In our new CONVOCO! Podcast Corinne M. Flick speaks with Prof. Raji Jayaraman, Academic Director at the Future Institute for Sustainable Transformation at ESMT Berlin, about:
Can We Make Globalisation Sustainable?
Here’s what she said:
Sustainability is an organizing principle. The idea is to think about how we can balance economic prosperity with social equity and environmental protection.
Due diligence obligations in supply chains (such as the German Lieferkettengesetz) pose two problems: The first is monitoring – especially in parts of the world with weak institutions. The second is enforcement.
It’s everyone’s favourite game right now to say globalisation is a terrible thing. But let’s not forget that opening up to international trade is a major reason why we have seen massive reductions in poverty in places like India and China. This is huge in terms of sustainable development.
Economist have two sets of instruments to counteract negative externalities such as biodiversity loss and climate change: price policy (such as carbon taxes) and quantity regulation (such as permits or carbon offsets).
Climate change boils down to an applied physics problem … But biodiversity loss is a complex biological problem. That makes it difficult to model. And if you can’t model something, it’s very hard to know how to tackle it.