The Dutch SDG Barometer 2024 reveals a nuanced perspective on sustainability progress in the Netherlands. While awareness of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remains high among Dutch organizations, significant challenges persist in their prioritization, implementation and measurement.This second edition of the SDG Barometer, developed collaboratively by Amsterdam School of International Business (AMSIB), Maastricht School of Management (MSM), and TIAS School for Business and Society, builds on its 2022 debut. It provides valuable insights into the adoption of the SDGs, showcasing both encouraging trends and persistent barriers as the 2030 deadline approaches. Key Findings from the Dutch SDG Barometer 20241.Sustainability Awareness: Nearly 70% of organizations in the Netherlands claim to prioritize sustainability, a steady trend from 2022. However, only 15% have fully integrated SDGs into their sustainability strategies.2.Framework Competition: While the SDG framework remains widely used, mandatory EU guidelines such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are starting to surpass the SDGs in usage, raising concerns about a ‘crowding-out effect.’3.Obstacles Persist: Resource constraints and knowledge gaps remain the top barriers to SDG implementation, though awareness and understanding of the goals have improved since 2022.4.Communication Decline: The number of organizations not communicating internally (31%) or externally (30%) about their SDG efforts has risen sharply, reflecting a potential de-prioritization.5.Government Role: A majority of respondents (55%) believe government support for SDG adoption is insufficient, while a consistent 80% of organizations agree that the government should play an active role in encouraging SDG adoption.6.Sectoral Insights: Educational institutions lead in SDG awareness, while not-for-profits and governmental bodies show varying levels of alignment. Corporate participation, though significant, often lacks depth in SDG integration.
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Electrification of transportation, communication, working and living continues worldwide. Televisions, telephones, servers are an important part of everyday life. These loads and most sustainable sources as well, have one thing in common: Direct Current. The Dutch research and educational programme ‘DC – road to its full potential’ studies the impact of feeding these appliances from a DC grid. An improvement in energy efficiency is expected, other benefits are unknown and practical considerations are needed to come to a proper comparison with an AC grid. This paper starts with a brief introduction of the programme and its first stages. These stages encompass firstly the commissioning, selection and implementation of a safe and user friendly testing facility, to compare performance of domestic appliances when powered with AC and DC. Secondly, the relationship between the DC-testing facility and existing modeling and simulation assignments is explained. Thirdly, first results are discussed in a broad sense. An improved energy efficiency of 3% to 5% is already demonstrated for domestic appliances. That opens up questions for the performance of a domestic DC system as a whole. The paper then ends with proposed minor changes in the programme and guidelines for future projects. These changes encompass further studying of domestic appliances for product-development purposes, leaving less means for new and costly high-power testing facilities. Possible gains are 1) material and component savings 2) simpler and cheaper exteriors 3) stable and safe in-house infrastructure 4) whilst combined with local sustainable generation. That is the road ahead. 10.1109/DUE.2014.6827758
Digitalization is the core component of future development in the 4.0 industrial era. It represents a powerful mechanism for enhancing the sustainable competitiveness of economies worldwide. Diverse triggering effects shape future digitalization trends. Thus, the main research goal in this study is to use sustainable competitiveness pillars (such as social, economic, environmental and energy) to evaluate international digitalization development. The proposed empirical model generates comprehensive knowledge of the sustainable competitiveness-digitalization nexus. For that purpose, a nonlinear regression has been applied on gathered annual data that consist of 33 European countries, ranging from 2010 to 2016. The dataset has been deployed using Bernoulli’s binominal distribution to derive training and testing samples and the entire analysis has been adjusted in that context. The empirical findings of artificial neural networks (ANN) suggest strong effects of the economic and energy use indicators on the digitalization progress. Nonlinear regression and ANN model summary report valuable results with a high degree of coefficient of determination (R2>0.9 for all models). Research findings state that the digitalization process is multidimensional and cannot be evaluated as an isolated phenomenon without incorporating other relevant factors that emerge in the environment. Indicators report the consumption of electrical energy in industry and households and GDP per capita to achieve the strongest effect.
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