The Urban Environmental Accords -- Environmental Justice for Some

With more than half of the world's population currently living in cities, and developing countries expected to account for 93% of urban growth over the next quarter century, the notion of “sustainable cities” has come to the forefront. Urban populations consume 75% of the world’s natural resources and produce 75% of its waste, making cities a prime cause for environmental concern -- and action.

This week, at the United Nation’s World Environment Day festivities in San Francisco, urban mayors from around the world will come together to sign the Urban Environmental Accords. The vision for the accords is “to create a grassroots political movement through public citizens’ ability to influence Mayors who are already responsible for tackling many urban environmental issues,” according to the WED official site.

The accords include a set of 21 actions that signatory cities commit to taking. These “are proven first steps toward environmental sustainability,” says the U.N. They are grouped into seven main categories -- energy, waste reduction, urban design, urban nature, transportation, environmental health, and water -- and include specific proscriptive actions. For example, in the energy category, signatories commit to:

• Adopt and implement a policy to increase the use of renewable energy to meet 10% of the city’s peak electric load within seven years.

• Adopt and implement a policy to reduce the city’s peak electric load by 10% within seven years through energy efficiency, shifting the timing of energy demands, and conservation measures.

• Adopt a city-wide greenhouse gas reduction plan that reduces the jurisdiction’s emissions by 25% by 2030, and which includes a system for accounting and auditing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a start. The accords will help bring about a much-needed environmental renaissance in some cities.

But some of the biggest urban environmental problems aren’t addressed. Concern about environmental justice issues -- those that inequitably affect the poorest urban dwellers around the world -- aren’t evident in the accords.

True, the accords' “environmental health” section commands cities to “Every year, identify one product, chemical, or compound that is used within the city that represents the greatest risk to human health and adopt a law and provide incentives to reduce or eliminate its use by the municipal government.”

But that’s likely of little help to those in my home town of Oakland, California, where one in five children in West Oakland suffers from asthma. They are victims of the more than 9,000 diesel trucks that drive through their neighborhoods each day on their way to and from the Port of Oakland (the Port hopes to double that number by 2010). A child in West Oakland is more than eight times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than her peers in the rest of the state, according to the Pacific Institute.

And the accords probably will be cold comfort to the parents of kids who ride each day in school buses in cities across America. A recent study found that the air inside school buses can be even more polluted than the air outside.

Those are just two examples of urban environmental issues. There are hundreds more throughout the United States -- and thousands more around the world: heavy industry polluting poor urban areas; siting of landfills, incinerators, highways, and toxic dumps near high-density residences and schools; poor dilapidated neighborhoods harborning pests and illness; and much more.

Will the Urban Environmental Accords help mayors address these problems? According to my reading, probably not.

Sustainable Business Rating System - World Environment Day Event (An Invitation)

For the past year or so, a small team in which I’ve taken part has been developing a prototype rating system for “sustainable business.” The Sustainable Business Rating System, or SBRS -- spearheaded by the Alameda County Waste Management Authority -- aims to do for companies what the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system does for buildings -- that is, create a consensus-built standard that can be applied to a wide range of company types.

SBRS, still early-stage, will be a core topic at a U.N. World Environment Day event titled “The Sustainable Business Phenomenon: Leading Initiatives in Redefining Business,” to be held at 2:00 pm on June 2, at The Metreon, 101 Fourth Street in San Francisco.

Speakers at the event include Rory Bakke of the Alameda County Waste Management Authority/StopWaste.org, the event's sponsor; Gil Friend, founder and CEO of Natural Logic; and yours truly. The session will be moderated by Alison Wise, Executive Director of Sea Change.

We'd be delighted if you can join us. To reserve a space, e-mail Alison Wise or call 510-708-2398.

The invitation follows:

A few more words about SBRS, excerpted from a draft overview document:

The core mission of the Sustainable Business Rating System (SBRS) is to provide a unified, market-based, broadly applicable, and transparent approach to assessing a company’s environmental and social practices and performance, and to fuel market demand for leadership companies. The system will enable the comparison of companies consistently regardless of their size, sector, or geography. The SBRS will serve as both a tool for companies to help them understand and improve their sustainability performance, as well as a rating system that will enable interested parties to assess the full measure of a company’s sustainability performance: their operations, products and services, and relationships with a range of stakeholders.

SBRS is modeled after the highly successful LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council, which has become a global standard for rating buildings’ environmental impacts. It also has been credited with accelerating market growth for green buildings and has encouraged product manufacturers, architects, developers, and city planners to engage in more sustainable practices with a full understanding of how their projects measure up to widely accepted standards.

In a similar vein, SBRS’s mission is to help grow markets for sustainable business practices by creating a widely accepted standard for what constitutes a “sustainable business.” Like LEED did for green buildings, SBRS will create a level playing field -- a unified calculus for companies that will help them -- and their customers, investors, regulators, suppliers, and others -- answer the challenging question: “How good is ‘good enough’?”

The Soul of Environmentalism

Forget environmentalism’s “death.” Turns out, the environmental movement is alive and well -- and has got soul.

That’s the message from a provocative paper, published today, in which nine prominent activists, academics, and policy analysts have made bold assertions and given voice to those left out of the “Death of Environmentalism” discussions: people working in the influential sustainability and environmental justice fields, as well as Latinos and African-Americans in general. The paper, titled “The Soul of Environmentalism” (downloadable here), was written by Michel Gelobter, the Executive Director of Redefining Progress; Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network; Richard Moore of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice; Peggy Shepard of West Harlem Environmental Action, and others.

Using prose that is variously scholarly and glibly hip, the paper makes the case that the environmental movement is standing squarely on the shoulders of the civil rights movement, using many of the tactics used by activists in the 1960s: boycotts, consumer campaigns, mass mobilizations, litigation, policy advocacy, and moral appeals. And while those techniques had started to run dry by the late 1970s, the civil rights movement was by no means “dead.”

History is repeating itself, contend the authors. Many of those same techniques, adopted by environmentalists, are running out of steam. Indeed, write the authors:

The problems facing environmentalism today are eerily similar to those faced by the Civil Rights Movement two decades ago. Any debate over the death of environmentalism should acknowledge that. Both movements started out as social uprisings that were visionary, and community- and systems-oriented. Both lost popular support as time went by. Both narrowed their advocacy increasingly to legal interventions. Both shifted from winning broad mandates to fighting specific political, regulatory, and legal battles.

As such, “Environmentalism has much to learn from understanding why the civil rights movement made the choices it did and what the consequences were.”

One example: The civil rights and environmental movements both allowed legal action and technical advocacy to dominate their activism and funding. “Whenever a movement spends more energy and money on winning in court than it does on winning in the streets, it speeds its own demise,” they write. Philanthropists -- whose foundations arose from great individual fortunes -- tend to unwittingly co-conspire by emphasizing individual-rights approaches to environmental issues far more than communitarian rights and systemic models of change.

The authors offer a vision of “what winning looks like” by offering “ideas and actions for transformational politics.”

Winning means having ideas that “fight the big fights, raise the value of community, and build from small victories to dominant frames.” Winning also means new actions, like investing in “deep change strategies,” fostering new leadership that transcends boundaries, and building transformative alliances.

Writ large, the soul of environmentalism shares with the Civil Rights Movement and many others one central characteristic: empathy. Empathy is what makes us reach out when we see a wounded bird. It is what calls to us when a child suffers from poverty or asthma. It is how we know our children will miss the snow when the latitudes of climate change have passed us by.

Empathy is also the central component of every point in the short list of big solutions. It is a central component in moving our country away from destructive individualism and toward a regenerative idea of community. It is a big part of what winning means to progressives.

Finally, political empathy is an action, not an emotion. It is expressed in building coalitions, not in writing essays. It means seeking and speaking the truth, not denying one’s troubled ancestry. Empathy is about whom you spend your days talking and walking with. It is how, in Martin Luther King’s words, we reach the Mountaintop.

In the end, many of the beliefs of the “Soul” authors aren’t that far off from their “Death” counterparts. Both papers point up the systemic and fundamental problems facing today's greens. Both describe the environmental movement’s need for new types of alliances and leaders. And both talk about the need to take a broader view than simply the birds and the trees, viewing “the environment” as being as much about people’s needs and rights as it is about “saving the earth.”

But “Soul” goes deeper, probing the movement’s structural racism -- a subject that’s taboo in most of Big Green’s board rooms -- including “the many ways in which the U.S. has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites.” It makes painfully clear that if environmentalism is to be reborn and flourish, it must connect with a much broader social movement. It’s those raw nerves touched by “The Soul of Environmentalism” that will make this paper a bit uncomfortable for many of us to read.

Which makes it required reading for us all.

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Blogging the 'Next Billion' Consumers

The World Resources has just launched a blog focusing on sustainable business models that address the needs of the world's poorest citizens

NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise is part of WRI's longstanding and well-regarded work on the so-called "bottom of the pyramid" -- the four billion or so souls at the lowest rung of the global economic ladder. WRI has been a champion of how to turn the poorest of the poor into a global market for goods and services offered in unique ways, through unique distribution channels, and in a manner affordable by those who make less than $2 per day.

Explains WRI: "NextBillion.net brings together the community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise."

The blog is also a follow-on to last December's fine conference on "Eradicating Poverty Through Profit", which brought together for the first time large and smaller companies along with government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other working on developing and propagating these new business models.

Among the new site's features is a regular Q&A with Stuart Hart, S.C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, from which post he teaches, does research, and runs the Base of the Pyramid Co-Laboratory. Here's the first installment:

Q. Why is capitalism facing challenges right now? Is this time period very different from previous history?

Think of it this way: In my lifetime alone, the human population has ballooned from about 2 billion to more than 6.5 billion. If I live to a ripe old age, I could easily see 8 billion or more people on the planet. Thus, in a single lifetime, the human population will have grown from 2 billion to more than 8 billion. This growth is truly unprecedented. Never before in human history has a single generation witnessed such explosive change. Combine this population growth with humans’ insatiable use of resources and you have global impact of truly epic proportions. Indeed, every major living system on the planet is now either overused or in decline—fisheries, forests, soils, watersheds, and atmosphere, just to name a few. Yet, with only 800 million of the wealthiest people accounting for well over three-quarters of the current resource use, the impacts could multiply further if the 4-5 billion poor emulate the development path of the rich.

The blog seems off to a good start, with postings from some of the leaders in the field. I've put it on my list of blogs I'm tracking and encourage you to do so, too.

Seeing the Forest: The Complex Realities Behind Environmental Paper Procurement

You know the drill: “Buy recycled paper.” For well over a decade, that advice has remained near the top of the list of “simple things you can do” for companies seeking to be greener -- or, at least, to project a greener image.

And yet while markets for greener papers continue to grow, companies, government agencies, and others continue to struggle to create -- and maintain -- environmental paper programs. And, along the way, there’s evidence that the approach even the most well-intentioned companies take toward environmental paper procurement may not even be effective from a sustainability perspective.

That's the gist of the lead story this month in The Green Business Letter, my monthly newsletter. An excerpt:

Metafore's Kristin Bonner explains that there’s a lot more to environmentally preferable paper than simply protecting forests, but that most paper policies focus solely or principally on the forest floor. “When you create policies that are just related to the forest management aspects of forest products, you’re ignoring many of the other impacts,” she says. “And because most interest groups that are putting pressure on companies are concerned about forests, the resulting policies relate primarily to forest management. That’s not a business-like approach. I don’t think most companies look at their other raw materials that way.”

When it comes to the environmental aspects of paper (or wood, for that matter), the forest is just the beginning. There are also issues related to labor, community and human well-being, manufacturing methods, and the health of all natural systems. From an environmental issues perspective, the production of paper (and wood products) relates not just to forestry management, but also to climate change, air and water emissions, natural resource depletion, biodiversity, solid waste management, and other issues. Says Bonner: “We realize that for companies to be successful they have to take a full life-cycle perspective on this, or it’s just not going to work.”

Also in this month's issue: A new report on how companies work with government and civil society to address water problems around the world . . . JPMorganChase becomes the latest major financial institution to embrace sustainability . . . The 25 largest green-power purchasers in the U.S. . . . . And some thoughts on the confluence of some recent changes taking place in the business world.

Water and Business: A Rising Tide of Concern

The connections between the business world and the world’s water supply have gained increased attention lately, with a spate of new reports and news stories. Everyone from the United Nations to state and local governments are getting involved, and the conclusions for water-intensive companies -- and even less-intensive ones -- are implicit, if not explicit: The world’s freshwater supply is at risk and the question is when and where, not whether, there will be major droughts or shortages that could have a major disruptive effect on business and society.

But it’s not just disruptive weather or climate change that’s of concern. Consider the use of water to produce the global food supply. A new report from the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development warns that unless steps are taken to improve the way water is managed, twice the world’s current water consumption may be needed by 2050 to feed a global population of some 9 billion.

(By the way, a quick update on the Safe Water: Currency for Peace Act of 2005, which I lauded when it was introduced earlier this year. It would authorize funding for a pilot program to assist countries with high rates of water-borne illnesses, and require federal agencies to coordinate in developing a strategic plan to focus the United States’ commitment to global water issues. The bill has had no action since it was introduced March 2 and referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. There it sits. Click here to track the bill’s status.)

In the business world, companies in both developed and developing countries should expect to find water issues rising to the level of awareness that energy conservation and efficiency has seen in recent years. Business needs reliable water supplies to manufacture products and deliver services to its customers. It also needs safe sanitation systems to protect the health of its employees and to treat and recycle used water. Without these things, few companies can operate.

A report last fall from the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, which focused on the “potential risks associated with water scarcity” called water “an emerging risk of strategic importance to businesses and their financial backers around the world.” It illuminated the need “to learn and expand on the issues that arise from dealing with water scarcity and highlight opportunities for the financial sector for contributing to sustainable development through active engagement in mitigating water related risks at different levels.”

The good news is that some companies already have dived in, implementing comprehensive water efficiency and management systems, giving them a jump on those that haven’t.

Addressing both energy and water involve extremely similar processes: conducting audits and establishing a current baseline; identifying cost-effective, low-hanging fruit for making efficiency improvements; generating organizational awareness of the issue through effective communication and training; getting top-level buy-in to tackle the bigger, longer-term, and more challenging issues, such as water-intensive manufacturing processes; engaging suppliers, activists, and other stakeholders; measuring and reporting; and on and on. If you've managed energy, you know the drill.

But businesses can’t solve most water problems by themselves, a fact underscored in a new report from the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. It shows how “sustainable water management requires collaboration between business, civil society, and governments.” The report, Collaborative Actions for Water Management, identifies steps companies can take, in interaction with other stakeholders, to ensure sustainable water management.

Some good stories along these lines already can be found. On its Water Sustainability Tool Web site, the Global Environmental Management Initiative offers a score of case studies involving its member companies: How Abbott Laboratories helped upgrade Puerto Rico’s inadequate drinking water system; how DuPont developed a wetlands water recovery system to replace its use of deep-well injection in disposing of wastewater in Texas; how Anheuser-Busch engaged multiple parts of the company in developing and implementing its water strategy; how Novartis harnessed employee education to produce water-management solutions that yielded significant returns. And others.

Increasingly, such stories will be expected of companies as water issues bubble to the surface around the globe. Unlike climate issues, where problems and their solutions have global impacts, water will be seen as a mostly local issue requiring local actions. But, if as experts predict, warmer climates and lowered water tables lead to widespread disruptions, activists and regulators will begin to connect the dots, foisting regulations or global treaties upon the business community.

And what seemed like a trickle of concern could turn into a flood.

Vital Signs 2005: The Looming China Syndrome

China has emerged as a global force that is driving consumption and production of almost everything through the roof, according to Vital Signs 2005, the latest annual pulse-taking from the venerable Worldwatch Institute, published today.

This isn’t exactly news. For years, hand-wringing “what-if” scenarios have considered the environmental impacts of a billion-plus Chinese aspiring to Americans’ levels of consumption. But, as Vital Signs shows, those scenarios are no longer hypothetical. Exploding growth in China is helping to boost the global economy, but it also is driving up consumption of natural resources, increasing prices of essential raw materials, and pushing up pollution levels around the world.

Example: China’s building boom has helped push world steel production up by a third over the last five years. China now produces just over a fourth of the world’s steel -- an essential input for its mushrooming industrial and urban infrastructure, as well as for the production of cars and other goods, and is a voracious buyer of steel from other countries, leading to shortages and price spikes in some areas.

“In terms of scale, it is as if all of Europe, Russia, and North and South America were simultaneously to undertake a century’s worth of economic development in a few decades,” says Worldwatch.

Steel is just the beginning. China is using its massive foreign exchange earnings from being the world’s low-cost manufacturer of choice -- producing goods for the Gaps, Walmarts, and Reeboks of the world -- to buy up other resources from around the globe. The global grain harvest shot up by 8% to over 2 billion tons last year, driven in part by China’s rising consumption and changing diets. Production of meat and fish -- the latter increasingly derived from environmentally problematic fish farms -- also hit new highs. One result is that grain reserves are at historically low levels, leaving the world vulnerable to higher prices should this year’s harvest be hurt by adverse weather, says Worldwatch.

And then there’s oil. “World oil markets have already entered their most turbulent period in more than two decades,” writes Worldwatch president Christopher Flavin:

“From Africa to South America, Chinese and Indian companies are now competing with American and European firms for access to the few remaining frontiers of the world oil industry. This struggle for supplies is likely to intensify in the next few years. The biggest losers will be countries that have virtually no impact on the world oil market -- poor oil-importing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”

In 2003, China passed Japan to become the world's second largest petroleum consumer. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030 China will import 10 million barrels per day, equal to the current U.S. total and almost twice Japan's current level. Where all that oil will come from -- and how much it will cost -- is anybody’s guess.

It’s not simply a question of energy supply. It’s also a matter of global security. According to a recent report by the Houston Chronicle, China's willingness to cut oil deals with nasty regimes already has begun undermining American policy priorities:

”Beijing shuns the spot oil market in favor of long-term contracts and investments in producer countries. When it does so in pariah states that Washington is trying to isolate, China's actions contravene efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and promote human rights. And in oil-exporting capitals where Washington's policies are unpopular, Beijing may be supplanting the United States as customer-of-choice.”

The good news is that China’s surging demand for new, cleaner energy technologies -- wind, solar, and biofuels derived from crops and agricultural waste -- will help power the growth of renewable energy.

Indeed, China (as well as India) is well positioned to claim the leadership role in renewables now held by Europe and Japan (and, poignantly, not by the U.S.). China’s just-adopted energy law, which takes affect next January, will accelerate its already fast-growing renewables sector. China has huge potential for solar, wave, tidal, and biomass power and -- coupled with energy efficiency -- could meet all of its energy needs solely from renewables, say experts.

Even still, says Flavin, “recent developments suggest that the world economy will be coping with the downsides of its voracious material appetite for decades to come.” And even if predictions about China’s clean-energy revolution come to pass, it could be decades before it puts a dent in the currently rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions that are altering the world’s ecological systems.

It’s not just China, of course, or even developing countries. Although rapidly developing nations with growing populations will increasingly leave their mark, “industrialized countries with relatively small populations but sky-high consumption patterns remain a major threat to the global environment,” says Worldwatch. For example, although the U.S. population is only about one-fourth the size of India’s, Americans have a much larger ecological footprint, with 15.7 million tons of U.S. carbon outputs released into the atmosphere, more than three times India’s 4.9 million tons.

The vital signs aren’t all bad. One positive indicator, says Worldwatch, is that the world’s tourists increasingly are supporting travel companies that are accountable to local communities and the environment. For example, travelers can also now choose an airline that will offset the carbon emissions produced by their flights: A person flying round-trip between London and Rome can pay $17.23 to account for her share of carbon -- about a half a ton’s worth -- released during the flight from the burning of jet fuel. And a growing number of tourists are seeking alternatives to conventional “mass tourism,” with eco-friendly destinations garnering increasing interest among the 760 million international tourism arrivals last year.

Presumably, several million of them will be going to China each year. And looking to live the good life in a country increasingly able to provide it.