State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?

One way to interrelate the goals of the new economy is by combining planetary boundaries as the “environmental ceiling” with basic human needs as the “social foundation.”

A central theme of their answers is “build resilience.”

These could include taxing consumption rather than income (with a design that protects consumption of basics such as food and shelter), subsidizing solar panels and other technologies that shift consumption away from nonrenewables, and

tend to fragment agencies by problem, rather like mailbox pigeonholes, but the long emergency will require managing complex systems over long time periods.

Would a rational consumer postpone for a few years some of his or her energy-intensive consumption in order to invest in insulating a house or installing solar panels? Yes—given the right market signals and realistic assumptions about the cost of energy tomorrow. Consumers decide to make this sort of investment every day—and those decisions could c

The Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) prepared by the United Nations sets out to do just that, assessing changes in countries’ manufactured, human, and natural capital stocks—with

the first rule for renewable-resource stocks is that extraction rates must not exceed regeneration rates,

deciding to change an infrastructure already built takes immense social effort.

a multidisciplinary assessment of environmental problems that integrated the social and policy sciences could only occur outside of ESS.

Chemical Pollution.