Highlights

• Pastoral farmers in Selwyn often feel misunderstood by regulatory authorities regarding the effects of increasing environmental regulations on their farm systems, and subsequent land-use change decisions.

• Financial factors and certainty around policy and practice were the most important factors to farmers when making land-use change decisions.

• Farmers were hesitant to make a sustainable land-use change decision without the confidence that it will remain a financially and strategically viable choice for the longer term.

• To encourage sustainable land-use change, regulatory authorities must give increased thought to understanding farmers’ response to regulations and how this affects creation and implementation of future regulation.

Climate change and environment-related problems are major concerns globally. Stakeholders including governments, corporates, investors, and customers, play different roles in building a sustainable world. Their tasks are challenging because of limited financial resources. To finance activities that benefit the environment and minimise the severe impact of climate change, green-labeled bonds are one of the resolutions.

With the green features, this type of fixed-income asset can signal investors and customers that the green bonds’ issuers are doing “good” for the future. However, there are other bonds that also hold similar green features as green-labeled bonds, but they are not readily recognised in the bond market. This paper describes a procedure to classify a new category for green-unlabeled bonds and call this as sustainable bond. The performance of green-labeled and sustainable bonds are compared. Evaluating the bond performance underpins the greenium fundamental of green bonds, and provides insight into applications of the new sustainable bond category in the economy.

Distributed Manufacturing (DM) is becoming increasingly important in operations management due to its potential to support sustainability goals, reduce risks in global supply chains, and boost local economies. However, previous analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of DM have mainly focused on operations, overlooking additional benefits across the supply chain. For example, DM can enable local sourcing, better serve end-users, and tackle reverse supply chain challenges. While economies of scale are essential for reducing costs and improving productivity, highly centralised manufacturing can increase transportation costs, vulnerability, and supply chain disruptions, particularly during pandemics or other times of restricted transportation. To address these challenges, this study introduces a Multi-attribute Decision Support System (MADSS) and assessment process that considers impacts across the supply chain and guides stakeholders, academics, and decision-makers. The MADSS handles quantitative and qualitative information, missing data, and uncertainty, and a team of experts from academia and industry in New Zealand has developed the evaluation. The MADSS was used to analyse DM and traditional construction alternatives from economic, social, environmental, and resilience perspectives in New Zealand. The research contributes to a better understanding of the impacts of DM across the entire supply chain. Also, it proposes a flexible decision-making framework to engage with stakeholders and support decision-making in other industries and regions.

Freshwater resources around the world are under increasing pressure from agricultural activities. As a result, regulatory frameworks around on-farm environmental compliance have become more complex. Consequently, farm plans which have been used in New Zealand to identify risks to and develop mitigation strategies for freshwater quality can be time consuming and costly to develop and monitor. Using semi-structured interviews, this study investigated the views of the regulators working in environmental policy and implementation on the use of drones to increase the efficiency of on-farm environmental compliance. Results show that drones can improve process robustness by providing an aerial view, and that they are quicker and safer to use on steeper contoured farms. However, there is confusion around the permissions required in order to capture footage, its ownership and storage, and who has access rights to the footage. This ambiguity in the implementation of environmental regulations can lead to uncertainty on the part of policy implementors around how to integrate drones in on-farm environmental compliance. In addition, positive relationships between farmers and compliance officers are needed in order for the benefits of drone use to be realised for on-farm environmental compliance purposes

Forest supply chain has drawn increasing attention worldwide. This paper develops a supply chain risk (SCR) framework in the forest industry. Forest supply chain risk has become an obstacle to gaining competitive advantages and developing sustainable forestry. However, very few studies attempt to investigate SCR in an integrated forest supply chain. It is essential to understand and manage these risks, which may impede the industry’s performance improvement. An extensive literature review, and Delphi study are performed to develop and identify the major forest SCRs. The result has shown that the five types of forest SCRs are recognized. In this study, we extend SCR into the forest sector and contribute to the forest supply chain management literature. Further research is needed to address specific problems associated with types of SCRs and develop appropriate forest SCR mitigation strategies in contexts.

Enhancing primary sector production and productivity while maintaining and improving our land and water quality for future generations is a key outcome of the National Science Challenge for Our Land and Water. It is therefore important to identify the hierarchy of international and national issues in order to provide an evidence base to guide investment and inform the Challenge Research Strategy. To this end, it was proposed that a small project be conducted, and regularly updated. This project aims to deliver an overview of international and domestic drivers, as well as issues that are of particular relevance to the New Zealand primary sector and land use. This overview is based on a literature search of the most important issues, followed by a survey of key stakeholders as to their opinion of the most important issues affecting New Zealand land use and land use practice from overseas and domestically. In addition, a review of the level of interest and concern of international consumers on various issues is produced relevant to the primary sector.

Rural communities in low- and middle-income countries are vulnerable to malnutrition. They also tend to have strong social ties, exhibit high social connectedness, and lean on relatives, neighbors, and friends for support and information. Accordingly, focusing on the three macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbohydrates) and three critical micronutrients (iron, zinc, and selenium), we analyze the effects of nutritional information acquired from relatives, neighbors, and friends on rural households’ nutrition intake. We utilize propensity score matching to analyze cross-sectional data collected from 915 rural households in China. Results show that acquiring nutritional information significantly improves households’ intake of fats, iron, and selenium but does not affect the intake of proteins, carbohydrates, and zinc. The disaggregated analysis reveals that the nutrition intake of females responds to nutritional information, but that of males does not. Also, large households’ nutrition intake increases in response to nutritional information, whereas that of small households is mostly unaffected. The results suggest that people assimilate new ideas to improve their dietary habits. However, by the same token, they may be susceptible to the deleterious effects of nutritional misinformation and fads. Policymakers, not-forprofit organizations, and industry stakeholders should disseminate evidence-based nutritional information to foster health and wellbeing in rural areas.

Worldwide, the agricultural sector is under pressure to demonstrate environmental sustainability. In New Zealand, farm environment plans (FEPs) and their auditing were intended to guide farmers towards sustainable practices by meeting regulations. However, on-farm audits can be time consuming, costly, and stressful for farmers. Meanwhile, the advancement of drone technology has made it possible to incorporate such tools in environmental audits. By means of field observation and in-depth interviews with both farmers and auditors, this research investigated the processes and perceptions of incorporating drones in environmental audits. The aerial views provided additional, high-quality information for the audit. However, flying a drone is subject to weather conditions.

Additionally, reductions in audit time were dependent on farm scale, topography, and the auditor’s knowledge of the farm and the farmer. Farmer-auditor relationships are critical for enabling the benefits of drone use within the FEP audit process. Such relationships require a high level of interaction-based trust between farmers and auditors. Further clarity around the use and ownership of drone images could enhance trust, enabling the benefits of drones in audits to be fully utilised, hence furthering the environmental management and compliance processes towards achieving their objectives of better environmental outcomes

With agrifood export earnings so pivotal to New Zealand (NZ)’s economy, understanding how expert buyers perceive the country’s agrifood products and businesses is imperative. This holds particularly true for the European Union (EU), being one of NZ’s main trading partners. This research draws on the key theories centering on buyer-seller relationships and Country of Origin (CoO) theory, investigating specifically the perceptions of NZ agrifood products and businesses held by European expert buyers who have different levels of knowledge and experience. A quantitative survey was conducted which investigated these perceptions held by the European expert buyers accessed in-person at a trade show in 2015 in Germany. Bipolar adjective scales were used to test product and business attributes. One-way ANOVA’s were adopted to test for perceptual differences between European buyers with high/medium/low experience with New Zealand’s agrifood products and/or businesses. Overall, New Zealand agrifood products and businesses were viewed positively from the perspective of European expert buyers, with the degree of positivity increasing as the level of experience increased. This study also highlighted the need for future research on how CoO affects buyer-seller relationships, especially via the concept of the “halo effect”.

Globalisation increases the numbers of involved business partners and distances between origin and destination. It complicates and stretches supply chains. Consequently, supply chains are exposed to higher risks, especially in rural societies where there is limited access to technology and the society is isolated. The research literature of supply chain resilience identified factors contributing to risks, factors counterbalancing risks, and mechanisms to assess the resilience of supply chains. However, there remains a gap in the use of the existing risk and resilience factors to the specific context of the rural supply chain. This research contributes by providing a state-of-the-art review and identifies which factors should be used for the rural supply chains.