International Youth Day 2009
SUSTAINABILITY: OUR CHALLENGE, OUR FUTURE Sustainability does not only refer to maintaining environmental balance and renewal. Sustainability encapsulates three facets of life: the environment, society and the economy. We live our lives in the overlaps and intersections of these facets, and our actions and attitudes help shape them. Their changing shapes in turn affect the...
Actuality / Climate & Energy / Developing Countries / Earth & Environment / Globalization & Global Culture / Human Rights / Photography & journalism / Politics & International Relations / Society / Sustainable Development / World
HOME: It’s Too Late To Be A Pessimist
‘If we can improve the images of the world, perhaps we can improve the world’ Wim Wenders Wim Wenders’ words have perhaps never been more relevant to a movie than in the case of Home. Following directly on from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Home is, of course, a film with a message that sets...
Using Human Rights Law to Address Climate Change
What are the legal and human rights implications of climate change? As the evidence becomes stronger and the science more serious, people in countries, companies, institutions and professions everywhere are taking up the issue of climate change and sounding the alarm. Among these concerned global citizens are lawyers and legal professionals. To gather this community...
The crisis can be an opportunity to rethink the global economy
Interview with Jacques Weber by Meriem Bouamrane With the financial and economic crisis tightening its grip around the world, many researchers, organizations and institutions are being galvanized into action. Terms like Green Deal or Global New Green Deal are circulating and, with natural resources becoming scarcer, there is talk of creating a tax system based...
Green Economy Initiative
Mobilizing and re-focusing the global economy towards investments in clean technologies and ‘natural’ infrastructure such as forests and soils is the best bet for real growth, combating climate change and triggering an employment boom in the 21st century. On 22 October 2008, UNEP and leading economists launched the Green Economy Initiative (GEI) aimed at seizing...
Earth Hour
Tomorrow, from 8.30 PM onwards for one hour, the world will cast a first truly global vote: between the planet or global warming. Last year, 2.2 million people and several companies in Sydney switched off their lights for one hour, resulting in an equivalent of 48.000 cars being taken off the road and saving 10,2%...
A green economy is a healthy one
MPs highlight need for UK to work towards creating an ambitious climate change, and a modern and sustainable economy Sir, In 2009 we face two key challenges: economic recovery and climate change. We can and must tackle both together. The UK must move to a low-carbon economy: not just to secure an ambitious climate change...
Brief aan Balkenende
(published in NRC: 14/3/2009) – in Dutch Geachte minister-president Balkenende, De kredietcrisis leidt tot een noodzaak aan nieuwe investeringen, die een in het slop rakende economie van de ondergang moeten redden – daar bestaat momenteel veel consensus over. Echter, over waarin wij als samenleving moeten investeren is veel debat. Als vertegenwoordigers van de jongere generatie –...
Why Economists Are So Often Wrong
They simply don’t understand we have instincts that go beyond money. Things like coffee shops and conviviality. What is called “economics” is really psychology on steroids. It starts with a model of human nature and extrapolates an entire scenario for how the world works from that. The model is homo economicus,the myopic protoganist of the...
How our economy is killing the Earth
The graphs climbing across these pages (see graph in detail, or explore the data) are a stark reminder of the crisis facing our planet. Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting Earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more...
Actuality / Climate & Energy / Earth & Environment / Economic Development / Politics & International Relations / Sustainable Development / World
The Climate for Change
- by Al Gore Op-Ed Contributor Ny Times The inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly...
Buy Nothin Day
What if we had everything and needed nothing else? Today (29th november: international) is Buy Nothing Day. Realizing that you actually have way too much stuff than needed to keep your life running… Watch the beautiful video here on the ‘good consumer’. (or read Benjamin Barber’s ‘Consumed’ bestseller – I’m not kidding, you HAVE to...
