This research leads to investigate the response of French companies through their corporate sustainability policies as a result of the different types of pressure that stakeholders can bring. The influence of stakeholders is increasingly significant towards ethical and environmental issues. Stakeholders do not hesitate to set up actions to make themselves heard. Social and environmental concerns facing this polluting industry make food companies exposed to more and more pressures that they must manage.  The academic literature necessary for the understanding of this study was carefully selected from online academic libraries. The literature review defined the objective of balancing Profit, People and Planet in corporate sustainability policies and its implementation through the Triple Bottom Line model. Also, the pressure groups are defined according to the academic literature and associated with Freeman's theory on stakeholders. This literature was coupled with collected primary data. Interviews were conducted with three French companies of different sizes to guarantee a realistic representation of the market. The interest of the inductive method used is to be able to apply the observations made on a larger scale.   The results obtained are grouped under five themes to facilitate their identification: Quality, Ethics, Environment, Consumer's power, and Well-Being. Under each of these themes, one or more stakeholders exert pressures to achieve the same objective. The strategies adopted by companies vary according to the type of pressure they face. Each company adapts its corporate sustainability policies to the pressures according to its size. Large companies will be better resourced than small ones. All corporate actions have two objectives: the satisfaction of their stakeholders and the improvement of the company in terms of sustainability.   This thesis contributes to the Stakeholder's theory and Triple Bottom Line model. The combination of these two theories is essential to explain the two converging phenomena of this thesis: pressures and sustainable responses.

<p>Economics is about the management of scare resources. In agricultural production, water stress and excess heat are the main constraints. The three essays of this dissertation try to improve our understandings of how climate and water resources interact with agricultural markets, and how global changes in agricultural markets may affect water resources. I construct empirical and simulation models to explain the interplay between agriculture and water. These models integrate economic theories with environmental sciences to analyze the hydroclimatic and economic information at different geospatial scales in a changing climate. </p> <p>In the first essay, I illustrate how irrigation, as a potential adaptation channel, can reduce the volatility of crop yields and year-on-year variations caused by the projected heat stress. This work includes estimation of yield response to climate variation for irrigated and rainfed crops; and global projections of change in the mean and the variation of crop yields. I use my estimated response function to project future yield variations using NASA NEX-GDDP climate data. I show that the impact of heat stress on rainfed corn is around twice as big as irrigated practices. </p> <p>In the second essay, I establish a framework for estimating the value of soil moisture for rainfed production. This framework is an extension of Schlenker and Roberts (2009) model enabled by the detailed soil moisture information available from the Water Balance Model (WBM). An important contribution is the introduction of a cumulative yield production function considering the daily interaction of heat and soil moisture. I use this framework to investigate the impacts of soil moisture on corn yields in the United States. However, this framework can be used for the valuation of other ecosystem services at daily basis.</p> <p>In the third essay, I have constructed a model that explains how the global market economy interacts with local land and water resources. This helps us to broaden the scope of global to local analysis of systems sustainability. I have employed SIMPLE-G-W (a Simplified International Model of agricultural Prices, Land use, and the Environment- Gridded Water version) to explain the reallocation across regions. The model is based on a cost minimization behavior for irrigation technology choice for around 75,000 grid cells in the United States constrained by water rights, water availability, and quasi-irreversibility of groundwater supply. This model is used to examine the vulnerability of US land and water resources from global changes.</p>