Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

Climate change and other threats to environmental sustainability will have an increasingly material impact on financial actors. However, transmission channels and possible spillover effects remain understudied. This review paper summarizes recent works published on these intersections and portraits venues for further research. In this respect, late advances on the control of the impact of climate change-related risks on financial risks have been relevant. New climate scenario analyses, stress testing techniques, and disclosure requirements have been recently introduced. Existing risk management frameworks are being updated to integrate climate change-related risks. Yet, as the development of new practices continues, the need for assessing their effectiveness and limitations, from a risk management as well as a financial stability perspective, remains. In this vein, sufficient attention needs also to be paid to emerging market failures linked to climate change. These include noninsurability of risks and credit rationing or mispricing, potentially hampering adaptation and mitigation investments in some areas. Last, while focus has been put thus far mainly on climate change, time has come to accelerate the debate on the financial implications of other threats to the environment. This is notably the case of loss of biodiversity, by also taking stock of the work of the Conference of the Parties (COP).

Recent literature is paying increasing attention to how the physical and transition dimensions of climate change can influence the sovereign debt market (sovereign creditworthiness, the cost of public borrowing), with direct implications for the fiscal sustainability of a country. A systematic review and analysis of the literature and policy documents published in the last three years has revealed two main findings: i) there is clear evidence of an international policy agenda aiming to address both climate and sovereign debt challenges, acknowledging that the cost of inaction compounds over time and gives rise to a vicious circle; ii) the most current research in the field, preponderantly empirically rooted, is multifaceted and can be divided into main research streams: 1) determinants of long-term sovereign bond yields and/or spreads; 2) the nexus between climate change/the Environmental, Social, and Governance and the sovereign credit risk; 3) the need for efficient tools to incorporate climate considerations into the reformed global debt architecture.

The urgency to address the environmental impacts of the building sector, particularly emissions allocated to building operation, necessitates immediate, informed action. Occupant behaviour is a known driver of building operational emissions. Use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices holds great potential in mitigating and distributing occupancy-driven energy demand, ultimately aiming for net-zero emissions. However, a full accounting of the environmental impacts and advantages is still lacking. As the adoption of IoT scales up, what will be the environmental impact of the tools used, from sensor life cycle to data storage? This study reviews the interdisciplinary literature on life cycle assessment (LCA) of IoT in buildings, encompassing emissions from pre-deployment to end-of-life, as well as savings from reduced building operational emissions. This opens a vital discourse on the opportunities and challenges of building-related IoT.

The new reform, implemented in 2023, as part of the fourth phase of the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS), introduces multiple changes that could contribute to the system's termination. However, even with the achievement of climate neutrality by 2050, budgetary climate financing needs will not disappear whatsoever. Instead, they are expected to grow significantly in the coming years and decades. Thus, the following questions arise. What will be the next direction of EU ETS reforms beyond 2028? Is building green public budgets based on revenues from the EU ETS justified or should we return quickly to discussing alternative sources of financing, including a European green tax?

The Sahel region of West Africa has experienced some of the most severe multidecadal rainfall variability over the past 50 years. Based on recollections of the past and observations of the present, local communities in the Sahel have developed extensive knowledge and understanding of their environment and climate that enables them to harness ecosystem services to support their livelihoods and survive environmental changes. Recent literature indicated that farmers’ knowledge and perceptions of changes in the local climate are largely consistent with observed meteorological data, except for the more heterogeneous precipitation change. This understanding of changes in their environment combined with their indigenous knowledge can be particularly useful in data-sparse regions such as the Sahel. This review highlights the importance of indigenous knowledge in enabling effective adaptation in the Sahel and beyond. It outlines some future research avenues for fostering indigenous knowledge-based adaptation, including addressing barriers to mainstreaming of indigenous knowledge into climate research and policy.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, financial institutions had started integrating climate risks into their operations, fostering sustainable finance through green policies and disclosure requirements. However, with the onset of the pandemic, strategic focus necessarily pivoted toward immediate crisis management. This shift inadvertently relegated the imperatives of climate risk to a position of lesser priority and reinforced investments in high-carbon sectors, reinforcing the ‘carbon bias’ in global finance. Research highlights the need for a joint strategy addressing climate change and pandemic impacts on financial markets. A coordinated response to these interconnected challenges is essential for the resilience and sustainability of the global financial system, which necessitates the alignment of crisis management with environmental sustainability efforts.

Sustainability is a powerful global framework for implementing transformations in agricultural and food systems. The complexity of the challenges involved leads to giving more importance to questions related to governance. The two recent globalization crises have accelerated this evolution. Experiments in the local governance of systems, carried out on the scale of cities and regions, contribute to reconfiguring the trajectories of these systems. The experiments confirm the positive effects of multiscalar and multistakeholder governance that is inclusive, participatory, and collaborative, while rooted in territories and societies. This literature review revisits the relationships between sustainability, governance, and food systems to encourage moving away from a theoretical and prescriptive position.

Online social media such as the microblog Twitter are key digital arenas shaping the public discourse on important societal topics. Automated social media accounts, so-called ‘social bots,’ have emerged as a controversial phenomenon, proven to both disrupt and support online communications on topics such as political elections and public health. To what extent social bots also impact online conversations on climate change, environmental crises, and sustainability remains unknown however.

We present a review of current research on social bots and their potential impact on Twitter discourses around climate, environmental, and sustainability topics; we collect the methods used to detect social bots, approaches to determine their online impact, extract a high-level normative assessment of automation, and summarize the recommendations for stakeholders to manage the challenges created by automation. We note a lack of common, comparable methodologies to robustly assess the impacts of social bots, which contributes to simplistic causal claims about their impact on public opinion and behavior. We identify research needs and offer methodological recommendations for future research on this topic of growing importance.

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) and associated dialogues brought together diverse food system actors and stakeholders from across the globe to take action on transforming food systems. These actions included pledges and expression of commitments from both state and nonstate actors to transform their food systems. State actor commitments are visions of what governments expect of their food systems by 2030, and their aspirations to achieve those expectations. This paper reviews pledges made by African Heads of State at the 2021 UNFSS and examines how responsive those commitments are to three dimensions of sustainable healthy diets, namely, nutrition and health, socio-economic, and environmental. Second, the paper assesses how responsive the commitments are to the World Health Organization’s “priority food systems policy actions” that include nutrition labeling, marketing regulation, public food procurement, fiscal policies, food fortification, reformulation, and food safety. We operationally define responsiveness as alignment or relatedness of the commitments to the dimensions of sustainable healthy diets, or the priority policies. We contextualize our appraisals using available literature on the subject.

The geographic overlap between disasters and armed conflict is substantial, making disaster resilience intrinsically linked to conflict exposure. Despite this, there is only a very small literature investigating how armed conflict impacts disaster risk and resilience in affected areas. This article reviews the most recent literature on armed conflict and disaster resilience and shows that while disasters can increase the risk of violent outcomes in contexts where governments and populations are particularly vulnerable to their impacts, these very features are also influenced by the presence of armed conflict. Thus, the relationship is circular, and conflict and disaster risk reinforce each other, and should not be dealt with separately. The review provides an overview for scholars and practitioners who wish to assess the current understanding of how disasters and conflicts impact affected communities’ resilience.