PhD Scholarship in Science-based ESG Metrics

Human activities are disrupting the planet's natural systems, collectively the 'Earth system', generating risks to the benefits that people obtain from these systems in Australia and worldwide. Critical tipping points for climate and other systems are rapidly approaching, for example, tipping of Antarctic ice sheets, Amazon forest cover, tropical monsoons, coral reefs, freshwater eutrophication and salinity from rising groundwater.

Concerns about global environmental risks are rising among a wide range of corporate and financial stakeholders including global standard setters, with the newly convened International Sustainability Standards Board recently publishing Exposure Draft Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information. However, these draft standards as well as those already in use often neither indicate how significant an impact is compared to scientific reference points nor account for systemic impacts of environmental pressures arising from interactions within the Earth system.

Action is urgently needed to assess systemic environmental impacts in a way that can be operationalised by company decision-makers and institutional investors. One potential solution is a recently-developed[1] prototype 'Earth system impact score' for assessing environmental impacts of companies and investors in a science-based, systemic and context-sensitive manner by leveraging planetary boundary science.

We are offering a scholarship for one PhD candidate to contribute to studying current ESG metrics and advancing the development and implementation of the prototype Earth system impact score. The work may involve interviews with corporate and financial actors, analysis of impact environmental impact databases, analysis of individual company or portfolio impacts, and contributing to the development of an interactive tool for the metric. The student will work closely with researchers from across ANU, Dr Tanya Fiedler at the University of Sydney, international researchers including from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and industry bodies nationally and internationally. The scholarship is funded by a Discovery Project awarded to Dr Steven Lade, Dr Tanya Fiedler, Prof Beatrice Crona and Dr Ingo Fetzer by the Australian Research Council with co-funding from the Fenner School of Environment and Society.

1. Lade et al. (2021), A prototype Earth system impact metric that accounts for cross-scale interactions, Environmental Research Letters 16 (11), 115005, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2db1