Renewable Matter goes bimonthly
We begin the year 2024 with great news: Renewable Matter becomes bimonthly. Six issues a year for more comprehensive and even more articulate reporting. From the circular economy of territorie...
Ten words for 2024
Another year has come to an end. There are those who reflect on these past twelve months while others prefer to look to the year ahead. We of Renewable Matter, who by nature are always looking ...
A circular food system can reverse the overshoot of planetary boundaries
* Álvaro Conde and Alex Colloricchio contributed to this article A global transition towards a sustainable food system is long overdue, scientists agree: and although farming has lon...
If a Tree Falls
Over the course of my life, I have encountered exceptional trees: the giant sequoias and the secular General Sherman (2200 - 2700 years old) in California, the Lebanese cedars in the Beqaa valley, t...
The Importance of Responsibility
In economics, “negative environmental externalities” occur when someone is responsible for something negative (e.g. a farmer using toxic chemicals that spread into the environment) and d...
Water scarcity may become our everyday reality, but a circular economy can help
Humans are about 60% water. Water covers about 71% of the Earth's surface. It feels like water is all around us, forever available. But approximately 1.1 billion people lack access to it, and 2...
Ecuador, a referendum for the future
Leaving oil in the ground by popular demand. This is what Ecuadorians approved yesterday in a historic referendum to stop the development of all new oil wells in Yasuní National Park in the A...
The Ocean Inside
On the island of Inhaca, Mozambique, lies one of the most extraordinary observatories of ocean life I have visited as a journalist. Since 1951, the Estação de Biologia Marinha Eduardo ...
The Sea and Humankind: an Interdependent Relationship
The sea is a natural resource with which we have increasingly lost contact over time.Yet, 50% of what we breathe comes from the sea and is produced by the marine organisms that inhabit it. The ocean...
The Circular Economy as a Pillar of the EU’s Development
Our world population consumes 110 billion tonnes of materials a year and wastes over 90 percent of them. Only 7.2 percent of those materials make it back into our economy and, according to the Circu...
Towards a Global Green Deal
The Ventotene Manifesto, penned by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, two of modern Europe’s founding fathers, and the Paneuropa document, written by Richard Nikolaus of Coudenhove-Kalergi, defin...
Critical Moment
In the world of robotics and informatics, as well as in the world of the energy transition, the material factor is often ignored. We have imagined android armies, hypercomplex machinery, infinite so...
The greatest economist you've probably never heard of
Thus someone defined Herman Daly, who passed away on October 28 at the age of 84. Whether or not he was the father of ecological economics matters little. What Herman Daly's work represented can al...
On Her Majesty’s Service
The transition (economic, ecological, cultural, circular?) requires technology, technical know-how, and soft skills of all kinds. New economic expertise, knowledge of governance processes, new langu...
Italy's turned right. What are the impacts for the ecological transition?
Italy will be led by a right-wing coalition. In an election with a very low electoral turn-out (64 percent, a 10 percent drop from previous elections), the party led by Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d'It...
Lost in the Supermarket: Retail and the Sustainability Challenge
I'm all lost in the supermarket I can no longer shop happily The ClashThe retail sector wants to change. It is a need dictated by the times, from macroeconomic and political scenarios to factors rel...
The biodiversity crisis: a war in the mirror
Three years after the publication of the report highlighting the devastating impact human activities have on biodiversity and ecosystems, the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Servic...
Water
When pondering on the complexities of sustainable development, sometimes we fail to include a priority index. Should climate change or pollution from microplastics rank first? Is it more important t...
50 years of Environment
World Environment Day is turning 50 years old. It was established by the United Nations on June 5th, 1972, at the first Conference on the Human Environment, which opened at that time in Stockholm. T...
A Global Roadmap for an Inclusive Circular Economy
On the occasion of Stockholm+50 - a major environmental event taking place on 2–3 June 2022, following on from the original UN Conference on the Human Environment that took place in 1972 – the I...