Steering the Circular Economy: A New Role for Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing is widely assumed to be designed to reward companies that are helping the planet.  However, ESG ratings, which underlie ESG fund selection, are based on the impact the changing world has on companies’ profit and loss.  Asset managers have deliberately allowed the confusion to go unrefuted and even encourage it since ESG funds are highly popular and come with higher management fees.  The harm is that ESG investing leads policymakers to believe that the market can remedy the threatened environmental and socioeconomic disaster when only prompt significant government intervention can avert imminent climate catastrophe.

To counter destructive non-linear system responses, tipping points, and spillover effects, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to transform the world towards societal well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection.  Achieving the SDGs, however, is challenged by the performance of interconnected sectors and the complexity of their interactions.  The SDGs are a holistic agenda intended to guide socioeconomic development policies and priorities, funding and government interventions at international, national, and local levels for their achievement.  With the increasing adoption of the SDGs at all levels, systems models are also increasingly used for the sustainable development and operation of communities in support of planning for sustainability.

Despite claims to the contrary, 97% of climate experts agree that humans are causing global warming.  In science, consensus is when the vast majority of experts agree on a fundamental principle.  In climate science, more than 97% of experts agree that CO₂ traps heat and that adding it to the atmosphere warms the planet.  Public perception of the scientific consensus concerning global warming is an important gateway into other enlightened climate-related attitudes, including policy support.  This article looks at summaries of the key studies and into the degree of consensus based on analyses of large samples of peer-reviewed climate science literature or surveys of climate and Earth scientists.  The slightly different methodologies used reached very similar conclusions.

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, climate denial is still widespread.  While much research has characterized climate denial, comparatively fewer studies have systematically examined how to counteract it.  This review fills this gap by exploring the research about counteracting climate denial, the effectiveness and the intentions behind intervention.  Through a systematic selection and analysis of 65 scientific articles, this review finds multiple intervention forms, including education, message framing and inoculation.  The intentions of intervening range from changing understanding of climate science, science advocacy, influencing mitigation attitudes and counteracting vested industry.  The review offers guiding questions for counteracting climate denialism.

Resulting from the Rights to Nature movement, Mount Taranaki on New Zealand's north island was granted rights equal to those of a human and assigned legal personhood in 2017.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, enabling the protection and recognition of each person.  Some say we need such rights for nature, to allow us to preserve sacred natural spaces.  We need laws that enable individuals to claim nature’s rights since the environment can’t speak up for itself.  One major barrier to such civic action and laws is that most land is private property and must be treated as such without legal consequences.  Although interested in the protection and preservation of nature, many countries and communities are having difficulty granting such rights to their ecosystems.

Local communities must focus on a locally-relevant subset of goals and understand potential future pathways for key drivers influencing local sustainability to contribute to overall national- and global-scale SDG achievement.  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize the importance of action across all scales and levels to achieve a sustainable future.  A participatory method to co-create local socioeconomic pathways was developed by downscaling the SDGs and driving forces of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) through contextual analysis and community engagement.  The SSPs and SDGs were linked by identifying the driving forces and describing how they affect the achievement of local SDGs.

This essay is the result of numerous interviews, decades of scientific research, and abstract mathematics of climate change about the possible end of the world as we know it.  We’re told that it’s worse than we could possibly imagine and whatever we fear, we’re “barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible”.   While acknowledging that ongoing global warming will “eventually” have “very severe consequences”, the Climate Feedback blog argues that the concept of Earth becoming uninhabitable within anywhere near the timescales suggested in the article are scientifically dubious and “pure hyperbole”, disregarding the latest foreboding IPCC report.

The sustainable development principle drives environmentally destructive neoliberal economic growth that exploits and degrades the local ecology. Despite well-meaning intentions behind sustainable development, it facilitates exploitative economic development activities that exacerbate systemic inequalities and injustices and the global “market-is-king” model of capitalism. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cannot be adopted as a global sustainability objective for all societies. Instead, they must be applied in a way that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive. Like 𝘣𝘶𝘦𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘳, they must offer the potential to critically rethink how societies could re-orientate to radically different locally beneficial socio-ecological sustainability

Sustainable Development Goal 9 is to “build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”, according to the United Nations.  For SDG 9, the UN has defined 8 targets that specify the goals and 12 indicators that represent the metrics by which the world aims to track whether these targets are achieved.  This toolkit provided by Our World in Data presents the global perspective on where the world stands today and how it has changed over time.  It quotes the original text of the targets and shows the data on the agreed indicators, to build SDG-targeted infrastructure.

„Der Natur und Umwelt eine Stimme geben!“ – So oder ähnlich könnte man das Anliegen der 1998 unter der Schirmherrschaft der UNECE geschlossenen Aarhus-Konvention umschreiben. Auch Österreich ist diesem internationalen Abkommen beigetreten, das es sich zum Ziel gesetzt hat, die Durchsetzung des Umweltrechts mit Hilfe der Bürgerinnen und Bürger sowie der Umweltorganisationen zu verbessern. Dazu sieht die Konvention drei Säulen vor: das Recht auf Umweltinformation, die Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung an umweltrelevanten Entscheidungsverfahren und den Zugang zu Gerichten in Umweltangelegenheiten. Österreich hat die Vorgaben der Konvention in den verschiedensten Bereichen des Umweltrechts umgesetzt; zu verweisen ist dabei vor allem auf das Umweltinformationsgesetz sowie die Bürgerbeteiligung.

Sustainable practices can be implemented within supply chains to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).  Procurement and distribution processes can be reengineered by implementing sustainable approaches that consider the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability.  SDG-oriented supply chains demonstrate a positive relationship between sustainable development and supply-chain performance enhancement.  There are differences in the number of opportunities depend on the motivation for implementing them, industry and supply-chain processes, performance achieved, and SDGs pursued.  Companies have many opportunities to support the 2030 Agenda and enhance their market and organizational performance when aligning their supply chains with the SDGs.

To hinder environmental damage and obtain a protective order or injunction in most civil law systems, danger in delay must be asserted for the enforceability of proceedings. To initiate legal proceedings, a 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘢 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘦 case must exist, requiring the claimant to present evidence and show the likelihood of success on the merits for the injunction and relief sought. The criterion of danger in delay typically requires evidence of irreparable harm or damage that would be difficult to repair. The latest IPCC reports and other scientific studies on the imminent threats and irreparable harm to our environment must be such irrefutable proof.

Concern about the misuse of the term was being voiced well before this article's appearance in 2007.  We have "sustainable" development, cities, economics, construction, investing, operation, and, inevitably, sustainability consultants – “There is nothing, it seems, that cannot be described as ‘sustainable’”.  A correct understanding of the term is important in the processes of policy-making and socioeconomic development as it has become a boundary term used for identification.  Its misuse to further the political and financial objectives of the counterproductive and unsustainable development of our communities and societies across the world has become a major concern to all serious socioeconomic stakeholders.

The divergence of ESG ratings creates uncertainty and represents a challenge for decision-makers, including investment managers and regulators. This ESG rating divergence makes it difficult to evaluate the ESG performance of companies, funds, and portfolios, which is their primary purpose. It also decreases companies’ incentives to improve their ESG performance. Companies receive mixed signals from rating agencies about what actions are expected and valued by the market, which will lead to underinvestment in ESG improvement activities. Thus, companies optimize for one rating while underperforming in other ESG dimensions and fail to improve the firm’s sustainability and intrinsic ESG performance.