Ob ausländische Arbeitskräfte,Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge oder Vertriebene, ein Hauptmotiv von Migranten, ihre Heimat zu verlassen, ist die Aussicht auf eine bessere Zukunft an einem
neuen Ort. «Charter cities» könnten Alternativen bieten.
Die Unterscheidung gründet auf der Annahme, dass "Agro", also die Agroindustrie, böse und "Öko", für Agrarökologie, gut sei. Dieses Gut-böse-Schema verursacht einen beträchtlichen Kollateralschaden für Gesellschaft und Umwelt, denn eine Zusammenarbeit von staatlichen und nichtstaatlichen Akteuren mit dem Privatsektor für die gemeinsame Erarbeitung von nachhaltigen Lösungen wird dadurch erschwert.
Humankind shares a common interest in the safety of the products it uses and consumes and an increasing interest in the way the product has been produced. In a globalized world, private standards play a role in ensuring the safety and sustainability of products and production methods. The co-management of the public good ‘food safety’ by the public and the private sector is not new from a historical point of view. The industrial revolution in the 19th century was characterized by the emergence of new industries that made use of science and technology to create new products and services and it was industry itself that started the creation and enforcement of private standards through independent non-for-profit standards organizations. The experience thus gained was later integrated into the design of national and international public standards. Such private standards are intended to ensure the safety of products made available through trade and innovation and as such would be in line with the WTO principle of non-discrimination. Yet the recent emergence of process-oriented international private standards may not always be in line with this principle. Buyer-driven private standards, especially if they are related to business-to-consumer (B2C) labels, are often more about corporate reputation management than sustainability. The present paper reviews the impact of such buyer-driven private standards on trade and innovation by looking at the governance of global value chains (GVC) by private standards. The conclusion is that business-to-business (B2B) private standards may indeed encourage more sustainable producer practices and reduce uncertainty in GVCs, but they are costly and often not sufficiently responsive to local challenges. B2C-based private standards need to become less influenced by advocac
Purpose – This paper aims to identify the relative contribution of sustainability criteria to property value risk. Design/methodology/approach – Adiscounted cash flow (DCF) model is used to assess the effect of a given set of 42 sustainability sub-indicators on property value. The anticipated demand for each sustainability sub-indicator is described by four future states of nature. Their impact on costs or revenue is estimated and included in the model. Subjective probability distributions describe the occurrence of the future states of nature. Monte Carlo simulations of the DCF model are then used to estimate the impact of an individual feature on the risk (volatility) of the property value distribution. Findings – The results for Switzerland show that “use of thermal energy” (29.3 per cent), followed by “access to public transportation” (16.3 per cent), “day light” (9.6 per cent) and “story height” (6.3 per cent) have the highest single impact on property value risk. Practical implications – The results are used for a risk-based weighting of a sustainability rating. The rating illustrates how sustainability criteria affect the risk of specific properties and are used as a basis for real estate investment decisions. Originality/value – In this paper, an effort is made to rigorously ground sustainability ratings in financial theory.
Die neue Veröffentlichung des CCRS gibt einen Überblick über bewährte und neuere Rendite- und Risikokennzahlen für Immobilien und beurteilt sie aus Nachhaltigkeitssicht. Herausgegeben wird sie gemeinsam mit RICS Switzerland und dem Verband der Immobilieninvestoren sowie Immobilien Basel-Stadt, Migros-Pensionskasse, Liegenschaftenverwaltung Stadt Zürich, SUVA, Swisscanto und Zürcher Kantonalbank.
Was sind die Ursachen hoher Preisvolatilität auf den globalen Agrarmärkten? In der öffentlichen Diskussion wird oft die «Finanzialisierung» des Agrarhandels für die stark schwankenden Nahrungsmittelpreise verantwortlich gemacht. Dabei wird übersehen, dass Preisbewegungen primär auf Veränderungen der Verfügbarkeit von global handelbaren Nahrungsmitteln zurückzuführen sind. Diese realwirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse werden von der Politik und weniger von Finanzmärkten, die diese primär nachbilden, beeinflusst. Nachhaltige Ernährungssicherung bedingt institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen, die Anreize schaffen, in die Landwirtschaft zu investieren, und den fairen Handel mit Agrargütern ermöglichen.
Agricultural innovation in low-income tropical countries ontributes to a more effective and sustainable use of natural resources and reduces hunger and poverty through economic development in rural areas. Yet, despite numerous recent public and private initiatives to develop capacities for agricultural innovation, such in itiatives are often not well aligned with national efforts to revive existing Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS). In an effort to improve coordination and responsiveness of Capacity Development (CD) initiatives, the G20 Agriculture Ministers requested the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to lead the development of a Tropical Agricultural Platform (TAP), which is designed to improve coherence and coordination of CD for agricultural innovation in the tropics. This paper presents a summary of the results obtained from three regional needs assessments undertaken by TAP and its partners. The surveyed tropical regions were Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. The findings reveal a mismatch in all three regions between the external supply of primarily individual CD and the actual demand for institutional CD. The misalignment might be addressed by strengthening south-south and triangular collaboration and by improving the institutional capacities that would render national AIS more demand-oriented and responsive to the needs of mallholders in domestic agriculture.
