Making a contribution to sustainable development through good corporate social responsibility presents businesses with a challenge, particularly in developing countries. This paper measures the sensitivity to corporate social responsibility amongst businesses operating in Bangladesh and Pakistan through a review of written policies of both listed local fi rms and multinational corporations operating there. We use the Global Compact supplemented by relevant parts of the Global Reporting Initiative Sustainability Reporting Guidelines to benchmark companies and countries. Signifi cant differences are found between local listed companies and multinational corporations. However, all companies are seen to be failing to engage with many aspects of corporate social responsibility related to sustainable development. Specifi c defi ciencies relate to anti-corruption, gender equality, child labor, community giving and the formal representation of workers. Few differences are found between the approaches taken by companies in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Given the development needs of the region we point to businesses being unwilling or unable to adopt suffi ciently robust corporate social responsibility and point to a role for both government and civil society.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the barriers inhibiting the adoption of green building and measures to promote this approach in Pakistan. Design/methodology/approach Barriers and measures were identified and examined by using a combination of research methods, including literature review, questionnaire survey, and in-depth interviews with the construction industry-related practitioners working in Pakistan. Ranking technique and factor analysis were used to identify the significant issues associated with the adoption of green building practices. Findings As per the survey results, the most critical barrier is “lack of awareness among people about the importance and advantages of adopting green building practices,” followed by “lack of incentives from government” and “lack of green building codes and regulations,” respectively. The results also indicate that most important measure to promote the adoption of green buildings is “creation of public awareness toward green initiatives through seminars, workshops, and discussions,” followed by “availability of green building codes and regulations (mandatory to apply)” and “financial incentives and penalties by the government (e.g. soft loan, tax) for promoting green building practices,” respectively. Research limitations/implications Research limitation is that its findings, other than Pakistan, cannot be generalized to other developing countries. Practical implications Findings of the research will be helpful in sensitizing the regulatory agencies, the policy makers, and the building construction practitioners about the barriers to adoption of green building practices. The suggested measures will help in devising policies and economic measures to promote the construction of green and environment-friendly buildings. Social implications This research will help the common people to know about the importance of green buildings that may lead to a deviation from the practice of traditional buildings to a widespread trend of building green buildings. This will lead to drastic reduction in demand for energy and considerable monetary savings for the common people. Originality/value The findings of this study are expected to contribute valuable information to decision makers for the better understanding of key issues that call for more attention in the promotion of efforts of green building practices in Pakistan. The results are based on the perception of local stakeholders, but might also be helpful for policy makers in other countries.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide information about the extent to which sustainability is integrated into business school education and learning in the Asia Pacific region. Design/methodology/approach -A survey was developed, and administered to business schools in the Asia Pacific region. In addition to measuring the number of courses and programs integrating sustainability, the study solicited qualitative observations by respondents, to provide information and insight into the issues. Findings -The research found that whereas corporate governance, sustainability and business ethics were quite commonly taught in business schools, they were not generally prioritized. There was also an overall lack of systematic approaches to the integration of sustainability in business curricula, and significant barriers to the integration of sustainability into programs remained. Originality/value -This is the first region-wide survey of sustainability in business education in the Asia Pacific region.

In compositional zero-shot learning, the goal is to recognize unseen compositions (e.g. old dog) of observed visual primitives states (e.g. old, cute) and objects (e.g. car, dog) in the training set. This is challenging because the same state can for example alter the visual appearance of a dog drastically differently from a car. As a solution, we propose a novel graph formulation called Compositional Graph Embedding (CGE) that learns image features, compositional classifiers and latent representations of visual primitives in an end-to-end manner. The key to our approach is exploiting the dependency between states, objects and their compositions within a graph structure to enforce the relevant knowledge transfer from seen to unseen compositions. By learning a joint compatibility that encodes semantics between concepts, our model allows for generalization to unseen compositions without relying on an external knowledge base like WordNet. We show that in the challenging generalized compositional zero-shot setting our CGE significantly outperforms the state of the art on MIT-States and UT-Zappos. We also propose a new benchmark for this task based on the recent GQA dataset.

Efficient and cost effective ways of irrigation have emerged as the need of the hour due to limited sweet water resources, especially the countries that are seriously hit by a lack of sweet water reservoirs. The majority of the water is wasted due to inefficient ways of watering plants. In this paper, we propose an intelligent approach for efficient plant irrigation that has a database of daily water needs of a type of plant and decides the amount of water for a plant type on the basis of the current moisture in soil, humidity, and time of the day. This approach not only saves sweet water by efficient utilization, but also supports smart consumption of energy. Our approach employs IoT and a set of sensors to efficiently record plant data and their watering needs and the approach is implemented with a mobile phone application interface that is used to continuously monitor and control the efficient watering system. The results of this study are easy to reproduce as the sensors used are cheap and easy to access. The study discusses in this paper is experimented on small area (such as tunnel farm) but the results of the experiments show that the used approach can be generalized and can be used for large size fields for efficient irrigation. The results of the experiments also outperform the manual approach and the similar approaches for sensor based irrigation systems.

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