Climate change poses great challenges to modern societies, central amongst which is to decouple human need satisfaction from energy use. Energy system…

Abstract. We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is to

For the world's 20 largest emitters, we use a simple trend/cycle decomposition to provide evidence of decoupling between greenhouse gas emissions and …

This paper examines the role of the “Big Three” (i.e., BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors) on the reduction of corporate carbon emissions aro

By Jose Pineda; Abstract: This paper proposes sustainability - adjusted human development index (SHDI) in which countries’ achievements in human

Ester Boserup: An interdisciplinary visionary relevant for sustainability

This paper develops a theory where access to food and fuel energy is critical to the location, number and size of human settlements. By combining our …

Hsiang, S. M., and Jina, A. 2014. “The Causal Effect of Environmental Catastrophe on Long-Run Economic Growth: Evidence From 6,700 Cyclones.” Working Paper 20352, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.

Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems | Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics

Climate Leadership Council. 2019. “Economists Statement on Carbon Dividends.”

Linda Derksen, John Gartrell, The Social Context of Recycling, American Sociological Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Jun., 1993), pp. 434-442

Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we c...

Ellis, E. C. 2018b. “Science Alone Won’t Save the Earth. People Have to Do That.” New York Times, 11 August.

Many teams have developed a wide range of numerical or categorical indicators of progress in the implementation of the SDG targets. But these indicators cannot identify why target goals have not been accomplished, whether or how they do or do not do justice to the social and cultural context in which they are applied, and how newly emerging social dynamics affect indicators. Nor do they provide means for resolving conflicting values and making balanced trade-offs. Our starting point in examining why we have not been successful in progressing towards sustainability is that the sustainability conundrum is primarily a societal, rather than an environmental problem. Our present emphasis is to maintain our way of life while minimizing its impact, hoping that such a minimization strategy would make the world more sustainable. Reducing for example the extent of pollution but keeping the same industries alive would not be sufficient for a transformation towards sustainability. Instead we should ask “How did we come to this point and what practices, in our societies and in our science, need to change to make progress towards sustainability?” To answer these questions, one needs to go much further back than usual in the history of western societies to identify the societal, scientific, technological and environmental co-evolutionary dynamics that have brought us to the current conundrum. And the fact that most societal challenges are of the “wicked” kind, as well as the need to decide among many societal options and many future pathways that may lead to positive results require that we seriously engage in using “Complex Systems” approaches. It is up to our scientific community to identify these pathways, and we need to move fast!

Research suggests that the scale of human population and the current pace of its growth contribute substantially to the loss of biological diversity. Although technological change and unequal consu...

Climate change will give rise to different impacts in different countries, and different countries have different levels of development. Equity-weight…

This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it—can teach us about how to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Organized around four drivers of change—climate; agriculture and pastoralism; megafauna; and imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism (ICC)—our review zooms in on key regions and debates, including desertification; rangeland degradation; megafauna loss; and land grabbing. Multiscale climate change is a recurring theme in the continent's history, interacting with increasingly intense human activities from several million years onward, leading to oscillating, contingent environmental changes and societally adaptive responses. With high levels of poverty, fast population growth, and potentially dramatic impacts expected from future climate change, Africa is emblematic of the kinds of social and ecological precariousness many fear will characterize the future globally. African people's innovation and adaptation to contingency may place them among the avant-garde with respect to thinking about Anthropocene conditions, strategies, and possibilities.

Land Degradation and Challenges of Food Security

Achieving sustainable economic development is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and, in this regard, the United Nations has promoted a line of research based on sustainable economic development. In view of this, our study focused on the sustainable economic development of nations, specifically, development through the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Academic researchers recognize the importance of ICT for economic and sustainable development, but there is controversy in the literature regarding two opposing points of view. First, there is a view that advances in ICT support Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, while, on the other hand, the view is that there is no relationship between these two factors. In view of this, we conducted a study where the objective was to determine whether investing in ICT contributes to sustainable economic development (measured by the GDP per capita) of European Union countries. We used Eurostat data and applied the partial least-squares (PLS) method to address the study. This approach allowed us to analyze European Union countries from 2014 to 2017, using fairly rigorous data. The most outstanding result was that ICT accounted for most of the explained variance in GDP per capita (GDPpp), and, specifically, the most representative indicator was “digital public services.” Therefore, we concluded that investing in the deployment of ICT supports the sustainable economic development of European Union countries. These countries should focus on investing in improved connectivity in areas with poor communications, as well as in training area inhabitants in the use and development of ICT to obtain greater development using these tools and technologies.

Although developing countries are called to participate in CO2 emission reduction efforts to avoid dangerous climate change, the implications of proposed reduction schemes in human development standards of developing countries remain a matter of debate. We show the existence of a positive and time-dependent correlation between the Human Development Index (HDI) and per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Employing this empirical relation, extrapolating the HDI, and using three population scenarios, the cumulative CO2 emissions necessary for developing countries to achieve particular HDI thresholds are assessed following a Development As Usual approach (DAU). If current demographic and development trends are maintained, we estimate that by 2050 around 85% of the world’s population will live in countries with high HDI (above 0.8). In particular, 300 Gt of cumulative CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2050 are estimated to be necessary for the development of 104 developing countries in the year 2000. This value represents between 20 % to 30 % of previously calculated CO2 budgets limiting global warming to 2°C. These constraints and results are incorporated into a CO2 reduction framework involving four domains of climate action for individual countries. The framework reserves a fair emission path for developing countries to proceed with their development by indexing country-dependent reduction rates proportional to the HDI in order to preserve the 2°C target after a particular development threshold is reached. For example, in each time step of five years, countries with an HDI of 0.85 would need to reduce their per capita emissions by approx. 17% and countries with an HDI of 0.9 by 33 %. Under this approach, global cumulative emissions by 2050 are estimated to range from 850 up to 1100 Gt of CO2. These values are within the uncertainty range of emissions to limit global temperatures to 2°C.