This study utilises panel data of 46 countries from 2005 to 2019 to examine the impact of digital service trade (DST) on inclusive growth. Inclusive growth is a growth model that promotes economic growth and development, while also building social equity and inclusiveness and balancing environmental sustainability. The findings indicate that a nation’s DST development significantly fosters domestic economic growth and development, specifically through its employment enhancement effect. DST substantially promotes social equity and inclusiveness, mainly through the inclusive innovation effect. However, DST is also found to increase carbon emissions, impeding environmentally sustainable growth, specifically via the energy demand effect. Hence, DST exerts diverse impacts on different facets of inclusiveness. The study also reveals heterogeneity in the effects of DST on the three aspects of inclusive growth related to trade’s import–export dynamics, income levels, and DST barrier intensities. This paper contributes to and refines the body of research on the relationship between DST and inclusive growth. It offers policy suggestions for crafting more open and mutually beneficial DST policies to foster social equity and inclusive global trade.

Broad and complex ideas about sustainability can be communicated through the Arts. Australian curriculum documents support the integration of Arts education with education for sustainability. Responding to artworks as a viewer is a key aspect of Arts education in Australian schools. Chris Jordan is a US artist whose online media galleries communicate ideas about environmental and social justice themes. This paper reports interview data from a larger project exploring children’s responses to Chris Jordan’s artworks. Conversations were held with 28 children aged between 4 and 12 as they navigated Jordan’s website to explore the images they encountered. Data relating to SDG14: Life below water were selected for the specific focus of this paper. Thematic analysis of the data revealed five themes: connections to prior experience and knowledge, links with local contexts and places, emotional engagement with the images, solutions and action-taking and ideas related to post-humanism and the human-nature binary. These findings endorse the power of Arts-based experiences for enhancing education for sustainability in primary schools and early childhood contexts.

The growing global focus on and sense of urgency toward improving healthcare environmental sustainability and moving to low-carbon and resilient healthcare systems is increasingly mirrored in discussions of the role of health technology assessment (HTA). This Perspective considers how HTA can most effectively contribute to these goals and where other policy tools may be more effective in driving sustainability, especially given the highly limited pool of resources available to conduct environmental assessments within HTA. It suggests that HTA might most productively focus on assessing those technologies that have intrinsic characteristics which may cause specific environmental harms or vulnerabilities, while the generic environmental impacts of most other products may be better addressed through other policy and regulatory mechanisms.

To reduce harm to the environment resulting from the production, use, and disposal of health technologies, there are different options for how health technology assessment (HTA) agencies can consider environmental information. We identified four approaches that HTA agencies can use to take environmental information into account in healthcare decision making and the challenges associated with each approach. Republishing data that is in the public domain or has been submitted to an HTA agency we term the “information conduit” approach. Analyzing and presenting environmental data separately from established health economic analyses is described as “parallel evaluation.” Integrating environmental impact into HTAs by identifying or creating new methods that allow clinical, financial, and environmental information to be combined in a single quantitative analysis is “integrated evaluation.” Finally, evidence synthesis and analysis of health technologies that are not expected to improve health-related outcomes but claim to have relative environmental benefits are termed “environment-focused evaluation.”

This discussion paper by a group of scholars across the fields of health, economics and labour relations argues that COVID-19 is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis from which there can be no return to the ‘old normal’. The pandemic’s disastrous worldwide health impacts have been exacerbated by, and have compounded, the unsustainability of economic globalisation based on the neoliberal dismantling of state capabilities in favour of markets. Flow-on economic impacts have simultaneously created major supply and demand disruptions, and highlighted the growing within-country inequalities and precarity generated by neoliberal regimes of labour market regulation. Taking an Australian and international perspective, we examine these economic and labour market impacts, paying particular attention to differential impacts on First Nations people, developing countries, women, immigrants and young people. Evaluating policy responses in a political climate of national and international leadership very different from those in which major twentieth century crises were addressed, we argue the need for a national and international conversation to develop a new pathway out of crisis.

Long examined by the academic literature as a challenging technical-legal fiction with a strong geopolitical impact, border carbon adjustment is on its way to becoming a European reality. This Article provides an overview of the European legislative process with a comparison of the initial Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (‘CBAM’) project presented by the Commission in July 2021 with the positions formalised by the European Parliament and the Council in 2022. With a detour through the doctrine of international law and building upon the work of Professor Thomas Cottier on the concept of Common Concern of Humankind (‘CCH’) in international law, the Article examines the European CBAM, and more broadly, the recent multiplication of unilateral environmental initiatives with extraterritorial impacts, as a contextual transition from a logic of coexistence to a logic of cooperation in the field of environmental policies. It concludes on the necessity to design the European CBAM accordingly, by redistributing its direct revenues and developing open and inclusive cooperation frameworks, to accelerate this transition in the field of industrial decarbonisation.

Sustainability encompasses social, economic and environmental issues with the primary aim to fulfil the needs of the present society without compromising the potential needs of future generations. Product design has been identified to greatly influence the sustainability of New Product Development. This study aims to identify and review the fundamental factors in which product design has the ability to influence and improve the overall environmental sustainability of a product. A comprehensive literature review has been performed to establish trends over the past four decades. The factors that have significant potential, such as the 6Rs, waste and energy, which aid designers in the implementation of environmental sustainability during the product design process have been identified and discussed. Through this analysis, a new conceptual framework has been conceived, facilitating designers in implementing environmental sustainability during product development. In addition, future research opportunities have been identified.