The EU Taxonomy Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are new rules that EU institutions have developed to make more companies disclose their sustainability information in a more adequate manner.

Who will be affected by these new rules?

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive CSRD establishes the reporting requirements to:

– All large companies, financial and non-financial, listed and nonlisted. It is considered that a large company is one that meets two out of three of the following criteria: €40 million in net turnover, €20 million on the balance sheet and 250 or more employees

– Small and medium-size listed enterprises. It is considered that a SME is one that meets two out of the three following criteria:

See full article here: https://planetgroups.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-European-Union-requires-sustainability-reporting-from-any-company-with-more-than-250-employees-starting-from-the-financial-year-2023-1-002.pdf?x43117

Internet, digitalization, and access to technology have transformed contemporary consumption patterns and habits. Whether or not these changes hold beneficial or detrimental implications for society is subject to an ongoing debate. Specifically, concerning the environmental impacts of online and omnichannel retail, claims have been made on both sides: crediting the efficiency of home deliveries versus individual shopping trips on the one hand and pointing out complex consumer behaviour on the other hand. Despite intensive research efforts, a solid consensus lacks. The disperse and contradicting scientific knowledge base that is currently available prevents policymakers and practitioners from implementing sustainability improving measures and from steering consumers towards sustainable practices. Supported by a systematic review of the literature, this article presents a framework for understanding the net environmental sustainability of shopping. The debate is broken down in three impact categories that need to be considered simultaneously: individual purchases, consumer behaviour and consumption geography. The majority of research articles focus on the environmental impact of purchasing a single item or a basket of items, in which in-store purchases are substituted by purchases online. Such studies conclude in favour of e-commerce. The balance shifts when taking changes in behaviour and geography into consideration. While behavioural reflections are on the rise, hardly any empirical work takes the spatial (re)organisation of businesses and consumers into account. The article surpasses the case-study approach and in doing so comprises the body of literature in a solid framework that is able to guide future discussions and research in more sustainable directions.

See full article here
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0966692321001113?via%3Dihub

With the growth of e-commerce, the “logistic intensity” of our commercial transactions in cities has increased and logistics is increasingly visible in the urban landscape. Delivery workers move around, park, unload, consult their smartphones, argue with motorists to justify their double parking, interact with shopkeepers and with the residents they have to deliver to. They are in trucks, vans, but also on motorbikes, cargo bikes, scooters, bicycles or even on foot. On their backs, large delivery bags, of all colours according to the brands that employ them. They are now part of the urban landscape.

This dynamic, perceived as unstoppable after a year of health crisis that is tightening the grip of traditional commerce, raises questions about the impact of e-commerce in the city and particularly about the emergence of a new form of logistics, resulting from e-commerce, as an object of permanent innovation and all the more unfamiliar as logistics sprawl and the digital revolution seemed to have pushed the flows of goods away from the cities. E-commerce is transforming the city as much as it is transforming mobilities. This first part looks at some of the definitions and understandings of e-commerce and the profound transformations it is bringing about in the logistics chain.

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https://www.lvmt.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/LC2021-UK.pdf

While studying the amount of carbon dioxide in the desert’s air, a team of researchers was surprised to learn that large amounts of the greenhouse gas were disappearing around a region of the desert called the Tarim basin.

The most likely explanation, they recently reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is a massive underground ocean that has more water than all five Great Lakes in North America combined.

“Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand,” professor Li Yan — who led the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital — told the South China Morning Post, where we first learned about the study. “Our definition of desert may have to change.”

A basin is, by definition, a valley that collects water from drainage systems, like water that has melted and is running down the face of nearby, snow-capped mountains. Two mountain ranges border the Tarim basin: to the north are the Tian Shan Mountains, and to the south are the Kunlun Mountains.

See full article here
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/how-a-desert-became-a-carbon-sink-zone/

New research, published in Nature Climate Change and available on Global Forest Watch, found that the world’s forests sequestered about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted between 2001 and 2019. In other words, forests provide a “carbon sink” that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually.

Unlike other sectors, where carbon makes a one-way trip to the atmosphere, forests act as a two-way highway, absorbing CO2 when standing or regrowing and releasing it when cleared or degraded.

Before now, scientists estimated these global “carbon fluxes” from the sum of country-reported data, creating a coarse picture of the role forests play in both carbon emissions and sequestration. With these new data that combine ground measurements with satellite observations, we can now quantify carbon fluxes consistently over any area, from small local forests to countries to entire continents.

Using this more granular information, we found that the world’s forests emitted an average of 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year due to deforestation and other disturbances, and absorbed 16 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year.

See full article here
https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbon-they-emit-each-year

Humanity and the way we feed, fuel and finance our societies and economies is pushing nature and the services that power and sustain us to the brink, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2018. The report presents a sobering picture of the impact of human activity on the world’s wildlife, forests, oceans, rivers and climate, underlining the rapidly closing window for action and the urgent need for the global community to collectively rethink and redefine how we value, protect and restore nature.

The Living Planet Report 2018 presents a comprehensive overview of the state of our natural world, through multiple indicators including the Living Planet Index (LPI), which examines trends in global wildlife abundance. Tracking 16,704 populations of 4,005 vertebrate species, the LPI finds that global populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have declined, on average, by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014, the most recent year with available data.

See full article here
https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/wwf-report-reveals-staggering-extent-of-human-impact-on-planet

Grasslands and savannahs cover some 26–40 per cent of the planet’s total land, representing 80 per cent of the world’s agricultural and livestock area (Suttie et al. 2005). Most are used as rangeland, providing feed for livestock used in meat and dairy production. In many places, such as the Northern Great Plains (United States), the Pantanal (Brazil and Paraguay), the Pampas and Campos (Uruguay and Argentina), the Llanos (Colombia), the Maasai Mara (East Africa), the Great Steppe (Mongolia and China), and the Himalaya and Trans-Himalaya region (China, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan), extensive livestock grazing provides livelihoods for millions of rural and indigenous people. In Africa, where savannahs comprise over 50 per cent of the continent, people depend on them for water, food, medicine, timber and grass for construction, fuelwood and charcoal, with a total annual value exceeding $9 billion (Ryan et al., 2016). They also provide opportunities for recreation and tourism, supporting local economies, particularly where they are home to charismatic species.

See full article here
https://www.wwf.de/fileadmin/fm-wwf/Publikationen-PDF/WWF-Study-Grasslands-and-Savannah-Ecosystems.pdf

See full article here
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15324980500546007?journalCode=uasr20