This Synthesis Report (SYR) of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) summarises the state of knowledge of climate change,
its widespread impacts and risks, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societies; the value of diverse forms of knowledge; and the close linkages between climate change adaptation, mitigation, ecosystem health, human well-being and sustainable development, and reflects the increasing diversity of actors involved in climate action.

This report presents the most up-to-date synthesis of international research efforts to track global inequalities. The data and
analysis presented here are based on the work of more than 100 researchers over four years, located on all continents, contributing to the World Inequality Database (WID.world), maintained by the World Inequality Lab. This vast network collaborates with statistical institutions, tax authorities, universities and international organizations, to harmonize, analyze and disseminate comparable international inequality data.

Find in this report also data on international conflict und unresponsive government. Most respondents to the 2022-2023 Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) chose “Energy supply crisis”; “Cost-of-living crisis”; “Rising inflation”; “Food supply crisis” and “Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure” as among the top risks for 2023 with the greatest potential impact on a global scale (Figure 1.1). Those that are outside the top 5 for the year but remain concerns include: failure to meet net-zero targets; weaponization of economic policy; weakening of human rights; a debt crisis; and failure of non-food supply chains.

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General António Guterres established the UN Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance (GCRG) to respond to the unprecedented interconnected food, energy and finance crises in the world. Inflation, food insecurity, soaring energy and food prices, supply chain disruptions and mounting debt are among the pressing challenges added to a world recovering from the human and economic losses of the COVID-19 pandemic and facing the ongoing threat of climate change and the war in Ukraine. These challenges are particularly acute in developing economies.

Shareholder Value is not only a myth, as forcefully demonstrated by Lynn Stout. It has also led to a mess under the form of extensive negative externalities and growing inequalities. A different measure of value creation is urgently required.

Wall Street's 2007–09 implosion and the ensuing global recession highlight the crucial relationship between finance and the economy. Governments, international agencies and experts had failed to detect rising risk levels in the deregulated financial sector. The author outlines the resulting huge cost in lost jobs and likely reductions in public goods and growth, as economies restabilize budgets after paying for massive bailouts and stimulus packages. Specifically, he assesses the role of monetary incentives for rent-seeking in the decisions that led to the crisis. Finally, he makes the case for radical reform of the institutions linking finance and the real economy.

The integration of global financial markets has delivered large welfare gains through improvements in static and dynamic efficiency – the allocation of real resources and the rate of economic growth. These achievements have however come at the cost of increased systemic fragility, evidenced by the ongoing crisis. We must now face the challenge of redesigning the regulatory overlay of the global financial system in order to make it more robust without crippling its ability to innovate and spur economic growth.

The Limits to Growth was published 50 years ago. Ordered by the Club of Rome, the study was a milestone in the analysis of the economic, demographic, technical and ecological effects of the existing economic system. In industrialised Western countries in particular, the critical examination of the development model of continuous economic growth led to a broad discussion about the far-reaching implications of a global economy focusing on growth, on a planet with finite natural resources.

An article by Stephen Metcalf featured in the Guardian which implies that ideology, especially neoliberalism, has rendered evaluations of "good" and "right" to be unnecessary. "The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human"

Within a capitalist economic system, commodification is the transformation of things such as goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people or animals into objects of trade or commodities.[1][2][3][4][5] A commodity at its most basic, according to Arjun Appadurai, is "anything intended for exchange," or any object of economic value.[6]

To some critics, one reason for the perceived recent shortcomings of economic performance — and allegedly capitalism itself — is the rise of so-called “crony capitalism:” deals between some private interests (business, anti-business interests, professions, social groups) and government that “pick winners” and thereby also pick losers, on the basis of political influence rather than merit. Such
deals would inhibit the productive reallocation of society’s resources, and reduce innovation and economic growth. Examples of such deals include cash subsidies, tax preferences, earmarked appropriations and no-bid contracts, regulatory and trade protection, among other forms of favorable treatment. They can be crafted to benefit virtually any sector of the economy, and though each alleged deal has its defenders — else it would not exist — the list of questionable private sectorgovernment interactions is long.

In this article Bruni looks at how capitalism undermines our capacity for flourishing: "The best way to eliminate vulnerability inside the community has always been immunity. Immunity is the main feature of the large capitalist enterprises today. Every invulnerable culture is also an immune culture: if I don’t want to be hurt in my relationship with you, I have to stop you touching me by building a system of relations that avoids any form of contamination. Immunity is the lack of exposure to the other person’s touch. Immunitas, as we have mentioned, is the negation of communitas: the soul of communitas is munus (gift and duty) in reciprocity, while that of immunitas is reciprocal ingratitude, the absence and the opposite of gift (in-munus: anti-gift)."

Corporate responsibility and sustainability tackle the relationship between business and society. However, the two fields of study have converged to become deeply entangled and blurred so that researchers from both research traditions now speak to the same business risks and opportunities. A field’s development is shaped by the clarity of its constructs and underlying assumptions; however, such clarity has eroded in responsibility and sustainability research. By tracing the development of these fields, we show that responsibility and sustainability were historically distinctive. Responsibility research took a normative position, railing against the amorality of business; sustainability research took a systems perspective, sounding the alarm of business-driven failures in natural systems. The convergence in responsibility and sustainability has not only confused constructs but has also vacated vast tracts of unexplored territory that can inform the relationship between business and society.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is failing at the very time it is emerging as a new discipline. This has implications not only for CSR itself, but also other disciplines wanting to understand the role of the private sector in the global political economy. This article highlights some of the evidence for this failure, but more significantly shows how it is rooted in an orthodoxy that the discipline has created but is unable to examine. As a result, CSR treats as ideationally and historically neutral particular concepts and practices that define what business’s relationship with wider society can mean. The article uses the perspectives of different social science disciplines to reveal the structural dimensions to CSR and some of their consequences. It proposes an alternative analytical framework for use by CSR and as an entry point for international relations and other disciplines wanting to understand the ways in which business shapes and responds to globalisation and influences the possibilities of contemporary society and governance.

Corporate social responsibility has become an important topic for both academics and practitioners. CSR typically stands for corporate responses to ethical, environmental and social issues. Whilst extant research has predominately focused on CSR in relation to external stakeholders and taking a macro-institutional and/or functionalist perspective, we provide a critical engagement with the interactions between CSR, employees and management control within organizations. Qualitative data gathered at two management consultancy firms demonstrate how CSR discourses and practices serve to construct an idealized image of a socially, ecologically and ethically responsible corporate self. In this way, CSR works as a form of aspirational control that ties employees’ aspirational identities and ethical conscience to the organization. The article discusses the implications of CSR concerning cynical distancing, ethical sealing and the space for politics and critique in corporations.

Among critics of corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is growing concern that CSR is largely ineffective as a corrective to the shortcomings of capitalism, namely, the negative effects of business on society and the undersupply of public goods. At the same time, researchers suggest that despite the shortcomings of CSR, it is possible to make it more effective in a stepwise manner. To explain the frequent failures of current CSR practices and to explore the possibilities of remedying them, I examine the close relationship between CSR, the persistent expansion of capitalism, and the pressure that capitalism puts on companies to legitimize their business operations. My analysis shows that the failure of CSR to serve as a corrective to the problematic effects of capitalism is, in fact, an inevitable consequence of the problematic dynamics of the capitalist system. On this basis, I suggest that capitalism limits the possibilities of making CSR more effective, argue for change on the systemic level of capitalism, and explore the ways in which CSR research can contribute to this political endeavor.

Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Here the authors Wright and Nyberg develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of “business as usual.” We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on business and market responses to the climate crisis.