Research have revealed that the accounting profession engage multi-disciplinary teams in the assurance of sustainability reports. However, how such teams are composed or the values that these teams bring to the assurance engagement process, and how reliance is established on the work performed by such teams has been left uncovered. This research sought to fill this gap, and hence, contributed to providing an understanding surrounding this issue. Semi-structured interviews with auditors from the Big Four Audit firms, engaged with performing sustainability assurance was conducted. The findings revealed that the engagement of multi-disciplinary teams, comprising both financial accountants and sustainability specialists from various disciplines, was necessary in ensuring quality assurance work performance. Firstly, the in-depth knowledge of sustainability subject matters possessed by the sustainability experts, enabled the questioning of the correctness of sustainability items reported by the clients. Secondly, sustainability experts were valuable in the planning stage of the engagement, in identifying client risk areas. Thirdly, sustainability expert involvement, enabled the winning of work contracts. Additionally, the engagement of multi-disciplinary teams was revealed to be valuable to the client firms. Firstly, the sustainability experts assisted clients in identifying the most valuable issues to report to their stakeholders. Secondly, due to the expert’s knowledge and experience, it enabled them to inform clients on high reporting levels. Finally, sustainability experts provided clients with valuable feedback that aids the improvement of the client processes, and the management of risks. The establishment of reliance on the work performed by the teams, requiring an accountant to signoff every engagement work performed by the team, as required by the applicable assurance standards, was partially supported by this study. Sustainability experts, who were non-accountants, was revealed to be engaged in this signing off ritual, hence, leaving room for the questioning of such assurance engagements signed off by sustainability experts.

This case study is dealing with a new city district in Uppsala and its potential for social interaction asking: how can visions regarding social development in Uppsala be implemented on the Field of Rosendal through its public spaces? The question is answered by using a territorial approach interviewing informants in the entire city being active in meeting places, concerning their view on social meetingplace and furthermore by analysing the zoning plan of the Rosendal area, mapping what public spaces that are planned, The study shows that Rosendal has great potential both in being in a strategic postition and having many types resources in the area, above all many green areas. The study however suggest that Rosendal needs to develop more public spaces with few threshholds such as limitating costs, opening hours and degree of specialisation of the place and safeguarding the cultural heritage that there is.

Due to health and climate change concerns, there is growing interest in a shift away from large-scale agricultural production towards a more localized, organic methodology. These practices help to preserve local ecosystems and require less energy than conventional farming. With this trend, a new form of community development is emerging. Developments that incorporate agriculture are a form of conservation development and have been in existence in their latest form in the United States for the past ten years. Most of the examples are located in the northern, eastern and western United States, including Vermont, Virginia, Illinois, Utah and Georgia. Why has this type of development not yet appeared in Texas? The purpose of this research is to identify the motivations behind creating these developments and to describe how they function, to identify the challenges in the development review process and how they were negotiated, to present a set of issues and lessons learned from the case studies about what matters to the development of a successful case and determine how this applies to potential Texas development. Is this a more sustainable model for development, as opposed to the traditional method for greenfield development? The research is aimed ultimately at exploring this newer type of development, determining whether it is more sustainable than traditional greenfield development and to present a set of issues and lessons drawn from the cases about what matters to the development of a successful case. / text

The population of Arizona has increased rapidly in the past two decades and faces an extreme shortage of urban affordable housing to accommodate for this population growth. There are several challenges facing the implementation of affordable housing in Downtown Phoenix including low-density development, high land costs, transportation issues, the current property tax structure, and infrastructure and environmental concerns. The City of Phoenix lacks the necessary policies and programs to encourage sustainable high-density development within the urban area. There are a large number of vacant parcels in the City which have either been passed over by previous development projects, or land which remains to be used from the demolition of older buildings. With the growing need for affordable housing, it is necessary to explore the opportunity to use the vacant land within the City of Phoenix for high-density infill development to include affordable housing. How can affordable housing contribute to making Phoenix a more sustainable city? High-density development creates affordability by increasing the number of housing units available in a given area. High-density is a necessary element in the transformation towards a more sustainable city not only by increasing affordability but also in connection with access to transportation and employment and efficient use of existing infrastructure. The opportunity for an increase in affordable housing within the larger sustainable development goals of urban Phoenix creates the need for an exploration of the relationship between high-density infill housing development and sustainability. / text

This paper will examine two cases where urban infill and sustainable neighborhood development converge: the Mueller redevelopment in Austin, Texas and the Stapleton redevelopment in Denver, Colorado. These projects represent significant efforts to develop sustainably in their respective cities, as well as provide prominent examples of New Urban development. The theoretical similarities between the neighborhood developments are many. However, which project does the better job of meeting the goals of sustainable urbanism? In order to address this question, the paper will begin by examining the theoretical framework of sustainable urbanism; a critical influence on both projects. The two projects will then be compared in order to assess how well they address critical goals of sustainable urbanism in practice. The comparison will be quantitatively measured using a sustainability indicators analysis in ArcGIS. The literature review will introduce the concept of sustainable urbanism. Neo-traditional development will then be examined in greater detail, with a focus on New Urbanism. From this literature, a common framework for sustainable urbanism is established. This framework will be used to arrive at a set of concrete goals for quantitative analysis. The paper identifies four goals of sustainable urbanism that will be measured: density, diversity, connectivity, and accessibility. The four critical objectives will be used to create a set of 12 spatial indicators for neighborhood sustainability. An analysis of the indicators will be calculated to compare the two sites. The paper looks to identify which of the two projects best meets the goals of sustainable urbanism. Finally, the report will examine the nuances of the projects in order to answer the question: what can the comparison can tell us about the future of the Mueller neighborhood? / text

The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies identifies nine current and critical issues facing the United States transportation sector: congestion, environmental preservation, deteriorating infrastructure, inadequate funding, social equity issues, susceptibility to natural disasters, insufficient safety improvements, outdated government institutions and a lack of investment in innovation. All of these issues directly threaten the sustainability of transportation in the United States. While numerous transportation stakeholders have presented definitions of sustainable transportation, there is significant variation and disagreement over what sustainability actually means in transportation. The absence of a coherent, universal definition has undermined the overall effectiveness of transportation plans, policies and programs, including the current federal highway authorization, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) as well as the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) program. Through examining the definitions of sustainable transportation put forth by the European Union, Transport Canada, the Transportation Research Board (TRB), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities and various state departments of transportation (DOTs), this report seeks to establish a clear definition of sustainable transportation, adopt applicable sustainable transportation indicators and offer meaningful recommendations that help strengthen the overall sustainability of MAP-21 and the CMAQ program. / text

Digital analytic tools offer great potential to enhance town and city planning. Software that facilitates the modeling of possible urban design future scenarios can help planners and stakeholders in a city simulate economic, ecological, and social impacts of urban design choices. The Envision Tomorrow analytic suite is a software program that has been used to enhance participatory, small-group urban planning exercises in the Sustainable Places Project in four small cities in central Texas. This suite features formula-based measurements that relate aspects of the built environment, such as parking ratios and land uses, to indicators related to sustainability impacts. These outcomes range from demographic and density characteristics of new planning scenarios to their effects on municipal budgets and household water and energy consumption. Envision Tomorrow is analyzed in terms of its use in the Sustainable Places Project. While the town scenarios designed in this process reflect strong sustainable design principles, process analysis and stakeholder interviews suggest that the analytic indicators did not have major impacts on the community design process itself. Software use should be combined with more focus on outreach and education efforts to make modeling more representative and effective. / text

Tension between water sustainability goals and continuing economic reliance on natural resource extraction poses challenges for accelerating water governance reform. Robust accountability mechanisms, as well as collaborative, watershed-scale approaches to water governance are needed to enhance decision-making processes and outcomes, especially where high-risk activities like mining exist. Existing scholarship has not adequately explored how to implement such governance principles in resource extraction contexts, where private actors, and particularly multi-national companies (MNCs), are often primarily responsible for community engagement, operations management, and watershed planning. Through empirical investigation in British Columbia’s Elk River Valley, this thesis investigates how one MNC shapes water governance at the watershed scale currently, and in turn, how their influence may affect key governance principles and approaches. Along with document analysis and participation in local conferences, interviews were conducted with community members, community-based organizations, local/regional governments, independent consultants, industry and provincial government staff, Indigenous Nation members and scientific advisors, and academic experts. Findings indicate that despite the presence of water quality contamination linked to mining, community-industry relationships are widely perceived as positive, and there are benefits related to the MNCs’ involvement in the watershed. This includes capacity building in a community-based water group, who is consequently regarded as making valuable contributions to water governance processes at multiple scales. Additionally, in response to the Indigenous Nations’ concerns and leadership, the MNC supported the development of a collaborative cumulative effects management initiative, which gained momentum and attracted government leadership. Findings also suggested that challenges remain for enhancing water governance outcomes when controls and accountability of a private actors’ high-risk activities are insufficient. I document how ‘social license to operate’ is vaguely operationalized and understood by watershed actors as an accountability principle. I argue that social license does not represent a meaningful accountability mechanism because it cannot guarantee efforts to improve ecological outcomes, and it is unclear whether and how its terms can be defined and enforced. This research contributes to the environmental and water governance literature by providing empirical evidence of new approaches to water governance in a resource extraction context. Considering that B.C. is in the midst of developing and implementing a new Water Sustainability Act, this research also provides practical lessons for policy-makers and practitioners who are exploring options for implementing alternative governance approaches. / Graduate / noverdui@uvic.ca

Background and problem: Strong barriers to incorporating sustainability into the strategic plan exist according to CFO Research in 2008, and there is clear difficulty in valuating effects that sustainability has on the whole value. This makes it interesting and important to study these issues in this thesis.   Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine and analyze how organizations could incorporate sustainability perspectives into the strategic plan by constructing standalone sustainability balanced scorecard, and get an understanding of what kind of critical aspects that should be taken into consideration while adopting a separate sustainability balanced scorecard.   Method: To achieve the purpose the authors have chosen to use a qualitative method and carried out interviews at Hilton Tokyo. The information obtained from the respondent is relevant in this study.   Conclusions: The adaptation of a separate sustainability management system to include sustainability has resulted in the growing realization by large companies such as Hilton. Sustainability is not only a human ethical responsibility, but it is also beneficial to the bottom line of the company who fully commits to it, which has been proved very well in this research. This analysis has demonstrated several ways in which social and environmental sustainability can be incorporated with the organizational strategic plan. The empirical evidence gathered from Hilton Tokyo helps to demonstrate that sustainability in a separate system works well to integrate with the Balanced Scorecard and has become an integral part of a company’s identity. Lastly, several considerable critical aspects while adopting a separate sustainability balanced scorecard have been analyzed and demonstrated.

<p> This study examines the environmental and economic effects of green information technology (IT). Green IT describes two sets of IT innovations: one set includes innovations that are implemented to reduce the environmental impact of IT services in organizations; and the other IT to reduce the environmental impact of other organizational processes. The two sets respond to the call for more environmentally friendly or &ldquo;greener&rdquo; organizational processes. </p><p> I developed and tested a preliminary model. The model applied the resource based view (RBV) of the firm (Wernerfelt 1984) the stakeholder theory (Freeman 1984) and included four constructs: (1) <i>BAS implementation; environmental value</i> conceived in a novel way as the conservation of electric energy in buildings; <i>economic value</i> -- from energy cost savings; and <i>BAS complements.</i> These four constructs formed three propositions: (1) <i>BAS implementation</i> is positively associated with <i> environmental value;</i> (2) <i>environmental value</i> is positively associated with <i>economic value;</i> and <i>BAS complements</i> moderate the relationship <i>BAS implementation </i> and <i>environmental value.</i></p><p> The model was used to guide the investigation of three research questions: 1. What are the environmental and economic values of green IT? 2. How do green IT create the above values? 3. Are other dimensions of value created? If so, what are they?</p><p> The focal IT investigated was the building automation system &ndash; a system designed to conserve electric energy and decrease operational costs. The unit of analysis of the study was the facilities management team &ndash; the implementers of the system.</p><p> I collected data on a sample of six diverse cases of BAS implementations. The cases were diverse in terms of the BAS types, the building purposes, the building locations and the building occupancy and management. Two types of BAS were involved in the study, each with a different level of artificial intelligence: the more intelligent BAS self-reconfigured when changes in setpoints, for example, were necessary; the less intelligent BAS must be reconfigured by an engineer in similar circumstances.</p><p> There was also diversity in terms of the buildings in which the systems were implemented and the occupancy and management of the buildings. The buildings include: the corporate headquarters of a global telecommunications firm; university classrooms; a residence hall in a university; and three multi-tenanted office complexes. The building occupancy and management differ in that some buildings are owner-occupied and are managed in-house, while the others are leased and their management outsourced.</p><p> Data collection involved recorded semi-structured interviews of three sets of users in the organizations: building engineers; chief engineers; and property/facilities managers. The interviews were prearranged and were conducted onsite using an interview protocol. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and was conducted in one session. The data were transcribed and analyzed in Nvivo 10.</p><p> The findings showed support for the presence of the four constructs within the preliminary model as well as for the three propositions in the preliminary model. The data also revealed contextual details of the <i>BAS implementation </i> and <i>BAS complements</i> constructs. There were also new dimensions value including: unanticipated types of economic value (including savings from reduced labor demand; social value (comfort and safety for building occupants); and <i>strategic value</i> (knowledge used to position the organizations for greater efficiency and effectiveness). Overall, the value outcomes of the implementations can be summarized as short term social, environmental and economic value as well as strategic value &ndash; consistent with the concept of <i>sustainable value</i> defined by Hart et al. (1995).</p><p> Also, consistent with Zuboff&rsquo;s (1985) description of the duality of intelligent IT systems -- the ability to <i>informate</i> and <i> automate,</i> the BAS implementation construct was found to include two distinct sources of value: <i>equipment automation;</i> and <i> equipment</i> information. The unanticipated value dimensions and types, as well as the sources of value were used to refine the research model.</p><p> The study therefore a preliminary theoretical model &ndash; the <i> resource based view of the sustainable organization</i> (RBV-SO) -- as well as contextual implementation details that can be used to guide future investigations of the value created by intelligent green IT systems such as the BAS, as well as measurement items that can be used to inform quantitative studies of these systems. The study also adds to the practical body of knowledge concerning green IT implementations in general and implementations of the BAS in particular, concerning: details of the information value &ndash; for example, for measuring the environmental impact of the system and for substantiating claims in the application for green funds available to organizations; and details of some key complementary resources that enhance value creation within the context.</p><p> Two major limitations of this study are: (1) a single coder was used in the analysis process and therefore no inter-coder reliability was established for the results; and (2) user perceptions rather than actual quantities were used to validate the findings.</p><p> Some future research prospects include: use of these findings to conduct a quantitative study of an intelligent system extended with, for example, investigation of the impact of external forces such as government regulations, environmental issue salience, and market forces on the value created by green IT (such as the BAS); and investigation of the impact over time of the development of the strategic capabilities enabled by the BAS on creation of value.</p>