We live in peculiar times: on the one hand, many people — mainly in Western countries — enjoy an unprecedentedly high standard of living from a historical perspective. On the other hand, a considerable part of the population has a feeling that something went wrong, which is underscored by...

The state of implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the European Union (EU) in the context of the EU framework governing business and human rights (B&HR) is worthy of consideration. This chapter follows the top-down approach: it explores the relevant EU legal and policy...

This book, through various differently oriented chapters, tries to give an insight on how the European Union and its multilevel model of governance must try to strike a balance between diverging interests and priorities. In particular, the EU and the European states (including the CoE's Members)...

While there is widespread agreement that climate change has negative implications for the enjoyment of human rights, it remains unclear in what circumstances State action associated with climate change amounts to a human rights violation. To unpack this question, this chapter analyses how the...

The future of corporate criminal liability in the U.S. and around the world may be for failure to adequately act on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. In Europe and elsewhere, courts have found a fundamental right or the equivalent to protection from climate change. That right...

This paper links the corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradigms to the sustainability agenda. The objective is to sharpen the strategic base of responsible behaviour in tourism enterprises. The design follows a comprehensive literature review about sustainable tourism from a hospitality...

We assess the feasibility, optimality, and policy implications of Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG)-linked or “green” lending in a credit market where banks incorporate such non-financial data in credit allocation decisions. We identify an asymmetric information problem:...

Sustainable finance refers to financial practices, policies, and interdisciplinary science, handling financial services, financial resources, financial decision-making, financial regulations, and the financial industry overall from sustainability perspectives by integrating environmental,...

This paper examines the current landscape of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing by focusing on environment. We analyze the discrepancies in ESG scoring methodologies among different rating agencies and demonstrate how these inconsistencies can lead to distorted investment...

Environmental disasters are thought to increase the focus on corporate sustainability in the communities where they occur. Extracting data on wildfires (a frequent type of disaster in the U.S.) and using ESG ratings and EPA air enforcement actions to construct measures of local corporate...