Global Sustainability Pathways Unveiled in Expert Survey
University of Eastern Finland
The majority of sustainable development researchers believe that in affluent countries, it is necessary to look beyond economic growth to achieve sustainable development, a recent study from the University of Eastern Finland suggests. The study, published in the scientific journal Ecological Economics, investigated the preferred future paths for countries at different income levels among 461 sustainability scholars. The survey results shed light on the strategic choices necessary for achieving global sustainability. The study focused on green growth and post-growth economic strategies. The green growth strategy aims to enhance both societal and environmental well-being as the economy grows. On the other hand, post-growth paths question this approach and advocate for a shift beyond growth, focusing on environmental and societal well-being instead of economic growth.
“This research reveals that an overwhelming majority of sustainability scholars, over 75 percent, support post-growth pathways for affluent countries already this decade. For less affluent countries, the majority of scholars favoured either green growth or post-growth pathways,” says Postdoctoral Researcher Teemu Koskimäki from the University of Eastern Finland, who conducted the study.Different paths are needed in countries with different income levels.In the study, scholars were asked to choose which pathways should be pursued in different country income groups in the 2020s and 2030s in order to achieve sustainable development globally. A comparison of the responses revealed that support for post-growth paths increased over time, while support for green growth declined in all contexts. Koskimäki emphasizes that the research results challenge the prevailing green growth-focused approach.“Currently, global Sustainable Development Goals are based on green growth. However, researchers emphasize the urgent need to consider post-growth strategies, particularly in affluent countries.”Koskimäki stresses the critical importance of understanding the views of sustainability scholars on suitable paths for countries of different income levels.
“Policy-makers at various levels and sectors may rely on these experts as they implement the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
Although sustainability scholars favour post-growth paths, the study shows they are not as familiar with this approach as they are with green growth.
“In my study, I address the challenges that this gap in knowledge and skills can create for achieving global sustainability,” Koskimäki says.
GDP is an insufficient measure of societal well-being
The study also found that most sustainability scholars who responded to the survey consider Gross Domestic Product, GDP, to be an inadequate measure of societal well-being.
“This underscores the need for a broader discussion of progress indicators, especially for wealthier countries, where the costs of continued consumption growth exceed its benefits,” says Koskimäki.
Based on the study’s conclusions, research, education, and policymaking should pay attention to targeted transformative change, with a particular focus on facilitating post-growth strategies in the wealthiest countries.
The study offers critical perspectives on the equitable and efficient implementation of various sustainability strategies and underscores the need for targeted approaches that take economic disparities between countries into account. According to Koskimäki, this recognition could facilitate the equitable and efficient achievement of sustainability, both locally and globally.
“The study reveals a potential contradiction between those sustainability paths addressed in sustainability reports and by political decision-makers and those favored by scholars. A broader, more inclusive conversation is needed to ensure that we are targeting the right transformations and implementing them in a controlled manner,” Koskimäki concludes.
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Children in Albania rehearse their play, “The Windmill”, about the climate crisis. Photo by Plaku Production/Save the Children. More content available here
NEW YORK, Monday 5 June – From touring theatre plays, to letter-writing, to radio shows: thousands of children in 24 countries across the world are marking World Environment Day by launching a “week of action” to draw attention to issues of the climate crisis and inequality.
Supported by Save the Children as part of its Generation Hope campaign to support children to raise their voice, the young people involved hope that their calls for change will be heard by leaders and policymakers as they prepare for the review of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
In Albania, a group of child campaigners recently undertook a survey looking into the impact of air pollution across four major cities and found it had negative impacts on children including asthma, headaches and lack of concentration at school[i]. Now, those same children have been inspired to produce and perform a play to educate older generations about why change is needed.
Martina, 15, is one of the children involved in the play “The Windmill”, being picked up again this week after attracting an audience of 300 people back in December. The 12 children involved, aged between 10 and 16, aim to reach a total of 300 more people before the SDG summit in September.
Martina plays the part of a girl named Sara who is taking part in a community project to install a windmill in her village to generate renewable energy. She said: “Our show addresses climate change and economic inequality, which are important issues because they affect our daily lives and the sustainability of the planet.
“These issues affect my life and that of many other children because they cause natural disasters, negatively affect the planet and economic inequality brings crises in health care and access to education. With this show we hope that people will become aware and act against economic inequality and climate change.
“In my opinion, adults should listen to children because we have unique ideas and perspectives that will help us move forward.”
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, children are using the week of action to write letters to leaders about how the climate crisis is already taking its toll on their lives. In Uganda, 13-year-old Doreen will send a letter saying: “There is no rain and crops are not growing because they’re not watered. We shall not have food. What is going to be done to solve this problem?”
Last year, Save the Children reported that the hunger crisis in Uganda, caused largely by extreme weather events, had led to parents sending toddlers of pre-school age to school with their older siblings to share their free school meals.
In Nepal, a giant white teddy bear that is two month into an epic six-month journey around the country to raise awareness of air pollution is going into schools to meet children and record their concerns.
And in Peru, Save the Children is facilitating dialogues between child-led organisations, including from migrant and ethnic minority communities, to discuss how the climate crisis and inequality are affecting their rights, and how they can try to effect change. These children are now sharing these concerns with leaders in a variety of ways that speak to the diversity of languages and cultures in Peru, including writing their hopes and demands in letters, and recording audio and video of themselves. Some are also meeting with authorities directly to voice their demands.
Inger Ashing, CEO at Save the Children, said:
“For years now we have seen children and young people all over the world take to the streets, march, and demand that their leaders take action to tackle the climate crisis.
“This year marks the halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon seven years ago – it’s a critical point to reflect on where we are and determine the steps we need to take for children around the world. As we approach the SDG summit in September it is compelling to see children express creative ways to demand change.”
“The climate crisis has an impact on almost every aspect of children’s lives, from having enough food on the table to having a safe and secure home to being able to concentrate in the classroom during scorching heatwaves. And it is the children most affected by inequality and discrimination who bear the brunt of climate change, time and again. This World Environment Day, we hope that leaders across the world will listen to what children are saying and step-up climate financing to create a greener, fairer planet for and with children.”
Universities must take “heroic action” to address the sustainability crisis after helping to lay its foundations by failing to take action sooner, Arizona State University president Michael Crow has claimed.
He said the sustainability emergency – which the GSDC is meeting to discuss urgent solutions for – was caused by the relationship between the built environment and the natural systems on which we are dependent.
Professor Crow told delegates at the event in Saudi Arabia that sustainability was “critical to our success as a species”.
“We in academia have contributed mightily to the designed environment, and hold much of the responsibility for the lack of sustainability of that built environment and its increasing disruption of the natural environment,” he said.
Professor Crow warned that the world was entering an “unbelievably challenging moment where everything is accelerating”, and that there were many things higher education could have done already but had not.
The sector’s inability to be “more conscious of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it” helped lay the foundations for the sustainability crisis today, he said.
“A lot of groups have been responsible for our lack of sustainability, but at the heart of all of them has been the academy, [and] the universities,” he added.
“It’s time for universities to really step up for heroic action in the way that universities did around some other issues in the past.
“It’s time for new types of knowledge to be produced, new ways of thinking.”
He called for universities to broaden the way they organised themselves because working in isolation would “not get us there quickly enough”.
The summit, held in the Middle East for the first time, is aiming to challenge the usual thinking on what higher education, with the support of governments, businesses and society, must do to help society meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“It’s time for us to mount up, to begin working together, to begin aligning together, to begin working across institutions and across the world to take on this notion of global sustainable development,” added Professor Crow.
Also speaking at the summit, Tony Chan, president of KAUST, said the world was in a state of crisis that imperiled all of humanity, and universities across the globe should act with resolve.
“Our required response to the present crisis must be of a scale and sense of urgency akin to how we must respond to major world wars,” he said.
“Our universities must cease to be exemplars of unsustainable practices and we must become the transformative enablers of sustainability for others.”
Those outside higher education took their cue not just from what universities preached, but from what they practised, said Dr Chan.
“If academics are serious about tackling sustainability challenges, we can’t wait for the cavalry to show up,” he said. “We are the cavalry.”
We Expect A Lot From Our Buildings — How Do International Codes Assure Sustainability?
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Today, society faces 3 major challenges in the built environment: ensuring building safety, improving sustainability, and addressing our affordable housing crisis.
May is Building Safety Month. Up-to-date international codes can make communities more equipped to endure increasingly frequent and severe weather events, improve sustainability, and address the affordable housing crisis. This year, innovation and collaboration are evolving due to the increasing frequency and severity of global weather events. All communities need building codes to protect their citizens from disasters like fires, weather-related events, and structural collapse.
It seemed to make sense to learn more about how modern and innovative international building codes address these imperatives, how code officials work day in and day out to keep the public safe, and how the International Code Council is enabling the flow of innovative policies and practices around the world to improve the built environment.
Q: Thanks for making yourself available to answer some questions. For those unfamiliar with the International Code Council, why is it in existence, and what effect has it had on cities and towns across the globe?
Dominic Sims, CEO of the International Code Council, Photo provided by International Code Council
The International Code Council was established in 1994 as a non-profit organization dedicated to developing a single set of comprehensive and coordinated model building codes. The mission of the Code Council is to steward the development process for model codes that benefit public safety and support the industry’s need for one set of codes without regional limitations. We are a member-focused association with members from across building industries who come together to participate in our democratic and transparent process to develop the most widely used set of building safety codes and standards in the world – the International Codes® (I-Codes®).
Our technical staff works closely with legislators and code officials to help jurisdictions implement the most appropriate set of codes for their specific regions.
Q: I’m struck by the call for reciprocity toward improving sustainability and addressing the affordable housing crisis. These 2 objectives seem not to be related. Might you offer some insights into their symbiosis?
We expect a lot of our buildings. They are complex systems that have broad ranging impacts on our lives and communities. They protect us from hazards, influence our health, and impact our environment. Finding the balance across all these expectations while maintaining affordability is challenging, but the Code Council and governments must navigate these complexities.
Housing affordability is particularly important for low and moderate income households. These households are often the hardest hit by disasters — many of which are exacerbated by climate change — and lack the resources for post-disaster recovery. At the same time, they spend a disproportionate amount of their income on utility bills — in some places 3 times as much as the average household. When we talk about housing affordability, it’s not just whether we can get someone in a house but whether they can afford to stay there.
The International Code Council is currently the only code development organization that actively considers cost as an element of the code development process. Through the code development, process stakeholders from across the building industry come together to identify the best practices for safety and sustainability while ensuring the resulting buildings remain affordable and accessible to broad populations. Naturally, individual communities have their own perspectives on priorities for their building stock. The Code Council provides communities with tools to achieve those priorities from model codes that capture the current consensus to stretch codes that can assist communities in going beyond minimum-level requirements.
Q: May is Building Safety Month. What should our readers know about the need to adopt modern, regularly-updated building codes?
Today, society faces 3 major challenges in the built environment: ensuring building safety, improving sustainability, and addressing our affordable housing crisis. Modern and innovative international codes are society’s first line of defense to address these imperatives. One of the most cost-effective ways to safeguard communities against natural disasters is to build using hazard-resistant building codes.
FEMA studies show that every dollar invested in the adoption of modern building codes provides 11 times more in savings by reducing casualties, lowering the cost of building damage and helping communities get back on their feet faster by minimizing indirect costs such as business interruptions and lost income. We want to emphasize to all communities the importance of adopting modern building codes and stress the critical importance of continued inspection and enforcement to keep buildings and their occupants safe and healthy. We also encourage local governments to fund their building departments to support the needed level of maintenance inspections.
The formula for success in implementing and supporting modern building codes and inspections is simple: staff, train, and finance.
Q: How is the building industry working to increase water efficiency through innovative practices and technologies — not just domestically but worldwide?
Logo provided by ICC
Innovation and collaboration must evolve due to global weather events’ increasing frequency and severity. There are many examples of countries in water-scarce areas that are innovating to increase water efficiency. Those involved in the code development process can draw best practices from the following examples across the globe:
Israel is leading the world through its policies, practices, and technologies for its water resources and conservation, most notably through reclaiming over 80% of its wastewater and stormwater for agricultural operation.
Saudi Arabia boasts the highest production of desalinated water worldwide (the country removes salt out of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf) and is in the process of converting its desalination plants to solar.
Cape Town, South Africa is incorporating automated domestic water metering installations to set a target water usage for each resident per day, leveraging alternative water sources, and updating their supply network infrastructure.
The United Kingdom is cutting water use through water metering, incentives for water-saving technologies, hosepipe bans, and investing in updating the country’s water supply equipment.
The North China Plain has addressed increasing agricultural demands on water through increased monitoring, institutionalized water conservation practices, ground leveling, and more efficient drainage and irrigation sprinklers.
Q: How does Building Safety Month address some of the issues that we face as a global community, including extreme weather events and water scarcity?
Clean water is the world’s most precious commodity, and public health depends on safe and readily available water. The World Health Organization estimates over two billion people live in water-stressed countries, which is expected to worsen in some regions due to a changing climate and population growth. Water conservation and efficiency issues have become crucial conversations amongst building safety professionals in recent years. Building Safety Month raises awareness about these issues by reinforcing the need to adopt modern, regularly-updated building codes, and helps individuals, families, and businesses understand what it takes to create safe and sustainable structures.
Q: What additional details or insights might you provide on how we can institute these best practices in the US?
There is currently no national standard on maintenance and inspection. Individual states follow their own enforcement procedures to seek out, modify, adopt and enforce their own building codes and standards. Currently adopted codes, which local jurisdictions can, and do, modify on a case-by-case basis, may or may not include provisions for building re-inspections and maintenance requirements. The International Property Maintenance Code® (IPMC®) established minimum requirements for the maintenance of existing buildings through model code regulations that contain clear and specific maintenance and property improvement provisions. The latest edition is fully compatible with the International Building Code® (IBC®).
Every jurisdiction needs to understand what their specific regional needs are so that their building, maintenance, and re-inspections codes have appropriately specific provisions for the natural, environmental, and emergency conditions more prevalent in their area (e.g., Florida hurricanes, Kansas tornadoes, California earthquakes and wildfires).
Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project all over the world looks out of context or mishandled, as We are about to break the 1.5°C limit and as rightly put by Isabelle Kempe in her article republished here.
Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project addresses ‘flawed’ approach cities use now, researchers say
The image above is metamorworks via Getty Images
City Climate Intelligence can provide free, near-real-time information on greenhouse gas emissions at the city, neighborhood, building and street level.
The systems cities use to monitor and analyze greenhouse gas emissions are “flawed,” says a group of researchers from Carbon Monitor, Hestia, IG3IS, Nexqt and RMI.
That’s why the group is developing City Climate Intelligence, which it describes as a “next-generation” methodology that offers cities free, near-real-time greenhouse gas emissions information at three increasingly granular levels: the metropolitan area, neighborhood and building and street level. The methodology draws on satellite data and local information such as public building databases, transmission service operator data and GPS data.
The greenhouse gas inventory is a hallmark of city climate action plans nationwide, allowing leaders to understand how much climate pollution their city emits and which sectors are responsible. While early tools to create that inventory were suitable for raising big-picture awareness— for example, that a city should drive down transportation or building emissions — they aren’t cutting it anymore, Nexqt founder and CEO Fouzi Benkhelifa said. As climate change impacts bear down on communities, and decarbonization deadlines loom, cities need more specific, timely data to make decisions that reduce emissions the most, he said.
Emma Loewen, a senior associate with RMI’s urban transformation team, described City Climate Intelligence’s future as akin to the National Weather Service. “Everyone can access it; it’s free. It’s updated in a timely manner that is useful for people,” she said. “And there’s no real questioning of it. It’s just an independent third party that is respected and taken for face value.”
Cities currently face numerous challenges in measuring and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. Inventories are time-consuming and resource-intensive, costing up to tens of thousands of dollars, points out an April report by the City Climate Intelligence team. Further, existing data systems on urban greenhouse gas emissions aren’t designed for planning or implementing emissions reduction efforts, the report says.
“During RMI workshops, city governments and community advocates alike identified policy planning capabilities as a key component of an optimal emissions data tool,” the report states. “Currently, these city stakeholders don’t have the capacity to conduct detailed data analyses on the impact of proposed climate solutions.”
The City Climate Intelligence team has provided emissions data at the metropolitan area level for 53 cities globally, including Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon. For the covered cities, users can see two years of emissions data at a 10-kilometer resolution broken down into six sectors: ground transportation, power, industry, residential, aviation and international shipping. The team plans to eventually offer this information for every major metropolitan area in the world.
The researchers have also explored the potential to use street- and building-level data to simulate the effects of specific climate policies in Los Angeles and Paris. In Los Angeles, their analysis showed that installing rooftop solar in central LAfor households making less than $50,000 annually would result in a 21.6% annual reduction in citywide emissions compared with 2019 levels. The median savings in annual electricity costs for the more than 260,000 households making the switch would be $1,884, the analysis estimates.
This ability to support effective decision-making is part of what sets City Climate Intelligence apart from other tools, the researchers say. “There are a lot of greenhouse gas emissions data platforms out there,” but they aren’t driving climate action on the ground, Loewen said.
Her team isn’t alone in identifying this information gap. An October report by the National Academy of Sciences acknowledges the rapidly increasing needs of cities and states to manage emissions and calls for accelerated development of greenhouse gas emissions information “at more granular temporal and spatial scales.”
It’s not just city leaders that the researchers believe could benefit from City Climate Intelligence. RMI’s report points to potential uses by community-based organizations to raise awareness of emissions-related equity issues, journalists to track progress toward goals and the climate finance community to locate areas for investment.
Next, the City Climate Intelligence team plans to create a policy toolkit using neighborhood-, street- and building-level information to simulate the impact of policies, investments and infrastructure. It will also develop a platform for the data and methodology that has a user-friendly design, is integrated with existing inventory reporting frameworks and can layer socioeconomic data sets with emissions data.
The researchers also plan to expand emissions data to a larger group of cities, prioritizing smaller ones and those in the Global South that might not have the information they need for a baseline greenhouse gas emissions inventory, the report says.
Generations of travelers have stood before the “ksars” of Djado, wandering their crenellated walls, watchtowers, secretive passages and wells, all of them testifying to a skilled but unknown hand.
Originally posted on DESERTIFICATION: Heidelberg Earth scientists study natural climate fluctuations of the past 500,000 years – https://www.labmanager.com/news/desertification-threatens-mediterranean-forests-30224 With a view towards predicting the consequences of human-made climate change for Mediterranean ecosystems, Earth scientists from Heidelberg University have studied natural climate and vegetation fluctuations of the past 500,000 years. Their primary focus was the effects…
Originally posted on HUMAN WRONGS WATCH: Human Wrongs Watch (UN News)* — Disinformation, hate speech and deadly attacks against journalists are threatening freedom of the press worldwide, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday [2 May 2023], calling for greater solidarity with the people who bring us the news. UN Photo/Mark Garten | File photo…
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