Vol. 6, No. 3 (2018): Regular Issue

This paper investigated the relationship between the climate change disclosure and the firms’ financial performance in the Indian context. The climate change disclosure scores assigned by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) survey to 44 participating Indian firms during 2011 to 2015 is being used to determine the extent of climate change disclosure. Further, Return on Equity (ROE) and Return on Assets (ROA) are being used to proxy the sample firms’ financial performance. After controlling for industry-and firm-specific ariables, we observed that the ROE will be higher for companies having higher environmental disclosure scores comparatively the companies having low environmental disclosure scores. Moreover, the results of the regression analysis revealed that the market rerceives the voluntary climate change disclosure as a positive corporate initiative, leading to significant positive regression coefficient. However, this study did not find any evidence to supports that the climate change disclosure affects ROA. These findings are crucial for managers and the investors to assess the economic consequences of voluntary environmental disclosures by the firms operating in emerging economies.

Cities play an important role in tackling climate change, as they consume close to 2/3 of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. To assess the effectiveness of urban energy conservation and carbon mitigation measures, a detailed Long Range Energy Alternatives Planning (LEAP) model is developed and applied to simulate a series of emission reduction measures. The developed LEAP model is also aimed at analyzing how these emission reduction measures change energy consumption and carbon emission from 2016 to 2050. Fifty scenarios were defined to describe the future energy strategies in relation to the development of Beijing city, including a ‘Business as Usual’ scenario, 42 sub-scenarios, 4 sectoral compound scenarios and 3 system compound emission reduction scenarios. The ‘Business as Usual’ scenario assumes that the government will do nothing to influence the long-term trends of urban energy demand. The 42 sub-scenarios reflect the effectiveness of singular measure including clean energy substitution, terminal technological innovation, industrial structural adjustment in three energy demand sector as well as external input of power scenario in transformation sector. Each singular measure has three A, B, C three levels, which represent different intensity of the measure. Sectoral compound scenarios show the integrated effectiveness of B-level measures which reflects the strength of the existing policy in each sector. The final effectiveness of all energy conservation and carbon mitigation measures of assorted level are presented in 3 system compound emission reduction scenarios. A further analysis of decoupling relationship between energy consumption and economy under system compound scenarios is discussed.

Cultural value is regarded as an important component of forest ecosystem services, which has been received great attention to a certain extent for the relevant research in recent years. In this study, taking Diebu County of Gansu Province in China as an example, the impact factors of Willingness to Pay (WTP) of forest cultural value is analyzed by adopting Logistic Regression Model (LRM) and Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), and the value of forest culture in Diebu County is estimated. The result shows that WTP of forest cultural value in Diebu County is rather low, the percentage of people who are willing to pay only accounts for 35.29% of total survey population. Impact factors ofWTP for cultural value mainly contain the education level, professional knowledge, personal income and so on, among which the impact of educational level for WTP is least, and the personal annual income is largest. In addition, the personal annual income is also the most prominent impact factor for not willing to pay for forest cultural value. Mean WTP per capita for forest cultural value of Diebu County is at the range between 18.96 RMB/a and 53.81 RMB/a. The results are calculated according to the population and number of the travelers in 2016. With the evaluation, forest cultural value of Diebu County is about between 8.2741 million RMB and 23.4390 million RMB in that year. The discussion is also raised according to relevant results in the research.

This study aims to analyze the influence of performance incentives, obedience pressures and ethical perceptions to audit judgment in auditors’ professional activities. Data collection was conducted by distributing questionnaires to auditors from public accounting firms in Indonesia. The result showed that the performance incentives increase the performance of audit judgment. The obedience pressures of auditors profoundly influenced the performance of audit judgment performance of auditors whereas the ethical perception has no effect on audit judgment. This study suggests that auditors should pay attention to auditing standards and professional codes of ethics, encourage auditors to be able to overcome the pressures and behave by the professional ethical standards. Therefore audit firms should provide performance incentives. Finally, the study shows that the Institute of Public Accountants Indonesia (IAPI) is expected to always conduct continuous professional education (PPL) for the audit profession in order to implement the audit standards and professional code of ethics.

Ecological interactions and their consequences to system evolution in the context of environmental disturbance are of special concern in ecological conservation since the environmental conditions have been changing so quickly in the past decades. Understanding how these interactions, particularly the indirect ones such as mimicry, could change prey variabilities in facing of predator loss is an interesting question. In this research, we incorporated Batesian mimicry into a three-species predator prey system to investigate the role of mimicry on regulating prey abundance when the system is suffering predator loss in various patterns. The Netlogo mimicry model was adopted to run the simulation experiments. We found that the timing of predator loss interacting with mimicry can induce significant difference in mimic prey’s abundance if partial predators were removed from the system. However, the variations of frequency of predator loss did not change the mimic prey’s abundance in all conditions. Our findings suggested that indirect interactions can change the final species composition on the long term evolutionary scale if environmental disturbances occur in the particular time window. This is the first report that addresses the question of how indirect interactions such as mimicry affects species bundance when environmental disturbance occurred. We expect that this finding could shed the light on conditions under which species and ecological balance can be better managed when environmental disturbances are inevitable to come.

In this paper, we account the emergy of 29 provinces in China in 2012 (excluding Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, andMacao due to lack of data) based on the application of the NEAD accounting framework at the provincial level. Based on the emergy-related data of 29 provinces in 2007, the emergy indicators of 2007 and 2012 are compared and analyzed. This study selected ESR, ED, EIR, and ESI, which can comprehensively represent the indicators of a province’s economic, social, environmental, and sustainable development. At the same time, we also use Pearson correlation to analyze the correlation between the four indicators and the three most primitive economic and social indicators (AREA, POPULATION, GDP) to derive the internal driving factors of the province. Comparing the correlation coefficient in two years can lead to changes in the internal driving factors of the province. We draw the following conclusions: (1) From 2007 to 2012, the resources development in the western region is remarkable, and the central and eastern regions have made some efforts on sustainable development on the basis of the better economic development. However, there is still a long way to go before the economic and environmental conflicts are resolved. There is still a lot of effort to reach the level of comprehensive sustainable development. (2) The larger the area, the stronger the sustainable development capability, and from 2007 to 2012, this trend has weakened. The greater the GDP, the weaker the capacity for sustainable development, but from 2007 to 2012, this trend has weakened. There is no obvious correlation between population and economy, society and sustainable development.

Gram staining is a widely used method for bacterial identification, where an alcohol burner is used as the fixed step, which requires a high level of proficiency, while the open flame is a potential fire hazard. A rapid, convenient and alternative method is also vailable that does not require a microscope or alcohol burner. This method utilizes the adsorption capacity of magnetic nanobeads. Ferriferous oxide beads are made by means of the co-precipitation method and adsorb bacteria in suspension liquid after being coated on the surface. The staining process omits the “heat” step and the need for a microscope, and distinguishes bacteria through the observation of the color of the liquid. According to our results, the behavior of this magnetic material performs well with various types of microbes. In particular, the color is clear and is easily distinguishable.

This paper deals with the study of a small scale wind turbine implementation for agricultural isolated location. Indeed, the electrification of these locations for industrial and agricultural requirements remains one of the largest current projects, especially when dealing with the use of sustainable sources such as solar, hydro and wind power. The main aim of this work is to validate the feasibility of using wind turbine in this location and to evaluate the performance of the excess energy storage capacity, which in this case is stored as water under the potential energy form. The study represented in this paper has been performed under the case of pumping water station using wind turbine in an isolated location at the north of Algeria, considering that this site fulfills the requirement of a favorable wind potential and a permanent water source. The design of the used wind turbine is based on the constraints of the climate data of the selected location and the lower cost of the implementation means, whereas, the water tank dimensions are is optimized with respect to the daily water consumption data and the available excess of energy to be stored and to be used later for water pumping during the period of wind absence.