Open Access

Essentials (Deutsche Version). Forschungsergebnisse III, Frankfurt, August 2022.

Abstract: English Environmental sustainability is one of the greatest challenges of this century. It depends on both compliance with environmental protection laws and its integration into directors’ decision-making beyond these laws. In this regard, the duty to promote the company’s success stipulates in the Companies Act 2006 that directors, who are protected by Business Judgment Rule, shall consider their companies’ environmental impacts. Since the stakeholders’ interests are regarded as a means to increase shareholder value, directors may pursue their companies’ environmental sustainability through a business case. The latest changes to the UK Corporate Governance Code 2018 further encourage directors to consider environmental sustainability in their business decisions. They may also link environmental sustainability to mandatory and voluntary disclosures through publishing their companies’ achievements. As a result, directors have broad discretion to pursue environmental sustainability beyond environmental protection laws. However, evidence shows that directors frequently neglect this discretion, the environmental sustainability’s resulting business case and that they even cause environmental damages to increase (the short-term) shareholder value. This is due to the social norm of shareholder primacy, which is now exacerbated by Brexit’s and the Ukraine war’s unclear economic impacts as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, the current approach of the UK’s company law in the predominant form of narrative reporting laws is insufficient because of the resulting greenwashing possibilities. This paper’s main argument is thus that changes to the current legal framework for directors’ decision-making are needed to achieve more environmental sustainability. Accordingly, a new principle for the UK Corporate Governance Code 2018 could lead to a greater consideration of environmental sustainability in directors’ decision-making and increased shareholder value in times of rising societal awareness of climate change and a growing trend towards environmental activist shareholders.

Poster

Abstract English Urban area tessellation is a crucial aspect in many spatial analyses. While regular tessellation methods, like square-grid or hexagon-grid, are suitable for addressing pure geometry problems, they cannot take the unique characteristics of different subareas into account. Irregular tessellation methods allow the border between the subareas to be defined more realistically based on the urban features like road network or POI data. This paper studies and compares five different tessellation methods: Squares, hexagons, adaptive squares, Voronoi diagrams, and city blocks. We explain how (open-source) POI data can be integrated into the tessellation process to build what we call “Local Geo-graphic Units” (POI-based tiles). These units are flexible and adaptable to the structure of the studied area and underlying data and could improve the performance of further analyses. The results of the various tessellation methods are demonstrated for the city of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. A simple clustering of Local Geographic Units for the studied city indicates that city blocks perform better than the other methods in the city segmentation in terms of reflecting the structure of this city. Abstract Deutsch Die Tessellierungen urbaner Gebiete ist ein entscheidender Aspekt bei räumlichen Analysen. Regelmäßige Tessellierungen, wie die Unterteilung in Quadrate oder Hexagons, eignen sich zwar für Probleme rein geometrischer Natur, berücksichtigen aber die Charakteristika der enthaltenen kleineren geographischen Einheiten nicht. Unregelmäßige Tessellierungen ermöglichen eine realitätsnahe Unterteilung basierend auf städtischen Merkmalen, wie dem Straßennetz oder POI-Daten. In diesem Beitrag werden fünf verschiedene Tessellierungsmethoden vorgestellt und verglichen: Quadrate, Hexagons, adaptive Quadrate, Voronoi-Diagramme und City-Blocks. Die Integration von (Open-Source) POI-Daten in den Tessellierungsprozess führt zu sogenannten „Lokalen Geographischen Einheiten“. Diese POI-basierten Einheiten sind flexibel und passen sich sowohl der Struktur des zu untersuchenden Gebiets, als auch der zugrundeliegenden Daten an und erlaube dadurch darauf aufbauende, detailliertere Analysen. Alle vorgestellten Tessellierungsmethoden werden an dem Beispiel Frankfurt am Main durchgeführt und präsentiert. Ein einfaches „Clustering“ der Lokalen Geographischen Einheiten zeigt, dass City-Blocks die Struktur der Stadt besser abbilden können, als die anderen vorgestellten Methoden.