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You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in sustainable solutions but unsure about their economic benefits? 

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Summary of the article titled The costs ad benefits of environmental sustainability from 2021 by Paul Ekins and Dimitri Zenghelis, published in the Sustainability Science journal. 

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the sustainable solutions compare to their financial investments. This article presents that no conventional cost-benefit analysis is appropriate in this case because it can understate the longterm benefits of sustainable solutions.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Starting early by credibly steering expectations, inducing innovation and directing investment is in all cases better than delay because ‘grow now and clean up later’ is the second highest cost option, only the existential costs of never cleaning up are higher.
2. There are three broad environmental strategies to deliver sustainable economies: decarbonisation to reduce the level of global warming, detoxification to reduce the emissions or impacts of other pollutants, and dematerialisation to reduce the environmental impacts associated with resource extraction, conversion, and processing.
3. A cost-effective low-carbon, resource-efficient transition can generate a cleaner, quieter, more secure, innovative, and productive economy for all countries at all stages of development.

You can find the article through this link.

Abstract: The natural science in GEO-6 makes clear that a range and variety of unwelcome outcomes for humanity, with potentially very significant impacts for human health, become increasingly likely if societies maintain their current development paths. This paper assesses what is known about the likely economic implications of either current trends or the transformation to a low-carbon and resource-efficient economy in the years to 2050 for which GEO-6 calls. A key conclusion is that no conventional cost–benefit analysis for either scenario is possible. This is because the final cost of meeting various decarbonisation and resource-management pathways depends on decisions made today in changing behaviour and generating innovation. The inadequacies of conventional modelling approaches generally lead to understating the risks from unmitigated climate change and overstating the costs of a low-carbon transition, by missing out the cumulative gains from path-dependent innovation. This leads to a flawed conclusion as to how to respond to the climate emergency, namely that significant reductions in emissions are prohibitively expensive and, therefore, to be avoided until new, cost-effective technologies are developed. We argue that this is inconsistent with the evidence and counterproductive in serving to delay decarbonisation efforts, thereby increasing its costs. Understanding the processes which drive innovation, change social norms and avoid locking in to carbon- and resource-intensive technologies, infrastructure and behaviours, will help decision makers as they ponder how to respond to the increasingly stark warnings of natural scientists about the deteriorating condition of the natural environment.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.007R – World scientists’ warning of climate emergency;
• No.013R – Managing climate change in Australia;
• No.036I – Interview with Magnus Moglia about urban regeneration and sustainability;
• No.057I – Interview with Amélie Uhrig about climate crises and individual actions;

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