Explainer: What Is Doughnut Economics? Doughnut Economics is a theory proposing a change of economic model as a response to humanity’s major challenge of eradicating global poverty within the means of the planet’s limited natural resources.   JORDAN CHEUN GLOBAL COMMONS OCT 25TH 2021 In a typical introductory economics lesson, you will be taught that the definition of economics is to study the allocation of scarce resources. The focus on scarce resources has led many people to see endless growth as a positive, or “more is better”. However, in reality, economic growth is measured only by an increasing GDP, completely ignoring the finite nature of Earth’s resources and the consequences of our actions. What would economics look like when increasing the abundance of resources is no longer the solution to the problem of scarcity but creates intractable problems of its own instead? In today’s world, millions of people still lack life’s essentials; living daily with hunger, illiteracy, insecurity, and voicelessness. At the same time, humanity’s collective pressure on the planet has already overshot at least four planetary boundaries – climate change, land conversion, fertiliser use, and biodiversity loss. The global economy is also deeply divisive, rife with acute gender and income inequalities. To ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials, while safeguarding we collectively do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems we fundamentally depend on, English economist Kate Raworth introduced the concept of Doughnut Economics in 2012, an economic model designed to fit in the 21st century.  Doughnut Economics is a new vision for an economy. By rethinking our systems, the goal of national and global economies can be changed from simply increasing GDP to creating a society that can provide enough materials and services for everyone while utilising resources in a way that does not threaten our future security and prosperity.                                                                                                                            

This model consists of a dashboard of indicators that define its boundaries. Imagine looking at a doughnut top down. You would see a healthy green region that is the circular doughnut. The outer region represents the ecological ceiling, while the inner region reflects the social foundation. The hole at the doughnut’s centre reveals how people are falling short on life’s essentials such as food, water, healthcare, and freedom of expression. If we undershoot or use our planetary resources incorrectly, the model would indicate that we are unable to ensure the necessary social foundations are met across citizens. In real terms, this means people living without access to plentiful food, clean water, and essential healthcare. Thus, a huge part of humanity’s challenge is to get everyone out of that hole. At the same time, overshooting on our resource budget would lead to catastrophic consequences such as freshwater withdrawals, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, and ultimately climate change. In our current systems, aspects such as the rise in healthcare costs resulting from increasing air pollution are “externalities” that are not included in the costs of production and consumption, whereas in an embedded economy that allows us to see the economy as embedded within the larger social and ecological fabric, these costs are taken into account. At its core, Doughnut Economics is based on an economy that is both regenerative and distributive by design. It has huge implications for any group negotiating the balance between economic growth and powerful social change.              https://earth.org/what-is-doughnut-economics/?psafe_param=1&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA8sauBhB3EiwAruTRJpcxxgxN87zAoXbxn6muLwQTSzK7H_IlMHEMK2EVC03C2MOMPXJOqhoCzNcQAvD_BwE            You might also like: What Is a Circular Economy?     

•  Everybody has a breaking point: how the climate crisis affects our brains......climatological neuroepidemiology a new developing field of research. Guardian- Clayton Aldern 27 March 2024Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?  Nomura, who teaches in the psychology department at Queens College, CUNY, as well as in the psychiatry department of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai , and her colleagues’ research offers a representative page in a new story of the climate crisis: a story that says a changing climate doesn’t just shape the environment in which we live. Rather, the climate crisis spurs visceral and tangible transformations in our very brains. As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward. The conclusions of her research reveal a startling disparity: children who were in utero during Hurricane Sandy bear an inordinately high risk of psychiatric conditions today. For example, girls who were exposed to Sandy prenatally experienced a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression later in life compared with girls who were not exposed. Boys had 60-fold and 20-fold increased risks of ADHD and conduct disorder, respectively. Children expressed symptoms of the conditions as early as preschool. “Our findings are extremely alarming,” the researchers wrote in a 2022 study summarising their initial results. It is not the type of sentence one usually finds in the otherwise measured discussion sections of academic papers. 

• Evidence comes from a variety of fields. Psychologists and behavioural economists have illustrated the ways in which temperature spikes drive surges in everything from domestic violence to online hate speech. Cognitive neuroscientists have charted the routes by which extreme heat and surging CO2 levels impair decision-making, diminish problem-solving abilities, and short-circuit our capacity to learn. Vectors of brain disease, such as ticks and mosquitoes, are seeing their habitable ranges expand as the world warms. And as researchers like Nomura have shown, you don’t need to go to war to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder: the violence of a hurricane or wildfire is enough. It appears that, due to epigenetic inheritance, you don’t even need to have been born yet. When it comes to the health effects of the climate crisis, says Burcin Ikiz, a neuroscientist at the mental-health philanthropy organisation the Baszucki Group, “we know what happens in the cardiovascular system; we know what happens in the respiratory system; we know what happens in the immune system. But there’s almost nothing on neurology and brain health.” Ikiz, like Nomura, is one of a growing cadre of neuroscientists seeking to connect the dots between environmental and neurological wellness.

• As a cohesive effort, the field – which we might call climatological neuroepidemiology – is in its infancy. But many of the effects catalogued by such researchers feel intuitive. During a summer 2016 heatwave in Boston, Harvard epidemiologists showed that college students living in dorms without air conditioning performed standard cognitive tests more slowly than those living with it. In January of this year, Chinese economists noted that students who took mathematics tests on days above 32C looked as if they had lost the equivalent of a quarter of a year of education, relative to test days in the range 22–24C. Cognitive performance is the tip of the melting iceberg. You may have also noticed, for example, your own feelings of aggression on hotter days. You and everyone else – and animals, too.....and there's much, much more......https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/27/everybody-has-a-breaking-point-how-the-climate-crisis-affects-our-brains

 Environmentalists Don’t Vote. This Group Wants to Change That. “The climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem,” says Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project. Elections 2024: How Much Do Voters Care About Climate? BY MARTINA IGINI GLOBAL COMMONS JAN 24TH 2024 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy, with roughly half of the human population called to the polls. A lot is at stake, especially for the climate. In this article, Earth.Org looks at how perceptions of climate change have shifted in recent decades and how the urgency of addressing the rapidly unfolding climate crisis has fostered a new breed of environmentally conscious voters who are keenly aware that their ballot choices can shape the fate of their planet.  Some 4 billion people – roughly half of the human population – are eligible to vote this year, making 2024 the biggest global election year of all time and a pivotal one for democracy. Beyond their immediate national impact, elections hold significant implications for global stability and the pursuit of sustainable development. As the world grapples with complex challenges such as climate change, social inequality, and geopolitical tensions, understanding the critical role of elections in fostering democracy and maintaining global stability becomes paramount.  Stinnett worked for over a decade as a political campaign adviser in the early 2000s. He and the teams he worked with paid close attention to voter polling, and he was consistently frustrated to see that very few voters listed climate change or other environmental issues as a top priority. In 2014, after managing an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in Boston, Stinnett was taking a break from politics as he and his wife were expecting their first child. “I was just having lunch with a friend of mine who’s a pollster, and we were looking over some data together and something caught my eye,” he recalls. It was a rare poll that broke out both voters’ and nonvoters’ priorities.                                                                                                                                                                                                    Stinnett saw that among the nonvoters, climate change and environmental issues seemed more likely to rank highly. “That just hit me like a ton of bricks,” he says. “Maybe the climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem.”Stinnett founded his own nonprofit to put a laser focus on that problem. The Environmental Voter Project, or EVP, is now active in 19 states and has participated in over 100 elections just this year. “It is always election day for the Environmental Voter Project somewhere,” he says cheerily.Stinnett and his team use a combination of data science and behavioral science to identify non voting environmentalists and get them to become more consistent voters. He describes the approach as “really, really nerdy.” When he first started the nonprofit, he knew the concept was solid — but “never in my wildest dreams did I think volunteers would be excited by this,” he says. Emily Church, one of the organization’s more than 6,000 volunteers, embraces the nerdiness. She began phone banking with EVP during the 2018 midterm season.“We need to pass meaningful legislation, and we need voters who care about climate change to vote [in order] to get there,” she says. “And it turns out we know how to do that, so let’s just do that.” 

“Even if the election doesn’t turn out the way that you might have wanted it to, if we get 300 people to vote for the very first time, they’re gonna show up again and again and again and start driving policymaking,” he says. “Those are wins. Those are examples of systemic change.”  For example, community organizers on the ground in Georgia, largely being organized by Stacey Abrams and her organizations, registered people to vote at historic rates and also did what they could to fight voter suppression — and in that process, flipped a state that everybody said had no chance of ever flipping, which became the margin of victory for us to get something like the IRA passed.”....read on      https://grist.org/looking-forward/these-climate-advocates-dont-care-about-your-carbon-footprint-they-care-about-whether-you-vote/                                                                                                           And explore these articles.........          Read: a catalog of climate actions that can be joyful — including voting and mobilizing other voters (Grist).......Read: about the Environmental Voter Project’s efforts to expand into more red states (NBC News)..........Read: how Gen Z voters have fueled a new appetite for climate as a campaign issue (Washington Post)..........Read: about how climate impacts are making it more difficult to cast a ballot in some places (Prism)

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Share Show Climate change is depressing, but we’re not! Explore a world of solutions with host Laura Lynch and our team of journalists. We find inspiration in unexpected places, scrutinize new technologies, hold powerful people accountable and join you on the journey to fix this mess. New episodes every Saturday. For Example,,,,check out a podcast on GLOBAL HEATING.......For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world's oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus. The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fuelled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren't just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023's mark and still rising at the end of the month, And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

The last month that didn't set a record for hottest month was in May 2023 and that was a close third to 2020 and 2016. Copernicus records have fallen regularly from June on.February 2024 averaged 13.54 C, breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree....check it out.......https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/warmest-february-climate-change-1.7136294.......and then click on any of the links below for more...... you can also go to the CBC website WHAT ON EARTH and sign up for the weekly podcast.

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