Environment, Enterprise and Development

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Environment, Enterprise and Development.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Environment, Enterprise and Development by Author "Weber, Olaf, professor"

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    Accounting for Risks: Identifying Water Risks in the Food and Beverage Industry Using an Ecosystem Services Benchmarking Framework
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-10-28) Saunders-Hogberg, Grace; Weber, Olaf, professor
    Global population growth and economic development has placed unprecedented demand for freshwater resources. However the supply of freshwater is becoming increasingly uncertain, due to the variability of the hydrological cycle, climate change and ecosystem degradation. This thesis questions the effectiveness of current sustainability frameworks in screening for material water risks. A new framework was developed based on an ecosystem perspective of water resources. The advantage of this approach is that it focuses on the valuation of water through the context of risk and encourages broader ecosystem perspective to managing those risks throughout the value chain and within a river basin. The study applied a mixed method approach to examine the interaction between Corporate Water Risk Management with general sustainability performance (using KLD Social Ratings) and with Corporate Financial Performance. A sample of sixty-one food and beverage firms was compiled from a universal database that combined data from the Compustat database and KLD (2012) Historical Summary. Their corporate disclosures were appraised using the Corporate Water Risk Management framework. Regression analysis showed significant and positive relationships with accounting performance measures but non-significant association with market measures. Firm size was shown to have a strong influence on the accounting performance correlations. For the market measures, it was determined that there are many factors influencing market values and thus more sophisticated models are required to isolate the relationship between CSP activities and market performance.
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    Comparing and Evaluating the Social Impact Assessment Reporting of Conventional and Social Banks
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-10-13) Folger-Laronde, Zachary; Weber, Olaf, professor
    The purpose of this mixed-method thesis was to assess the relationships between banking organizational characteristics and the quality of social impact assessments reported by conventional and social banks. Employing a multi-theoretical framework of legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory, the following characteristics were investigated in their relation to the quality of social impact assessments: bank type, bank size, net profit, and home country. Following a content analysis approach, the quality of assessments reported by banks, concerning their internal operations, philanthropic activities, and financing activities, were evaluated using an instrument based on the Impact Value Chain. Overall, the study found significant heterogeneity in the quality of disclosure among the three activity areas of the banks, with the assessment of internal operations being the highest quality reported. Also it appears that conventional banks face more pressures and demands to assess their impacts compared to social banks. Furthermore, for conventional banks, the variables of size and net profit showed to be determinants for social impact assessment quality. Conversely, the assessment behaviour of social banks were found to have no associations with the banking characteristics investigated. Overall, the findings of the assessment behaviour of conventional banks are generally in agreement with legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory, however these extant disclosure theories struggle at predicting the disclosure behaviour of social banks, likely because of their relatively small size. Moreover, the challenges inherent to measuring the indirect social impacts of philanthropic and financial activities appear to remain significant, further signalling for future research.