Humanity’s demand for biological resources has outpaced our planet’s ability to regenerate resources since the 1970s (1). The persistence of this overshoot has led to tensions. Shocks in supply chains associated with the global pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have revealed that our resource situation is far more fragile than generally recognized. They have also [...]
By Leo Wambersie, research associate, David Lin, Ph.D., chief science officer, and Mathis Wackernagel, Ph.D., founder and president The Ukraine invasion comes with heart-breaking human suffering. It will also impact people far away from the war as global supply chains for food and energy are crippled. The price shocks they cause may well lead to [...]
Webinar: Nature and country risk from CountryRisk.io on Vimeo. Ecological data confirms that many forms of natural capital and the associated ecosystem services are in decline. There is growing recognition that biodiversity and nature-related risks could have significant consequences for economies and the global financial system. What are the links to sovereign risk and what [...]
Global Footprint Network and its partners characterize the food dilemma through a set of ten tough challenges we call the “impossible imperatives.” The imperative to use no more fossil fuels. The food system, and particularly farms, will have to produce all the food while rapidly phasing out fossil fuels or its derivatives, from farm to fork. Humanity, if [...]
PRI’s Jasper Cox speaks with Joanna Woods from Franklin Templeton and Susan Burns from Global Footprint Network about how climate change affects sovereign bonds through both physical risk and transition risk, and how investors can measure this.
72% of the world population live in countries faced with a precarious situation. These countries both (1) run a biological resource deficit (where demand for biological resources exceeds regeneration) and (2) generate less than world-average income, limiting their ability to purchase resources from elsewhere. These findings were released in “The Importance of Resource Security for Poverty Eradication,” [...]
The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review was released February 1st after two years of extensive research. Overall, we are extremely pleased with the outcome. Published by the UK government, the report is a strong reference piece for grounding economics on an ecological foundation. It confirms the significance of ecological overshoot and helps build the bridge [...]
We sat down (virtually, of course) with David Lin, our Chief Science Officer and Eric Miller, Director, Ecological Footprint Initiative, York University in Toronto, to discuss the new 2021 edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts. First, can you spell out for us what the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts (NFAs) are? Eric: The [...]
Environmental risks in sovereign bonds are likely to be a fast growing area of interest, according to the panelists at the launch of Global Footprint Network’s ERISC Phase II report in London. The ERISC II report, a joint project of Global Footprint Network and the UN Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative, showed how food price shocks [...]
