Based on the complex combination of ecosystemic and polyfunctional approaches, the typology of Nature Reserve Fund territories management functions and “green growth” indicators system was defined. The institutional framework was formed, which enables to ensure aligning the society’s social, environmental, and economic interests.

The activities of forestry enterprises suffer from ecological and economic conflicts of interest that are long- and short-term in nature. As a result, productive forest stands are depleted and forest ecosystem sustainability is reduced. Therefore, this article is aimed at justifying recommendations to evaluate and ensure forest resource security. The article also defines the essence of forest resource security as qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the forest fund that ensure the desired level of economic efficiency of the forestry subject to rational use of forest resources, maintaining the quality of the forest ecosystem and performing all other functions of the forest.
Based on the functional and process approach, the methodology of forest-resource safety assessment has been developed, which considers main features of forestry activities and provides for the definition of an integral index of forest resource security as the sum of three groups of indices. The methodology was tested in the context of four forestry enterprises of Volyn and Rivne regions (Ukraine). The results reveal a high level of forest resource security. However, the study identified many problems and, on that basis, the proposals were made to improve forestry practical activities. The results obtained can be considered as the basis for developing environmental policy and taking current and strategic management decisions to ensure the sustainable development of forestry enterprises.

The article analyzes the need to transfer the environmental innovations effectively in the system “enterprise-region-state” and to establish the relevant innovative changes promotion channels for the country’s sustainable development. The authors study this problem in the context of priority directions of UNO Sustainable Development Strategy and Sustainable Development Strategy “Ukraine – 2020”. Its solution is a key factor of influence on Ukraine’s economic growth and security. The study is based on methods for defining the influence of national economy innovative activity on the choice of relevant ecological modernization state regulation channels for sustainable development. FCM analysis was used for the study. Six groups of instruments were defined and characterized depending on the influence on sustainable development subjects. The system of instruments was formed, and the approach towards making the managerial decisions in order to ensure Ukraine’s national economy sustainable development was proposed. Practical value of the obtained results is that the established relevant channels can ensure the fastest reaction of business environment to state regulatory impact, which is the main constituent of state administration and sustainable development processes regulation system.