The report Avoiding Blind Spots: Promoting Circular & Fair Business Models by Circle Economy, European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and The Fair Trade Advocacy Office (FTAO) provides an overview of the blindspots - the unintended, unaddressed or underexplored negative impacts - of promoting circular business models.

The aim is to get a holistic understanding of the impacts of circular business models, specifically taking into account the social sphere.

The report considers three circular business models (repair, resale and product as a service - PaaS) and four types of blindspots (governance, market, social and environmental).

Recommendations for (EU) policy makers, public procurers and businesses are then formulated to address these blindspots.

Circular economy interventions in four key sectors can halt global biodiversity loss and help the world's biodiversity recover, finds this study.

Tackling root causes - Halting biodiversity loss through the circular economy, written by experts from Sitra and Vivid Economics, is the first to quantify the role a circular economy can play in tackling global biodiversity loss, targeting the four sectors with the largest impacts:

• food and agriculture
• construction
• textiles
• forest and forestry

Circular interventions in these sectors can halt biodiversity loss even if no other action is taken. And more than that, the study finds that the world’s biodiversity can recover to 2000 levels by 2035, if the circular interventions are implemented.

Urgent global action is required to address unsustainable material resource use. This report explores the possibility of, and analyses the implications associated with, developing an international agreement on the management of natural resources.

Why an international agreement?

An international agreement could support

• incentivizing action on a global level
• generate awareness to tackle the issue of resource management
• solve the issue of uncoordinated actions at various regional and governance levels.

The report also looks at the extent to which Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), many of them including provisions relevant to developing circular solutions, cover natural resource management and could be leveraged to enhance resource efficiency.