Documents environment 1 114 results

"Governments at the EU and the member state level are placing increased emphasis on public research and development (R&D) for energy and the environment to advance a circular economy (CE). To achieve CE goals, it is critical to engage SMEs as they represent the vast majority of enterprises in the EU. To date, there is a lack of evidence regarding the impact of these public R&D investments on SMEs' CE activities. We address this gap by analysing the impact of public environmental and energy R&D on CE implementation and investment by SMEs. The study draws from a multi-level database of 10,618 SMEs across 28 EU member states for the period 2013–2015 from the Flash Eurobarometer 441 survey and country-level data from other EU sources. Employing a mixed-level probit regression, we find that the knowledge generated by public environmental and energy R&D, defined as country-level investments in this activity from 2004 to 2015, positively affects SMEs' implementation of CE activities. Additionally, the study finds that public environmental and energy R&D affects the level of SMEs' investment in CE activities negatively, suggesting that more public R&D can substitute for the financial efforts that SMEs have to take when implementing CE activities."

"It is widely acknowledged that introducing a price on carbon represents a crucial precondition for filling the current gap in low-carbon investment. However, as this paper argues, carbon pricing in itself may not be sufficient. This is due to the existence of market failures in the process of creation and allocation of credit that may lead commercial banks – the most important source of external finance for firms – not to respond as expected to price signals. Under certain economic conditions, banks would shy away from lending to low-carbon activities even in presence of a carbon price. This possibility calls for the implementation of additional policies not based on prices. In particular, the paper discusses the potential role of monetary policies and macroprudential financial regulation: modifying the incentives and constraints that banks face when deciding their lending strategy - through, for instance, a differentiation of reserve requirements according to the destination of lending - may fruitfully expand credit creation directed towards low-carbon sectors. This seems to be especially feasible in emerging economies, where the central banking framework usually allows for a stronger public control on credit allocation and a wider range of monetary policy instruments than the sole interest rate."

"Climate change is a grave and urgent threat to human and other life, Earth's ecosystem, and global security and economic well-being. The global community increasingly understands that business as usual is no longer an option. Debate about states' legal obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions is still in its infancy. This seriously hinders progress through the political process or the courts. A group of legal experts has sought to fill this gap by drafting the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations. The Principles identify states' reduction obligations and articulate a series of related obligations aimed at prevention. An extensive commentary further explains the Principles and their legal underpinning. The members of the expert group are: Antonio Benjamin, Michael Gerrard, Toon Huydecoper, Michael Kirby, M.C. Mehta, Thomas Pogge, Qin Tianbao, Dinah Shelton, James Silk, Jessica Simor, Jaap Spier (rapporteur), Elisabeth Steiner and Philip Sutherland."

"he implementation of environmental standards can be facilitated by motivating workers with pro-social preferences. Therefore, we study if employees working for firms achieving registration for environmental-related standards are more likely to display positive attitudes towards their job, to be actively involved in their jobs and to donate effort. Using a French matched employer–employee database, we find that these “green employees” report a significantly higher perception of usefulness and equitable recognition at work. Besides, they are more likely to work uncompensated overtime hours. Finally, if the adoption of environmental standards is shown to have no direct influence on job involvement, we expose how it indirectly impacts job involvement through the mediation of employees' reported perception of usefulness and equitable recognition at work."

"l Rapporto sui diritti globali, che da 11 anni propone analisi e documentazione sulla globalizzazione in una chiave di lettura del l'interdipendenza dei diritti, è un volume unico a livello internazionale per ampiezza dei contenuti e dei temi trattati.
La struttura del Rapporto è articolata in macro-capitoli tematici dove viene documentata la situazione relativamente all'anno in corso e vengono delineate le prospettive. L'analisi e la ricerca sono corredate da cronologie dei fatti, da schede tematiche, da qua dri statistici, da un glossario, da una bibliografia e sitografia, dalle sintesi dei capitoli e dall'indice dei nomi e delle organizzazioni citate.
È uno strumento fondamentale d'informazione e formazione per quanti operano nella scuola, nei media e nell'informazione, nella politica, nelle amministrazioni pubbliche, nel mondo del lavoro, nelle professioni sociali, nelle associazioni.
Ideato e realizzato dall'Associazione Società INformazione ONLUS, è co-promosso con la CGIL nazionale, in collaborazione con ActionAid, Antigone, ARCI, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) della Catalogna, Coordinamento Nazionale delle Comunità di Acco glien za (CNCA), Fondazione Basso-Sezione Internazionale, Forum Ambientalista, Gruppo Abele, Legambiente, Sbilanciamoci!, vale a dire con le associazioni tra le più autorevoli, rappresentative e territorialmente diffuse che sono concretamente impegnate sulle problematiche trattate dal Rapporto."

"Ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation, shadow pricing, sustainability measures, and squeezing Nature into the commodity boxes of goods, services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic, financial and banking discourses. There are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social, psychological, political and ethical facets. The relationship with Nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching. However, this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation. A shallow movement, allied to a business as usual politics and economy, has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values. If, instead, ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society. The implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century."

"Policy makers are dependent upon scientific knowledge. However, scientific results cannot be applied straightforwardly in practical decision making. We deploy Kant's term “power of judgment” – the human capacity to apply general insights to specific, contingent situations – to show that this problem is systematic rather than coincidental: decision making requires the power of judgment to make use of scientific knowledge. Power of judgment, in turns, can be supported by heuristics. Against this background, we focus on sustainability politics and outline a heuristic for framing and analyzing sustainability problems. Because time is a key factor in relation to sustainability we distinguish three distinct concepts of time and argue that the economic concepts of “stocks” and “institutions” can be used to foster power of judgment with respect to these time concepts. Based on these concepts, the heuristic serves to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and practical decision making in sustainability politics."

"Recently, White (2007) analysed the international inequalities in ecological footprints per capita (EF hereafter) based on a two-factor decomposition of an index from the Atkinson family (Atkinson, 1970). Specifically, this paper evaluated the separate role of environment intensity (EF/GDP) and average income as explanatory factors for these global inequalities. However, in addition to other comments on their appeal, this decomposition suffers from the serious limitation of the omission of the role exerted by probable factorial correlation (York et al., 2005). This paper proposes, by way of an alternative, a decomposition of a conceptually similar index like Theil's (1967) which, in effect, permits clear decomposition in terms of the role of both factors plus an inter-factor correlation, in line with Duro and Padilla (2006). This decomposition might, in turn, be extended to group inequality components (Shorrocks, 1980), an analysis that cannot be conducted in the case of the Atkinson indices. The proposed methodology is implemented empirically with the aim of analysing the international inequalities in EF per capita for the 1980–2007 period and, amongst other results, we find that, indeed, the interactive component explains, to a significant extent, the apparent pattern of stability observed in overall international inequalities."

"Combating climate change will increasingly impact on production industries and the workers they employ as production changes and consumption is targeted. Yet research has largely ignored labour and its responses. This book brings together sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and representatives from international and local unions based in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Together they open up a new area of research: Environmental Labour Studies.

The authors ask what kind of environmental policies are unions in different countries and sectors developing. How do they aim to reconcile the protection of jobs with the protection of the environment? What are the forms of cooperation developing between trade unions and environmental movements, especially the so-called Red-Green alliances? Under what conditions are unions striving to create climate change policies that transcend the economic system? Where are they trying to find solutions that they see as possible within the present socio-economic conditions? What are the theoretical and practical implications of trade unions' "Just Transition", and the problems and perspectives of "Green Jobs"? The authors also explore how food workers' rights would contribute to low carbon agriculture, the role workers' identities play in union climate change policies, and the difficulties of creating solidarity between unions across the global North and South.

Trade Unions in the Green Economy opens the climate change debate to academics and trade unionists from a range of disciplines in the fields of labour studies, environmental politics, environmental management, and climate change policy. It will also be useful for environmental organisations, trade unions, business, and politicians."