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A rapidly growing group of ambitious multinational businesses are actively reshaping the energy market through their global investment decisions and accelerating a zero emissions economy, a new report shows.

This inaugural issue of the World Bank Group’s Global Investment Competitiveness Report presents novel analytical insights and empirical evidence on foreign direct investment’s (FDI) drivers and contributions to economic transformation. Three key features distinguish this report from other leading FDI studies.

The palm oil industry is still a leading cause of deforestation in Indonesia. Three years after the world’s biggest palm oil traders adopted ‘no deforestation’ policies, Greenpeace International examined 11 traders to see how much progress they had made.

CDP’s 2017 Global Forests Report draws on the disclosures from 201 companies that responded to the investor request for information on the risks and opportunities linked to four commodities responsible for the majority of deforestation and forest degradation: cattle products, palm oil, timber products and soy.

Compensatory afforestation is a dubious and controversial environmental “offset” that is adding to environmental damage instead of mitigating or compensating it. Compensatory afforestation may actually be accelerating the invasion of India’s forests by big corporations, in collusion with a permissive state, by legitimising the destruction of forests, greenwashing the land grabs, and encroaching on common property resources and community-held lands.

This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements ('advertorials') in The New York Times.

Land acquisition for development project is not a new topic of discussion at least in a developing nation as ours. In recent times, we happened to have witnessed a wide range of protests and chaos relating to land issues in the country. Land is needed for industrialisation, which is the prime concern for economic growth, but the central concern of development should be the welfare all sections of the society rather than just economic growth. The article aims to understand the complexities of development, keeping land acquisition and its consequences at the forefront.

The Tamirabarani river is a part of the ecological and cultural landscape, and traditions of the people of Tamil Nadu. Unfortunately, public resources like the river water are sold at throwaway prices to corporations, who in turn resell the water either in the form of packaged drinking water or as aerated beverages. The political economy of the river and the state’s industrial plans, require radical rethinking.

New estimates show that just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world. As growth benefits the richest, the rest of society – especially the poorest – suffers. The very design of our economies and the principles of our economics have taken us to this extreme, unsustainable and unjust point.

The closure of Nokia's mobile phone assembly plant in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, just eight years after it commenced production, illustrates how corporations can quit operations at a point when it is no longer profitable for them to continue, while the impact of such closures on workers is profound. The special economic zones policy of the state actively promoted corporate-led industrialisation promising employment, and creating aspirations among young workers.

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