Description: Two thirds of today's world trade is based on global value chains and supply networks. Purely regional supply chains have become less important in recent decades. The effects of these globalised structures are manifold. On the one hand, they promote employment and generate prosperity. On the other hand, they are beset by extreme social, ecological and economic imbalances. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of existing supply chain systems. The lockdown continues to disrupt complex supply chains and many problems of existing production and consumption continue to worsen. COVID-19 is one example of the crises that can shake globally networked supply chains in the short term. Other crises, such as climate change, develop more insidiously and are less immediately recognisable. Different as they are, such crises have one thing in common: they highlight the vulnerability of global social and economic structures and illustrate the impact of global trade on the regions and people of the world. This is precisely where global sustainability strategy comes in - it aims to fundamentally reduce differences and inequalities in opportunities and quality of life. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the entire world into upheaval, creating an opportunity to make sustainability a central political resilience strategy. In the wake of the Corona pandemic, the discussion about resilient communities has flared up. In order to guarantee supply in the face of such crises, these should be more strongly regional and circular in their economic approach and global and sustainable in their perspective. The aim should be sustainable, transparent, non-exploitative supply chains that guarantee the security of supply to cover basic needs and public services despite sudden changes and crises. This discussion paper draws a future scenario of globally cooperative, circular regional economies that fundamentally reduce global inequalities in opportunities and quality of life, while at the same time permanently preserving the natural foundations of life.

Description: The food and agricultural sector will face numerous challenges in the next decades, arising from changing global production and consumption patterns, which currently go along with high resource use, causing ecological and socio-economic impacts. The aim of this paper is to illustrate and evaluate the practical applicability of the Hot Spot Analysis methodology in the context of supply chain management in companies. The HSA is a method to identify social and ecological problems along the entire life cycle of a product. Special emphasis is put on a customized implementation in the value chain beef of McDonald's Germany. The HSA of McDonald's beef value chain shows that the main ecological problems arise in the phase of raw material extraction, whereas the main social problems can be identified in the phase of slaughtering. Finally, the paper shows potentials and shortcomings of such a customized application and how the results can be implemented in the sustainability management of a company.

Description: The project "Plastic Credits - Financing the Transition to the Global Circular Economy" supports the implementation of a waste management structure in India's rural regions. By that it aims to improve the current waste collection and treatment structures in the pilot regions Goa, Maharashtra, and Kerala. Herein, the project focuses on low value plastics (LVP), and especially multi-layer plastics (MLP), that have no market value. In order to analyze the environmental impacts of the project, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was conducted. The considered environmental components comprise: greenhouse gas emissions, usage of primary resources, impacts on marine and terrestrial wildlife, standard of living, and economic costs.

Description: Businesses are under increasing pressure to improve the resource efficiency of their products and services. There is a need for practical tools that enable businesses to implement resource efficiency in their value chains. In this paper, a mixed-method approach for assessing the life-cycle-wide use of natural resources in products and services is applied in a case study on a coffee value chain of the company Mars Incorporated. Material inputs along the entire chain were assessed quantitatively using the Material Input Per unit of Service method, while a semi-quantitative Hot Spot Analysis was performed to identify environmental hot spots. This mixed-method approach has been implemented for the first time in practice to assess the value-chain-wide resource consumption and environmental impacts within a specific value chain of Mars Incorporated. The paper concludes that combining the methods provides better insights into the value chain than using just one of either of the methods alone. For the company, the approach has proven to be practicable because it identifies improvement options and their value-chain-wide resource efficiency potential.

Description: Energy performance contracting (EPC) as a market instrument has been effective in promoting energy efficiency worldwide, but it has encountered many insurmountable obstacles in rural energy management. In this study, based on the characteristics of energy management in rural areas, three EPC modes are designed and tested in 24,000 rural households. The test results show that two adapted EPC modes of local government involvement and energy payment directly from the national grid can effectively overcome the barriers encountered in the traditional EPC modes and work well under the economic and social environmental conditions in rural areas. The key to the adaptation of the traditional EPC modes is the introduction of the local government as the third party. Participation of the third party can effectively reduce and remove the barriers and risks and increase the mutual trust between the clients (households) and the energy service companies (ESCOs). Based on the testing results, this study suggests that governmental departments should formulate relevant EPC policies and technical guidelines within the rural context. This research recommends that farmers should not manage their energy services by themselves and it is suggested to out-contracting ESCOs by applying the modes developed and tested by this paper.

Description: Transnational corporations' (TNCs) economic operations cover numerous countries and can be diverted between several continents. These units have reached a level of significance, having not only economic, but also social and environmental implications. This justifies that they shall be treated separately as a social phenomenon, when considering strategies for the development towards sustainability. This paper presents the concept of Responsible Corporate Governance (RCG), as a strategy to "govern" TNCs. RCG is suggested as a stakeholder based policy instrument, which aims at allocating responsibilities to societal actors aiming at corporate accountability. RCG recognises that the process of societal change is strongly based on what can be called as bottom up-processes. Learning processes take place through the interaction of the different societal members, which eventually leads to macro changes. Therefore, governing TNCs towards sustainability improvements is considered to be a collective process including all stakeholders. Firstly, the paper places the concept of RCG in the ongoing debate of political modernization based on the fact that society develops overtime and the political system must correspondingly modernize. In this context, political overload developed as a consequence of increased resource interdependencies is explained and as a resolution, network approach is discussed. Secondly, demands on the orientation of the TNCs in terms of accountability and innovative action are brought forward. Here, the paper also lists down corporate elements (stakeholder empowered corporate governance, management and performance evaluation systems, transparency enhancement and accountability verification), which need to be in place to attain an accountable orientation in the society. Following, using an analytical framework, the orientation and capabilities of each societal actor (environmental non-governmental organisations, financial institutions, intergovernmental organisations) to affect improvements in the corporate responsibility elements are investigated and recommendations for their effective orientation are listed.

Description: In this paper, we aim to present a comprehensive analysis on the emerging phenomenon of distributed innovation in commons-based peer production (CBPP) platforms. Starting with the exploration of the widely held belief on value-creation confined to industrial settings, we raise several questions regarding the feasibility of, and a need for, an inclusive innovation process that can tap grassroots capacity into both traditional (industrial research and development) and emerging (peer-to-peer) innovation models to yield sustainable solutions. In particular, we explore the emergence and structuration of digital innovations in the maker movement, as it presents an alternative construct of innovation wherein access to and sharing of knowledge is predominantly distributed. With innovation outcomes often freely revealed, its very structuration could pose a principal challenge to our conceptualizations of value creation and competitive advantage in the current economic model. Drawing from responses received from 200 collaborative innovation platforms, six semi‐structured interviews focusing on socio-technical innovation cases, as well as four in-depth narrative interviews with maker turned entrepreneurs, we present a detailed analysis on the topology of network, typology of actors, as well as the underlying innovation ecosystem in CBPP networks in Germany. In doing so, we contribute to the conceptualization of peer-to-peer distributed innovations in collaborative platforms.

Description: Tropical coastal benthic communities will change in species composition and relative dominance due to global (e.g., increasing water temperature) and local (e.g., increasing terrestrial influence due to land-based activity) stressors. This study aimed to gain insight into possible trajectories of coastal benthic assemblages in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, by studying coral reefs at varying distances from human activities and marine lakes with high turbidity in three temperature categories (〈31 °C, 31–32 °C, and 〉32 °C). The benthic community diversity and relative coverage of major benthic groups were quantified via replicate photo transects. The composition of benthic assemblages varied significantly among the reef and marine lake habitats. The marine lakes 〈31 °C contained hard coral, crustose coralline algae (CCA), and turf algae with coverages similar to those found in the coral reefs (17.4–18.8% hard coral, 3.5–26.3% CCA, and 15–15.5% turf algae, respectively), while the higher temperature marine lakes (31–32 °C and 〉32 °C) did not harbor hard coral or CCA. Benthic composition in the reefs was significantly influenced by geographic distance among sites but not by human activity or depth. Benthic composition in the marine lakes appeared to be structured by temperature, salinity, and degree of connection to the adjacent sea. Our results suggest that beyond a certain temperature (〉31 °C), benthic communities shift away from coral dominance, but new outcomes of assemblages can be highly distinct, with a possible varied dominance of macroalgae, benthic cyanobacterial mats, or filter feeders such as bivalves and tubeworms. This study illustrates the possible use of marine lake model systems to gain insight into shifts in the benthic community structure of tropical coastal ecosystems if hard corals are no longer dominant.

Description: The evolution of the Pontocaspian lakes and seas (Caspian Sea, Black Sea, Aral Sea) is characterised by major changes in water levels, which developed into a pulsating system of connected and isolated basins. During the late Quaternary (Late Pleistocene and Holocene), these basins have hosted a unique endemic biodiversity that experienced species turnover events. There are indications that the Pontocaspian species diversity is now in demise because of anthropogenic modifications of the ecosystem, such as habitat alteration, poaching, pollution and invasive species. Little data is available on faunal changes and resilience of Pontocaspian species to help discerning the effect of natural drivers and anthropogenic drivers on the endemic fauna, which is of direct relevance for conservation strategies. \nThis thesis aims to characterize species richness and abundance of fossil faunas to establish a baseline for comparison with the changing biodiversity of today. Mollusc species are used as the study group as they easily fossilize and are abundant in the geological record. They inform us about the composition of communities and how they change, and enable us to reconstruct environments (\xe2\x80\x98habitats\xe2\x80\x99). This is necessary in order to compare biodiversity through different time intervals and establish whether comparable habitats existed as those of today. A baseline of Pontocaspian mollusc faunas was achieved by analysing snapshots from the Caspian Sea basin and the Black Sea basin. Caspian mollusc assemblages are analysed from late Pleistocene (corresponding to the late Khazarian, Hyrcanian, early Khvalynian and late Khvalynian regional stages) and pre-20th century Holocene (Novocaspian) assemblages. Black Sea assemblages from the late Neoeuxinian and late Holocene are described. They are both compared with modern day assemblages. \nThis study shows clear indications of a Pontocaspian mollusc diversity crisis. Overall, in the 20th\xe2\x80\x9321st century, Pontocaspian molluscs have experienced a severe decline in species richness and abundance: a strong turnover towards invasive species in the Caspian basin, a strong habitat decline in parts of the Black Sea basin and a total obliteration in the Aral basin. The late Quaternary mollusc fauna snapshots demonstrate that endemic species dominated the Caspian communities with minor contributions of native species until the late Holocene. The Pontocaspian mollusc species richness in the Caspian Sea basin is higher than in the Pontocaspian habitats of the Black Sea basin, or the Aral Sea basin. Throughout the Late Quaternary, the strong natural fluctuations of Caspian Sea level affected shallow water bivalve species of the genus Didacna, but barely changed the overall composition of the mollusc faunas. Late Quaternary mollusc fauna snapshots of the Black Sea basin show very little change in the Pontocaspian species community since humans impacted the habitats. However, the Black Sea Pontocaspian mollusc communities are currently under severe threat of habitat deterioration and destruction. \nThis research indicates that the Caspian Sea could act as a source for Pontocaspian biota, hence conservation efforts are imperative there. The deeper parts (〉50 m water depth) possibly present a (partial) refuge, and urgent research is required to assess these habitats and their faunas. Future research should focus on improving the taxonomic framework to elucidate the identity of some Pontocaspian cryptic and sister species. We need more distribution and ecological data of current Pontocaspian species and more detailed biodiversity time series coupled with detailed environmental proxies to assess the nature of the Pontocaspian biodiversity crisis more comprehensively and plan conservation actions accordingly.