Strategic Sustainability Consulting Network

Check it out.  Quite a resource for clients and consultants. "Sustainability for Every Company" is their motto. They have developed a scalable set of self-learning and boutique consulting services.

Strategic Sustainability Consulting provides organizations with the tools and expertise they need to actively manage their social and environmental impacts. We specialize in helping under-resourced organizations implement sustainable solutions usually reserved for large, multinational companies. 

Bio-Geo Engineering can Save the Planet?!

Well, i was not expecting either a very cogent summary of the current business as usual (BUA) trends and end-game predicament humanity is facing when i read a recent editorial by Thomas Lovejoy, III, PhD. I was also not expecting a biological-based approach to geo-engineering. The combination is nothing short of brilliant. Lovejoy is an internationally distinguished biologist and educator. Read the article, contemplate the situations and options. A long excerpt follows below.

I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, Geo-Engineering Can Help Save the Planet, By THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, Published: June 10, 2011

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are pushing 400 parts per million (p.p.m.) — up from the natural pre-industrial level of 280 p.p.m. Emissions for last year were the highest ever. . . . the time to act is now.

The biology of the planet indicates we are already in a danger zone. The goal of limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, as discussed at the Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits, is actually disastrous.

As we push the planet’s average temperature increase beyond 0.75°C, coral reefs . . . are in increasing trouble. The balance of the coniferous forests of western North America has been tipped in favor of wood-boring bark beetles; in many places 70 percent of the trees are dead. The Amazon — which suffered the two greatest droughts in recorded history in 2005 and 2010 — teeters close to tipping into dieback, in which the southern and eastern parts of the forest die and turn into savannah vegetation. Estimates of sea-level rise continue to climb.

Even more disturbing, scientists have determined that, if we want to stop at a 2°C increase, global emissions have to peak in 2016. That seems impossible given current trends. Yet most people seem oblivious to the danger because of the lag time between reaching a greenhouse gas concentration level and the heat increase it will cause.

So what to do? One possibility is “geo-engineering” . . . . An example would be to release sulfates in large quantity into the atmosphere or do other things that would reflect back some of the incoming solar radiation.

There are serious flaws with most geo-engineering solutions because they treat the symptom (temperature) rather than the cause (elevated levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases). That means the moment the solution falters or stops, the planet goes right back into the ever-warmer thermal envelope. Such “solutions” also neglect the oceans because elevated CO2 makes them more acidic. Further, any unintended consequences of global scale geo-engineering by definition will be planetary in scale.

It’s far better to address the cause of climate change by lowering concentrations of greenhouse gases to an acceptable level. That means going beyond reduction and elimination of emissions to things that can pull out some of the excess CO2. Fortunately, because living things are built of carbon, the biology of the planet is capable of just that.

At the moment, roughly half the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from destruction and degradation of ecosystems over the past three centuries. A significant amount of CO2 can be withdrawn by ecosystem restoration on a planetary scale. That means reforestation, restoring degraded grasslands and pasturelands and practicing agriculture in ways that restore carbon to the soil. There are additional benefits: forests benefit watersheds, better grasslands provide better grazing and agricultural soils become more fertile. This must integrate with competing uses for land as the population grows, but fortunately it comes at a time of greater urbanization.

The power of ecosystem restoration to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and avoid disruptive climate change is great but insufficient. We also need to use non-biological means to reduce atmospheric carbon. The barrier to the latter is simply cost, so a sensible move would be to initiate a crash program to find more economical ways.

Smart Growth & GHGs -- No Clear Link! Really!

How Smart Growth Reduces Emisstions, Sustainable Cities Collective, 060911

And why are people still attempting to refute the irrefutable? Short term gain can be the only rational reason.

Rob writes that the flaw in NAHB’s analysis is that they looked only at the density of residential development, in isolation from other relevant factors:

“If all you do is bring people closer together, you get modest reductions in gasoline consumption. But if you do all of the other things associated with smart growth — that is to say, create a walkable environment with multiple destinations and alternative modes of transportation — the impacts on VMT, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions are huge.

That is true as far as it goes, but I would go further to clarify the most important factor of all is what transportation researchers call regional accessibility (sometimes also called "destination" accessibility), or the location of a place within a region.  The more central a place is to the region, or to a strong suburban center, the lower the VMT, in large (though not exclusive) part because driving distances become shorter. 

In Ewing and Cervero's exhaustive study of the published literature, they found that such locations are as significant in reducing driving rates as the next two significant factors (street connectivity and mixed land use) combined.  (See graph above comparing the significance of five major factors.)  As Todd Litman puts it, “residents of more central neighborhoods typically drive 10-30 percent fewer vehicle miles than residents of more dispersed, urban fringe locations.”

Climate Refugee Planning - Portland

Portland's resilience to many climate change challenges will make it a magnet for climate refugees from other, harder-hit areas of the west. Within a relatively short time (the next 20-30 years, the forces unleashed by climate change will begin to make extreme weather events daily events, raise sea levels, disrupt or obliterate agricultural and daily-needs economic production, and drmatically reduce rainfall in the west (by 2050), amoung other things.

In short, life and survival will become much harder, shorter, and brutish to paraphrase Hobbs' characterization of a different era.

Yet, hope springs eternal as people substitute the mantra of climate adaptation for humanity's failure over the past 20 years, really 40 years, to make any hopeful and substantial progress on reversing climate change, establishing a new ecologically-based economy, prosperity, and security orchestrated via a soft, short-as-possible, multi-century reversal of climate to pre-1990 conditoins.

Read the article on climate refugee planning in the Portland Tribune's Daily Sustainable Life Section  (Portland should brace for ‘climate refugees’. Eco Thoughts: Climate disruption could be defining issue of the century, By Kat West, Pamplin Media Group, Jun 9, 2011).

Thomas Friedman, The Great Disruption, and The Great Response?

Thomas Friedman, the great illuminator, succinctly presents the key elements of humanities sustainability predicament.

He summarizes the argument of Paul Gilding book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, in his Op Ed column, The Earth is Full.

India - Champion of Democracy or Conspicuous Consumption?

Arundhati Roy By Amy Kazmin Published: June 3 2011 17:15 |

"On the cusp of turning 50, Roy, once the poster-child of the new India and now its most vociferous, high-profile critic, is still messing with power. For the past decade, India’s establishment has been selling the world its story: of an emerging superpower and vibrant democracy that is enjoying rapid economic growth. Roy, meanwhile, has used her special way with words, and her fame, to challenge that narrative, creating a picture of a state serving only a rapacious middle class, and trampling the poor in its rush for high living and global status."

"Her latest book focuses on India’s newest unfolding tragedy: its hidden war against Maoist rebels, who have established a firm foothold among the neglected tribal people of India’s heartland. New Delhi has ignored the tribal belt – and the hardships of its residents – for years. Now, though, the government, and India’s corporations, want to mine the minerals buried beneath the region’s soil – and are dismayed to find the Maoists in their way."

GOP Reversal of History. . . , and Prosperity?

Our Fantasy Nation? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: June 4, 2011

. . . So in this season’s political debates, let’s remember that we’re arguing not only over debt ceilings and budgets, but about larger questions of our vision for our country. Do we really aspire to take a step in the direction of a low-tax laissez-faire Eden ...like Pakistan?

21st Century Revolutions, Sustainability, and the Challenge to Power

The new enabling factor in 21st century revolutions arising since year 2000 is global hyper connectivity from computers, search engines and now cell phones; it is obliterating the local and creating a new global-local geography. Dignity is the old and eternal motivational factor in 21st century revolutions.

Hyper connectivity has empowered a new societal capacity for smart innovation from the bottom by enabling access to self-education and resources. This has created a new role for leadership of companies, communities, and countries: "[inspiring, empowering, enabling, and then editing and melding] all that innovation coming from the bottom up. But that requires more freedom for the bottom."

Understanding this new shift in the source of economic and political power presents leaders, and the people of the world, with a unique option: embrace the change and ride the wave, or resist the change and wipe out. History is on the side of the latter, but the sustainability challenge of the 21st century demands the former.

OP-ED COLUMNIST Advice for China By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: June 4, 2011

FROM: Ministry of State Security TO: President Hu Jintao

SUBJECT: The Arab Spring

Dear President Hu: You asked for our assessment of the Arab Spring. Our conclusion is that the revolutions in the Arab world contain some important lessons for the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, because what this contagion reveals is something very new about of how revolutions unfold in the 21st century and something very old about why they explode.

China Teeters on the Environmental Brink

An interesting article, reflecting what anyone who has been alive since the 1960s has long predicted, China's economic miracle will go up in a cloud of pollution if it follows the western path of industrialization instead of the new frontier of perpetual ecologically sustainable development. The comments below raise some interesting questions. Is China's investment in green tech simply a green washing marketing campaign to put one over on the international development community and to sell green tech abroad?

The comment below illustrates the false choice that is a prevalent perspective on economic development, that decreased environmental quality and human health are the cost of increasing economic prosperity. The statement is pure illogic. Practically speaking, the tradeoff works when the environment is pristine and when the human population and economy, and associated environmental degradation is low. After 200 years of industrialization and exponential population and economic growth and environmental impacts, the tradeoff begins to unravel and reveals the essential interrelationship between the environment and the economy. After a point, increases in economic prosperity decrease environmental quality to the point where it starts to compromise human health and economic productivity. This unfortunate understanding prevents pursuing green solutions, which empower and expanding and durable, ecologically powered economic prosperity that enhances not only economic productivity but environmental quality as well.

Excerpts:

Cancer is now the leading cause of death in the Asian country; it's linked to one in four deaths nationwide. Lung cancer is the most common form.

, , , In rural areas, lung cancer is less dominant. Liver, lung and stomach cancers each accounts for about one fifth of cancer deaths. A Chinese farmer's risk of liver cancer is more than three times the worldwide average. Rural Chinese people die of stomach cancer at twice the global average. Both types of cancer are linked to consumption of polluted water. According to the Chinese government itself, half of the country's rivers and more than three out of of four lakes and reservoirs are too polluted to provide safe drinking water even after treatment. But those waters nonetheless supply huge numbers of people.

Comment: I'm not going to deny that China is polluted or that pollution can have health effects, but some context is in order here.

1) Life expectancy in China has increased from 62 to over 73 since 1970 (source: World Bank). Cancer is generally an old person's disease, so we would expect cancer rates to increase. Furthermore, because the age distribution has shifted upwards due to the one child policy, you would expect to see a higher cancer rate. The numbers need to be adjusted for age. Does this explain the entire increase? I doubt it, but it does provide some explanation.

Would it be better for China to return to its previous level of development had live shorter lives? I think that would be a tough sell. "You'll die sooner, but at least it won't be from cancer!"

2) "According to the Chinese government itself, half of the country's rivers and more than three out of of four lakes and reservoirs are too polluted to provide safe drinking water even after treatment." How much clean water did they have when China was impoverished? Access to clean drinking water is a major problem in most poor countries, so this is a problem that probably has been going on for decades if not centuries.

Environmental Leader

Environmental Leader, a Environmental Energy & Management News,

See current articles on the smart grid.

IPCC study

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Global-Warming/2010/0311/Independent-review-of-IPCC-and-its-global-warming-reports-an-answer-to-critics

Running out of Food and Water on the Nile?

NYT Opinion piece by Lester Brown, June 1, 2011.

When will someone actually do the math and conclude that many current projections of population growth, food production, ecosystem and state failure, etc., will not only create difficult conditions, but, most likely, impossible conditions that will cause a dramatic increase in death, destruction, and human misery, not to mention ecosystem, even bioshpheric destabilization and collapse that will touch everyone? This is the iron clad conclusion of the trends and the logic. The odds are against us. The only hope is the capacity of humans to change destiny by exercising intelligence and behaving in different ways that will produce different results. This will only occur if analysts begin concluding how high the probabilities are for the former (problems), and how low they are for the latter (successful human intervention), but also point out that the latter could still prevail if we mount an extraordinary effort. Unfortunately, the probability of the latter is zero if we presume the odds that we will behave differently are much higher than they actually are, which is the typical conclusion or implication of articles on this topic.

A NEW scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. . . .

Because Egypt’s wheat yields are already among the world’s highest, it has little potential to raise its agricultural productivity. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge.

Egypt’s plight could become part of a larger, more troubling scenario. Its upstream Nile neighbors — Sudan, with 44 million people, and Ethiopia, with 83 million — are growing even faster, increasing the need for water to produce food. Projections by the United Nations show the combined population of these three countries increasing to 272 million by 2025 — and 360 million by 2050 — from 208 million now.

Growing water demand, driven by population growth and foreign land and water acquisitions, are straining the Nile’s natural limits. Avoiding dangerous conflicts over water will require three transnational initiatives. First, governments must address the population threat head-on by ensuring that all women have access to family planning services and by providing education for girls in the region. Second, countries must adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies and plant less water-intensive crops.

Finally, for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabs by foreign governments and agribusiness firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban, similar to the World Bank’s role in facilitating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, would likely be necessary to make it a reality.

None of these initiatives will be easy to implement, but all are essential. Without them, rising bread prices could undermine Egypt’s revolution of hope and competition for the Nile’s water could turn deadly.

UK Values Nature In Urban and Economic Policy

Nature 'is worth billions' to UK, By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News

The UK's parks, lakes, forests and wildlife are worth billions of pounds to the economy, says a major report.

The health benefits of merely living close to a green space are worth up to £300 per person per year, it concludes.

"Urban green space, for example, is unbelievably important - if affects the value of houses, it affects our mental wellbeing.

"This report is saying 'this has got incredible value, so before you start converting green space into building, think through what the economic value is of maintaining that green space' - or the blue space, the ponds and the rivers."

On the global stage, several countries have previously evaluated the economic worth of specific factors such as forests or fisheries.

And two international studies - the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) - have given broader views of society's environmental trajectory, and the costs and benefits.

But the UK is the first nation to produce such a detailed assessment across the piece.

China's Top 100 Green Firms

and lots of interesting insight into CSR and green business in China.

Chinadialogue:  Not in Good Company, Meng Si, May 19, 2011

"This year’s list of China’s greenest firms has some notable omissions. Meng Si looks at who made it, who didn’t and why certain big names have fallen out of favour."

“Running a list like this also takes courage on our part,” said Liu Donghua, founder of the China Entrepreneur Club, established in December 2006 by 31 entrepreneurs, economists and diplomats with influence in China. The club runs the Daonong Enterprise Institute and bi-monthly business publication Green Herald Magazine.

Fight Global Warming - 10 Things YOU Can Do

Tips from the Environmental Defense Fund:

• Web Page
• PDF Pamphlet

Walmart - Force of Nature

Force of Nature-The Unlikley Story Behind the Greening of Walmart.

NYT - Behind the Greening of Walmart, (By BRYAN BURROUGH, May 14, 2011)

Excellent review. Connects the everyday view of sustainability (too complicated, too costly, onus of government regulation) with the compelling reality of its profitability--something economists and environmentalists have been saying for years--in the unlikely case of Walmart's pragmatic embrace.

The book, and article show what a well positioned champion can accomplish--Jib Ellison, a onetime California river-rafting guide and founder of Blu Skye Consulting, offering strategic services focused on sustainability.

WorldChanging -- Idea Factory

About WorldChanging:

Worldchanging.com is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to solutions-based journalism about the planetary future.

Since 2003, Worldchanging has brought together a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers to cover the world’s most innovative solutions to the planet’s problems, and inspire readers around the world with stories of new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. It brings awareness to issues like refugee aid, renewable energy and innovative solutions for improving building, transportation, communication and quality of life. Worldchanging connects readers ready to change the world with the latest ideas on how to do it.

So far, Worldchanging has produced almost 12,000 visionary articles and two editions of its bestselling book, and continues to be a go-to source for forward thinking, solutions-based journalism that takes a big-picture approach to sustainability (see this post for a retrospective of WC's first six years). This approach has garnered Worldchanging a great deal of attention, with Nielsen ranking Worldchanging.com the second-largest sustainability website on the planet and over 600 media stories focusing on its work. Worldchanging's work has had a profound impact on the debate about sustainability and the global future.

Portable Solar PV Panels

Next gen products now:  Mobile solar panels!

About Voltaic Systems:  Voltaic Systems makes products that produce and store their own power to run your electronics anywhere. We are based in New York City and ship directly to customers and our partners worldwide from warehouses in New Jersey and the Netherlands.

Renewable Energy Economy - Time has Come?

Although steeped in pragmatism, and missing some of the larger vision and value, the recently released IPCC report on jump-starting a renewable energy economy is heartening.

The conclusions,

1) renewables could account for 80 percent of total energy use by 2050 and reduce GHG emissions by one-third (not enough, but. . . ),

2)  that the cost is expensive ($3-$12T between now and 2030, or $150-$600B/yr), BUT LESS THAN or equal to CURRENT OIL SUBSIDIES of $600B annually), which no one seems to mind;

3) that the transition is already underway;

are good news.

However, the larger point,

1) that this is really NOT a choice, but an essential requirement for survival and prosperity,

2) that the forecast scenario does not cut GHG's sufficiently,

3) that moving to a zero-carbon economy is the essential innovation strategy for inventing the only economic growth and development scenario capable of generating true prosperity, and

4) that the current BUA scenario is one of species suicide, not simply a somewhat lower quality of life,

only amplifies the message and urgency of the transition. Let's get on with it!

See: Taipei Times or IPCC.

Partnership for Sustainable Communities

About

The mission of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities is to advance the sustainability of communities, including the reduction of GHG emissions, by promoting land use policies and development practices that encourage location ally and environmentally efficient development, reduce sprawl, offer housing and economic opportunities for personals of all incomes, and support revitalization of neglected urban areas. 

See also, the new magazine: Sustainable Communities.

And the Home page has breaking news and lots of useful resources.