International spillover effects in the EU's textile supply chains: A global SDG assessment

Carbon and social impacts in the EU's consumption of fossil and mineral raw materials

Fossil and mineral raw materials cause unintended and detrimental environmental and social impacts via extraction, production and combustion processes. In this study, we analyse how consumer demand in the European Union (EU) drives environmental and social impacts in mining sectors worldwide. We employ multi-regional input-output analysis to quantify positive (i.e., income, female and male employment) and negative (greenhouse gas emissions, accidents at work, and modern slavery) impacts of raw materials. We trace these environmental and social impacts across the EU's trading partners to identify sectoral and regional hotspots of international spillovers embodied in the EU's consumer demand. We estimate that the EU's consumption is associated with significant spillover impacts primarily in Central Asia, Asia Pacific, and Africa. We contextualise these results within a three-pillar framework to highlight the importance of a comprehensive and partnership-based approach to curbing environmental and social spillovers embodied in the EU's consumption of raw materials. Specifically, we highlight three potential practical policy strategies: leveraging EU domestic instruments and regulations, strengthening the Green Deal and SDG diplomacy and financing, and promoting responsible consumption, recycling and innovation. Our results underline the need for further reforms in mining industries and trade policies to reduce adverse social and environmental impacts.

Global transboundary synergies and trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals from an integrated sustainability perspective

Domestic attempts to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a country can have synergistic and/or trade-off effects on the advancement of SDGs in other countries. Transboundary SDG interactions can be delivered through various transmission channels (e.g., trade, river flow, ocean currents, and air flow). This study quantified the transboundary interactions through these channels between 768 pairs of SDG indicators. The results showed that although high income countries only comprised 14.18% of the global population, they contributed considerably to total SDG interactions worldwide (60.60%). Transboundary synergistic effects via international trade were 14.94% more pronounced with trade partners outside their immediate geographic vicinity than with neighbouring ones. Conversely, nature-caused flows (including river flow, ocean currents, and air flow) resulted in 39.29% stronger transboundary synergistic effects among neighboring countries compared to non-neighboring ones. To facilitate the achievement of SDGs worldwide, it is essential to enhance collaboration among countries and leverage transboundary synergies.

Sustainable Development Goals for Textiles and Fashion

In this paper, each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is discussed in the context of textiles and fashion. The necessity of collaborative efforts is accentuated to overcome the climate crisis and human health concerns encountered by the textiles and fashion industry. The concerns over poverty faced by cotton farmers, soil depletion, and toxicity to aquatic life due to microfibres and heavy metals are presented. The paper underlines numerous corrective practises such as the utilisation of African Organic Cotton, Better Initiative Cotton, and others that could enable curtailing poverty and hunger. The requirement for a more corporate and socially responsible textiles and fashion business that would propel SDGs is described with inspiring examples of Inditex, Culthread, Saint Basics, Flamingo's Life, etcetera. More, the greenwashing and ardent necessity of transparency across the fashion value chain is emphasised herein. The importance of reducing inequalities and working in partnership for innovation and justice is highlighted such as apple leather, algal foam, and others. Even more, the production waste and landfill disputes are reviewed. Eventually, the paper concludes with an appeal for mindful and diligent efforts from textiles and fashion consumers, designers, manufacturers, and traders to continually adapt to SDGs even after 2030 as there is no planet B. Also, abiding by the laws of nature as listed herein is found to be the key to reaching SDGs.

COVID-19 and sustainable development goals: A bibliometric analysis and SWOT analysis in Malaysian context

The COVID-19 crisis has been a core threat to the lives of billions of individuals over the world. The COVID-19 crisis has influenced governments' aims to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); leading to exceptional conditions of fragility, poverty, job loss, and hunger all over the world. This study aims to investigate the current studies that concentrate on the COVID-19 crisis and its implications on SDGs using a bibliometric analysis approach. The study also deployed the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) approach to perform a systematic analysis of the SDGs, with an emphasis on the COVID-19 crisis impact on Malaysia. The results of the study indicated the unprecedented obstacles faced by countries to meet the UN's SDGs in terms of implementation, coordination, trade-off decisions, and regional issues. The study also stressed the impact of COVID-19 on the implementation of the SDGs focusing on the income, education, and health aspects. The outcomes highlighted the emerging opportunities of the crisis that include an improvement in the health sector, the adoption of online modes in education, the swift digital transformation, and the global focus on environmental issues. Our study demonstrated that, in the post-crisis time, the ratio of citizens in poverty could grow up more than the current national stated values. We stressed the need to design an international agreement to reconsider the implementation of SDGs, among which, are strategic schemes to identify vital and appropriate policies.

SDG-Oriented Supply Chains: Business Practices for Procurement and Distribution

This paper aims at analyzing sustainable practices that can be implemented within supply chains, linking them to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to show the performance achieved by SDG-oriented supply chains. Sustainable practices were collected from the repository “Business Process Framework for Sustainability” owned by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salerno (Italy). By using literature research and descriptive statistics, there emerges a positive relationship between sustainable development and SC performance enhancement. From the study of the practices that can be implemented for cooperation activities with upstream and downstream supply chain partners, it emerges that companies have many opportunities of both supporting the 2030 Agenda and enhancing their market and organizational performance. The research demonstrates that both procurement and distribution processes could be reengineered by implementing sustainable approaches considering all three dimensions of sustainability. Differences emerge in terms of number of opportunities, depending on motivations for implementing them, industry and supply chain processes, performance achieved, and SDGs pursued.

Integration of CSR and SDG in creating added value of the textile industry

Socially responsible business entities (CSR) have reoriented their CSR initiatives towards environmental and social management. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are newer strategic tools that focus on addressing sustainability issues arising from increased production, consumption and disposal. Sustainability will be the most important directive in the near future, therefore, this paper aims to examine the cohesiveness between current CSR initiatives in the fashion and textile sector and the prescribed SDGs. The paper further highlights a case study of good practice of a clothing factory in the Republic of Serbia, which incorporates CSR and SDG above the prescribed regulations. The conclusions in this paper suggest several future research directions.

Analyzing driving forces of China's carbon emissions from 1997 to 2040 and the potential emission reduction path: through decomposition and scenario analysis

Energy and environmental policies are important methods for the government to restrain carbon emissions growth. Identifying the potential dynamic trends of China's carbon emissions under different scenarios has important reference significance for the government's policy implementation. This paper firstly predicted China's carbon emissions from 2017 to 2040 based on three energy transition scenarios at the industrial level. Then, Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index decomposition model was applied to evaluate the driving forces of emissions changes during 1997-2040. Finally, the Spatial-Temporal Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index model was used to explore the emissions reduction potential and the potential reduction path at provincial level. The results showed that (1) as the reduction in energy intensity cannot offset the growth of industrial scale, the carbon emissions of all industries have shown an increasing trend from 1997 to 2017; (2) In the current policies scenario, China's carbon emissions cannot reach the peak before 2040. And only in the sustainable development scenario, the carbon emissions of the three industries will all reach the peaks before 2030. And the development of non-fossil energy will reduce carbon emissions by more than 30%; (3) Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Heilongjiang are key provinces and improving energy efficiency of the secondary industry is a potential way to promote carbon emissions reduction.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

The framework and main content of this paper.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10098-021-02240-7.