The legacy environmental footprints of manufactured capital.

The foundations of today's societies are provided by manufactured capital accumulation driven by investment decisions through time. Reconceiving how the manufactured assets are harnessed in the production-consumption system is at the heart of the paradigm shifts necessary for long-term sustainability. Our research integrates 50 years of economic and environmental data to provide the global legacy environmental footprint (LEF) and unveil the historical material extractions, greenhouse gas emissions, and health impacts accrued in today's manufactured capital. We show that between 1995 and 2019, global LEF growth outpaced GDP and population growth, and the current high level of national capital stocks has been heavily relying on global supply chains in metals. The LEF shows a larger or growing gap between developed economies (DEs) and less-developed economies (LDEs) while economic returns from global asset supply chains disproportionately flow to DEs, resulting in a double burden for LDEs. Our results show that ensuring best practice in asset production while prioritizing well-being outcomes is essential in addressing global inequalities and protecting the environment. Achieving this requires a paradigm shift in sustainability science and policy, as well as in green finance decision-making, to move beyond the focus on the resource use and emissions of daily operations of the assets and instead take into account the long-term environmental footprints of capital accumulation.

From SARS to COVID-19: the role of experience and experts in Hong Kong's initial policy response to an emerging pandemic.

As one of the most densely populated places in the world, Hong Kong fared relatively well in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a very low number of cases and fatalities per capita. This was mostly due to the Hong Kong government, healthcare workers, and the general public's institutional and individual memory after they successfully overcame the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. However, while Hong Kong was well accustomed to measures such as wearing masks and social distancing, the cooperation of the Hong Kong public to government restrictions was highly affected by its local political context, especially after widespread anti-government protests began mid-2019. This brought the public's trust in government to an all-time low, creating a political 'new normal', which underpinned how COVID-19 policies would be proposed, accepted, and implemented, if at all. To understand how science advice was offered and how public health decisions were made, this research investigates the evolution of Hong Kong's science advisory mechanisms for public health from before SARS, after SARS, and during COVID-19 in 2020, including the roles of key organisations and departments, the establishment of new centres and committees, and the creation of workgroups and expert advisory panels. This paper compares and analyses the reasons behind these differences in science advisory mechanisms between SARS and COVID-19. The findings from this research reinforce the unquestionable need for robust science advisory structures and knowledgeable scientific experts to solve health-related crises, though more research is required to understand the ways in which science advice influences both policy decisions and public acceptance of these policies.

Making technological innovation work for sustainable development.

This paper presents insights and action proposals to better harness technological innovation for sustainable development. We begin with three key insights from scholarship and practice. First, technological innovation processes do not follow a set sequence but rather emerge from complex adaptive systems involving many actors and institutions operating simultaneously from local to global scales. Barriers arise at all stages of innovation, from the invention of a technology through its selection, production, adaptation, adoption, and retirement. Second, learning from past efforts to mobilize innovation for sustainable development can be greatly improved through structured cross-sectoral comparisons that recognize the socio-technical nature of innovation systems. Third, current institutions (rules, norms, and incentives) shaping technological innovation are often not aligned toward the goals of sustainable development because impoverished, marginalized, and unborn populations too often lack the economic and political power to shape innovation systems to meet their needs. However, these institutions can be reformed, and many actors have the power to do so through research, advocacy, training, convening, policymaking, and financing. We conclude with three practice-oriented recommendations to further realize the potential of innovation for sustainable development: (i) channels for regularized learning across domains of practice should be established; (ii) measures that systematically take into account the interests of underserved populations throughout the innovation process should be developed; and (iii) institutions should be reformed to reorient innovation systems toward sustainable development and ensure that all innovation stages and scales are considered at the outset.

Barriers to the implementation of green chemistry in the United States.

This paper investigates the conditions under which firms are able to develop and implement innovations with sustainable development benefits. In particular, we examine "green chemistry" innovations in the United States. Via interviews with green chemistry leaders from industry, academia, nongovernmental institutions (NGOs), and government, we identified six major categories of challenges commonly confronted by innovators: (1) economic and financial, (2) regulatory, (3) technical, (4) organizational, (5) cultural, and (6) definition and metrics. Further analysis of these barriers shows that in the United States, two elements of these that are particular to the implementation of green chemistry innovations are the absence of clear definitions and metrics for use by researchers and decision makers, as well as the interdisciplinary demands of these innovations on researchers and management. Finally, we conclude with some of the strategies that have been successful thus far in overcoming these barriers, and the types of policies which could have positive impacts moving forward.

The workings of a molecular thermometer: the vibrational excitation of carbon tetrachloride by a solvent.

An intriguing energy-transfer experiment was recently carried out in methanol/carbon tetrachloride solutions. It turned out to be possible to watch vibrational energy accumulating in three of carbon tetrachloride's modes following initial excitation of O-H and C-H stretches in methanol, in effect making those CCl(4) modes "molecular thermometers" reporting on methanol's relaxation. In this paper, we use the example of a CCl(4) molecule dissolved in liquid argon to examine, on a microscopic level, just how this kind of thermal activation occurs in liquid solutions. The fact that even the lowest CCl(4) mode has a relatively high frequency compared to the intermolecular vibrational band of the solvent means that the only solute-solvent dynamics relevant to the vibrational energy transfer will be extraordinarily local, so much so that it is only the force between the instantaneously most prominent Cl and solvent atoms that will significantly contribute to the vibrational friction. We use this observation, within the context of a classical instantaneous-pair Landau-Teller calculation, to show that energy flows into CCl(4) primarily via one component of the nominally degenerate, lowest frequency, E mode and does so fast enough to make CCl(4) an excellent choice for monitoring methanol relaxation. Remarkably, within this theory, the different symmetries and appearances of the different CCl(4) modes have little bearing on how well they take up energy from their surroundings--it is only how high their vibrational frequencies are relative to the solvent intermolecular vibrational band edge that substantially favors one mode over another.