How to Invent the Right Institution to Cut Resource Conflicts
March 11, 2013Can you resist the impetus coming from a 234 page report that has the promising title “Resource Futures” and boasts a beautiful Sankey diagram on the front page? See, I couldn't either. But before you expect a concise summary here, you had better be warned. I'm deeply sorry, but the report's giant scope of analyzing all the major resource flows in all of the world's bigger countries, including the...
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10 Appropriate Indicators to Measure Green Growth in Industry
December 17, 2012 5 CommentsGreen Growth, Sustainable Growth, Green Economy – All of these concepts require decoupling. A decoupling, in a nutshell, that maintains economic growth while achieving material de-growth. Instead of consuming ever more resources to produce ever more profits (“traditional” growth), decoupling refers to the idea of consuming less material resources and still generating more profits (green growth). What sounds good in theory, faces some technicalities in practice. The most important one is: how do you measure “greenness”? Which of all the shrinking resources should be saved, in order to merit get...
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5-Fold Increase in Efficiency - Not Delusional at All
October 28, 2012 2 CommentsSome of my recent articles have circled around an apparent antagonism between different schools of thought in sustainability. I mentioned the two main contemporary concepts for leading business and society through the transformation to sustainable development: efficiency and sufficiency. The former aims at getting the same output with less input, whereas the latter calls for reducing output (mainly by reducing consumer needs). If there was a slight disposition to support sufficiency hidden between the lines of my blog posts, I want to clarify once more that we absolutely need both strategies. ...
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Avoiding the Relocation of Emissions - How to Face Carbon Leakage
April 1, 2012 1 CommentIn the course of the last 20 years, some of the more developed countries achieved a remarkable reduction of carbon emissions. However, taking a closer look at this, we see that a reduction in one place can be closely correlated to an increase of emissions in another. A scope of “one country” is incomplete, since both goods and emissions circulate all around the world. In this article, I'll explain the phenomenon of carbon leakage and will suggest ways to assess emissions in a more precise way. Many western and northern European countries can serve as examples of the above mentioned “carbon ...
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The Path to a Green Economy - Lessons From Germany
February 12, 2012 4 CommentsWhat green economy deals with is the idea of running our businesses in a sustainable way. All of them. All of us. Running a business in a sustainable way means that, while doing business, you preserve the basis of your business. One business may be based on a talent, another one on an idea, a third one on luck. There are capital intense businesses, risky businesses and there is dad's business. What they all have in common, every single one of them, is they all require a certain state of affairs to run. I don't refer to the classic triangle of land, labor and capital here - I stretch the point ...
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Transparency and Saving Potentials
September 7, 2011 1 CommentWhen I read about "transparency" in the context of sustainability or sustainability management the term mostly is referring to reporting to and communication with the relevant stakeholders of businesses. That's the case in a study on "Corporate Responsibility and Transparency" (in German: Unternehmerische Verantwortung im Zeitalter der Transparenz) published by pwc in March 2011. The pwc study assesses sustainability reporting of Austrian, Swiss and German companies and shows that 87% of German DAX noted businesses already do sustainability reporting. The energy sector is strongly represented...
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Waste Prevention vs. Recycling - Analyzing Material Flow Accounts
August 30, 2011 3 CommentsWhy should we even bother about recycling, when we could prevent waste in the first place? Well, according to the following study, published in May 2011, forget that question. Turn it around. We shouldn't even bother about waste prevention. Seeking a European Resource Efficiency Framework In an attempt to estimate the impact of policy efforts, the European Comission ordered several studies, aiming at the development of a frameweork contract for resource efficieny. The most interesting of all these studies is the analysis of the Key Contributions to Resource Efficiency. Three parties were inv...
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Carbon Neutral Online Shopping – How Green are Mail Order Compani ...
August 29, 2012 7 Comments -
Only 16.7% of Global Energy Consumption Is Renewable – Ways for I ...
June 26, 2012 6 Comments -
Biomass Lagging Behind Prospering Wind and Solar Markets
September 1, 2011 6 Comments -
How Sustainable are Europe's 5 Million E-Cars in 2020? New LCA Gu ...
February 5, 2013 5 Comments -
10 Appropriate Indicators to Measure Green Growth in Industry
December 17, 2012 5 Comments
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5 Clear-Cut Economic Benefits of Sustainability Reporting
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How to Recycle Phosphorus, the Most Least-Known Scarce Resource
May 6, 2013 1 Comment -
ISO 14051-Based Material Flow Cost Accounting in a Nutshell
May 1, 2013 1 Comment -
Who's Happier – The Proactive Lohas or the Spontaneous Hedonist? ...
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The Truth About the Dragon: China's Future is Inevitably Green
April 3, 2013 1 Comment
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Thanks Moritz for the interesting blog post. Recently ARTE T ...
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A very nice blog explaining the basic idea as well as the be ...
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[...] valued the universal guidelines for all sorts of envi ...
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[...] 5-Fold Increase in Efficiency – Not Delusional at All ...
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[...] Diese weiße Weste verträgt ruhig ein paar Kleckse Konz ...
April 21, 2013
