Barriers to institutional social sustainability.

Social sustainability is a work field characterised by an emphasis on social aspects, e.g. equity, ethics, health, gender balance, or empowerment, within a broader sustainability context. Although the concept seems to be reasonably well established and deemed worthy of pursuing, some obstacles prevent its wide dissemination. Through a bibliometric analysis focusing on the literature on social sustainability at institutions, with a focus on companies, this paper aims to investigate and describe some of the barriers associated with social sustainability implementation. Apart from identifying that sustainability reporting, environmental disclosure and financial performance play a central role in successfully achieving social sustainability, in the context of which gender-related issues seem more tangential, the results indicated some solutions commonly reported for overcoming barriers and obstacles to a company's social sustainability implementation within different sectors. These solutions have to do, among many other factors addressed in this study, with strengthening communication transparency and trust, contributing to awareness, using technology to document and promote social sustainability. Thus, empowering organizations and citizens, recognized as essential factors to social development, and addressing the challenges in a multi-dimensional way.

The influences of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainable consumption: an international study.

Background: Sustainable production and consumption are two important issues, which mutually interact. Whereas individuals have little direct influence on the former, they can play a key role on the latter. This paper describes the subject matter of sustainable consumption and outlines its key features. It also describes some international initiatives in this field. Results: By means of an international survey, the study explores the emphasis given to sustainable consumption during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the degree of preparedness in individuals to engage in the purchase of green and sustainably manufactured products. The main results indicate that the pandemic offered an opportunity to promote sustainable consumption; nevertheless, the pandemic alone cannot be regarded as a 'game changer' in this topic. Conclusions: Apart from an online survey with responses from 31 countries, which makes it one of the most representative studies on the topic, a logit model was used to analyse the main variables that affect the probability of pro-environmental consumption behaviour because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper lists some of the technological and social innovations that may be needed, so as to guide more sustainable consumption patterns in a post-pandemic world.

COVID-19: the impact of a global crisis on sustainable development teaching.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis, one which also influences the ways sustainability is being taught at universities. This paper undertakes an analysis of the extent to which COVID-19 as a whole and the lockdown it triggered in particular, which has led to the suspension of presence-based teaching in universities worldwide and influenced teaching on matters related to sustainable development. By means of a worldwide survey involving higher education institutions across all continents, the study has identified a number of patterns, trends and problems. The results from the study show that the epidemic has significantly affected teaching practices. The lockdowns have led to a surge in the use of on-line communication tools as a partial replacement to normal lessons. In addition, many faculty teaching sustainability in higher education have strong competencies in digital literacy. The sampled higher education educations have-as a whole-adequate infrastructure to continue to teach during the lockdowns. Finally, the majority of the sample revealed that they miss the interactions via direct face-to-face student engagement, which is deemed as necessary for the effective teaching of sustainability content. The implications of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, it describes how sustainability teaching on sustainable development has been affected by the lockdown. Secondly, it describes some of the solutions deployed to overcome the problem. Finally, the paper outlines the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic may serve the purpose of showing how university teaching on sustainability may be improved in the future, taking more advantage of modern information technologies.