Featured Opinion
For humanity and the planet to thrive, we need to empower women
07 March 2023 - There’s a golden rule for humanity, common across all major religions and societies: treat others as you would like to be treated. It is the bedrock of democracy and just legal systems. But when it comes to one part of society, this rule, it seems,...

23 March 2023 - The negative environmental and social side-effects of our current development trajectory, typically based on a narrow focus on growing GDP, are well known. In a previous article we argued that GDP is indeed a problematic indicator for progress and discussed the ...

16 March 2023 - We are in a desperate race to avoid locking in a pathway to human extinction. This requires brutal honesty on the threats we face. Climate change, not China, Russia or the US, is the greatest threat the world faces; it will only be overcome with unprecedented ...

13 March 2023 - There is much debate presently in Europe about the transition towards a sustainable wellbeing economy that responds to the need for greater resilience, equity, ecological sustainability and societal wellbeing to better protect Europe’s citizens against economic, ...

08 March 2023 - Some 23% of Fortune 500 corporations claim to engage with the Sustainable Development Goals framework. Yet, a peer-reviewed study found that a measly 0.2% have developed concrete methods and tools to evaluate their progress toward relevant SDGs.
This ...

08 March 2023 - The yearly COP is the highlight of the climate calendar. Yet, as emissions continue to climb and the impacts of climate change worsen, it is time we asked what the COP process is really achieving and how it can be overhauled to ensure it helps to deliver a safe ...

07 March 2023 - There’s a golden rule for humanity, common across all major religions and societies: treat others as you would like to be treated. It is the bedrock of democracy and just legal systems. But when it comes to one part of society, this rule, it seems, does not ...

24 February 2023 - NOT IMPOSSIBLY EXPENSIVE BUT IT REQUIRES AN ACTIVE AND WELL-FUNDED STATE
Over the last 15 years, my colleagues and I have studied possible paths for human wellbeing on planet Earth in the 21st century. Our perspective is that of past and future growth in ...

09 February 2023 - Land use is responsible for about 22% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which is why it is important to reduce emissions from land systems, for example related to deforestation and the conversion of other intact ecosystems to agricultural land. However, ...

01 February 2023 - Exxon Mobil has just announced it made $56 billion in profits in 2022, smashing not only its previous record of $45.2 billion in 2008, but setting a historic high for the Western oil industry. Chevron reported record profits of $35.5 billion last week, while ...

17 January 2023 - Europe needs to be leading the charge to a more sustainable world, but is being held back by short-termism and poor policymaking, argues Systemiq's Janez Potočnik.
"Co-operation in a fragmented world" is the title of the gathering of the great and the good at ...

16 January 2023 - To mitigate the worst effects of climate change and prevent societal breakdown, we must shift to renewable energies and reduce extreme inequality. But doing so would require massive increases in public spending, which is why governments must overhaul their ...

27 December 2022 - Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ESIR group advocated the need for the EU institutions to avoid relying exclusively on short-termism, and instead adopt a “protect, prepare and transform” (PPT) approach for resilience. “Protect”, through a swift ...