Sustainability and the New Economics

Sustainability and the New Economics PDF Author: Stephen J. Williams
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030787958
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This multidisciplinary book provides new insights and hope for sustainable prosperity given recent developments in economics – but only if swift and strong actions consistent with Earth’s biophysical limits and principles of justice are universally taken. It is one thing to put limits on resource throughput and waste generation to conform with the ecosphere’s biocapacity. It is another thing to efficiently allocate a sustainable rate of resource throughput and ensure it is equitably distributed in the form of final goods and services. While the separate but interdependent decisions regarding throughput, distribution, and allocation are the essence of ecological economics, dealing with them in a world that needs to cure its growth addiction requires a realistic understanding of macroeconomics and the fiscal capacity of currency-issuing central governments. Sustainable prosperity demands that we harness this understanding to carefully regulate the rate of resource throughput and manipulate macroeconomic outcomes to facilitate human flourishing. The book begins by outlining humanity’s current predicament of gross ecological overshoot and laments the half-century of missed opportunities since The Limits to Growth (1972). What was once economic growth has become, in many high-income countries, uneconomic growth (additional costs exceeding additional benefits), which is no longer advancing wellbeing. Meanwhile, low-income nations need a dose of efficient and equitable growth to escape poverty while protecting their environments and the global commons. The book argues for a synthesis of our increasing knowledge of the ecosphere’s limited carrying capacity and the power of governments to harness, transform, and distribute resources for the common good. Central to this synthesis must be a correct understanding of the difference between financial constraints and real resource constraints. While the latter apply to everyone, the former do not apply to currency-issuing central governments, which have much more capacity for corrective action than mainstream thinking perceives. The book joins the growing chorus of authoritative voices calling for a complete overhaul of the dominant economic system. We conclude with policy recommendations based on a new economics that, if implemented, would come close to guaranteeing a sustainable and prosperous future. Upon reading this book, at least one thing should be crystal clear: business as usual is not a viable option.

Sustainable Economics for the Anthropocene

Sustainable Economics for the Anthropocene PDF Author: Leanne Guarnieri
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303131879X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book examines both the need for sustainable economics and the financial practices that will underpin it. The link between rising inequality and the threat to social sustainability is highlighted to create the Economic Scale of Global Boundaries model, which realigns GDP to include quantifiable environmental and social economic gains and losses. The model is applied at both the national and company level to show its practical application for policy and everyday business practice. The impacts of inequality, declining economic growth and the impending deadlines of the Sustainable Development Goals are also discussed in detail. This book aims to highlight how principles of the circular economy and ESG can be utilized to help meet net zero targets. It will be relevant to students, researchers, organizations, and policymakers interested in environmental economics and sustainability and is written to provoke predictive thinking on the global changes ahead.

Sustainability and the New Economics

Sustainability and the New Economics PDF Author: Stephen J. Williams
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030787958
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This multidisciplinary book provides new insights and hope for sustainable prosperity given recent developments in economics – but only if swift and strong actions consistent with Earth’s biophysical limits and principles of justice are universally taken. It is one thing to put limits on resource throughput and waste generation to conform with the ecosphere’s biocapacity. It is another thing to efficiently allocate a sustainable rate of resource throughput and ensure it is equitably distributed in the form of final goods and services. While the separate but interdependent decisions regarding throughput, distribution, and allocation are the essence of ecological economics, dealing with them in a world that needs to cure its growth addiction requires a realistic understanding of macroeconomics and the fiscal capacity of currency-issuing central governments. Sustainable prosperity demands that we harness this understanding to carefully regulate the rate of resource throughput and manipulate macroeconomic outcomes to facilitate human flourishing. The book begins by outlining humanity’s current predicament of gross ecological overshoot and laments the half-century of missed opportunities since The Limits to Growth (1972). What was once economic growth has become, in many high-income countries, uneconomic growth (additional costs exceeding additional benefits), which is no longer advancing wellbeing. Meanwhile, low-income nations need a dose of efficient and equitable growth to escape poverty while protecting their environments and the global commons. The book argues for a synthesis of our increasing knowledge of the ecosphere’s limited carrying capacity and the power of governments to harness, transform, and distribute resources for the common good. Central to this synthesis must be a correct understanding of the difference between financial constraints and real resource constraints. While the latter apply to everyone, the former do not apply to currency-issuing central governments, which have much more capacity for corrective action than mainstream thinking perceives. The book joins the growing chorus of authoritative voices calling for a complete overhaul of the dominant economic system. We conclude with policy recommendations based on a new economics that, if implemented, would come close to guaranteeing a sustainable and prosperous future. Upon reading this book, at least one thing should be crystal clear: business as usual is not a viable option.

Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene

Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Luis-Alberto Padilla
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783030803988
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In the Anthropocene sustainable development responds to socio-economic, environmental and political crises provoked by humankind due to global warming and the great acceleration of human intervention in ecosystems. This book introduces readers to current debates on sustainable development and to a holistic and multidisciplinary approach. Regional integration and supranational institutions are fundamental for sustainable development. The democratisation of the international system requires a new multilateralism. Global problems of demography, economic ideology of unlimited growth, the prevailing technocratic paradigm, consumerism, problems of waste, fossil fuels, industrial food production, use of fertilisers, water management and climate change are discussed, and the importance of multilateral agreements for security, sustainable peace and development is explored. This planetary crisis may be solved by international cooperation based on the UN sustainable development goals. This book - provides a concise synthesis of the main subjects of sustainable development studies- links development studies to multilateral diplomacy as practised by UN bodies and organisations- gives a new holistic and multidisciplinary approach to environmental and social sciences in the Anthropocene epoch.

Utopia in the Anthropocene

Utopia in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Michael Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429859562
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Utopia in the Anthropocene takes a cross-disciplinary approach to analyse our current world problems, identify the key resistance to change and take the reader step by step towards a more sustainable, equitable and rewarding world. It presents paradigm-shifting models of economics, political decision-making, business organization and leadership and community life. These are supported by psychological evidence, utopian literature and inspirational changes in history. The Anthropocene is in crisis, because human activity is changing almost everything about life on this planet at an unparalleled pace. Climate change, the environmental emergency, economic inequality, threats to democracy and peace and an onslaught of new technology: these planetwide risks can seem too big to comprehend, let alone manage. Our reckless pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet could even take us towards a global dystopia. As an unprecedented frenzy of change grips the world, the case for utopia is stronger than ever. An effective change plan requires a bold, imaginative vision, practical goals and clarity around the psychological values necessary to bring about a transformation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, sustainability studies, ecological economics, organizational psychology, politics, utopian philosophy and literature – and all who long for a better world.

The Great Mindshift

The Great Mindshift PDF Author: Maja Göpel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319437666
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This book describes the path ahead. It combines system transformation researchwith political economy and change leadership insights when discussing the needfor a great mindshift in how human wellbeing, economic prosperity and healthyecosystems are understood if the Great Transformations ahead are to lead to moresustainability. It shows that history is made by purposefully acting humans andintroduces transformative literacy as a key skill in leading the radical incremental change

The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis

The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis PDF Author: Clive Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317589084
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the new geological epoch, the ‘Age of Humans’. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the ‘social-only’ understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of ‘Holocene thinking’. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the ‘politics of unsustainability’.

Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene

Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Gareth Austin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474267491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
For the populations of the developing economies – the vast majority of humanity – the present century offers the prospect of emulating Western standards of living. This hope is combined with increasing awareness of the environmental consequences of the very process of global industrialisation itself. This book explores the interactions between economic development and the physical environment in four regions of the developing world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. The contributors focus on the 'Anthropocene': our present era, in which humanity's influence on the physical environment has begun to mark the geological record. Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene examines environmental changes at global level and human responses to environmental opportunities and constraints on more local and regional scales, themes which have been insufficiently studied to date. This volume fills this gap in the literature by combining historical, economic and geographical perspectives to consider the implications of the Anthropocene for economic development in Asia and Africa.

Sustainable Wellbeing Futures

Sustainable Wellbeing Futures PDF Author: Robert Costanza
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1789900956
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Ecological economics can help create the future that most people want – a future that is prosperous, just, equitable and sustainable. This forward-thinking book lays out an alternative approach that places the sustainable wellbeing of humans and the rest of nature as the overarching goal. Each of the book’s chapters, written by a diverse collection of scholars and practitioners, outlines a research and action agenda for how this future can look and possible actions for its realisation.

After the Anthropocene

After the Anthropocene PDF Author: Anne Fremaux
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030111202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The environmental crisis is the most prominent challenge humanity has ever had to battle with, and humanity is currently failing. The Anthropocene—or so called ‘age of humans’—is indeed a period when the survival of humanity has never been so much at risk. This book locates itself in the field of critical green political theory. Fremaux's analysis of the current environmental crisis calls for us to embrace radical shifts in our modes of being; or, in other words, socially progressive innovations that will be described within the unique framework of "Green Republicanism." In offering a constructive and emancipatory delineation of what could be considered an ecological civilization that is respectful of its natural environment and social differences, this book describes how to shift from an ‘arrogant speciesism’ and materialistic lifestyle to a post-anthropocentric ecological humanism focusing on the ‘good life’ within ecological limits. This new political regime calls for a radical reinvention of our societies, a decentering of the humans within our metaphysical worldview, and a withdrawal of the capitalist technosphere at the benefit of the biosphere. It will require a new economic paradigm that replaces the unsustainable capitalist logic of growth by sustainable degrowth and steady economics. Rooted in ethical thinking and political philosophy, this book seeks to offer a concrete roadmap of how sustainable societies can be fostered.

Climate Change, Disasters, Sustainability Transition and Peace in the Anthropocene

Climate Change, Disasters, Sustainability Transition and Peace in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Hans Günter Brauch
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319975625
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book provides insight into Anthropocene-related studies by IPRA’s Ecology and Peace Commission. The first three chapters discuss the linkage between disasters and conflict risk reduction, responses to socio-environmental disasters in high-intensity conflict scenarios and the fragile state of disaster response with a special focus on aid-state-society relations in post-conflict settings. The two following chapters analyse climate-smart agriculture and a sustainable food system for a sustainable-engendered peace and the ethnology of select indigenous cultural resources for climate change adaptation focusing on the responses of the Abagusii in Kenya. A specific case study focuses on social representations and the family as a social institution in transition in Mexico, while the last chapter deals with sustainable peace through sustainability transition as transformative science concluding with a peace ecology perspective for the Anthropocene.