In recent years and mostly during the last two decades, the decisive role of the environment in the business administration field and business life in general has emerged. In the modern, fast changing, and highly competitive business environment, and even more so in the context of the recent economic crisis, businesses constantly struggle to survive, trying to resolve problems and improve their performance and competitive advantage. Therefore, they must save and invest substantial sums of money to build strong infrastructure, to change procedures, and to produce environmentally friendly products. In view of the above, the current study attempted to examine the impact of environmental strategy on the growth of medium and large enterprises in all sectors in Greece, in a period of economic crisis. The study, carried out in February and March 2018, confirmed the positive correlation and the critical role of environmental strategy in the financial performance of Greek enterprises during this period of economic recession. Both eco-efficient practices and innovative practices lead to the creation of competitive advantage and, thus, to the improvement of the financial performance of a firm.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of health tourism product as a competitive tourism product with a focus on Ikaria Island, Greece. The diversification of the health tourism product is explored and the study identifies key components for a successful development of a spa resort. The paper also examines the prospects for the thermal/mineral springs of Ikaria Island, taking account of the climatic and bioclimatic regimes of the area. The study concludes that there are prospects for future development if the spa product is diversified. This, in combination with the good climatic conditions of the area, can be a starting point for providing services in order to satisfy potential clients.

The present work presents a statistical framework for analysing and evaluating the environmental performance of 21 wines (protected designation of origin or protected geographical indication) produced in Greece, through their complete lifecycle. For this purpose, the life cycle assessment methodology was used. It is well known that lifecycle thinking is a scientific approach that can support businesses in decision making towards sustainable consumption and production. However, such techniques provide a large amount of multi-dimensional data that are difficult to comprehend and interpret. Therefore, the application of an appropriate statistical framework to aid this assessment, which should be as unambiguous and reliable as possible, is needed. This statistical framework should be based on the lifecycle inventory results, on an appropriate multivariate technique such as principal component analysis, and on probability distributions, thereby providing an objective framework to assist the evaluation of the environmental performance of the products. Applying the proposed framework to 21 Greek wines, we found that the proposed framework could be used for categorizing the examined wines according to their environmental impact severity, as well as the impact types associated with them.

In an era of big data, organizations increasingly aim to adopt data-driven decision-making processes to enhance their performance. This paper investigates the data-driven decision-making process by developing a framework tailored for application in the energy sector. The proposed framework integrates interdisciplinary approaches to comprehensively address the “data, information, knowledge” triad, applying it to both operational and maintenance decision-making. Designed to be managerially focused rather than technically oriented, the framework aims to engage all employees, including those without technical backgrounds, enabling them to effectively contribute to the decision-making process from their respective roles. To demonstrate the practical application of the proposed framework, this paper presents a case study of an energy organization managing a wind farm project, which implemented the framework to improve its decision-making process. The case study examines how the organization identified its objectives and information needs, formulated key performance questions for each stakeholder, explicitly defined and measured the key performance indicators, employed data collection and organization methods, managed the progression from data to information to knowledge, and transformed the acquired knowledge into informed decisions. By adopting this pragmatic framework, energy organizations are anticipated to solve problems, predict trends, and discover new opportunities, thereby enhancing their efficiency and predictability.

In the last decades increasing attention to environmental issues has come to the fore due to the looming issue of climate change. The growing demand for energy, coupled with the increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, have forced the study and development of energy plants that use renewable energy sources (RES), as electricity generation is one of the major contributors to anthropogenic emissions. Small hydropower plants are of particular interest as their potential is assumed to be high. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive assessment of the environmental impacts of small hydropower plants (SHPs) using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The main parameter set for our simplified LCA model was the weight of the components used to construct and operate the plant: concrete, aggregates and steel. Through LCA, air pollutant externalities were associated with the life cycle of SHPs. This was accomplished by applying the NEEDS framework. The results are given per impact type (human health, loss of biodiversity, crop yield, material damage and climate change). The spearhead of the study is that the environmental cost must be a parameter of the total investment cost, which may affect the indexes of the financial evaluation of the project.

Global economy, trade and other human activities are affected by the behaviour and the psychology of the individuals [1–3]. Knowing the influential factors, which contribute to the perception, behaviour and psychology, a positive reinforcement to the economic cycle could be possible [2,4,5]. Human behaviour is affected by a wide set of factors, some of them being the social and environmental conditions. The expression of behaviour is frequently reflected as wishes, desires and preferences which drive to everyday choices and actions. Scientists have already described the influence of the environmental conditions, especially weather, on the psychology and behaviour via conscious and subconscious functions [6–9]. The essential datasets for the analysis of weather influence on human life are the meteorological data, along with archives of medical registries, psychiatric hospital databases, and police stations’ records [9–17] or structured questionnaires completed by individuals in open public spaces [18–20]. The major drawback of those datasets is that are fragmented and more or less biased by several known and unknown factors [9,21,22] such as the unknown physical, mental and psychological conditions of interviewees along with their acclimatization level when we referred to structured questionnaires [7,23]. An essential part of individuals’ lifestyle (as a part of their behaviour) is the choice of summer vacation destinations. It is known that tourism, especially summer tourism, can be described by the Triple S (Sun, Sea and Sand), which is an abundant feature of the Mediterranean region [24,25]. Many of the major tourism factors for the triple S depend on weather and local climate. Tourist decision making with respect to the destination choice could be supported by specific indices such as, among others, the Tourism Climate Index (TCI) developed by Mieczkowski [26], the Climate Index for Tourism [27] and the ClimateTourism/Transfer-Information-Scheme [25,28,29]. Further, the application of new tools and applications such as Decision Support Systems (DSS) takes into account distinct criteria in a decision making process about preliminary ratting destinations [30]. DSS are usually refers to demand-oriented systems such as destination management or consumer-oriented travel-counselling systems [31]. A DSS is usually built to support the solution of a certain problem or to evaluate an opportunity, through the design of computer models and the simulation of real-life experiences [32]. DSSs continue to improve the quality of decisions by standardizing the process and logic information managers’ choices and making the criteria for determining appropriate outcomes systematic [33]. To investigate the relation between the outdoor thermal conditions and the individuals’ desires related to the summer holidays, we examined the searching frequency of specific keywords as retrieved by the Google Trends service and the values of human thermal index Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) during the simultaneous time period. The summer holidays terms, thereafter keywords, were a set of famous summer holiday destinations over Mediterranean Sea and northern coastal European regions, accompanied by some very common words linked with the summer. The results indicate a clearly positive relation between the searched keywords and the PET values.