Sandra Caeiro

Universidade Aberta · Department of Sciences and Technology (DCeT)

With the increased concern about social and environmental impacts, managing sustainability in supply chains has become a focus of interest. In consequence, companies are adopting supply chain sustainability practices also due to pressures from various stakeholders. Questions arise about how certain types of pressures can influence the adoption of b...

Supply chains play a crucial role in today's global economy, and adopting sustainability practices is recognized as an important strategy for companies to mitigate risks and enhance their performance. This study aims to address this topic by exploring the relationships between behavioral and technical sustainability practices, supplier sustainabili...

Purpose This study aims to explore the alignment between strategic plans of the Portuguese public higher education institutions (HEIs) and their perception of the integration of sustainability in education and curricula. Design/methodology/approach The strategic plans from 15 institutions were selected for content analysis; data about the integrat...

Networks are an important mechanism for systemic change towards sustainability in higher education institutions. In Portugal there is no formal law or regulation at governmental level pressuring for this change. Also, there was a need for action and a lack of collaboration between the Portuguese higher education community to allow an advanced susta...

Circular economy (CE) is becoming an increasingly mandatory material issue within corporate sustainability reporting, however, what remains unaddressed within literature are the perspectives and capacities of the companies which must soon adapt to meet the evolving reporting requirements. This research aims to capture insights from companies engage...

The current eco-social crisis includes global challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation and demographic shifts that call for a global response. The European Environment Agency claims that over the next decade, very different answers will be needed to the world’s challenges than the ones provided over the past 40 years to confront...

Perceção dos jovens sobre sustentabilidade local: definição de áreas temáticas para a Beira Baixa, Portugal

É essencial e urgente promover a coesão territorial e a qualidade de vida dos cidadãos, entre outros, entre regiões urbanas e rurais, através de políticas globais e/ou locais, com especial atenção às características singulares de cada região. Os jovens enquanto agentes e promotores da mudança deveriam assumir papéis mais ativos, o qual permitiria a...

In a world characterized by Ecological Overshoot, where humanity demands more from natural ecosystems than they can sustainably renew, education can nurture sustainability-minded citizens and future leaders to help accelerate the transition toward an era where our finite planet’s resources stand at the core of all decision-making. Despite the essen...

There has been increasing research on pedagogical approaches, sustainability competences, and how to connect them in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper's aim is to provide deeper insights into the system of pedagogical approaches and sustainability competences, as well as how these interrelate. A survey was developed to investigate su...

No âmbito geral, onde esta investigação se insere, pretende-se descrever a metodologia que serviu de base à conceção de um SI para esta região, baseado num processo de participação pública e co-criação, composta, na 1.ª fase, por um inquérito por questionário aplicado à população residente e maior de idade e aos jovens do 3.º ciclo, no âmbito do Pr...

The circular economy (CE) concept has become a major interest for companies, promising new business opportunities and a decrease in environmental impacts. Though research on circular business models has recently increased, few scholars have investigated how companies engaged with CE view the connection between CE and sustainability. To address this...

Circular economy (CE) continues to become an increasingly important topic within disclosure frameworks and taxonomies for sustainable finance, however, early evidence points to CE not readily being included within corporate sustainability reports. Therefore, this research aims to explore how CE is emerging within the sustainability reports of compa...

Sustainable development (SD) in higher education has occupied the agenda over recent decades. Higher education institutions make efforts to promote sustainability in education, curriculum, research, outreach, and campus operations. This article aims to analyze the level of implementation of sustainability in higher education in the Amazon. The spec...

An emerging research area is dedicated to developing approaches for assessing the ‘circularity’ of companies and their products, within the context of sustainability goals. However, empirical evidence on the uptake of these assessment approaches remains scarce. Using a purposive sampling, we conducted a survey receiving 155 responses and held 43 se...

Supply chains involve several stakeholders, with different environmental, social, economic, and ethical attributes, and are exposed to various risks along all stages. One of these risks relates to conditions or events related to sustainability that have the potential to generate harmful reactions from stakeholders in the supply chain. Those risks c...

ESSE ARTIGO TEM COMO OBJETIVO CONTRIBUIR PARA O APRIMORAMENTO DO CONHECIMENTO SOBRE OS RISCOS DA SUSTENTABILIDADE NAS CADEIAS DE SUPRIMENTOS POR MEIO DE UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA DA LITERATURA. FOI ADOTADO UM MÉTODO DE IDENTIFICAÇÃO, SELEÇÃO, ANÁLISE E SÍNTESE DAS PESQUISAS EXISTENTES SOBRE O ASSUNTO, COM FOCO NA GARANTIA DE UMA REVISÃO TRANSPARENTE,...

O OBJETIVO DESSA PESQUISA É EXAMINAR O PAPEL DAS PRÁTICAS COMPORTAMENTAIS E TÉCNICAS NO DESEMPENHO ORGANIZACIONAL, ALÉM DE ANALISAR O IMPACTO DESSAS PRÁTICAS NOS RISCOS DE SUSTENTABILIDADE. ESTE ESTUDO CONTOU COM UM SURVEY EM EMPRESAS BRASILEIRAS. NA PESQUISA FORAM ABORDADAS 152 EMPRESAS, BUSCANDO VERIFICAR AS RELAÇÕES ENTRE AS PRÁTICAS, DESEMPENHO...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis, one which also influences the ways sustainability is being taught at universities. This paper undertakes an analysis of the extent to which COVID-19 as a whole and the lockdown it triggered in particular, which has led to the suspension of presence-based teaching in universities worldwide and influe...

Organisations are increasingly being pushed to manage, assess and report their sustainability performance, including public sector organisations (PSO). Several approaches were developed to implement sustainability assessments at organisation level. However, the majority are still for the private sector and are often not supported by active stakehol...

A growing commitment from companies to implement circular economy (CE) strategies demands the development of guidelines for consistent related external communication. The fields of non-financial reporting and sustainability are well established with numerous available international reporting frameworks and approaches; however, there is still an abs...

Marine litter is claimed to be one of the most meaningful environmental crises of the century. Education that supports behavior change is a tool to tackle this problem. However, there is a lack of research linking educational initiatives and marine litter issues. A literature review was conducted through a bibliometric and content analysis to explo...

Universidade Aberta (UAb) is the public Portuguese distance education university. It has around 6,000 students (full-time and exclusively engaged in distance education) and 340 employees (academic and administrative staff). UAb has focused on the quality of its service and has been recognised by several national and international entities, for exam...

Purpose Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, as they operate as multipliers for thousands of students. However, despite several advantages of e-learning environments compared to traditional class-teaching, there are still challenges regarding suitable e-learning tools and didactical models. The pur...

Purpose Universities are continually transforming its structure and governance in response to the new social, environmental and economic challenges. Particularly, there has recently been a growing academic interest for measuring sustainable practices of higher education institutions (HEI) aiming to monitor and reduce their carbon emissions, as well...

Sistema de Indicadores, Sustentabilidade Local, Temas, Áreas-chave, Participação Pública, Municípios Rurais

Sistema de Indicadores, Sustentabilidade Local, Temas, Áreas-chave, Participação Pública, Municípios Rurais

Resumo Os Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) colocam desafios às pedagogias tradicionais, onde a Educação para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável (EDS) deve promover a consciência das complexidades e incertezas face ao planeta Terra (Mogren et al., 2019), pelo que é importante fortalecer as ligações entre a sociedade e Instituições de Ensino...

Based on the literature, a set of sustainability risks was identified, of which ten were selected as the most relevant in the context of the cosmetics supply chain. These were identified with the collaboration of a group of experts and studied using the ISM and MICMAC methodologies. The results show that organizations consider the risks 'technology...

Purpose Encouraged by the State, the Brazilian public organizations practice sustainable procurement as one of the strategies to promote sustainable development. Performing them requires understanding to manage stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to identify and categorize the stakeholders of Brazilian public organizations’ sustainable procu...

It is essential and urgent to seek social cohesion and quality of life of citizens, namely quality public spaces, energy efficiency, employment, economy, integration and social inclusion, among others, through policies (global or local), while respecting the specificity of each region. Indeed, in order to change the municipalities’ planning policy,...

In 2015, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) defined a new agenda and supplied a holistic and multidimensional view for development. These Goals are challenges to traditional teaching methods, and important to educate for Sustainable Development (SD) and involve young people in the participative model. Young generation can contr...

This Special Issue “Sustainability Assessment in Higher Education Institutions” provides peer-reviewed research from several geographies and institutions and covering various topics with the broad objective of achieving an assessment of the effectiveness and impact of different implementation dimensions measuring and evaluating how sustainability i...

Livro de atas do seminário doutoral em Sustentabilidade Social e Desenvolvimento da Universidade Aberta ocorrido em junho de 2019.

Purpose This study aims to expand knowledge and provide further insights on how education for sustainable development (ESD) has been integrated into programmes at higher education institutions (HEIs) in Portugal. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey was given to key actors in charge of sustainability implementation at each Portuguese...

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a crucial role in implementing practices for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This implementation should be done in different dimensions according to a holistic and whole-school approach. Different tools have been adapted and developed to assess this integrated approach. The aim of this research...

The Portuguese Distance Learning University (UAb) assess in a holistic way the Institution's Sustainability performance. In the case of research, it is evaluated by analyzing the scientific publications deposited in the Open Repository. Since 2019, it is possible to associate to each deposit the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that match the pu...

Life long training and education in food safety is a crucial issue in particular for professionals working in the field. At the same time there is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of that training in particular when is given in e-learning. The purpose of this explorative work is to evaluate the Food Safety and Quality e-learning course within a...

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS THE FIRST RESULTS OF A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW, LOOKING TO IDENTIFY SUSTAINABILITY RISKS IN SUPPLY CHAINS AND HOW THESE RISKS ARE INTERPRETED AND TREATED IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT. THE ABSENCE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY PRACTICES CAN EXPORT COMPANIES, GENERATING RISKS, WITH POTENTIAL MARKET LOSSES. THIS RESEARCH IDEN...

O debate sobre sustentabilidade local ganhou um lugar de destaque e uma importância cada vez maior, quer a nível mundial, europeu e nacional, desde a Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento em 1992, e a primeira Conferência Europeia sobre Cidades e Vilas Sustentáveis, em 1994. Atualmente, o desenvolvimento rural no âmbit...

Since the nineties, a lot has been written about local sustainability, mostly about big cities and/or big regions. These days the debate about small towns and/or rural municipalites has also come about. It is up to all the agents, political and from the community, as well as to the citizens to promote the transformation to more sustainable societie...

The main goal of this research is to present the results of the enquiry by questionnaire applied to the resident population, of legal age, of Beira Baixa, Portugal. The aim of the questionnaire was to know the perceptions, the knowledge and attitudes of this population about SD and what areas there is a need to act for its implementation in the sco...

Título: El aspecto medioambiental de los ODS en el proceso de formación integral de los estudiantes de la UAM Las universidades han reconocido como un componente importante el desarrollar y promover soluciones sostenibles para construir una sociedad sensibilizada y responsable con el planeta, alineados a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS...

Higher Education Institutions have been recognized as a critical component to develop and promote sustainable solutions for the development needs of both society and the planet. Therefore, a challenge to HEIs is to provide students with the knowledge and the skills required to achieve a Sustainable Development (SD). In this context, there have been...

The Copernicus Declaration of 1994, which was understood as a commitment to sustainable development (SD) by top management in higher education, was signed by many universities. This signature worked as an important driver for these institutions to put different dimensions of SD principles into practice. In Portugal, a Southern European country, six...

The fact that the world community is engaged in pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) means that an unrivalled opportunity is provided to universities, both in respect of teaching and in research, on individual SDGs, as well as in pursuing their “third mission” linking up with external stakeholders and society. However, not many univers...

Climate change can be regarded as one of the key topics of sustainable development where public awareness and education are crucial. In the field of education, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have raised remarkable attention throughout the last decade as their initial objective is to provide massive open online education for everyone. This arti...

Researchers have adopted a concept for sustainable development (SD) that has given rise to different systems of sustainability assessment, systems to which several authors have suggested non-material components should be incorporated. This work aims at developing a conceptual model to integrate these components into systems of sustainability assess...

Purpose This paper aims to determine, from key actors’ perspective, how sustainability has been integrated into the policies and strategies of higher education institutions (HEIs), particularly Portuguese public universities, within the framework of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UN DESD) 2005-2014. Design/met...

The adoption of sustainability policies and practices in organisations is a rising trend, in particular in companies. Public sector organisations are also following this occurrence but with slower signs. Despite a relevant amount of research work on sustainability practices implemented by private organisations and by some public agencies, central p...

Práticas de implementação da sustentabilidade na Universidade Aberta.

The motto of this special issue is to link lessons learned both from the North and the South or from the East and the West, and from new small‐scale sustainable development changes to wider and global transitions. It brings together contributions that were debated at the 22nd International Sustainable Development Research Society Conference (ISDRS...

This study's aim was to develop and implement an integrative epidemiologic cross-sectional study that allows identifying and characterising exposure pathways of populations living and working on the shores of a contaminated estuarine environment. Population residing in Carrasqueira, located on the Sado estuary with known contaminated areas was comp...

The Universidade Aberta in Portugal, founded in 1988, is the only public institution of higher distance education in the country, offering courses anywhere in the world. It has e-learning and online learning through the development of its pedagogical Virtual Model. In Brazil, since the implementation of the Open University system, distance educatio...

Although there have been proven and successful developments in the field of Higher Education for Sustainable Development over the past 15 years or so, there are still numerous challenges to be overcome. Among these challenges is the need for Higher Education Institutions to improve the integration of sustainability in the curriculum and in research...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) contain a set of 17 measures to foster sustainable development across many areas. It offers a good opportunity to reinvigorate sustainable development research for two main reasons. First, it comprises many areas of SD research, which have become mainstream thanks to the UN SDGs. Second, th...

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated ‘elite’, there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the expectation for...

Many European countries, particularly in Northern Europe, have conducted integrated studies on Sustainable Development in Higher Education. In Portugal, no attempt has been made to evaluate how Public Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are incorporating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at policy and strategy level and how it was impleme...

Environmental risk assessment of complex ecosystems such as estuaries is a challenge, where innovative and integrated approaches are needed. The present work aimed at developing an innovative integrative methodology to evaluate in an impacted estuary (the Sado, in Portugal, was taken as case study), the adverse effects onto both ecosystem and human...

Earlier research studies have shown that e-learning higher education is a powerful system within teaching and education for sustainable development. In spite of the advantages of independency of time and place, compared to traditional face to face, some barriers are found showing the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of e-learning system....

Conflicts frequently emerge in border areas between population and industry, often located in coastal regions. The municipality of Sines, in Portugal, with cultural traditions connected to the sea and fishing activities, is a paradigmatic case where this problem has existed for decades. Knowing that dialogue has provided good results in settling ne...

p class="BODYTEXT">MOOCs are a recent phenomenon, although given its impact, have been subject to a large debate. Several questions have been raised by researchers and educators alike as regarding its sustainability both economical and as an efficient mode of education provision. In this paper we contribute to this discussion by presenting a case s...

The assessment of sustainability of public services is an important issue, especially at local level, taken into account the central role of local governments as a major public employer and provider of a diversity of services. Local governments are close to citizens and are moving faster than other public sector levels with regard to the integratio...