Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

This review paper contributes to understanding and interpreting the widely adopted Doughnut model by investigating the mathematical objects underpinning its creation. While the model has gained popularity as a geometrical representation of sustainability, little attention has been given to the nature and properties of its components. By analyzing the visuals of the model and using mathematical tools such as sets and hypergraphs, this work provides a new perspective on the pathways to sustainability. The deconstructive methodology reveals a paradox within the model that distinguishes weak sustainability from strong sustainability. This paper adds value by extending the range of ideas and implications associated with the Doughnut model and providing a more nuanced understanding of its implications for sustainability.

Climate change became a central issue in 1988 with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Financial authorities only started to take up the subject in 2015. Since then, they have continuously accelerated their endeavour in this regard and have quickly added biodiversity loss to the environmental issues to deal with. Unfortunately, despite the very fast learning curve they follow, financial authorities have taken a path that may not succeed. But moving beyond approaches solely based on a financial risk paradigm and fostering transdisciplinary research to address broad systemic questions at the interface of the natural and socioeconomic worlds, central banks and supervisory authorities could enter a new era, where the impact of their decisions would contribute materially to solve the challenges of our time.

This paper examines the evolving landscape of biodiversity reporting standards, describes their underlying rationale and anticipated effects, and highlights unresolved issues that impede the provision of ‘good’ information to markets and other report users. While a variety of reporting regulations exist, they do not point to a common ground for reporting. They address different aspects of corporate biodiversity impact and adopt different conceptions of assurance and materiality. Given the early stage of this field, further research is needed on what best practice informational governance may entail.

Informal traders, street vendors, and transporters — known as midstream businesses — play a critical role in food systems in the Global South, providing affordable food to low-income households. However, negative impacts relating to these businesses may occur because of unregulated activities, for example, poor working conditions, operating outside of regulation food safety policies, and lack of knowledge around and incentives to enforce adequate hygiene standards. Knowledge on effective approaches to reach out and include informal businesses in enhancing food system outcomes and reducing negative impacts is lacking. This is leading to missed opportunities in achieving zero hunger — Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 — and other SDGs. There is a need for improved understanding of the motivations, organization, and governance of informal businesses, so policies and interventions can be adjusted to their realities.

In response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, the number of transdisciplinary research projects in which researchers partner with sustainability initiatives to foster transformative change is increasing globally. To enable and catalyze substantial transformative change, transformative transdisciplinary research (TTDR) is urgently needed to provide knowledge and guidance for actions. We review prominent discussions on TTDR and draw on our experiences from research projects in the Global South and North. Drawing on this, we identify key gaps and stimulate debate on how sustainability researchers can enable and catalyze transformative change by advancing five priority areas: clarify what TTDR is, conduct meaningful people-centric research, unpack how to act at deep leverage points, improve engagement with diverse knowledge systems, and explore potentials and risks of global digitalization for transformative change.

In the current scenario characterized by distrust about business contributions to sustainable development, it is necessary to identify new tools to legitimate companies’ operations. The main initiatives launched by supranational institutions and standard setters contributed to this goal by providing new reporting standards to encourage companies to disclose their environmental, social, and governance information on a mandatory or voluntary basis. However, the proliferation of reports prepared by companies with different attitudes toward sustainable development underlined the need to identify alternative accountability mechanisms to restore the signaling effects of adopting these technologies. In particular, a key role is covered by external assurance mechanisms, which represent an emerging research stream in accounting research. According to this evidence, our contribution aims to contribute to this debate through a science mapping of the existing knowledge about external assurance. The insights collected revealed that academics identified a set of information about the main constraints and opportunities related to adopting external assurance mechanisms that could support the recent initiatives launched by international organizations.

Trajectories of human conflict have direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function. These occur across terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems via the well-established drivers of biodiversity loss: land and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation, pollution and invasive species. However, the mechanisms underlying the nature of some of these connections are still poorly explored, as is the compilation of existing evidence. Furthermore, indirect drivers, spillover effects, and synergistic relationships between drivers are additional knowledge gaps. Building a full picture requires exploring the magnitude and directionality of impacts within the wider context of socioeconomic change and geopolitics with which conflict is associated. As this knowledge advances, conflict in its diverse forms is likely to emerge as the most overlooked and significant indirect driver of biodiversity loss internationally. Additionally, it is our greatest challenge in achieving sustainable development, specifically due to the primacy of its influence on all other sustainability challenges.

Impact measurement (IM) is an important tool to understand how organizations generate non-financial value, including social and environmental impact. However, if impact is to be actionable, it needs to be considered material and thus included in decision-making. Nevertheless, diverging guidelines and directives around materiality generate confusion, presenting a challenge in linking IM to materiality decisions. This challenge becomes increasingly complex when we consider factors related to sustainability, as it involves the presence of numerous stakeholders, each with their unique perspectives. Understanding what holds significance for these stakeholders through active dialogue and engagement is paramount for meaningful IM. While the intricate nature of materiality has been widely acknowledged in the sustainability reporting literature, a dearth of studies explored the drivers of tensions related to impact materiality in the context of IM. Our study proposes four critical research directions to shed light on these tensions and provide valuable insights into this complex area. For instance, additional empirical studies are needed to assess how impact materiality from a multistakeholder perspective has been embedded in the organizational decision-making process.