Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

This review considers climate-related vulnerability and the key issues linking gender equality and social inclusion to scaling and mainstreaming climate-smart agriculture (CSA) toward achieving transformative, inclusive, and sustainable food systems, to reduce climate-related vulnerability. Recent literature continues to highlight structural barriers, biases, inequalities, and power relations impeding the contribution of CSA to reducing climate-related vulnerability. We review the role of CSA solutions toward achieving gender equality and transformation outcomes to enable food system transformation for climate change resilience. Effective food system transformation requires gender-responsive interventions, social and youth inclusion, intersectionality, and cognizance of how global social and environmental changes affect the transformation process. In the context of food system transformation, gender transformation requires scalable, enabling mechanisms.

The current literature documents significant effects of climate change on the cost of sovereign debt and debt levels. These effects are due to a complex nexus of climate change systemic effects on the economy, characterized by deep uncertainty, fat tails, feedback loops, and uncertain fiscal costs of climate policies. Investors believe that climate risks have begun to materialize but are underpriced. I give an overview of the multichannels and review the evidence on fiscal costs from climate change, climate premia for sovereign debt, and climate risk assessments of sovereign bond portfolios. Recent advances integrate forward-looking climate scenarios in debt sustainability analysis and credit ratings. The findings suggest several mechanisms may activate a doom loop between climate change and sovereign debt.

This essay delves into the evolving role of audit engagements in assuring sustainability reports. While traditional and contemporary auditing focus primarily on evaluating financial data and governance structures to foster investors’ trust and ensure financial market stability, the recent push for sustainability assurance stretches the auditors’ role much further, requiring them to guide numerous stakeholders in navigating long-term (climate) risks and opportunities. We identify three pitfalls and overpromises in applying contemporary auditing principles to provide sustainability assurance: the feasibility of existing methodologies, the tension between social aspirations and economic realities, and the illusion of pseudo-assurance. These findings offer guidance to auditors and underscore the further need to revisit the paradigmatic foundation of auditing.

Climate change challenges are formidable, and especially so for the insurance sector for the economy-wide risk management role it plays. Extreme events, depicted by acute climate risk, and steady deterioration in climate elements, captured as chronic climate risk, pose specific challenges to different segments of the insurance sector. We review these challenges and mitigation, adaptation, and innovation responses being developed, as well as highlight the need for future research and advances to support a resilient global insurance sector.

This article reviews the literature on climate-related prudential regulation, identifying the most relevant articles published in the last two years. The study is situated within the recent developments of this regulation in the United States and the European Union, given the high concentration of Global Systemically Important Banks in these regions. Through this critical analysis, five emerging perspectives have been identified: compensation policy, biodiversity loss, financed emissions, systemic risk, and sustainability taxonomies. The policy implications shed light on the proliferation of voluntary initiatives that may divert from climate goals, and highlight the need for a guided transition through harmonized regulation.

This paper argues that certain erroneous premises upon which the mainstream finance paradigm is based are a structural cause of greenwashing. By scrutinizing the metatheoretical hypotheses of this paradigm through a critical realist lens, we aim to show that it rests upon on tacit representations that impose a distorted view of financial ‘knowledge’, financial systems, the Earth System, and society. This ontological bias leads to fallacious research questions, biased methodologies, and has even generated ill-advised policies that are conducive to the financialization of nature. We then put forth that critical realism could offer realistic metatheoretical foundations for the development of a new ecological finance paradigm.

The increased use of Artificial intelligence systems (AI systems) is associated with multifaceted social, environmental, and economic consequences. These include nontransparent decision-making processes, discrimination, increasing inequalities, rising energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in AI model development and application, and an increasing concentration of economic power. By considering the multidimensionality of sustainability, this paper takes steps toward substantiating the call for an overarching perspective on ‘sustainable AI.’ It presents the Sustainability Criteria and Indicators for Artificial Intelligence Systems (SCAIS) Framework, an assessment framework that contains a set of 19 sustainability criteria for sustainable AI and 67 indicators that are based on the results of a critical literature review, and expert workshops. Its interdisciplinary approach contributes a unique holistic perspective to facilitate and structure the discourse on sustainable AI. Further, it provides a concrete assessment framework that lays the foundation for developing standards and tools to support the conscious development and application of AI systems.

Sustainable finance and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues have garnered significant attention in both industry and academia. However, the lack of consensus on these concepts has led to confusion about their impact on investors and markets, hindering the interpretation of empirical data and the development of effective regulations. This highlights the need for transparent analyses from the finance research community. By reviewing recent asset pricing literature to determine if it has effectively identified an ESG factor, the paper examines theoretical models linking ESG factors to asset performance, with differing views on whether high-ESG firms yield lower returns due to reduced risk or outperform due to sustainable practices and market sentiment. The paper also reviews empirical studies, presenting findings on whether green assets outperform brown assets in financial markets. The paper contributes to the debate on integrating ESG into investment strategies without compromising returns, providing practical insights for investors and policymakers navigating responsible investing.

The increasing recognition of the importance of climate-resilient development (CRD) for developing countries is accompanied by a further recognition of the need for financial resources to meet the need for adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development in these countries. Innovative finance sources and mechanisms are therefore recommended as a solution for scaling up climate finance to meet CRD needs in developing countries. This review article examines the alignment between innovative climate finance and CRD. It argues that the operationalisation of innovative climate finance generates misalignments with CRD principles particularly relating to how the finance is sourced, governed and allocated. This fails to align with CRD principles of ensuring transformations and transitions, equity and justice and agency and empowerment. The review article proposes an expanded and CRD-aligned understanding of innovative climate finance that improves the governance of existing climate finance flows.