Category Archives: Ecological Economics

Energy intensity convergence

In climate change discussions, energy intensity is the amount of energy required to produce a dollars worth of GDP.  While there are big differences in energy intensity around the world.  Generally poor countries are more energy intensive than rich, and … Continue reading

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Green light for IPBES

UN agreed to establish the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES write hopefully on their homepage This is a major event in the world of biodiversity and ecosystem services as the IPCC-like platform will bridge the gulf between … Continue reading

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Persepctives on Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Nagoya

Eight perspectives on the recent Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Nagoya. 1. Environmental economist Charles Perrings interviewed by Earth and Sky on his recent Science article 20 Biodiversity targets for 2020: Charles Perrings: The rate of species decline is … Continue reading

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What’s driving current food prices?

New Scientist interviewed food policy researchers Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun from IFPRI about current rise in food prices and they blame financialization of commodity markets: Is this another crisis like the one we had in 2008? Not quite. … Continue reading

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Is promoting climate change disinformation a new type of crime against humanity?

Donald Brown,a professor of law and environmental ethics at Penn State University,on his blog Climate Ethics wonders whether funding climate disinformation is A New Kind of Crime Against Humanity?. He writes: On October 21, 2010, the John Broder of the … Continue reading

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Environmental externalities and institutional investors

The UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative is a collaboration of between UNEP and the financial sector that aims to improve the understanding of the connections between environmental and financial performance. A new report Environmental externalities for institutional investors from UNEPFI … Continue reading

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Food security and financial markets

FAO says that Food price volatility a major threat to food security: Concluding a day-long special meeting in Rome the experts recognized that unexpected price hikes “are a major threat to food security” and recommended further work to address their … Continue reading

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Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox

My colleagues are I recently published a paper in BioScience, Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing As Ecosystem Services Degrade? The paper originated from the involvement of the first four authors, my former PhD student Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, … Continue reading

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IUCN’s Guidebook to the Green Economy

IUCN has just published a guidebook to the green economy. It can be freely downloaded from their website (pdf 490 kb). Guidebook presents an overview of key ideas and themes surrounding discusisons of the Green Economy. They write: The guidebook … Continue reading

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Jeremy Jackson describes “How we wrecked the ocean”

Eminent coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson recently gave a talk at TED called How we wrecked the ocean, which presents a popular version of his research on the long-term human impact on the ocean.

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