As climate change intensifies extreme heat, heat-health policies increasingly use alerts, forecasts, and behavioral guidance to encourage individual self-protection. Evaluations of such policies often track survey-based intermediate outcomes, including warning awareness, perceived heat risk or vulnerability, and protective behavior, in addition to health outcomes. Yet routine self-protection can make reported risk perceptions difficult to interpret: perceived risk may motivate prevention, while reported risk may already reflect the protection that respondents have adopted. In a web-based survey of residents of Tokyo's 23 wards, we elicit subjective probabilities of heatstroke under realized and counterfactual prevention scenarios. Respondents are randomly assigned to evaluate either a no-prevention scenario or a full-prevention scenario. Reported risk changes systematically with the assumed level of prevention, suggesting that reported risk perceptions may reflect both perceived susceptibility and behavior-conditioned reappraisal and may be misleading as stand-alone indicators in adaptation monitoring and evaluation. We also find that perceived risk under the no-prevention scenario is positively associated with realized preventive effort, suggesting that this counterfactual belief provides a more interpretable basis than realized-prevention risk for examining how perceived susceptibility relates to preventive effort.
Besides improving environmental conditions, large scale ecological restoration initiatives carry implications for households' livelihoods. Therefore, evaluating whether restoration policies can align ecological objectives with income growth is important for promoting environmentally sustainable development. We study whether China's Integrated Protection and Restoration Project of Mountains, Rivers, Forests, Farmlands, Lakes, Grasslands, and Deserts, commonly known as the Shan-Shui Initiative, has helped promote rural income growth as well as the channels through which income effects operate. Using a panel of 1700 counties from 21 provinces, we estimate policy effects for the period 2016–2022 with a synthetic control approach that uses machine learning to construct counterfactual income paths for treated counties. Our results show that the initiative has increased rural incomes with gains growing over time. Estimated effects differ by pilot batch, with incomes rising by about 5% and 1.9% for the first two project cohorts implemented in 2016 and 2017, respectively, but decreasing by 0.9% for the final batch in 2018. After adjusting for potential anticipation effects, the estimated effect for the 2017 cohort increases to 3.7%. We demonstrate that ecological restoration promotes rural incomes via improvements in ecosystem services, infrastructure, and tourism development. Income effects are generally larger in more economically developed and less ecologically fragile areas, while differences across dominant project types are comparatively modest. The results provide insights into potential policies for aligning environmental protection objectives with rural development.
Environmental conditions shape the conditions under which human well-being is produced, yet limited attention has been paid to how ecological conditions influence the conversion of economic resources (household income) and relational resources (community social trust) into subjective well-being. Drawing on the capability approach, this study conceptualizes environmental quality as a contextual conversion factor through which resources are translated into well-being. Using five waves of the China Family Panel Studies and individual fixed-effects models, the analysis examines how the well-being returns to income and social trust vary across pollution conditions in contemporary China. The results show that the well-being returns to income and social trust vary systematically across pollution conditions. Social trust is positively associated with life satisfaction, whereas income exhibits comparatively limited well-being returns. Under moderate pollution, both resources exhibit their strongest associations with life satisfaction, with social trust contributing more strongly than income. By contrast, neither association remains statistically significant under either low or high pollution, suggesting that well-being returns are strongest under moderate environmental stress. The findings suggest that environmental conditions matter less through their average association with subjective well-being than through their role as contextual conversion factors linked to differences in the well-being returns to material and relational resources. The study contributes to ecological economics by showing that environmental conditions are associated with differences in both the well-being returns to material and relational resources and their relative importance for subjective well-being.
This research inquires whether the property rights templates of US benefit corporations (BCs) and French sociétés à mission (SaMs) are credible protections against greenwashing. By dissecting their unique legal structures (dubbed their “legal DNA” by B Lab), we aim to find whether these firms' environmental and social claims are truly backed by robust corporate governance. The importance of this lies in the “credence” nature of environmental and social claims, which makes their verification difficult while increasing the likelihood of fraud. This vulnerability is further exacerbated by ambiguous missions and third-party assessments weakened by the freedom BCs and SaMs have to select and pay auditors. Rooted in the tradition of institutional ecological economics, this research emphasizes institutional realism by leveraging a mechanism-based methodology. Qualitative institutional data, derived from the model benefit corporation legislation, société à mission legal status, case law, and company filings, are then analyzed through manifest coding using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which adheres to the ISO/IEC 21838–1 standard. Findings reveal a fundamental bargaining power imbalance favoring shareholders in BCs and SaMs, leaving non-equity stakeholders with limited countervailing powers (e.g., costly exit, no voting, ineffective legal recourse). Formal stakeholder protection proves ineffective, leading to weak practical accountability and heavy reliance on owner altruism for mission fulfillment. The implications are that ensuring credible protection against greenwashing necessitates a fundamental structural redesign of BCs and SaMs. This involves shifting bargaining power towards stakeholders and establishing governance independent of selfless owners, thereby creating imperative credible commitments.
This paper estimates the distribution of wealth-related greenhouse gas emissions across the German population, assigning responsibility for emissions to the owners of different asset types. It combines macro-data on the emissions per asset type with micro-data on the asset ownership per individual in Germany in 2019, linking data from national accounts, air emission accounts, and survey data on wealth to capture both direct held assets and indirect ownership of corporations. The results show a distinct inequality in emission responsibilities along the net wealth distribution. The top 10% are responsible for 66% of total wealth-related emissions and hold 62% of the total net wealth in Germany in 2019. Simulations of sectoral differences in emission intensity show a band around these estimates ranging from 38% to 94% of total emissions, and a random sectoral portfolio allocation using bootstrapping finds an emissions share of the top 10% of 66.5%. Wealth-related emissions are thus not only substantially more unequally distributed than emissions distributed by income or consumption, but also even more unequally distributed than wealth.
As compounding systemic global crises push modernity toward collapse, the dominant epistemological and economic frameworks are proving fundamentally inadequate. This commentary revisits and expands upon early coevolutionary thought in ecological economics to diagnose the current crisis of “collective cognizance.” We argue that fragmented, atomistic modern science fails to grasp whole-system dynamics, while mainstream economics—functioning as a global belief system of “economism”—has constructed a brittle, destructive monoculture optimized for short-term market efficiency. Drawing on the biological mechanisms of evolution, where profound diversity supports resilience, we propose a shift toward cognitive biodiversity. To navigate an unpredictable, post-crash future and help ensure intergenerational equity, humanity must abandon the monolithic pursuit of a single global blueprint. Instead, we advocate cultivating a rich pluriverse of diverse, coevolving learning cultural experiments, bound together, within and across groups, by caring relationality. To avoid epistemological tribalism and maintain cooperation, this pluriverse must be underpinned by a shared commitment to methodological pluralism—an ecology of knowledges that allows different ways of understanding the world to cross-pollinate without demanding a unified theoretical framework.
The use of antibiotics in aquaculture contributes to the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which poses serious public health risks. Bacteriophages offer a promising alternative for preventing and treating bacterial diseases in fish, effectively replacing antibiotics without fostering antibiotic resistance. However, little is known about consumer perceptions and acceptance of bacteriophage-treated seafood. This study examines consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for bacteriophage-treated rainbow trout using a discrete choice experiment. On the basis of responses from 1918 Danish and 1914 German consumers, our findings reveal a positive mean WTP for bacteriophage-treated trout (€3.03 in Denmark and €3.76 in Germany per 250 g fillet, respectively) relative to the reference level (vaccine-treated), whereas the mean WTP for antibiotic-treated trout was significantly lower. Substantial heterogeneities in WTP for health control across consumers were confirmed, as the estimated standard deviations were statistically significant. However, at least 75.6% of Danish respondents and 64.2% of German respondents demonstrated a positive WTP for phage-treated trout. These findings highlight consumer openness to bacteriophage-based disease control and provide valuable guidance for policy-makers and the aquaculture industry in their transition toward potentially more sustainable and health-conscious alternatives to antibiotics.
The aim of this article is to assess whether and how the financial transaction tax (FTT) could be “greened” – that is, adapted to support environmental objectives and the transition towards a more sustainable economy. While traditionally conceived as a regulatory tool, the FTT holds unexploited potential as an instrument for climate finance and broader environmental alignment. This paper outlines five complementary arguments in favor of a green FTT: (1) its capacity to mobilize stable, international funding for global public goods; (2) its relevance in light of the financial sector's role in recent economic, social and environmental crises; (3) its ability to modestly lengthen investment horizons and counteract excessive short-termism; (4) its potential to enhance public trust in finance by matching rhetoric about sustainable finance with contributions; and (5) its use as a differentiated tool to reward environmentally responsible investors and issuers. The paper also includes an exploratory calibration of potential revenues from a tiered green FTT, intended to provide illustrative orders of magnitude rather than forecasts, and to show how such a mechanism could operationalize the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in climate finance. While recognizing practical limitations (in terms of governance, data reliability, and risk of complexity), the paper concludes that a well-calibrated green FTT could be a simple and useful complement within the broader climate policy mix.
The transition towards low-carbon and digital technologies is set to profoundly reshape metals markets, particularly those required for battery manufacturing. Amid growing geoeconomic fragmentation, this shift is accelerating the implementation of public policies aimed at securing supply and strengthening the resilience of strategic technology value chains. In the European Union, the recently adopted Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) aims to ensure secure and sustainable access to critical raw materials. By integrating the entire lithium value chain into an Integrated Assessment Model, we analyse the interplay between lithium supply, demand, and recycling within decarbonisation scenarios. Our findings suggest significant challenges in meeting the CRMA reshoring targets without reducing industrial demand. We show that sufficiency strategies could help achieve these benchmarks, while cutting European lithium imports by at least 44% between 2030 and 2050 and reducing cumulative final demand by 1.2 Mt, a 46% decrease relative to current policy trajectories. Beyond securing supply, sufficiency reduces the energy footprint of the lithium chain, improves spatial extractive justice, and strengthens overall robustness under uncertainty. Integrating sufficiency into Europe’s material security framework offers a pathway to more closely align strategic autonomy with sustainability objectives.
Compliance with rules and laws is critical to societal function and may be driven more by social pressures than enforcement penalties. In conservation, many protected areas closed to hunting and fishing have been rendered ineffective due to inadequate compliance. Here, we explore the role of social norms in compliance decisions by using a novel experimental game to study real anglers' decisions to fish ‘illegally’ in a simulated marine protected area (MPA) or ‘legally’ in an open access fishing area. We demonstrate that a descriptive social norm, exogenously created by computer confederates posing as other players, can increase or decrease participant compliance over time. Specifically, participants conform to confederate-driven social norms even though these are irrelevant to their final payouts. Building on past common pool resource games studying cooperation as a viable long-term strategy in fisheries, we demonstrate how cooperative (or non-cooperative) behaviors can be causally driven by conformity to group norms. Additionally, our analysis of participants' compliance decisions reveals that normative influence accumulates over time, such that each rulebreaker observed over time makes individuals ∼2.8% more likely to eventually break the rules themselves (Est = 0.037, p = 0.0069). The influence of catch and fines, by comparison, dissipates much more quickly. Noncompliance decreases markedly following big catches, even more so than after fines for fishing the protected area. Potential feedbacks between the observed catch effect, normative effects, and MPA spillover could merit further investigation.
We examine the relationship between climate hazards and housing affordability, measured by the price-to-income (PTI) ratio, across a global cross-section of 195 cities. While previous research has linked PTI mainly to credit conditions and macro-financial factors, much less is known about its relationship with climate conditions. We use hierarchical cluster analysis to organize a broad set of climate indicators and quantile regressions to examine whether these relationships differ across the PTI distribution. Climate variables show little association with PTI around the median but are more strongly related to affordability at the upper end of the distribution. Higher cooling degree days are associated with higher PTI ratios at the upper quantiles, whereas a greater number of days above 35 °C is associated with lower PTI ratios. These contrasting patterns may reflect several underlying channels, but the cross-sectional design does not allow us to identify them. Because the affordability data come from a harmonized but crowdsourced source, the estimates should also be interpreted with appropriate caution. Overall, the results document systematic cross-city associations between climate conditions and housing affordability, especially among cities with high PTI ratios. They should not be interpreted as causal effects or as evidence of how affordability within a given city will respond to climate change over time.
This paper offers the first comprehensive assessment of the trade effects of due diligence policies (e.g., the U.S. Lacey Act and the EU Timber Regulation) which are motivated by concerns over illegal logging in global timber markets. We use a structural gravity model with global timber trade data from 2000 to 2021 to estimate the impact of these regulations, differentiating effects based on an exporter’s risk profile and product type. We find that these policies act as a significant non-tariff barrier. Crucially, this deterrent effect is indiscriminate: we find no evidence that high-risk exporters are more constrained than compliant, low-risk exporters. This suggests that the substantial compliance costs and procedural barriers limit trade for all suppliers. We also show that these policies most strongly affect raw and lightly processed timber. Counterfactual simulations confirm that a risk-targeted policy–one that restricts due diligence obligations to high-risk exporters–could preserve overall trade volumes while effectively shifting sourcing away from risky suppliers. Our findings offer timely insights for global trade and environmental policy design, highlighting the need for refined, risk-calibrated mechanisms in emerging regulations such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
Despite decades of advances in sustainability science, global progress on climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, and human wellbeing remains dangerously inadequate. While these failures are often attributed to insufficient political will or contested knowledge, we argue that a more fundamental constraint lies in how collective decisions are made. Contemporary governance systems are increasingly shaped by concentrated economic and political power, undermining their capacity to act in the collective interest and to pursue long-term sustainability goals. At the same time, there is growing evidence that citizens broadly support transformative policies aimed at sustainable and inclusive wellbeing. We argue that governance design itself has become a critical leverage point for sustainability transitions. For example, deliberative democracy offers an alternative by representing shared societal values and goals through randomly selected citizens' assemblies. Such assemblies operate independently of partisan and special-interest control and have demonstrated success at several scales. Advances in communication technology now make their broad application increasingly feasible. In parallel, new decision-making methods, such as sociocracy, emphasise consent over majority rule and provide tools to reduce polarization and foster inclusive agreements within deliberative processes. Viewed historically, today's governance challenges resemble recurrent crises and may offer a critical opening to adopt more sustainable and inclusive forms of governance, grounded in deliberation, consent, and collective wellbeing.
We examine whether non-life insurance penetration moderates the relationship between natural disaster intensity and market income inequality using a balanced panel of 63 countries over the period 2004 to 2019. The empirical strategy combines two-way fixed effects with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors, panel threshold model, split-sample analysis by income group, and instrumental variable estimation using standardised precipitation anomalies and earthquake counts. We find that disaster shocks are associated with reduced inequality in countries with minimal insurance coverage, but this association reverses as insurance markets develop. The Hansen model identifies a structural break at 0.451% of GDP in non-life premiums. The turning point at which the association reverses differs between developing economies (0.851%) and high-income countries (2.188%), consistent with the buffering role of complementary social protection institutions. This reversal accords with the prediction that, where insurance access rises with income and wealth, the development of coverage shifts post-disaster recovery toward better-off households. These results suggest that expanding insurance coverage without broadening distributional access may widen post-disaster inequality.
Material footprints (MF) and the broader framework of Material Flow Accounting (MFA) have gained prominence as indicators of human pressure on the environment, particularly in policy discussions on resource efficiency and circular-economy strategies. While MF and MFA can be useful as a descriptive measure of industrial metabolism, this paper argues that they exhibit several fundamental scientific limitations that distinguish them from other widely used indicators of human demand such as carbon footprints, ecological footprints, or human appropriation of net primary productivity. These limitations arise primarily from the absence of a biophysically grounded aggregation principle and the lack of an intrinsic upper bound. As a result, material footprints are analytically weak and potentially misleading as a sustainability metric, even though they remain valuable as a throughput indicator. To address these limitations, this paper outlines strategies to reduce misuse and deploy material footprint accounting more effectively as a tool for sustainability transitions.
While input-output models are widely used to assess the economic impacts of natural disasters, their results strongly depend on how disaster shocks are specified. This paper examines two alternative characterizations of flood-induced business interruptions, and their effect on total economic losses. We compare restoration time estimates derived from the Hazus-Flood framework with a novel approach based on micro-level insurance claims data, which allows for partial reductions in plants' productive capacity during the restoration phase, rather than assuming full inoperability. Using georeferenced plant-level data and high-resolution flood maps, we calibrate flood shocks for four major Italian flood events and simulate their propagation through the economy using the IRIO-Flood model. We find that Hazus-based specifications generally produce larger and more dispersed estimates of productive capacity contractions, leading to greater GDP and sectoral output losses-particularly in the short term-and to stronger spillovers to regions not directly affected by the flood. Despite these substantial differences in magnitude, both approaches identify broadly similar patterns in terms of the most affected sectors and regions, with discrepancies emerging more frequently when considering the medium-term propagation of losses. These results highlight the importance of accurate shock specification and suggest that the two proposed methods can be viewed as complementary tools for flood impact and risk assessment.
Disagreement and conceptual vagueness continue to characterize the use biological metaphors in economics, including its bio-inspired, sustainability-oriented subfields. This paper suggests that these challenges may be addressed by asking whether and how the structure, function and dynamics of complex organisms are analogous to those of economies. Aligning with educational and scientific standards in biology, we explore this question by comparing the structure, function, and dynamics of economies against an established standard by which scientists distinguish living from non-living systems: the eight, well-established characteristics of complex organisms: Hierarchical Organization (HO), Metabolism, Homeostasis, Response to Environmental Stimuli, Growth and Development, Reproduction, Evolutionary Adaptation, and Order. To identify deep, structural-functional parallels – rather than flexibly-interpreted metaphorical similarities – we apply the formal criteria of structure-mapping theory which underlie the cognitive alignment process that drives scientific model-building. This analysis suggests that economies are not just metaphorically similar to organisms, but that the properties, principles or laws underlying the structure and abilities of complex organisms apply to economies. More simply, although economies may not resemble complex organisms in appearance, they are organized and function as if they are. This supports shifting from the mechanistic to a biological paradigm. Importantly, shared characteristics – particularly with respect to HO – may enhance the conceptual clarity of vague ecological metaphors, offering potentially a novel, scientifically grounded framework for understanding economies in terms of the structure, function, and dynamics of complex organisms. The paper concludes with limitations and directions for future research.
Using a discrete choice experiment, this study examines household preferences for staying versus relocating under future coastal flood risk in metropolitan France. We estimate mixed logit models to analyse how experimentally varied environmental and economic attributes, together with selected self-reported behavioural variables, shape residential relocation preferences. Flood frequency, beach amenities, insurance premiums, local economic conditions, perceived ability to relocate, homeownership, and prior network exposure significantly influence relocation choices. Counterfactual simulations show that insurance premiums provide a strong price signal: changes in insurance premiums generate substantial predicted changes in staying probabilities, even relative to large increases in flood probability. At the same time, high-income households exhibit slightly higher average staying probabilities across all policy scenarios. These findings suggest that the uniform pricing structure of the French CatNat system may weaken location-specific financial incentives and contribute to socioeconomic differences in coastal exposure while spreading risk-related costs more broadly. As a possible reform direction, we propose finer-scale risk-based pricing complemented by means-tested vouchers to preserve affordability.
