Development needs to meet the UN SDG have primarily been financed through private sector financing, conventional public sector funding and philanthropic commitment. These sources are not sufficient in scale and speed to meet the pressing finance needs. The world community is too busy repairing, stabilizing, and refunding the system to maintain the stability of the existing system. The introduction of a parallel electronic currency specifically designed to finance global commons, and a human-centred economy would provide the necessary resources to achieve the UN SDGs while stabilizing the existing monetary system. This book analyses how the development of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain distributed ledger technologies has prompted leading central banks around the world to study the potential application of this approach to directly inject purchasing power without dependence on the banking system. Furthermore, the book illustrates how this approach can be utilized to finance the huge multi-trillion dollar annual investment requirements for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). With a Foreword from the President of the Club of Rome. “This book is where fiction turns into fact.” - World Bestselling Author of ‚The Minister of the Future‘ Stan Robinson “...challenging, innovative and interdisciplinary... to address the world’s problems.” - Founder and Father of the Quantitative Easing (QE), Prof. Dr. Richard Werner, Oxford University, GB “The real tragedy of the commons, as this book shows, is that we have allowed the most valuable social resources, our money and legal systems, to be employed for private gain instead of mobilizing them for social goals, not the least to ensure the survival of the human species on this planet.” - Best-selling author of ‚The code of capital’ Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and Director, Center on Global Legal Transformation Columbia Law School, USA

Our world is experiencing increasingly complex social and environmental challenges. The prevailing business models and, to some extent, capitalism per se, are frequently blamed for these problems due to their neglect of social and environmental values in favour of financial returns. Within this context, social finance has attracted the attention of governments, organizations, entrepreneurs, and researchers as a means of mobilizing resources and innovation with the goal of establishing effective long-term solutions. This edited collection summarizes, discusses, and analyzes new innovative trends in social finance. It features contributions that aim to highlight emerging trends (products, tools, and processes) in social finance, present a series of case studies related to the development, deployment, and scaling of social finance innovations, offer an understanding of how non-economic externalities are being incorporated, managed, and assessed in recent innovations, reveal the disruptive potential of social finance innovations by analyzing how they are redefining mainstream finance, analyze the scales – of operation and impact – of different innovations, and explore the complex relationship between social finance and social innovation. Featuring contributions from both the research and practitioner community as well as policy actors, the book provides more than a snapshot of the current social finance field by specifically highlighting the major challenges and difficulties that require the urgent attention of policymakers and social entrepreneurs.

The monetary system is the indispensable missing link in the debate of sustainability, and whether the current financial system can handle these evolved needs. To date, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) primarily have been financed either through the private sector, through conventional public sector taxes and fees, or through philanthropic commitment. Assuming a need of 4 to 5 trillion dollars annually in the 10 to 15 years left to finance our future, these conventional sources of finance are insufficient in terms of both the scale and speed of funding required to finance our future. Furthermore, the inherent instability of our financial system forces the world community to focus first and foremost on repairing and stabilizing the existing system. The development of cryptocurrencies using distributed ledger technologies (mainly blockchain) has prompted leading central banks to study the potential application of this approach to independently create purchasing power. In this vein, this book offers a new approach, namely introducing a parallel electronic currency specifically designed to finance global common goods and provide the resources necessary to achieve the SDGs. Furthermore, this mechanism would have a stabilizing effect on the existing monetary system. The book argues that one way this could be achieved is by giving central banks a modified monetary mandate to inject new liquidity into the system using a top-down approach. Alternatively, liquidity could come from corporate or communal initiatives with crypto- or communal currencies in a bottom-up approach. The author maintains that by issuing a blockchain-enabled parallel electronic currency earmarked for SDG-related projects and using other channels for monetary flow rather than the conventional ones, the future could be financed in a different manner. In the long run, abandoning our current monetary monoculture and introducing a monetary ecosystem would stabilize international financial markets, increase monetary regulatory efforts, reduce negative externalities, create a social Pareto optimum and stabilize democracies. This book presents, in the same spirit as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, a Tao of finance--an outside-of-the-box approach to financing global common goods.

We live on an increasingly human-dominated planet. Our impact on the Earth has become so huge that researchers now suggest that it merits its own geological epoch - the 'Anthropocene' - the age of humans. Combining theory development and case s

The book is current and interdisciplinary, engaging with recent developments around this topic and including perspectives from sciences, arts, and humanities. It will be a welcome contribution to studies of the Anthropocene as well as studies of research methods and practices. —Sam Mickey, University of S. Francisco Educational institutions play an instrumental role in social and political change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their institutional practices. The essays in this volume critically examine scholarly research practices in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in ‘righting’ their relationship to the environment. The volume further calls attention to the geographical, financial, legal and political barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional modes of scholarly conversation. As such, Right Research is a bold invitation to the academic community to rigorous self-reflection on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a three-part structure that bridges conceptual and practical concerns: the first section challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defined, measured and practiced; the second section showcases artist-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third section investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. This timely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats, spanning academic articles, creative acts, personal reflections and dialogues. Right Research will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communication formats in the face of the current climate crisis.

A wide-ranging and original introduction to the Anthropocene (the Age of Humanity) that offers fresh, theoretical insights bridging the sciences and the humanities From noted environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, this book focuses on the original concept of the Anthropocene first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in their foundational 2000 paper. It undertakes a broad investigation into the ways in which science, technology, and the humanities can create a new and compelling awareness of human impacts on the environment. Using history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, ethics, and justice as the focal points, Merchant traces key figures and developments in the humanities throughout the Anthropocene era and explores how these disciplines might influence sustainability in the next century. Wide-ranging and accessible, this book from an eminent scholar in environmental history and philosophy argues for replacing the Age of the Anthropocene with a new Age of Sustainability.

In The Organisation of the Anthropocene, J. E. Viñuales explores the legal dimensions of the currently advocated new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, in which humans are the defining force.