During the last few years, sustainability has become an increasingly important dimension for corporations. Many stakeholders expect companies to implement sustainability-oriented practices and report on these actions and their results. As a consequence, corporate accountability and, more specifically, corporate accounting and reporting, should focus not only on financial, social, and environmental performance, but also on sustainability-related aspects. Among these aspects, climate change is becoming increasingly important for companies, which must take action to counter the effects of their activities on climate change and inform their stakeholders about these actions and their effects. Given the initial state of research about climate change accounting and reporting, the authors focused on the sustainable development goal (SDG) no. 13, “climate action”, in order to highlight the current state and the future directions of this area of inquiry. They used a mixed approach to perform a systematic literature review about sustainability accounting/reporting and climate change: (1) a qualitative analysis according to a qualitative analytical framework, and (2) a bibliometric (descriptive statistical) approach. The authors found that: (1) the main perspectives addressed in the selected articles relate to sustainability accounting and reporting in a broad sense; (2) there was a lack of contributions about management of climate change-related aspects, with specific reference to strategic and operational planning, accounting, and control of the actions implemented by the management of firms to counter climate change problems. The authors suggested the topics accounting scholars should focus their future research upon and underscored the social responsibilities of accounting scholars to increasingly integrate climate change mitigation into their accounting foci. They reviewed the main areas of climate change accounting/reporting literature and identified the gaps to be filled.

This paper investigates how and whether circular economy (CE) business models affect the implementation of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the waste management sector. A case study is used to determine the relationship between CE business models and SDGs. It shows that CE business models, potentially, can contribute directly to achieving a significant number of SDGs. The strongest relationships are between the CE business model and the targets of SDG4 (Quality education); SDG 5 (Gender equality); SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 8 (Decent working and economic growth); SDG 9 (Industry, innovation and infrastructure), SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production). After a narrative literature review on the intersection between CE and SDGs, the paper performed a case study on Contarina SpA, a firm that developed a business model to recycle wastes into recyclable materials under a CE approach. The case findings could stimulate further research into how this and similar types of business models will help societies to change from the ‘use‐it‐once‐and‐throw‐it away’ mentality of linear business models to the integrated, holistic, CE model that seeks to emulate nature's cyclical systems, and achieve the implementation of sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the relationship between the governance structure of universities and the universities' knowledge transfer (KT) performance outcomes measured in terms of university spin-off firms university spin-offs (USOs).Design/methodology/approach: The universities' board of directors has been analyzed under three profiles: the incidence of internal directors belonging to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) faculties, the incidence of women directors and the incidence of external directors.Findings: The findings provide evidence of a significant and positive association, for southern Italian state universities, of the presence of university STEM directors and the establishment of university spin-offs (USOs).Originality/value: The article is original as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study, except for the paper by Meoliet al.(2019), examined the governance of universities in relation to the establishment of academic spin-offs.