In this paper, we investigate the relationship between gender and environmental sustainability. Based on a sample of 296 firms, drawn from the population of US publicly traded firms over a five-year period, we empirically test whether firms that have (1) more gender diverse boards of directors and (2) more policies and practices that enable or reinforce gender diversity throughout the organization, adopted more environmentally responsible policies and practices. We find that both 'demographic' and 'structural' gender diversity are significant predictors of a firm's environmental sustainability initiatives. Our findings show gender diversity is a sustainability issue as well.

The holistic green energy transition of non-interconnected islands faces several challenges if all the energy sectors are included, i.e., electricity, heating/cooling, and mobility. On the one hand, the penetration of renewable energy systems (RES) is limited due to design restrictions with respect to the peak demand. On the other hand, energy-intensive heating and mobility sectors pose significant challenges and may be difficult to electrify. The focus of this study is on implementing a hybrid Wind–PV system on the non-interconnected island of Anafi (Greece) that utilizes surplus renewable energy production for both building heating through heat pumps and hydrogen generation. This comprehensive study aims to achieve a holistic green transition by addressing all three main sectors—electricity, heating, and transportation. The produced hydrogen is utilized to address the energy needs of the mobility sector (H2 mobility), focusing primarily on public transportation vehicles (buses) and secondarily on private vehicles. The overall RES production was modeled to be 91,724 MWh with a RES penetration of 84.68%. More than 40% of the produced electricity from RES was in the form of excess electricity that could be utilized for hydrogen generation. The modeled generated hydrogen was simulated to be more than 40 kg H2/day, which could cover all four bus routes of the island and approximately 200 cars for moderate use, i.e., traveled distances of less than 25 km/day for each vehicle.

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Emissions of greenhouse gases, the extraction of mineral resources and land use are three major pressures with global impact. More specifically, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) are of central importance to climate change. The extraction of mineral resources is the starting point of all abiotic material flows and determines the pressures which are related to the volume of work circle from the mining stage to manufacturing, final production, use, recycling and disposal. Land use, especially the change of land use, is significantly associated with the use of biomass for food and non-food purposes, the pressures on biodiversity and with the change and resilience of the ecosystem. In order to investigate the performance of socio-industrial metabolism that these parameters induce, their degree of decoupling from economic growth (decoupling indices (DI)) is studied.Certainly there are other factors related to the performance of socio-industrial metabolism and can cause adverse environmental impacts, such as water abstraction which AbstractThe current study is divided into two parts. Part I deals with the indices of resource and impact decoupling for 13 countries of the EU, for a period spanning from 1990 to 2011. Employing the major pressures, of GHG emissions, mineral resource extraction and land use, the different cases of relative/absolute and no decoupling are determined. Part II uses data envelopment analysis to determine the resource productivity index on the basis of the same sample of countries, over the same period of time. Resource productivity index attempts to quantify the simultaneous application and the interrelationships of decoupling indices. The index of the GDP is used as output, while the indices of material resources, land resources and GHG emissions are used as inputs. Then, the index of total factor productivity changes is decomposed into efficiency change and technical change, showing, respectively, whether the productivity gains come mainly from improvements in efficiency or are mainly the result of technological progress. Finally, the index of efficiency change is decomposed into pure efficiency and scale efficiency, showing, respectively, whether the major source of efficiency change comes mainly from improvements in pure technical efficiency or is mainly the result of an improvement in scale efficiency.

The island of Agios Efstratios is a unique case, since a pilot green energy transition program is taking place. Wind and solar photovoltaic technologies have seen tremendous growth during the past decade and various policy measures have been introduced in support of their growth. For the cases of islands that are not connected with the mainland grid the integration of renewable energy systems (RES) is a challenge, due to the variable performance for wind and solar. This study investigates the integration of electrolysis and fuel cells as a method to increase the penetration of RES in the isolated system of the island and to store hydrogen for other uses like green transportation. The software RETSCREEN was used for the analysis and the available excess energy from the renewables showed that it can support the operation of a 200 KW fuel cell system and the replacement of two small 90 KW diesel engines and would increase the overall RES penetration. At the same time, more than 20 tons of hydrogen could be stored annually for other uses.