Articles 2020

Despite mounting evidence of global warming’s costs, the Trump administration has made multiple moves to avoid tracking climate-related economics.

The tiny former Soviet republic’s determination not to be cowed by the Kremlin could provide a template for the west on how to hold back the tide of subversion and corruption

The 20th edition of the Global Risks Report 2025 reveals an increasingly fractured global landscape, where escalating geopolitical, environmental, societal and technological challenges threaten stability and progress. This edition presents the findings of the Global Risks Perception Survey 2024-2025 (GRPS), which captures insights from over 900 experts worldwide. The report analyses global risks through three timeframes to support decision- makers in balancing current crises and longer-term priorities.

Le puits Martha #1 dans le canton de Waterford du comté d’Erie, en Pennsylvanie, a été bouché ! C’est en soi fantastique. Le méthane est 84 fois pire que le dioxyde de carbone (CO2) en matière de changement climatique. Le bouchage d’un puits empêche le méthane de s’échapper dès que le bouchon est mis en place !

A short definition of the polycrisis, including global environmental, geopolitical, and economic aspects.

Added complexity allows an economy to grow, even as resource limits are reached. But at some point, the complexity itself becomes a problem.

The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses.

Belangrijkste les van het Wereld Economisch Forum? De klimaatproblematiek en het verlies aan natuur zijn een enorme bedreiging voor de bedrijfswereld. Heel wat CEO’s zijn zich daar intussen van bewust, maar de politiek moet nu het juiste kader scheppen, schrijft Julie Vandenberghe van WWF-België.

This report written by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Oliver Wyman, provides an in-depth economic analysis of how climate change will reshape health landscapes over the next two decades. It highlights increased risks from new pathogens, pollution and extreme weather events and shows how these will exacerbate current health inequities, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable populations.

Catastrophic climate change and the collapse of human societies By Josep Peñuelas, Sandra Nogué National Science Review, Volume 10, Issue 6, June 2023 The scientific community has focused the agend…

Lancet study finds 'green growth' policies fall far short of what's needed to prevent dangerous change…

The CEO of one of Infosys' other major clients, Shell, also joined Rishi Sunak's new business council two weeks ago.

The damage functions in the models, which relate GDP to temperature and sea-level rise, account for impacts on agriculture, forestry, fisheries, floods, road infrastructure, energy supply and demand, and labor productivity. Using this novel approach, the researchers estimate that the avoided damages are 1.5-3.9 times higher than the costs of climate mitigation. In other words, one euro invested in climate solutions saves the world about 1.5 to 4 euros in effects from climate change.

Misguided policies are hurting the poorest in society; our focus should be on reducing inequality not increasing GDP

Letters: I risked prison to stand up against an system that will lead to ecological and societal collapse – we must look for alternative economic models, writes Zoe Cohen

We face so many concurrent threats that commentators have argued that we now face an unprecedented "polycrisis" – where multiple interacting global crises produce greater harms to the planet and humanity than those crises would produce in isolation. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance has argued that the current economic design is at the root cause of this polycrisis, and with good reason.

As Nobel laureate Solow said to Congress when criticizingeconomicmodelsforfailingtoanticipatethe“GreatReces-sion,” “Every proposition has to pass a smell test: Does itreally make sense?” (2). The methods and conclusions inDietzetal.(1)donotmakesense. ...

The 1972 book "The Limits to Growth" shared a somber message for humanity: the Earth's resources are finite and probably cannot support current rates of economic and population growth to the end of the 21st century, even with advanced technology. Although disparaged by economists at the time, it turns out that, 50 years later, the message still deserves our attention.

Degrowth is a radical economic theory born in the 1970s. It broadly means shrinking rather than growing economies, to use less of the world’s dwindling resources. Detractors of degrowth say economic growth has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing. Supporters argue that degrowth doesn’t mean “living in caves with candles” – but just living a bit more simply.

Food supply expert paints grim global picture hunger 05.23.2022 By Arvin Donley NEW YORK, NEW YORK, US — Global wheat inventories currently stand at about 10 weeks of global consumption, a food supply expert said during a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council on May 19. Sara Menker, chief executive officer of Gro Intelligence, an organization that gathers and analyzes global food and agricultural data, said she disputes official government agency estimates that put global wheat inventories at 33% of annual consumption, countering inventories are closer to 20%. “It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years,” Menker said. “Similar inventory concerns also apply to corn and other grains. Government estimates are not adding up.” Menker told the security council that while much of the blame

Capitalism isn’t what it used to be. Since 2008, critics of the world’s dominant economic system have been lamenting its imperviousness to change. And for good reason. In earlier epochs, financial crises and pandemics wrought economic transformation. In our own, they seem to have yielded more of the same. Before the 2008 crash, global capitalism was characterized by organized labor’s weakness, rising inequality within nations, and a growth model that offset mediocre wage gains with asset-price appreciation. All of these have remained features of the world’s economic order.

At the beginning of nearly every war including the current one in Ukraine, there are those who loudly declare that it will be over shortly and then business-as-usual can resume. They are rarely right. While no one can say for certain what the trajectory of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will be, the economic warfare that is going on alongside it is very likely to destroy the current global trading system.

The inventor of the Brics acronym says sanctions against Russia have exposed nations’ dependence on the western economic system

We must do what we can to contain Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. But we also need to be clear-eyed about it, and face the costs. Economics can’t be separated from politics, and neither can be separated from history. Here are eight sobering realities:

Experten wereldwijd zijn meer bezorgd over een gebrek aan klimaatactie, extreem weer en het verlies van biodiversiteit dan over de pandemie. Dat blijkt uit het laatste rapport van het World Economic Forum.

De coronapandemie mag dan wel het nieuws domineren, experten wereldwijd zijn meer bezorgd over een gebrek aan klimaatactie, over extreem weer en over het verlies van biodiversiteit. Dat blijkt uit het laatste rapport van het World Economic Forum, dat gisteren werd gepubliceerd.

Researchers examined the economic cost of the climate crisis and found it would cut about 37% from global GDP this century, more than twice the drop experienced in the Great Depression. For every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, the global economy would be $3,000 worse off by the end of the century, they estimated.

The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.

As an economist who has studied the effects of weather and climate change, I have examined a large body of work that links heat to economic outcomes. Here are four ways extreme heat hurts the economy – and a little good news.

Et si l’Europe en attendait trop de ses forêts ? Selon un récent rapport du cabinet de conseil Material Economics, en pointe sur les sujets liés à la durabilité et l’économie, l’Union européenne "surestime de loin l’offre de biomasse d’origine végétale et forestière potentiellement disponible".

A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we’re unfortunately right on schedule.

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.

Even “sustainable” technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs

New research suggests social transformations that prompt “degrowth” could cut humanity’s climate footprint in time to meet the Paris climate agreement target.

the court found that one million of today’s Australian children are expected to be hospitalised because of a heat-stress episode, that substantial economic loss will be experienced, and that the Great Barrier Reef and most of Australia’s eucalypt forest won’t exist when they grow up. It found this harm is real, catastrophic, and – importantly from a legal perspective – “reasonably foreseeable”.

Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently. Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic. But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected.

How is it possible to own land? The current pattern of ownership and control of land lies at the heart of many of our biggest dysfunctions: the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems, the exclusion and marginalization of so many people, the lack of housing in many cities—indeed, in many parts of the world—the lack of public space in cities, our exclusion from the countryside. The pattern of land ownership underlies all of these massive issues, and indeed of many more. Yet we rarely question it.

While climate scientists warn that climate change could be catastrophic, economists such as 2018 Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus assert that it will be nowhere near as damaging. In a 2018 paper published after he was awarded the prize, Nordhaus claimed that 3°C of warming would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, compared to what it would be in the total absence of climate change.

Based on preliminary analysis, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2020 was 412.5 parts per million (ppm for short), setting a new record high amount despite the economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the jump of 2.6 ppm over 2019 levels was the fifth-highest annual increase in NOAA's 63-year record. Since 2000, the global atmospheric carbon dioxide amount has grown by 43.5 ppm, an increase of 12 percent.

CCS - Carbon Capture and Storage: A research brief published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes that the abrupt recent shutdown of the Petra Nova coal-fired carbon capture plant in Texas should be seen as a strong signal for investors to avoid such projects.