ESG/Of Interest News
Africa: Fast Fashion Fuelling Global Waste Crisis, UN Chief Warns
March 30, 2025-Fast fashion is accelerating an environmental catastrophe, with the equivalent of one garbage truck's worth of clothing either incinerated or sent to landfill every second, the UN chief warned on Thursday.
Speaking at an event commemorating Sunday's International Day of Zero Waste, Secretary-General António Guterres called for urgent action to curb the textile industry's devastating impact on the planet.
'Renewables are renewing economies', UN chief tells top climate forum
March 26, 2025-2025 marks a milestone: the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the deadline for countries to submit their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), designed to keep the global goal alive of limiting temperature rise to 1.5℃C above pre-industrial levels.
How DeepSeek has changed artificial intelligence and what it means for Europe
March 20, 2025--By mid-2024, artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs) were running into diminishing returns to scale in training data and computational capacity. LLM training began to shift away from costly pre-training to cheaper fine-tuning and allowing LLMs to 'reason' for longer before replying to questions.
IMF-Driving Change: Women-Led Economics
March 10, 2025-Summary
The developing world's vibrant research in the face of limited resources offers valuable global insights
For too long, Western institutions have shaped empirical research and policy recommendations. Authors based in developing economies have a far too small footprint in top economics journals.
F&D: Reconnecting Morality with Political Economy
March 5, 2025-Putting moral insight back into economics enhances understanding of political outcomes
For much of the 20th century, the disciplines of moral psychology and economics were seen as distinct-each focused on separate concerns, with little cross-pollination. This wasn't always the case.
If we look back to philosophers such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, discussions of political economy were deeply intertwined with questions of morality.
Half of world's CO2 emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms, study shows
March 5, 2025-Researchers say data strengthens case for holding firms to account for their contribution to climate crisis
Half of the world's climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed.
Carbon Majors: 2023 Data Update March 2025
March 5, 2025-Executive Summary
Carbon Majors traces 33.9 GtCO2e of emissions to the 169 active entities in the database in 2023, a 0.7% increase from 2022. The CO2 emissions in the database accounted for 78.4% of global fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2023, with just 36 companies linked to over half of these global emissions.
WTO and OECD release expanded dataset on trade in services covering over 200 economiess
February 17, 2025-New data on bilateral trade in services covering over 200 economies from 2005 to 2023 was released by the WTO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on 17 February.
OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index
Policy Trends up to 2025
February 12, 2025- Abstract
The OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) provides annually updated, comparable information on regulations affecting trade in services across 51 countries and 22 sectors from 2014 to 2024.
The Economic Costs of Temperature Uncertainty
January 24, 2025--Summary
Beyond its environmental damage, climate change is predicted to produce significant economic costs. Combining novel high-frequency geospatial temperature data from satellites with measures of economic activity for the universe of US listed firms, this article examines a potentially important channel through which global warming can lead to economic costs: temperature uncertainty.
