Corporate governance reforms are increasingly promoted as a method of materially improving social and environmental (ESG) outcomes. This chapter clears up the conceptual confusion about what counts as an action taken primarily for ESG purposes, then considers the incentives, resources, and market constraints that compel corporate actors to avoid unnecessary expenses or lower-value investments. The empirical evidence suggesting corporations are unlikely to voluntarily pursue ESG includes: (1) the revealed preferences of managers, particularly those that emphasize their ESG commitments; (2) the impact of ESG-friendly governance practices on corporate outcomes; and (3) the actual outcomes generated by giving ESG-friendly constituencies (such as socially responsible investors or employees) more power in corporate governance arrangements.

The gross injustice of environmental change, with those who have polluted the least suffering the biggest consequences, is becoming more apparent. Society is not responding at the scale and pace required to avoid catastrophic loss of life, but from courtrooms to the streets changes are emerging. In this context, public health is now practised. Public health skills, knowledge and attitudes are essential to creating a more sustainable and fairer world.

This chapter defines key terms, describes some of the most important environmental transitions, challenges and opportunities, and considers what our public health response to these can be. It seeks to equip the reader with some basic knowledge and all-important motivation for becoming a more effective agent for change at a time when planetary health must become everyone’s business.

Opioid use disorder is currently viewed as a chronic disease characterized by specific drug-seeking behaviors and compulsive use patterns. In general, these behaviors are difficult to control, and occur despite harmful consequences to the user, but not every person who is exposed to an opioid becomes addicted. The disease of addiction is complex and multifactorial and, as of this writing, a single factor has not been identified that can either accurately predict or quantify the risk that a given individual will develop opioid use disorder. Like most diseases, there is a combination of factors at play, which can influence the risk for addiction. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that exposure to opioids will lead to addiction. Conversely, the fewer risk factors an individual has, the less likely that exposure will result in opioid use disorder. Specific risk factors discussed in this chapter include biological (genetic predisposition), environmental (exposure during critical points in development) and social factors such as accepted use within certain communities and variable access to medical care for members of different socioeconomic status.

Global environmental meetings provide a locale for understanding how multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) become words on paper that shape international practices and norms. These meetings are central sites of global environmental agreement-making because they provide diverse actors with a negotiation space and process for the development of treaty text. This chapter provides practical guidance to those who attend, observe, and collect data at MEA negotiation sites. It will help researchers design and implement their studies, and situate their academic work into the negotiation process. Scholars, students, and observers at all stages of their careers will find this chapter useful when preparing to attend a MEA supreme body meeting, navigating on-site, and working to understand and analyze their observations afterward. It can also help when choosing whether to attend in person or not, highlighting the digital resources now available that make that decision even easier. In sum, by unpacking the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made and the new arrangements these create, this chapter helps the reader find the appropriate site for their research and navigate the events more confidently.

Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) have been at the core of the global academic debate throughout the last decade, while affecting several fields of knowledge, among which legal jurisprudence. Although much has been said about ESG policies in different fields of the law, less has been said about their multidisciplinary dimension. In this Chapter we analyse ESG policies at the intersection of corporate governance and competition policy, focusing especially on technological innovation – given the centrality of dynamic efficiency for the solution of the environmental crisis. We also highlight other potential intersections of ESG themes across competition and corporate law and governance, while suggesting the need for an integrated policy-making in this area.

Private regulators operating across national borders play and increasingly important role in areas once occupied exclusively by states and state law. These new regulators and their regulatory regimes challenge state-centred conceptions of law, including public law. The Equator Principles (EP) make up a private transnational regime that seeks to regulate infrastructure project finance world-wide. It includes detailed environmental and social impact standards and procedures. After offering a primer on Thailand’s constitutional system, the chapter turns to a case study of the Equator Principles regime that explains how it works, explores its impact in Thailand, and considers its implications – practical, conceptual, and normative – for the uncertain boundaries between private law and public/constitutional law in Thailand.

For the United States, which already bears costs from human-caused climate change, taking action to address the crisis is cheaper than doing nothing. Yet, the Trump administration not only pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement but banded together with Russia and Saudi Arabia to undermine progress in international climate talks. The administration attempted to derail the prudent efforts by state governments and the nonfossil-fuel private sector to adapt to the changing economic opportunities in response to the climate crisis. It curbed states’ rights, e.g., blocking California’s efforts to tighten vehicle fuel-efficiency standards in line with global demand. It used regulatory powers to block the financial sector’s decision not to fund Arctic drilling and pension-fund managers’ growing interest in considering environmental, social and governance issues that affect their investment returns. The United States can still right its course on climate action. In December 2020, Congress enacted legislation to fund clean energy investments and to mandate cuts in hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas, for which US manufacturers are leaders for substitute products. While ambitious climate legislation faces tremendous hurdles in Congress, these narrower provisions, framed as strategies to support American jobs and leadership in manufacturing, were able to win bipartisan support.

In the Anthropocene, earth system governance must be effective both within and across identities, and the inescapable equivocality of democratic governance means that discussions can never be closed but merely transformed as old problems and concerns give way to new.The experimental quality that effective environmental governance must possess cannot be a transient quality but, rather, must be a permanent feature of the landscape of democratic decision-making, in which success is realized in a context of identity politics.To take place without distortion and without posing systemic disadvantage, and for intergroup differences to be accommodated, substantial equality of access to decision-making and equitable allocation of fundamental capabilities are essential prerequisites.Institutional arrangements must provide for empowerment of those whose identities are otherwise ill-favored and the embeddedness of environmental decision-making in the communities of fate where people actually determine their shared life experiences.

More than just democracy in the form of aggregation of votes, deliberative democratic practice makes possible the learning, local knowledge, and engagement required by enlightened environmental governance under the conditions associated with the concept of the Anthropocene.

This chapter traces the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a global norm informing the practices of international business.While acknowledging historical instances of CSR, the emergence of CSR as a global norm can be traced to the 1970s, with the advent of globalisation, alongside important intersecting developments such as the rise of environmentalism, the growing role of non-state actors in global governance, and the expansion of production into the developing world.Since the 1970s, the scope (from labour to environmental to human rights responsibilities) and geographic reach of CSR expanded to the point that by the late 1990s, CSR attained global normative status.Far from being a linear progression, the meaning and scope of CSR remains contested and manifestations of global CSR reflect broad tendencies in the assignment of responsibility across actors and the role and prominence of the state in the proliferation of collaborative global governance initiatives.

This chapter focuses on green criminology, which continues to emerge and evolve as a dynamic multidisciplinary approach to addresses behaviours and actions that compromise and threaten the integrity of the planet. Walters et al. (2013: 4) summarise green criminology as ‘a collection of new and innovative voices within the criminological lexicon, and its engagement with diverse narratives seeks to identify, theorise and respond to environmental issues of both global and local concern. The expansion of green criminological perspectives serves to harness and mobilise academic, activist and governmental interests to preserve, protect and develop environmental issues’. Green criminology's agenda inevitably involves an examination of the intersection of the concepts of harm, power and justice; and also of the ways in which power is mobilised to justify a market model of capitalism with unjust and harmful consequences for the environment and the world’s most vulnerable peoples. It is thus that green criminologies extend critical rethinking of the parameters and horizons of the criminological landscape.

Institutional investment in forestry has now exceeded US$100 billion, much of this in the United States. Many large institutional investors are considered ‘universal owners’ because they own a portion of all sectors, geographies and markets of the global economy through their investment portfolios. These large investors increasingly acknowledge that negative environmental and social externalities pose material risks to their long-term investments, with many beginning to consider the alignment of their portfolios with internationally agreed objectives on climate change and sustainable development. Efforts to measure and monitor ESG (environmental, social, governance) performance of forestry investments are now well established. We propose a framework of criteria to assess landscape-scale outcomes from forestry investment activities which we call Sustainable Landscape Investment. This framework can help address wicked forestry problems and the often-competing demands of investors, local communities, governments and NGOs.

Behavioral determinants with the largest effects are often those related to the environments in which behaviors occur. This suggests the merits of a shift in focus of changing behavior at scale away from interventions based on deliberation and decision-making and toward interventions that involve changing cues – physical, digital, social, and economic – in environments. This chapter focuses on changing cues in small-scale physical environments – sometimes known as choice architecture or nudge interventions. Despite attracting much interest, these interventions have been little explored from a theoretical perspective. Exploring the mechanisms by which some of these interventions exert their effects provides a starting point. Examining evidence of three interventions – increasing availability of healthier food options, reducing glass size, and putting warning labels on food and alcohol products – suggests no single theory explains their effects. The mechanisms by which these interventions affect behavior change also necessitate different levels of explanation and demand a theoretical framework that applies at different levels. Recognizing the distinction between model-free and model-based learning and behavior may be central to this. Advancing knowledge on changing behavior by changing environments requires robustly designed field studies to estimate effect sizes, complemented by laboratory studies testing mechanisms to optimize interventions and develop theoretical understanding.

This chapter examines the importance of geomorphic understanding of river dynamics for managing, restoring, and naturalizing rivers to achieve environmental objectives. Many management efforts are based on the concept of equilibrium adjustments among flow, sediment transport, and channel morphology that presumably lead to the development of stable channel forms. Overviews are provided of geomorphic assessment methods to inform management. Management of rivers is linked to human processes, especially within the context of stream naturalization, which emphasizes the social nature of policy and decision-making that underpins management. The discussion highlights how the setting of goals for management and actual management outcomes are fundamentally social processes. It also emphasizes that factors other than geomorphological considerations are vital considerations in environmental decision-making related to river management. The Natural Channel Design approach to river restoration is compared with process-based approaches. How rivers respond to the removal of dams is also considered. The discussion emphasizes the importance of a watershed perspective on river management.