The South and carbon dioxide: every cloud has a silver lining

Bendell, Jem ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0765-4413 and Chawla, Inderpreet (2012) The South and carbon dioxide: every cloud has a silver lining. In: Cosgrove-Sacks, Carol and Dembinski, Paul H., (eds.) Trust and ethics in finance: innovative ideas from the Robin Cosgrove Prize. Globethics.net Global, 6 . Globethics.net, Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 341-354.

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Abstract

Money makes the world go round. The growth of the now 370 trillion dollar derivatives market, according to a Bank of International Settlements estimate for the first half of 2006, serves to remind us that the financial sector is the compass from which both companies and countries take their direction. Yet as news about climate chaos, persistent poverty and intensifying inequality continues to percolate our pleasant lives in the West, we have to ask whether money is now causing the downfall of the world. In recent years more people have been choosing to engage in global finance to solve problems of the environment and international development. Their efforts herald a new paradigm for ethical finance, which no longer focuses on personal ethical dilemmas within existing professional frameworks but on how to use opportunities as a financial services professional to transform those frameworks so the world’s most powerful motor – money – makes the world work around barriers to a more sustainable, just and healthy future. Our paper outlines how this is happening both in professions and in academia. It identifies urgent interconnected challenges of climate change, unemployment, local enterprise and poverty reduction, and suggests that a new approach to socially responsible investing is required to create new frameworks for the innovative financing of sustainable enterprise in the global South. Investors can make money while contributing to low-carbon high-employment societies, if they help support the development of appropriate risk adjusting mechanisms. This focus on creating new financial frameworks is one of the highest embodiments of a commitment to our common humanity and ecology, which is the ground of all subsequent ethical discourse and philosophy.

Item Type:	Book Section
Publisher:	Globethics.net
ISBN:	9782940428410
Departments:	Research Centres > Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS)
Additional Information:	Chapter 21 within book.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	29 Mar 2017 12:07
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2024 10:31
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2787

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