Description / Table of Contents: Institutional Quality, ICT Infrastructure, Transportation and Sustainable Development: The Case of Lower-Income Countries -- Does globalization promote green growth? Empirical evidence from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries -- The causal relationship between globalization and income inequality in the world: Towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals -- Examining the long and short run asymmetric effects of climate change on food security in Tunisia -- Neoliberalism, Climate Risks, and Resilience-Building in the Caribbean -- A fuzzy approach to assessing progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Using Choquet Integral aggregation -- Underlying the Impact of Economic, Social, and Governance Adaptation on Poverty Reduction under the Shadow of External Financial Inflows – Panel estimation from the Sub-Saharan Region.

Description / Table of Contents: The Built Environment in the Context of the New Urban Agenda: An Overview -- The Built Environment as a Value Chain Process.-The Biophysical Environment: Key Ingredient in Shaping the Built Environment -- Geoinformatics and Land Surveying Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Spatial Planning Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Construction and Civil Engineering Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- The Role of architecture in implementing the New Urban Agenda -- Sustainable Urban Mobility and the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Quantity Surveying Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- A review of the contribution of the real estate sector towards the attainment of the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Institutions, Laws and Governance Structures for Developing and Managing the Built Environment: Elephant in the Room for Advancing the New Urban Agenda -- Climate Resilience and the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe: The Role of the Built Environment Disciplines and Practice -- The New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe: Policy and the Future .

Description / Table of Contents: - A review of balanced scorecard application in public hospital setting -- Critical Success Factors in Implementing Sustainable Business Models: The ITAL case -- Earnings Conference Calls’ Tone in Just Meet-Beat Firms: Evidence from the UK -- Economic Sustainability through IPSAS: A Global Perspective -- ESG Reporting: Impacts, Benefits and Challenges -- Green Marketing Strategies: Research Agenda for Sustainable Consumer Behavior and Corporate Responsibility -- Size as a Motive for Bank Window Dressing: Evidence from an Emerging Economy -- Strengths and Weaknesses of Integrated Reporting: A Comprehensive Literature Review -- The impact of Jordanian tourism website performance on online purchase intention: Review -- Sustainability in Education -- Outstanding Support for Students Becoming a Social Entrepreneurship Course -- Environmental orientation and sustainable innovation performance: The role of dynamic capabilities -- Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable Finance: A Scopus Based Bibliometric Analysis -- Shedding Light on the Link: Salient Stakeholder Theory and Sustainability Connections -- Accounting in the Digital Era: Does Big Data add value? -- Driving Sustainability Forward: Do Fintech and Digital Transformation Matter? -- Factors affecting big data analytics in Jordanian commercial banks -- Investigating Firm-Generated Content's Influence on Digital Marketing Effectiveness in Private Hospitals – A Jordanian Perspective -- Sustainability Practices within Fin-Tech Firms: A Literature Review -- The Impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) on Food Security in Jordan -- The moderating role of accountant’s capability on the relationship AIS and the quality of financial reporting: A literature review.

Description / Table of Contents: Quantifying species responses to the effects of changing environmental conditions is critical for a better understanding of how climate change affects invasion, expansion, and contraction of marine coastal species. Climate change is leading to modifications in the marine coastal environment, to conditions not experienced before; climate change results in that marine organisms experience simultaneous changes in several environmental variables (=drivers: e.g. temperature, salinity, food). How simultaneous changes in multiple drivers are experienced depend on species-specific traits (e.g. physiological tolerance, developmental time); for instance, co-occurring native and non-native species may experience and respond to climate change in different ways. In addition, within species, responses to multiple drivers may vary across populations and environmental gradients. The general objective of this thesis was to quantify the effects of environmental drivers (temperature, salinity and food limitation) on performance of native and non-native species with focus on larval stages and using crabs as model systems. There were two main objectives, first to compare native and non-native species in the responses to multiple environmental drivers and to quantify larval responses to temperature across their distribution range. I focused on larvae because they play a critical role in population dynamics: larvae are important for the dispersion and connectivity of populations, and are more sensitive to changes in environmental conditions than adults. I used three ecologically relevant species of coastal areas of the North Sea and North Atlantic Ocean as models: Hemigrapsus sanguineus, Carcinus maenas and Hemigrapsus takanoi. C. maenas is native to Europe; Hemigrapsus spp. are both non-native species in the European coast, where they coexist with C. maenas as juveniles and adults in the benthos. I used factorial experiments rearing larvae from hatching to megalopae at different combinations of temperature and other environmental drivers (salinity, food limitation). Larval performance was quantified as survival, duration of development, and growth. The first series of result show that both non-native (Hemigrapsus spp) species had higher performance (high survival, shorter duration of development and high growth rates) than the native C. maenas at higher temperatures and at moderately low salinities (18 – 24 °C, 20 – 25 ‰). These results are comparable to another non-native species in Europe, the Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis. In H. sanguineus, larvae show moderate level of tolerance to limited access to food at high temperature, which contrasted to the low tolerance shown in native C. maenas. Experiments and modelling show that the nature of the multiple driver response depends strongly on the metric used to measure time, where my emphasis is on biological time (time to metamorphosis). The results from the populations comparisons showed species and gradient-specific responses. For H. takanoi, distributed over a salinity gradient (North Sea -Baltic Sea), larvae from the North Sea populations always showed higher survival and faster development compared with those from the Baltic Sea. The population near the limit of the distribution showed very low survival, suggesting that subsidies or complex ontogenetic migration patterns are needed for population persistence. Results did not show genetic differentiation among the studied populations in the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit one gene (COI) suggesting that there is high connectivity among populations. For C. maenas distributed across a latitudinal gradient (South: Vigo, Spain; North: Bergen and Trondheim, Norway) and reared under different temperatures (range 6 to 27 °C in steps of 3 °C), there was little variation in survival and growth among populations. However, larvae from the Norwegian populations had a slightly shorter duration of development at low temperatures than those from Vigo, this response has an adaptive value in that it could sustain survival in scenarios of reduced temperature, by shortening the larval phase, when mortality rates are high. Besides, results from this experiment (as well as for the mentioned above) showed high intrapopulation variability in larval performance which has a potential to affect range expansion of the above-mentioned species. Variation in the responses of larval stages to the effects of different environmental drivers highlights the importance of using physiological descriptors to quantify the performance of marine invertebrates to changing environments. Larval responses vary in rates of survival but also in the duration of time to achieve metamorphosis, as well as the rate at which the organisms grow, with concomitant effects on post-metamorphic success, which in seasonal habitats may strongly depend on temperature. The results from the thesis highlight the importance of quantifying the responses of marine invertebrates to changing environmental conditions, considering different species and species distributed across different gradients as well as variations among and within species.