Teresa de Noronha

How Corporations Deal with Reporting Sustainability: Assessment Using the Multicriteria Logistic Biplot Approach

This paper suggests a new methodology capable of accessing in detail the contribution of companies to countries’ sustainability related to economic performance. The concept of sustainability has been brought up in several debates, leading to a clearer understanding of its progress in recent decades. The most adequate indicators to achieve a unique value to define sustainability have been identified. However, specific behaviors of economic agents such as exist in particularly large organizations, have rarely been exposed and evaluated regarding their positive or negative contribution to the increase of sustainability throughout the world. This paper proposes an integrated approach incorporating an evaluation of the positive and negative contributions to sustainability by means of a logistic biplot application. This allows the creation of a summarized index that combines all single sustainability indicators. These synthetic indices allow the positioning of each of the companies in a geometric representation for an original exploration of the sustainability paradigm. The supplied method permits accessing and evaluating information concerning specific behaviors of economic agents such as big companies. In our paper, we have followed the engagements towards sustainability of big corporations, individually or as groups, across the different activity sectors in Portugal and Spain.

Sustainability in the trans-border regions? The case of Andalusia-Algarve.

The goal of this work is to detect the basic characteristics of the development of the southern border between Spain and Portugal. This trans-border area is described and analysed comparing the region of Algarve, in Portugal and the region of the County, in Huelva, Spain. The method used 15 quantitative indicators, desegregated at municipal level, obtained from different official sources and applied to 30 municipalities. The analysis includes multivariate statistic methods. The conclusions show that those indicators related to national governance systems are of utmost importance in the cluster classification. Furthermore, those municipalities with higher development levels are also less sustainable from the environmental point of view - this is probably due to the fact that tourism supports the fragile socio-economic systems in many of such regions. Significantly, the clustering tendencies show that the Portuguese municipalities are tourism oriented (or less tourism oriented) and the Spanish ones are agri-business (or less agribusiness oriented). Lastly, such geographic structures seem to have its roots in long term paths of development.

Conclusion: Resilience—What’s Next?

The previous chapters of this book did not explore the concept of resilience from the perspective of firms. Corporations, including small and medium-sized firms, are those to function as the real engines of the productive processes. They have been under extreme cost reduction policies due to great instability related to both medium-term severe technological change and numerous volatilities expected within the financial markets. To maximize potential cost reduction and mitigate loss, companies are obliged to add flexibility to their whole production process using salary reduction. It is predicted that continuous excessive downsizing will no longer be a sustainable solution for these issues.

Introduction: Resilience—Concepts and Geography

Resilience, like innovation, is a term that has been increasingly used in the most recent social research for growth and development. This introductive chapter visits the very elementary roots of the concept ‘resilience’ in order to better understand its original frontiers and boundaries in the fields of psychology.

An Exploratory Landscape Metrics Approach to Agricultural Changes: Applications of Spatial Economic Consequences for the Algarve, Portugal

Socio-economic growth and urban change have been an increasing concern for decision makers in recent decades. Led by the creation of new infrastructures to support economic activity, peri-urban areas have mostly become adversely affected and the consequences for the ecological but also the rural landscape have become a lasting concern. The monitoring and mapping of land-use change, especially in areas where urban change has been high, is crucial. The collision between traditional economic activities related to agriculture in tourist areas such as the Algarve and current demand for tourism infrastructures in urban regions is also leading to loss of economic activity. This paper uses a combined Geographical Information System approach with remote- sensing imagery and land cover databases to perform a Markov analysis for the purpose of quantifying changes in agricultural areas. The paper then expands on the nature of the agricultural changes observed, and offers a multi-temporal assessment by means of landscape metrics in order to understand the shifting land-use patterns for the Algarve in land use planning and regional economic equilibrium: (1) forest regions become transformed into agricultural areas and agricultural areas become urban; (2) areas which are initially agricultural become scattered residential regions created by economic investors; and (3) changes in the land-use have a cyclical nature in which in the course of the economic recession we may witness a shift in this effect brought about a decrease in tourism and focus on traditional sectors.