Among the most widely recognised and respected global university ranking systems are the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), U.S. News Best Global Universities, and THE Impact Rankings.
These systems assess universities’ capacity to generate knowledge through a range of criteria, including the quality of education, research strength, citation impact, international outlook, collaboration with industry, and societal impact.
According to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2026, 109 Turkish universities were included among 2,191 institutions worldwide. Four of our universities ranked among the top 500, while 15 placed in the top 1,000. These are encouraging results, and numbers certainly matter. I congratulate all our universities and academics whose efforts have contributed to these achievements.
Where knowledge is produced, how science engages with the world, and whether research enters the global circulation of ideas are no longer merely local concerns. They have become part of a global arena of competition. More importantly, however, a university is not simply an institution that educates students; it is an ecosystem that expands a country’s capacity to think.
That is why the question applies not only to our universities in the top 500, but also to those in the top 1,000 and even to those not yet represented in these rankings but with the potential to be there: Are we producing new knowledge, or are we simply repeating knowledge produced elsewhere?
A university is not merely an institution that awards degrees. It represents a country’s courage to think, its culture of inquiry, and its hope for the future. For this reason, we should evaluate a scientific ecosystem not only through rankings, but also through the long-term investments made in science.
University rankings therefore tell us more than where we stand on a global league table. They also help us ask more fundamental questions: Are we genuinely producing new knowledge, and does that knowledge resonate globally? Is science meaningfully connected with society and industry?
In countries where industry, entrepreneurship, and universities cannot speak the same language, innovation cannot become lasting, nor can development be sustainable. The countries best positioned for the future are those whose universities contribute to the global body of knowledge and work to address the challenges facing the world.
At the Sabri Ülker Food Research Foundation, we are committed to doing our part. Through the international research we conduct in nutrition, metabolic health, and quality of life, the young scientists we support, and the scientific research awards we present, we strive to ensure that knowledge transcends local boundaries and contributes to global science.
Because lasting value is created when science, society, and industry come together to produce knowledge that makes a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
I continue with two examples from Australia…
LEADERSHIP FOR THE COMMON GOOD BUT HOW FAR SHOULD INTERVENTION GO?
Professor John Pollaers, a former member of the pladis Board, is a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) and one of Australia’s influential figures across business, academia and public life. He is Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology and has held numerous roles in not-for-profit and public-interest organisations, where he remains actively involved. Earlier in his career, he held senior executive positions at major companies including Pacific Brands, Foster’s Group and Diageo.
In a message letting me know when he and his family would be visiting Türkiye, Pollaers also shared two articles he had published on leadership on Substack, the platform where journalists, writers and thought leaders publish directly to their subscribers, and asked for my views on them.
On 11 October 2020, I published an article on my blog titled “The Post-Corona Economy: Simit! In Other Words, Doughnut Economics.” Pollaers’ articles, viewed from a broader perspective, draw on ideas that resonate with Doughnut Economics, but take the discussion further by connecting them with the concept of leadership for the common good.
I wanted to share them with you for two reasons: to bring the discussion into the present day, and to revisit some of the ideas I argued for at the end of my 2020 article.
Let us first take a closer look at what our friend John Pollaers has to say.
In his article “Leadership for the Greater Good,” Pollaers argues that the leadership crisis facing the modern world is not so much a failure of technical competence as a failure of our mental models. The paradigm, he says, has shifted: we have reached the end of the 20th-century model of leadership. That model divided the world into three separate domains: the economy, which creates value; society, which distributes that value; and nature, which absorbs the waste generated in the process.
Pollaers argues that we have now entered the age of Shared Systems. In this new reality, a decision made in one domain economic growth, for example can generate social unrest or ecological damage elsewhere, often with irreversible consequences. According to Pollaers, the fundamental mistake leaders make is that, although the boundaries between these systems have disappeared, they continue to rely on old models of management and governance that treat them as separate.
He identifies three realities that leaders of this new era need to understand. The first is that limits are real: resources no longer represent some theoretical capacity; they have tangible points of depletion. The second is compounding: actions do not unfold in a simple linear fashion; their effects interact, reinforce one another and accumulate. The third is the absence of true externalities. The very idea of an “external cost,” Pollaers argues, is an illusion. There is no real “outside” to the system. Carbon released into the atmosphere, or an individual excluded from society, will ultimately return as a cost to the system itself.
Pollaers also argues that today’s leaders tend to respond to complexity with more data and more reporting. Yet, in his view, this merely amounts to travelling faster in the wrong direction. Data, by its nature, looks backwards and arrives with a delay. Genuine leadership therefore requires going beyond the data and applying ethical as well as strategic judgement in the interests of the system’s long-term stability.
One of Pollaers’ most distinctive arguments concerns the relationship between supply and demand. Traditional leaders tend to regard demand whether consumer demand, energy needs or something else — as natural and therefore something that must be satisfied. Pollaers instead focuses on the power of leaders to legitimise, shape or reject demand. A leader’s responsibility, he argues, is not simply to provide more supply, but to ask which forms of demand actually serve the greater good of the system.
He points to the energy, housing and healthcare sectors as examples. Leaders, he argues, have a responsibility to shape excessive or inefficient demand when it threatens the sustainability of the system. Ultimately, this is not merely a technical decision about outputs or efficiency. It is a moral choice.
Pollaers reminds us of Wittgenstein’s famous words, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” arguing that thought is shaped through language and that leaders therefore need to change the terminology they use. Sustainability should not be treated as the responsibility of a single department. Instead, it should sit at the heart of governance as a fundamental leadership responsibility. Leadership, Pollaers argues, is not simply about managing assets or metrics; it is about leading people around a shared purpose.
Leadership for the greater good does not mean abandoning performance or competitiveness. But Pollaers makes several important observations:
- Concentrated benefits often produce widely distributed harm.
- Short-term success can undermine long-term legitimacy.
- Avoiding a difficult decision is itself a decision, and its costs are usually borne by others.
- Leaders earn trust by exercising restraint, foresight and balance in proportion to the impact they have.
Pollaers also sets out a series of questions that leaders should ask themselves when making decisions:
If your decision were adopted everywhere in the world, would the world remain liveable?
Who benefits today, and who will pay the price in the future?
Are we merely managers trapped within the system, or are we stewards responsible for carrying that system into the future?
According to Pollaers, the coming decade will be a period of choice and adaptation. Leadership for the greater good is not a form of romantic idealism. It is a rational, practical and necessary approach to governance if we are to prevent the systems on which we depend from breaking down.
The leader’s ultimate responsibility is not to exploit the system, but to preserve the conditions that allow it to continue to perform.
STEWARDSHIP GOVERNANCE
In his second article, “Earth as a Shared System: From Resource Management to Stewardship Governance,” John Pollaers explores this new understanding of a shared system in greater depth.
According to Pollaers, challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are not separate problems. They are consequences of the same fundamental error: failing to see the Earth as a finite and shared system. The economy is, in fact, a subsystem of society, and society itself is a subsystem of the Earth.
He argues that the leadership mindset needs to change in three fundamental areas:
- Nature should no longer be viewed simply as something to be used, but as a shared inheritance to be protected.
- The liveability and resilience of the system must be safeguarded.
- In a system with finite resources, the legitimacy of demand itself must be questioned.
Pollaers argues that the perspective astronauts gain when looking back at Earth from space, the direct and profound realisation that ours is a fragile, interconnected planet without visible borders should be integrated into our models of governance. Such a perspective brings with it a sense of responsibility that extends beyond political boundaries.
He also argues that not every form of consumer demand necessarily has to be satisfied. Instead of encouraging artificial demand generated by phenomena such as fast-changing fashions or disposable products, we should focus on forms of demand that genuinely contribute to wellbeing and strengthen the resilience of the system.
Similarly, Pollaers presents the circular economy as something far more ambitious than recycling. The objective should be to design waste and harm out of the system from the very beginning.
Pollaers emphasises that this approach is not merely theoretical. He points to concrete examples already being implemented around the world: France’s Repairability Index, New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, Japan’s Top Runner Programme, Singapore’s vehicle ownership system, the European Union’s gradually evolving but potentially far-reaching measures, Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act, Costa Rica’s Payments for Ecosystem Services, Australia’s commercial building initiatives, and Amsterdam’s application of Doughnut Economics, which I mentioned earlier.
The Repairability Index (Indice de Réparabilité) is a rating system that indicates how easily an electronic device or product can be repaired when it breaks down. Its fundamental purpose is to combat planned obsolescence, reduce waste and encourage consumers to choose products with longer useful lives.
Under the system, products are generally given a score from 1 to 10. The higher the score, the easier the product is to repair, with the assessment taking into account a range of criteria related to repairability.
The significance of the index lies partly in its ability to make consumers more informed. When buying a phone, for example, we are encouraged to consider not only the quality of its camera or its other features, but also what happens when something goes wrong: Can it be repaired, or will it simply end up as waste?
More repair means less electronic waste and a smaller carbon footprint. At the same time, repairing an existing device at a reasonable cost rather than replacing it with a new one can also generate meaningful savings for the consumer.
The Wellbeing Budget, meanwhile, is a model in which a government measures economic success not only through financial indicators such as Gross Domestic Product, but also through criteria including quality of life, health, environmental sustainability and social equity.
When New Zealand introduced this approach in 2019 under Jacinda Ardern’s government, four areas were given particular priority. Mental health received substantial funding, including investment in mental health services and suicide prevention. Child wellbeing brought reducing child poverty and tackling family violence into the budget framework. The transition to a low-carbon economyincluded investment in scientific research to address climate change. And digital transformation focused on harnessing technology to improve people’s wellbeing.
At its heart, the approach asks a simple question: How much does a government budget actually improve people’s lives?
This is what distinguishes a Wellbeing Budget from a conventional one. Indicators such as child poverty, mental health, air quality and housing standards become measures of budgetary success. The needs of future generations — including addressing the climate crisis and protecting natural resources — are brought into present-day decision-making. And rather than ministries pursuing their objectives independently, different parts of government are expected to work together towards shared outcomes.
One of the most advanced examples of this thinking is Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015, pioneering legislation that makes consideration of how today’s decisions will affect our grandchildren a legal obligation.
The Act seeks to break with politics’ familiar tendency to think only as far ahead as the next election and replace it with a long-term perspective spanning 25, 50 years and beyond. It requires public bodies — from local authorities and health boards to government institutions — to confront a fundamental question: Will the decision we make today, whether about a road, energy policy or the education system, compromise the wellbeing of people living 50 years from now?
Nor is the legislation confined to environmental issues. Public bodies are required to work towards seven wellbeing goals: a prosperous Wales, built on an innovative, productive and low-carbon society; a resilient Wales, capable of maintaining biodiversity and adapting to climate change; a healthier Wales, supporting both physical and mental wellbeing; a more equal Wales, in which people are able to fulfil their potential; a Wales of cohesive communities, with attractive, viable, safe and well-connected communities; a Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, supporting the arts, culture and heritage; and a globally responsible Wales, whose actions contribute positively to wellbeing beyond its own borders.
The Act also established the office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, a world-first institution of its kind. The Commissioner’s role is to safeguard the interests of future generations and scrutinise whether public institutions are acting in accordance with these long-term objectives. In a sense, the Commissioner serves asan advocate within government for people who have not yet been born.
Singapore’s approach to controlling vehicle ownership offers an urban-scale expression of the same philosophy Pollaers describes: seeing the world as a finite system. Singapore treats the issue not simply as one of traffic congestion, but from the recognition that both physical space and clean air are finite, shared resources. TheCertificate of Entitlement, Electronic Road Pricing and Zero Vehicle Growth Policy are among the key mechanisms through which the system is managed.
The European Union, through its ecodesign regulations, has similarly developed standards that consider not only how products look and function while they are being used, but also how their lives will end — and how their materials can begin another life.
The idea of shaping markets through design standards, which Pollaers discusses in his article, can be seen in several concrete policies pursued under the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan: the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, Digital Product Passport, Right to Repair, and the introduction of a common charger based on USB-C.
Costa Rica’s Payments for Environmental Services system is built on another powerful principle: those who benefit from ecosystem services should contribute to the cost of maintaining them.
A forest is not merely a collection of trees. It regulates and supplies water, stores carbon, protects soil and provides a habitat for biodiversity. If these “services” disappear, the economy ultimately bears the consequences. The logic follows that those who maintain the ecosystems providing these services — including landowners — should be compensated for doing so.
Costa Rican law recognises four principal environmental services provided by forests: the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions; the protection and regulation of water for human consumption, agriculture and hydroelectric power; the conservation of biodiversity for scientific and pharmaceutical research and genetic resources; and the preservation of natural scenic beauty, which also supports tourism.
Crucially, the system is not conceived simply as charitable funding for conservation. It is financed in significant part by those who use or benefit from natural resources. A portion of revenues from the tax on fossil fuels is channelled towards the programme, while water users can also contribute to protecting the forests and watersheds on which their supply depends.
Consider a hydroelectric dam. Protecting the forest upstream has direct economic value: if the forest disappears, erosion and sediment can damage the river system and ultimately the dam’s infrastructure. Paying upstream landowners to conserve that forest can therefore be more rational than paying later for the consequences of its destruction.
Farmers and landowners can similarly receive payments for preserving forests rather than clearing them for agriculture. In this way, something once regarded as an obstacle to productive land use becomes a form of natural infrastructure capable of generating continuing economic value for its owner.
The underlying message of the Costa Rican model is straightforward: if we destroy the services nature provides for us, we will eventually have to replace them with artificial and often vastly more expensive infrastructure, whether treatment plants, flood defences, cooling systems or other engineered solutions.
Costa Rica’s experience is particularly striking in this respect. After its forest cover fell dramatically during the latter half of the 20th century, the country succeeded in reversing the trend and today more than half of its land is once again covered by forest.
Japan’s Top Runner Programme is widely regarded as one of the world’s most intelligent approaches to energy efficiency. In conventional regulatory systems, governments typically establish a minimum standard and prohibit products that fall below it. Japan took a different approach, creating a dynamic system in which the best performer helps set the benchmark for everyone else.
The government examines a particular product category — air conditioners, refrigerators or automobiles, for example — and identifies the most energy-efficient product currently available on the market: the “Top Runner.” Its level of performance then becomes the benchmark that other manufacturers are expected to reach or exceed within a specified period.
Rather than relying primarily on outright bans, Japan combines regulation with consumer transparency and competitive pressure. Products carry labels showing their energy performance and progress towards efficiency targets, enabling consumers to favour better-performing products. Manufacturers that consistently fail to meet their obligations may also be publicly identified. In a business culture where corporate reputation carries considerable weight, such disclosure can itself become a powerful incentive for companies to innovate.
Through the Top Runner approach, Japan has achieved substantial improvements in energy efficiency across numerous categories of appliances and vehicles since the programme was introduced in the late 1990s. Importantly, it has done so without eliminating market competition. On the contrary, it has helped redirect competition towards a different question: Who can deliver the same or better performance while consuming fewer resources?
Türkiye also uses the familiar coloured energy-efficiency labels running from A to G, in alignment with the European Union system. Yet there is a fundamental difference in logic between the Turkish and EU approach and Japan’s Top Runner model.
In Türkiye, the regulatory logic is essentially this: “If you are going to manufacture a refrigerator, it must meet at least this minimum level of efficiency, otherwise it cannot be placed on the market.” Products are then classified so that consumers can compare their performance. Standards are established through regulatory and technical processes and periodically revised.
Japan’s Top Runner philosophy works differently. It looks to the market and effectively says: “This is currently the best-performing refrigerator available. That level of performance will help define the next target.” In other words, the frontier of technology already achieved in the marketplace plays a direct role in determining where the bar should be set next.
Türkiye’s energy-efficiency labelling system has worked successfully. And as Türkiye is one of the world’s major manufacturing centres for household appliances, our manufacturers have demonstrated a strong capacity to adapt rapidly to these standards.
The United Kingdom, meanwhile, offers examples of measures that may appear gradual but can nevertheless be highly effective. Rather than relying exclusively on sweeping prohibitions, the UK has increasingly sought to influence behaviour and demand by changing the rules, standards and design choices embedded in everyday life.
Consider Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles. Faced with the enormous waste associated with fast fashion, the underlying policy direction is to make producers more responsible for what happens to their products beyond the point of sale. The objective is to encourage longer-lasting clothing, greater reuse and products that can be more readily recycled.
Another example is action against vehicle idling. A number of UK local authorities have taken measures to discourage drivers from leaving engines running unnecessarily while vehicles are stationary. Enforcement can be particularly relevant around sensitive areas such as schools and hospitals. Beyond penalties, the broader objective is behavioural: to establish the understanding that an idling engine is producing unnecessary air pollution and that switching it off should become the normal habit.
Then there is the UK’s Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) regime for connected consumer devices. The UK introduced mandatory security requirements for consumer smart products, including greater transparency about how long certain security updates will be provided. This gives consumers more information about the expected support life of the devices they purchase and can contribute to a market in which product longevity matters more.
Light pollution provides another interesting example. In the UK, excessive artificial lighting is increasingly treated not simply as an aesthetic issue, but as one with implications for biodiversity, energy consumption and the wider environment. Planning and lighting policies can require outdoor lighting in new developments to be appropriately designed and directed towards where it is actually needed, rather than unnecessarily into the night sky. Some local authorities also dim or partially switch off street lighting during periods of very low overnight demand.
What these examples have in common is significant. Instead of simply telling people to consume less, regulators can redesign the conditions in which choices are made. Products become more efficient, producers assume greater responsibility for their full life cycle, unnecessary consumption becomes less attractive, and better choices become easier.
In other words, the system itself begins to shape demand rather than waiting for individual consumers to change the system on their own.
This is precisely what the article means by reshaping demand without coercion. The objective is not to force, but to design. Instead of telling people not to turn on the lights, design a system in which lights operate only when and where they are needed. Instead of expecting every consumer to make environmentally responsible choices, shape the market so that the products available to them already meet responsible environmental standards.
Australia’s success in the commercial building sector is based on systems such asNABERS, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, and Green Star. The strength of this model lies in its ability to transform the market without relying primarily on direct intervention. It uses transparency and data to create competition among property owners over efficiency and performance.
NABERS rates the actual energy performance of a building on a scale of one to six stars. For certain large commercial office spaces, energy efficiency information must be disclosed when the property is offered for sale or lease. Tenants and investors can therefore see how a building performs. Knowing that poorly rated buildings may carry higher operating costs and face a greater risk of becoming less attractive or even stranded assets in the future, the market naturally places greater value on higher performing buildings.
Traditional regulation might prescribe which materials should be used to construct a building. The Australian approach focuses more strongly on outcomes: design the building as you choose, but demonstrate how efficiently it actually performs.
Rather than restricting architects and engineers, this approach gives them an incentive to innovate. Natural ventilation, intelligent facade systems and solar energy integration are not valuable merely because regulation prescribes them. They become ways of achieving a higher rating, reducing operating costs and ultimately increasing the value of the building.
In effect, energy efficiency is translated into financial value. Buildings with stronger energy performance can command greater market appeal, attract tenants more easily and, in some cases, gain access to more favourable forms of green financing.
Through this approach, Australia has achieved substantial reductions in emissions from commercial buildings while also encouraging technological innovation across the property and construction sectors.
Then there is Doughnut Economics, a subject I have written about before. Developed by the British economist Kate Raworth, it is an economic model designed around the challenges of the 21st century. While conventional economic thinking has often placed continuous growth, measured primarily through increases in GDP, at the centre of success, Doughnut Economics argues that the real objective should be to enable humanity to thrive within the limits of the planet while leaving no one behind.
The model takes the visual form of a doughnut and is built around two principal boundaries.
The inner ring, the social foundation: The empty space at the centre of the doughnut represents deprivation, where people lack the essentials required not merely to survive, but to live with dignity. These include food, water, healthcare, education, housing, energy, gender equality and other fundamental social needs.
The outer ring, the ecological ceiling: The outer boundary represents the Earth’s ecological limits, including climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution and biodiversity loss. When production and consumption push humanity beyond these limits, we place excessive pressure on the planetary systems on which life depends.
The safe and just space: The dough itself, the area between these two boundaries, represents the balance we should seek. It is the space in which people can prosper and meet their needs without destroying the natural systems that make that prosperity possible.
This is the central idea behind Doughnut Economics: an economy should be judged not simply by how much it grows, but by whether people can thrive within the ecological limits of the planet.
Doughnut Economics is built around five fundamental principles.
From growth to wellbeing: Instead of asking, “How much did our economy grow this quarter?”, the more important question becomes, “How healthy are people and the natural world?”
Circular design: The aim is to move away from the “use and discard” model and towards a system in which resources are continuously recovered, reused and circulated.
Distributive justice: Rather than allowing wealth to accumulate predominantly at the top, the system should be designed from the outset to distribute income, opportunity and value more fairly.
Dynamic balance: An economy is not static. It should be understood more like a living organism, continually adapting and rebalancing itself in response to changing ecological and social conditions.
Cities including Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Brussels are said to have incorporated elements of the Doughnut model into their development strategies.
Pollaers then turns to the question of political systems and governance.
He argues that liberal democracies provide mechanisms for environmental protection and public interest outcomes through transparency, participation, rights based protections and accountability. Empirically, democracies tend to perform better on measures such as air quality, public health and environmental regulation.
Yet they also face structural tensions. Short electoral cycles favour immediate priorities over long term risks. Economic assumptions built around growth are deeply embedded. Strong property rights can complicate the management of shared challenges. And decisions made at the national level may not always align with the needs of global commons.
Recent pressures within some liberal democracies illustrate these vulnerabilities. Concentrated corporate power, disinformation and short term political incentives can weaken the ability of otherwise robust institutions to respond to long term shared risks. Pollaers argues, however, that these dynamics are not insurmountable if leaders are prepared to regard long term system integrity and collective impact as non negotiable conditions of democratic legitimacy.
Illiberal systems of governance present a different picture. Centralised authority can enable long term planning, rapid implementation and large scale execution in areas where urgency and coordination are critical, including renewable energy, emissions control and ecosystem restoration. Yet such systems depend heavily on legitimacy derived from outcomes and can encounter significant challenges in transparency, adaptability, rights and the continuing consent of the public.
Other approaches argue that governance should begin closer to the local level. Models that treat shared resources as commons, connecting local communities, governments and institutions, can often create strong adaptability, continuous learning and resilience over time.
This logic is sometimes described as polycentric governance, in which decision making authority is distributed across multiple interacting centres rather than concentrated in a single institution. Some approaches extend this principle further by seeking to represent the interests of ecosystems and future generations within present day decision making.
What all of this suggests is not that one model should replace all the others. Rather, no single model is sufficient on its own.
Pollaers ultimately brings the argument to a stark conclusion. Leaders are no longer choosing simply between the environment and the economy. The real choice is between managing systemic decline and consciously assuming responsibility for the only life support system we have, the Earth itself.
Institutions and their leaders must therefore stop viewing nature merely as a resource available for exploitation. They must recognise it as a shared system on which our existence depends and for which we carry a responsibility of careful stewardship.
But when I wrote about Doughnut Economics, I also offered a word of caution.
Raworth, the author of Doughnut Economics, is well aware of the difficulties involved in bringing about the economic order she describes. Nevertheless, she remains convinced that humanity can ultimately act collectively, make greater use of renewable resources and accept as a fundamental objective the responsibility of leaving a clean and liveable planet to future generations.
Raworth’s approach inevitably brings to mind Marx’s criticism of those who continuously defended human and animal rights, including journalists and commentators, without contemplating a transformation of the underlying principles of capitalism itself. Marx, as we know, mocked this kind of critique of the system as a form of bourgeois socialism.
I have referred to Marx, and I think it is worth explaining why. Societies influenced by Marxist thought pursued this path through revolutions, yet the roughly 70 years during which the red wind swept across much of the world also brought profound social tragedies. Surely this was not what the revolutionaries had hoped for. In the end, however, we saw Glasnost and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, we should not forget that the Communist Party has been the architect of what we now call the Chinese economic miracle. Through an authoritarian single party system, disciplined planning, hard work and the deliberate direction of capital accumulation, China has lifted vast numbers of people into a more prosperous, modern way of life. The environmental damage that accompanied this extraordinary development is now also being addressed through the power of the same centralised system, at times through highly interventionist measures, including restrictions or temporary suspensions of industrial activity in order to reduce severe air pollution.
In the West, Germany offers a different example. Governments can achieve significant results through more conventional systems of incentives.
Raworth herself points to Germany. In 2004, the government strengthened incentives for households and organisations generating renewable energy through guaranteed tariffs that offered payments above conventional retail electricity prices. This helped stimulate extensive and transformative investment in wind, solar, hydroelectric and biomass energy. Within roughly a decade, renewables had grown to account for around 30 percent of the country’s electricity generation.
The principle was actually quite straightforward. The government assigned an economic value to the desired behaviour and paid for it. The incentive changed the economics, and the transformation followed.
Then, of course, there are thinkers such as Bjørn Lomborg, who accept that climate change is real but challenge claims that catastrophe is as immediate or inevitable as some narratives suggest. Lomborg argues that poor science can distort our understanding of the problem, while poor economics can direct scarce global resources towards the wrong priorities and ultimately leave us less capable of improving both human welfare and the environment.
I believe we should listen to these arguments as well. They deserve discussion. Perhaps we should even begin by asking a more uncomfortable question: Are some of the predicted consequences of climate change being overstated, and if so, to what extent?
My own argument is this.
Wetlands and the ecosystem services provided by insects and pollinators have enormous economic value. Economists have increasingly developed methods for assigning monetary values to what we call natural capital and ecosystem services.
So why not take that logic further?
If governments could establish credible values for natural assets and create appropriate certification systems around them, those assets could acquire recognised financial value. If properly structured, such instruments could then circulate through financial markets. Nature would no longer be treated merely as something outside the economic system that we ask people to protect out of goodwill. Protecting nature itself could become an economically attractive investment.
Today, much environmental policy operates through the opposite logic: penalties, taxation and restrictions. Governments frequently use taxes to discourage forms of consumption they consider undesirable, while also generating additional public revenue in the process.
Why not also make greater use of the other side of the equation?
If properly valued natural assets could participate in financial markets, environmental protection could attract the very capitalist incentives that are so powerful elsewhere in the economy. Instead of continually asking markets to act against their instincts, perhaps we should ask whether those instincts can be directed towards protecting natural capital.
And I am not referring here to the existing market for carbon credits.
I have reservations about that model precisely because it can, in some circumstances, allow an organisation that continues to pollute to compensate on paper by purchasing credits associated with reductions or environmental benefits achieved elsewhere. The resulting accounting may improve the net figure without necessarily eliminating the polluting activity itself.
That creates a fundamental question of incentives. Does the mechanism genuinely accelerate technologies and business models that prevent pollution at its source, or can it sometimes make continued pollution economically permissible?
If our objective is real environmental progress, I believe the stronger model is one that makes preventing damage, restoring nature and increasing natural capital economically valuable in their own right.
As I have said many times before, our mission can be summed up in the words “Make Happy, Be Happy.” At its heart, this is a mission of leadership for the greater good. Its roots lie in the concept of Salih Amel, doing good deeds for the benefit of society, a legacy I inherited from my father, Sabri Ülker.
At Yıldız Holding, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we are taking action across many of our companies, including Ülker, ŞOK Marketler, Bizim Toptan and SuperFresh, to reduce carbon emissions. We are also implementing approaches focused on talent management, quality and safety throughout our value chain, and we report our progress regularly.
We support the United Nations’ calls for global cooperation on these issues. With 82,000 employees, we are sincerely working towards becoming a more environmentally responsible company. We do this by directing our resources where they can make a real difference and taking action that produces tangible results, while remaining equally conscious of another responsibility: avoiding waste in the process.
But I believe we must make an important distinction.
Accepting that global warming and climate change are real is one thing. Turning them into predictions of imminent catastrophe and creating an epidemic like climate of fear is quite another.
We need seriousness, science and effective action. But we also need perspective. Protecting the planet should mean directing our resources towards measures that genuinely work, rather than allowing fear itself to determine where those resources go.
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