ESG and Of Interest News
State of the Global Climate 2024
April 15, 2025-Key messages
Key climate change indicators again reach record levels
Long-term warming (averaged over decades) remains below 1.5℃
Sea-level rise and ocean warming irreversible for hundreds of years
Record greenhouse gas concentrations combined with El Niño and other factors to drive 2024 record heat
Early warnings and climate services are vital to protect communities and economies
The clear signs of human-induced climate change reached new heights in 2024, which was likely the first calendar year to be more than 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial era, with a global mean near-surface temperature of 1.55 ± 0.13 °C above the 1850-1900 average.
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view the World Meteorological Organization State of the Global Climate 2024 report
Source: World Meteorological Organization
OECD urges strengthened co-operation to sustain trillion-dollar ocean economy
March 31, 2025—While the ocean economy doubled in real terms, from USD 1.3 trillion in 1995 to USD 2.6 trillion in 2020, co-ordinated policy action is essential to safeguard its long-term prosperity and sustainability, a new OECD report finds. The OECD Ocean Economy to 2050 identifies key priorities for policymakers to secure a resilient and sustainable future ocean economy, balancing economic opportunity with environmental responsibility.
Over the past 25 years, the ocean economy- driven by offshore oil and gas, marine and coastal tourism, marine fishing and aquaculture, maritime transport and port activities-contributed between 3% and 4% of global gross value added and grew steadily with no substantial contractions. But various forces - including climate change, demographic shifts, trade disruptions, and insufficient investments in productivity and green energy - could slow or even reverse growth. In a future scenario where investment in productivity is not forthcoming and the energy transition stalls, global ocean economic activity could decline by around 20% below 2020 levels by mid-century. In contrast, an accelerated shift to cleaner energy combined with technological innovation could support continued ocean economy growth, albeit more modestly than past performance.
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Source: OECD
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.
Braganza was speaking at the official opening of the 5th edition of the AFRODAD Media Initiative (AFROMedI) held in Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa recently.
With half of the continent currently being in debt distress, Braganza said the need to capacitate the media for the benefit of the public and holding authorities accountable.
"Dressing to kill could kill the planet," he stressed.
The fashion industry is one of the world's most polluting sectors, responsible for up to eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
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Source: allafrica.com
'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.
Addressing the 16th Petersberg Climate Dialogue (PCD) in Berlin-the first official gathering on climate since last year's COP29 summit in Baku-the UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a strong call for decisive climate action.
He said the year had begun against a backdrop of geopolitical instability and widespread cuts to overseas aid budgets.
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Source: news.un.org
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.
Fine-tuning uses chain-of-thought (CoT) training data that includes questions and the logical steps to reach correct answers. This increases the efficiency of learning for smaller AI models, such as DeepSeek. CoT data can be extracted from large 'teacher' LLMs to train small 'student, models.
These changes shift the cost structure of AI models from high pre-training costs to lower fine-tuning costs for model developers and more inference costs for users.
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Source: bruegel.org
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.
They account for only 7 percent of articles in the top 10 journals of the profession, as Ernest Aigner, Jacob Greenspon, and I show in a forthcoming paper, even though their collective weight in the world economy exceeds 60 percent (measured by their global GDP share at purchasing power parity). The representation of women economists on all fronts is lower still.Even when research is published, getting it noticed is a major challenge. Promoting research within academic circles is one thing; bringing it to wider attention is quite another. Translating research findings into tangible policy requires sustained engagement with policymakers and the public-a demanding process that competes with researchers' limited time and resources. This creates a difficult balance: While researchers face pressure to produce new work, the crucial task of ensuring that existing research influences policy often remains underfunded and undervalued.
Global relevance
Empirical research produced in developing economies is not only locally relevant but also holds critical insights for global challenges. From climate adaptation to conflict resolution, pressing world issues first manifest intensely in developing regions.
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Source: imf.org
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.
More recently, these fields have started to reconnect, recognizing that morality influences economic behavior, and vice versa, in profound ways.
It’s something I discussed in a recent review of the latest literature in this field (2024).
As an economist, I believe this growing intersection offers valuable lessons not only for academia but also for policymakers grappling with today's biggest challenges, such as greater inequality, political polarization, and diminishing trust in institutions.
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Source: imf.org
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.
The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors.
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Source: theguardian.com
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.
Carbon Majors is a database of historical production data from 180 of the world's largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers representing 169 active and 11 inactive entities. This data is used to quantify the direct production-linked operational emissions and emissions from the combustion of marketed products that can be attributed to these entities.
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Source: carbonmajors.org
How Animal Spirits Affect the Economy
March 3, 2025—Viral narratives could be the missing link between emotions and economic fluctuations
Storytelling is central to how we interpret economic events. We recall economic history through haunting images of anxious crowds waiting to take money out of banks during the Great Depression or dejected office workers carrying cardboard boxes out of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
We gauge inflation by comparing shopping baskets with friends and family. We grapple with the consequences of artificial intelligence by channeling our hopes and fears into science fiction.
Storytelling is central to how we interpret economic events. We recall economic history through haunting images of anxious crowds waiting to take money out of banks during the Great Depression or dejected office workers carrying cardboard boxes out of Lehman Brothers in 2008. We gauge inflation by comparing shopping baskets with friends and family. We grapple with the consequences of artificial intelligence by channeling our hopes and fears into science fiction.
But do stories themselves influence the economy? This idea has a long precedent in economic thought. John Maynard Keynes wrote extensively about how "animal spirits"-nstincts and emotions that influence behavior-prompt people's economic actions, like spending or investing in businesses. He argued that these herd emotional urges lie at the heart of economic booms and busts.
Taking this idea one step further, Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University, has pushed for a more detailed study of economic narratives-the contagious stories that shape how individuals view the economy and make decisions. Shiller hypothesizes that sufficiently popular narratives can go viral and have society-wide impact (Shiller 2020).
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Source: IMF.org
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