Resources

The Policy Brief, Enabling Sustainable Lifestyles in a Climate Emergency offers insights on what forces shape our lifestyles, from our values and norms to economic factors and government regulations, underpinned by the physical infrastructure within which we live. 

This first installation in the Hot or Cool Think Piece series shows that climate disruption and biodiversity collapse are but two symptoms of the environmental crisis caused by ever-growing resource consumption. Multiple overshoots of Earth’s planetary boundaries have pushed our natural systems close to or even beyond critical tipping points.

Some countries have been more successful than others at dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. When we explore the different policy approaches adopted as well as the underlying socio-economic factors, we note an interesting set of correlations: countries led by women leaders have fared significantly better than those led by men on a wide range of dimensions concerning the global health crisis.

The concept of ‘wellbeing economy’ (WE), that is, an economy that pursues human and ecological wellbeing instead of material growth, is gaining support amongst policymakers, business, and civil society. Over the past couple of years, several national governments have adopted the WE as their guiding framework to design development policies and assess social and economic progress.

Despite widespread recognition of the need to transition toward more sustainable production and consumption and numerous initiatives to that end, global resource extraction and corresponding socio-ecological degradation continue to grow.

While women were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging research suggests that the crisis and its subsequent shutdown response have resulted in a dramatic increase in this burden.