ESG is a dead end. Do we care?
ESG is a dead end. Yet, there is an increased demand for ESG investments as investors seek to incorporate socially conscious principles into their portfolios without sacrificing performance. Jyoti Banerjee investigates regenerative concepts as a better way of addressing our degenerative failures in investment and business.
Funding conservation without costing the Earth
The history of philanthropy is full of systemic disfunction. North Star Transition’s concern to accelerate systemic change immediately stumbles when the fundamental system, in this case wealth creation, militates against the secondary outcome, which is philanthropy. The system is quite simply broken. Peter Harris investigates.
Regenerative farming: Profits, people and Purpose
Modern agriculture evolved partly to meet challenges of food supply and affordability. Yet its use of chemicals has deplete the land and its biodiversity. Add in the growing challenges of climate change, as well as failing farms and sick farmers. Farming must change. One farm that has successfully transitioned from the methods of industrial agriculture is Bradwell Grove in southwest England. To understand this shift, Matthew Phan spoke to Charles Hunter-Smart, who manages the farm.
Negative Externalities: It’s time to change our viewpoint (Part II)
Negative externalities are mostly viewed as a macro-economic issue, but their poison percolates the entire economic system, including at micro-economic level, sending the wrong incentives to business executives and consumers. Olivier Boutellis argues that they are a fundamental flaw we have to fix now.
Negative externalities - It’s time to Change our Viewpoint (Part I)
Markets have been a fantastic driver of wealth and wellbeing... but for the small problem of negative externalities. Scientists worry that negative externalities threaten life on earth - yet we have not resolved the problem. In the first of a two part series, Olivier Boutellis asks why a hundred years of debate on externalities has not changed anything.