Sustainability accounting and reporting: an ablative reflexive thematic analysis of climate crisis, conservative or radical reform paradigms

Every year the global financial system sends trillions of dollars to finance environmental destruction, but the climate crisis forces change. Notwithstanding vested interests and the unrecognised paradox of adopting environmental business strategies, the implementation of sustainability accounting and reporting (SAR) is imperative to catalyse economic transition away from fossil-fuel and plastic configurations to more sustainable ones. The research proceeded sequentially. First, it scanned the backdrop to the SAR problem and identified key associated institutions and a corpus of recent literature. An initial review to disentangle its conflicting threads generated three themes of ‘climate crisis’ and ‘conservative’ or more ‘radical’ SAR reform paradigms. Iteratively harnessing this thematic lens, the investigation re-examined the SAR literature corpus. It detected fragmented SAR responses to the climate crisis. Accordingly, the research reformulated its first theme to ‘dystopic climate crisis fragmentation’ but only refined the other two conservative or radical themes to take account of materiality and the split between Anglo-Saxon (IFRS, SSAB) or global and continental institutions (UN, EU, GRI). Conservatives defend incremental standard improvements but retain a single materiality investor-focus. Radicals seek to implement double materiality with a broader spectrum of stakeholders in mind. Both approaches have theoretical as well as pragmatic advantages and disadvantages, so the SAR contention rumbles on. Whilst the standard setting landscape is evolving, division, paradox and contention remain. Given vested interests in the destructive status quo, it would be naïve to expect a harmonious SAR Ithaca to emerge anytime soon. Yet the challenges impel urgent action.

Rich kids of Europe? Social basis and strategic choices in the climate activism of Fridays for Future

In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements.

Assessment of Potentially Toxic Elements in Egbetua Stream Sediments, South-Western Nigeria

The study area is located in Egbetua area in Akoko Edo Local Government Area of Edo State, southwestern Nigeria. the aim of the study is to assess the concentrations of potentially toxic elements in sediments from the study area. Ten samples collected from various locations in Egbetua stream were subjected to standard geochemical analysis using energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence spectrometer model “Minipal 4”. The average concentrations of six elements are V (26.89 ppm), Cr (32.33 ppm), Co (6.13 ppm), Ni (16.10 ppm), Au (21.13 ppm), and Zr (1,285.20 ppm) and they were compared to those of upper continental crust baseline values. V, Cr, Co, and Ni have extremely low concentrations, while Au and Zr have very high concentrations. Moreover, V, Cr, Co, and Ni have average enrichment ratios of 0.28, 0.35, 0.35 and 0.34, respectively, which are < 1 implying their depletion in relation to their average crustal baseline concentrations. On the other hand, Au and Zr are highly enriched in the study area. Au has average geoaccumulation index (Igeo) values of 4.40 indicative of strongly to extremely polluted, while Cr, Co, Ni and Zr have average Igeo values of 10.95, 6.14, 9.98 and 17.34, respectively, indicative of sediments that are extremely polluted. The potentially toxic elements pose very serious environmental geochemical pollution threat in the study area. It is recommended that urgent action should be taken to mitigate and clean the study area of these potentially toxic elements.

Promoting Climate Actions: A Cognitive-Constraints Approach

Many Americans do not view climate change as a threat requiring urgent action. Moreover, among U.S. conservatives, higher science literacy is paradoxically associated with higher anthropogenic climate-change skepticism. The present study harnessed the power of two cognitive constraints essential to belief formation and revision to design educational materials that can mitigate these problems. The key role of the coherence and causal-invariance constraints, which map onto two narrative proclivities that anthropologists have identified as universal, predicts that climate-change information embedded in scientific explanations of (indisputable) everyday observations within a coherent personal moral narrative, juxtaposed with reasoners’ typically less coherent explanations, will be more persuasive than climate-change information by itself. An experiment conducted in U.S. states with the highest level of climate skepticism demonstrates that across the political spectrum, conveying science information using materials that leverage these constraints raises both appreciation of science and willingness to take pro-climate actions.

Lack of sample diversity in research on adolescent depression and social media use: a scoping review and meta-analysis

Research on whether social media use relates to adolescent depression is rapidly increasing. However, is it adequately representing the diversity of global adolescent populations? We conducted a pre-registered scoping review (research published between 2018-2020; 34 articles) to investigate the proportion of studies recruiting samples from the Global North vs. Global South and assess whether the association between social media and depression varies depending on the population being studied. Sample diversity was lacking between regions: 70% of studies examined Global North populations. The link between social media and depression was positive and significant in the Global North but null and non-significant in the Global South. There was also little evidence of diversity within regions in both sampling choices and reporting of participants’ demographics. Given that most adolescents live in the Global South and sample diversity is crucial for the generalisability of research findings, urgent action is needed to address these oversights.

Protecting Half the Planet and Transforming Human Systems Are Complementary Goals

The unfolding crises of mass extinction and climate change call for urgent action in response. To limit biodiversity losses and avert the worst effects of climate disruption, we must greatly expand nature protection while simultaneously downsizing and transforming human systems. The conservation initiative Nature Needs Half (or Half Earth), calling for the conservation of half the Earth's land and seas, is commensurate with the enormous challenges we face. Critics have objected to this initiative as harboring hardship for people near protected areas and for failing to confront the growth economy as the main engine of global ecological destruction. In response to the first criticism, we affirm that conservation policies must be designed and implemented in collaboration with Indigenous and local communities. In response to the second criticism, we argue that protecting half the Earth needs to be complemented by downscaling and reforming economic life, humanely and gradually reducing the global population, and changing food production and consumption. By protecting nature generously, and simultaneously contracting and transforming the human enterprise, we can create the conditions for achieving justice and well-being for both people and other species. If we fail to do so, we instead accept a chaotic and impoverished world that will be dangerous for us all.