Globally, financial services are well positioned to contribute to the transformation needed for sustainable futures and will be critical for supporting corporate activities that regenerate and promote biosphere resilience as a key strategy to confront the new risk landscape of the Anthropocene. While current financial risk frameworks focus primarily on financial materiality and risks to the financial sector, failure to account for investment externalities will aggravate climate and other environmental change and set current sustainable finance initiatives off course.
A framework for understanding water's many functions for supporting, regulating, and stabilizing hydro-climatic, hydro-ecological, and hydro-social systems.
If moral concern for nonhuman nature underpins conservation, it is essential to understand how individuals populate their “moral communities,” a core concept from environmental ethics, with various elements of biodiversity. Using data from an online survey of the United States public (N = 1331), we investigated the extent to which respondents' moral communities align with four worldviews discussed in the environmental ethics literature: anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Each worldview provides a vision for how the moral community should be constituted.
In the face of the growing challenges brought about by human activities, effective planning and decision-making in biodiversity and ecosystem conservation, restoration, and sustainable development are urgently needed. Ecological models can play a key role in supporting this need and helping to safeguard the natural assets that underpin human wellbeing and support life on land and below water (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; SDG 15 & 14).
Does humanity's future lie in the ocean? As demand for resources continues to grow and land-based sources decline, expectations for the ocean as an engine of human development are increasing. Claiming marine resources and space is not new to humanity, but the extent, intensity, and diversity of today's aspirations are unprecedented. We describe this as the blue acceleration—a race among diverse and often competing interests for ocean food, material, and space.
The unprecedented global heatwave of 2014–2017 was a defining event for many ecosystems. Widespread degradation caused by coral bleaching, for example, highlighted the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of people dependent on reefs for their livelihoods, well-being, and food security. Scientists and policy makers are now reassessing long-held assumptions about coping with anthropogenic climate change, particularly the assumption that strong local institutions can maintain ecological and social resilience through ecosystem-based management, adaptation, and restoration.
A growing movement of conservationists proposes to stem biodiversity losses by setting aside half of Earth's land as an interconnected global conservation reserve. As the largest land governance proposal in history, Half Earth engages with some of the wickedest challenges in land system science. How best to allocate and manage Earth's land to maximize biodiversity conservation in the face of competing demands for food, housing and other human needs? Can half of Earth's land be reallocated and governed fairly and equitably in ways that honor the rights of vulnerable populations?
