The six keys to driving green change in a conservative corporate culture include: top-level support; management-level and administrative support; minimal risk; a clear path; bottom-line value; and political awareness.

by Anna Clark, President of EarthPeople

Evidence abounds that companies can improve their financial bottom line by looking out for the other two-thirds of their triple bottom line. So if sustainability makes so much sense, why isn’t everyone doing it?

The hurdle is not the hard facts so much as the soft ones. Companies, like people, have personalities. Some are progressive, but most are conservative. When it comes to sustainability, the progressives get a lot of press, but in reality, they are the exceptions to the rule.

I’m no stranger to working in a conservative culture. Before launching a sustainability consulting practice, I was a management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, working within industries like oil and gas and accounting. As a sustainability consultant, my first clients included law firms, also conservative by nature. Ready to barrel down the green superhighway at top speed, I created green plans that would take them from zero to 60, only to find out they were more content to creep along in the slow lane.

The issue wasn’t in figuring out what to do. There are a number of well-documented third-party certification programs that can deliver demonstrable value through cost-savings measures that reduce environmental impact and increase brand awareness. The real challenge in greening a conservative culture lies in bridging the chasm between “progressives” and “conservatives.”

Conservatives are cautious; progressives throw caution to the wind. Conservatives are grounded in reality; progressives are planted in possibility. Although these are broad generalizations, in today’s highly charged political environment, any issue, particularly a heated one like energy, is subject to sweeping generalizations and half-truths.

So how do we chart a course for change within a conservative culture without being labeled as progressive — and potentially disregarded as a result? That question was on my mind when I met Dan Northcut.

Dan is the Director of Environmental Studies at St. Mark’s School of Texas, a private preparatory school for boys founded in Dallas in 1906. Dan has been with the school for over 20 years. In fact, if you count the six years he spent there as a student, you could say he’s been there for nearly 30 years.

During that time Dan has seen a lot. He remembers the late seventies when conserving energy was considered patriotic. To do its part, the school removed every other bulb from the light fixtures in its hallways and classrooms. Then came the 1980s. The solar panels were removed from the White House and the zeal for energy conservation in America was on the wane. Nearly two decades of relatively cheap energy followed.

Fast forward to today. Conservation has once again become a hot topic in the national discourse, prompting companies to take a fresh look at conservation practices. But while the words “going green” roll of the tongue with ease, rolling out green initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases is not so easy. Many organizations today pay lip service to sustainability while only a few are making genuine investments to make facilities and operations more efficient.

So what sets St. Mark’s School of Texas apart? A proactive, comprehensive approach to the 21st century realities of energy insecurity and climate change, driven by broad support from stakeholder groups, a spirit of leadership among its students, and the personal commitment of people like Dan Northcut, who also serves as the school’s environmental director.

During the past few years, St. Mark’s has implemented a single-stream recycling program and has switched its power source to a blend of 30-percent renewable energy, setting a goal to increase that amount by 10 percent each year. Dan’s AP Environmental Science elective course is so popular that the school added a second section. An environmental component is also being integrated into the curriculum of the lower school, giving younger students exposure to sustainability concepts at an early age. Even the teachers’ lounge reflects eco-consciousness, now that Styrofoam cups have been replaced with ceramic mugs bearing St. Mark’s special green branding.

The most significant reflection of St. Mark’s commitment is the Board of Trustees’ approval of LEED certification for the two new buildings undergoing construction. This decision added just two percent more to the construction cost. St. Mark’s will recover this within approximately 10 years — less if the cost of energy rises — with the added benefits of a healthier indoor environment.

The school’s eco-improvements, which began two decades ago with Dan, now have the support of teachers, administration, students, parents, and the board. How one person helped drive change at St. Mark’s presents a roadmap any change agent can follow in a conservative culture.

Although Dan has a longer history in his organization than the typical employee in a company, longevity has less to do with his success than the vital qualities of personal commitment, a penchant for education, a collaborative approach, and sheer enthusiasm. The green programs that gain traction, when compared to the ones that produce lackluster results, are created through one person or team exhibiting these traits. Let’s take a closer look at these qualities in terms of Dan’s experience:

1. Personal Commitment. As the Director of Environmental Studies, Dan demonstrates knowledge of ecology and conservation on a daily basis. He also walks his own talk by living a green lifestyle. Nobody is suspicious of his motives.
2. Education. Conservatives don’t want to be sold to, but they do want to be informed. What tends to hold people back, even CEOs, from jumping into new territory are concerns that they can’t quite articulate. People need to develop a comfort level with green ideas. For the Headmaster, Dan created a “green print” plan, prioritizing and budgeting every element of his strategy. Dan engages the students through his environmental science classes, the administration through practical modifications for a greener campus, the parents through newsletters, and the community through free events such as movie festivals featuring eco-oriented documentaries.
3. Collaboration. Dan is just one guy. As with any organization, there exists at St. Mark’s a number of spheres of influence: students, parents, administrators, and board members. By working with these groups to address their specific concerns or interests, Dan is not pushing an agenda but providing a service. He’s garnering buy-in throughout the process by asking influential people to help support these programs.
4. Enthusiasm. Dan has fun. He likes people and seeks to understand them. Dan’s persistence is tempered by his enthusiasm, so that even when he urges people to make green changes, he does so without annoying them. Enthusiasm is the antidote to burnout for anyone steering a green initiative inside a change-resistant culture.

Having the right people in place is half the battle. The other half involves strategy. To drive progress in a conservative culture, you must demonstrate the following:

1. Top-level support. While a progressive culture will take grass roots efforts seriously, a conservative culture is more likely to follow the direction of top-level leadership. When the St. Mark’s Board of Trustees decided that building its new facilities to LEED standards was the right thing to do, the school’s green program finally got some teeth. Sustainability went from being “Dan’s project” to becoming a core value of the organization.
2. Management-level and administrative support. A major stumbling block in organizations that fulfill the first prerequisite is failure to engage other rungs of employees. Engaging stakeholders requires a sincere statement backed by action on the part of the leader, as well as education and incentives to motivate staff that may be reticent to support “progressive” ideas.
3. Minimal risk. Any initiative perceived as a risk to the brand will not gain support.
4. A clear path. Conservative cultures are not innovative by nature. By sharing case studies of similar companies’ sustainability initiatives, change agents can offer a concrete path to follow. Reputable third-party certifications like Energy Star also offer a step-by-step plan as well as promotional materials and opportunities for recognition.
5. Bottom-line value. The numbers have to demonstrate a relatively short payback period with a clear ROI.
6. Political awareness. Know the culture. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Sometimes you can have everything else in place and the plan can still fall flat. Never underestimate the importance of hierarchy in the planning stage. Know your audience. If you don’t engage the right people early on, they will not appreciate the value of a sustainability plan that may require funds or behavioral changes, even if the numbers work on paper.

As specialized as the sustainability field is becoming, the gulf between where the experts are heading and where everyone else still remains continues to widen. In trying to solve complex problems, we create solutions that make sustainability ever more confusing for conservative cultures to embrace. Already they must wade through scores of certifications and requirements that can resemble regulations to the less informed. The result is stagnation, frustration, and inertia.

In order to get green off the ground within a change-resistant culture, try going back to basics. Even a program as simple as the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle, can be effective. Companies that put into place a simple but measurable program may see enough positive evidence to inspire more strategic actions down the road. Slow and steady wins the race.

Conservation is still a conservative value, so why the pushback from conservative cultures? The reality is that most companies, like people, don’t make decisions according to their values as much as their circumstances, especially in uncertain times. In this case, sustainability enthusiasts might dispense with idealism and try Dan’s pragmatic approach, which he succinctly summarizes in the words of Harry Truman, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

There has been an enormous growth in national and state-level voluntary campus sustainability programs in the U.S. in recent years. These programs not only help universities and colleges institutionalize sustainability principles into everyday processes and actions, but also create a common knowledge pool of resources and best practices that enable these institutions to build strong sustainable communities.

by Naimish Upadhyay, Green Economy Post

As centers of change, innovation and progress, universities and colleges are well-poised to take the lead on sustainability. By adopting good environmental practices, not only can campuses reduce their own environmental impact but also serve as role models for their larger communities. Incorporating sustainability principles in their policies and practices also enable institutions of higher learning to build student capacity for critical thinking and problem solving.

The recognition of these benefits has led to the creation of numerous campus sustainability initiatives in recent years. Universities and colleges are increasingly choosing to participate in state and nationwide sustainability networks that emphasize knowledge sharing and collaboration within and among institutions. Five of the most notable campus sustainability programs in the U.S. are described below. These range from formal commitments and reporting systems to independent assessments and student-driven conservation programs.

American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC)

The ACUPCC is a collective effort undertaken by a network of colleges and universities to minimize their institutional greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainability research and education.

The commitment provides participating institutions a framework to implement comprehensive plans in pursuit of climate neutrality. Signatories agree to five broad time-bound commitments that include a campus-wide emissions inventory, setting up short-term and long-term emissions reduction actions and integrating sustainability into curriculum. All submitted documents, including action plans, inventories and progress reports, are made publicly available.

Developers of ACUPCC believe the commitment will not only decrease institutional carbon footprints, but will also help them generate strategic investment opportunities and cost savings, open up new funding opportunities and improve their competitive positioning.

The commitment was conceived in 2006, and is supported by three non-profit organizations: AASHE, ecoAmerica and Second Nature. To date, 675 colleges and universities have signed this commitment.

Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS)

STARS, developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), is a self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to gauge relative progress towards sustainability. The program aims to enable meaningful comparisons over time and across institutions by establishing a common standard of measurement for sustainability in higher education.

Institutions earn points in three main categories: Education & Research; Operations; and Planning, Administration and Student Engagement. There is also an Innovation category to recognize pioneering practices that are not covered by other STARS credits.

Participating colleges and universities are awarded one of five levels of ratings depending on the extent to which they fulfill the criteria. Ratings are based on an absolute scale of progress toward sustainability and are not relative to the performance of other institutions.

AASHE launched the pilot version of the reporting system in February 2008 and the STARS 1.0 (current version) edition in September 2009. STARS is available to any college or university in the U.S. or Canada. Currently, 121 institutions have registered for this program.

Sustainable Endowments Institute – College Sustainability Report Card

The College Sustainability Report Card is an independent sustainability evaluation of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. In contrast to the academic focus on sustainability in research and teaching, the Report Card focuses on institutional operations and endowment investment activities to identify institutions that are leading by example on sustainability. The aim is to provide accessible information for schools to learn from each others’ experiences and to help high school students identify a sustainable college.

The assessment is made across 43 indicators in 9 main areas of policies and practices, such as Food & Recycling, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment Transparency and Shareholder Engagement.

The data is collected by surveying administrators and students at target institutions as well as gathering information from publicly available sources. The annual Report Cards are made available to the public free of charge.

Now in its fourth year, the program evaluated a total of 332 schools in the U.S. and Canada in the College Sustainability Report Card 2010. The report is published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Alliance to Save Energy – Green Campus Program

The Green Campus Program is a student-driven California-wide campus sustainability initiative. Under this program, students work on energy-conservation projects on campuses, such as building general campus awareness, incorporating energy conservation and efficiency into course curricula, and advocating operational changes.

The program is run by the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit organization that advocates energy efficiency to combat global climate change. The organization supports and funds student interns at each of the participating institution, who in turn work closely with administrators, faculty and staff to create campus energy efficiency strategies.

The Green Campus program currently serves 12 California university campuses and 3 California community college campuses.

National Wildlife Federation – Campus Ecology Program

The Campus Ecology Program, developed and run by the National Wildlife Federation, is a conservation program that aims to promote practical conservation projects on campus and train a new generation of environmental leaders. Since its inception in 1990, more than 3000 specific ecological conservation projects have been completed on college campuses around the U.S.

As part of this initiative, the National Wildlife Federation provide practical training and incentives to college and university communities, organize student competitions, and supports a publicly shared knowledge base of effective conservation practices.

The Social Venture Network is looking for the next generation of innovative, socially responsible business leaders and nonprofit entrepreneurs.  And so, they’ve created the Innovation Awards program, dedicated to recognizing the leaders of emerging enterprises.  Once these figures have been recognized, they will be immersed into the SVN community, providing them access to a network of 500 successful socially responsible business and nonprofit leaders, investors, and other resources and connections that can help them achieve success with their own enterprise.

For more than 23 years, SVN members have played an integral part in transforming the way the world does business.  From the organic revolution to fair trade to socially responsible investing and so much more, their members have pioneered a movement that has proven that business can truly be used as a tool for making the world a better place.

2010 SVN Innovation Award recipients will each receive:

• 2011 SVN Membership: A one-year complimentary 2011 SVN basic membership, giving each Innovation Award winner access to an inspiring community of socially responsible business leaders who can provide advice, introductions and resources.
• 2010 Fall Conference: Complimentary registration, travel and hotel, and special recognition during a Friday evening Awards Ceremony at SVN’s 2010 Fall Conference to be held again at the Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch, New Jersey, October 21-24.
  
• Promotion: Prominent recognition on SVN’s website for a full year, and recognition in our 2009 Stakeholder Report
• Press: Winners will be featured in a 6-page spread in the November/December 2010 issue of Utne Reader, as well as promoted on Care2.com and GreenBiz.com.

How to Apply: Click here to download the application.

Deadline: The application deadline is April 15, 2010 at 11:59 PM PST.

Application Process and Eligibility:

-  To be eligible for the Awards, applicants must currently hold positions as C-level executives (CEOs, executive directors, founders, etc.).  The Awards are open only to entrants whose organization (company or nonprofit) has been fully operational for more than 6 months, but less than 5 years as of April 15, 2010.  “Fully Operational” within the SVN Innovation Awards context means that the organization has already started offering its services, products or programs to its intended customers.  Applications submitted on behalf of an organization that is still in the business plan phase, or that is still in the process of launching but has not actually launched, will not be considered.

-  Applicants must be based in the US or Canada, not including Quebec.

-  The application process includes providing thoughtful answers to several essay questions and presenting relevant metrics describing your enterprise or organization.  Applicants selected as finalists will also need to participate in phone interviews and submit additional materials.

Timeline:

Applications for the 2010 Awards will be accepted from January 15 – April 15, 2010.

By June 11, 2010: A group of up to 15 finalists will be selected by the Innovation Awards judging panel and will be notified and asked to submit further documentation, which may include, but not necessarily be limited to:

• Business plan
• Past, current, and projected financial statements
• Letters of recommendation (from partners, investors, supplies, customers, stakeholders, etc.)

SVN will schedule a 1-hour phone interview with each of the Finalists to be conducted by both an Innovation Awards judge and an SVN representative sometime  between June 11 – July 9, 2010. 

By late July 2010: The 2010 Innovation Award winners will be notified and invited to attend the 2010 SVN Fall Conference to be held at the Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch, New Jersey, October 21-24. Winners will also begin working with SVN staff to create the feature article for Utne Reader (due to Utne Reader by August 15, 2010)

The Awards ceremony will take place on Friday, October 22, 2010.  Winners are encouraged to attend the entire conference in order to make the most of their experience as a 2010 Innovation Award winner.

Contact: Should you have any questions about the SVN Innovation Awards, please email Awards@svn.org or call 415-561-6501 and ask for Lars Olson or Tina Sciabica.

For more detailed information: Read the Official Rules for the SVN Innovation Awards and check out previous years’ winners.

Note: Please do not contact the Green Economy Post regarding this opportunity.  We are not affiliated with the sponsoring organizations, and therefore have no additional information. Sometimes the link is changed for the opportunities.  When this happens, go to the home page of the organizers to locate information on the opportunity or contact the organization directly.

The RES Alliance for Jobs, a coalition of America’s renewable energy companies and national renewable energy associations, has released a new study showing that a 25% by 2025 national Renewable Electricity Standard would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States. The study found that a 25% by 2025 national RES would result in 274,000 more renewable energy jobs over no-national RES policy. This additional employment is equivalent to 2.36 million additional job-years by 2025.

by Naimish Upadhyay, Green Economy Post

A coalition of leading renewable energy advocates has announced a new study showing that a 25% by 2025 national Renewable Electricity Standard would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States. Instituting such a standard would also prevent a near-term collapse in some industries, according to the same report.

The “Jobs Impact of a National Renewable Electricity Standard” study, conducted by Navigant Consulting, Inc (NYSE: NCI), was commissioned by the RES Alliance for Jobs – a coalition of renewable energy companies and national renewable energy associations. The Alliance advocates for the Congressional enactment of a strong federal Renewable Electricity Standard (RES).

The study found that a 25% by 2025 national RES (i.e. a federal standard requiring all utilities to obtain 25 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025) would result in 274,000 more renewable energy jobs over no-national RES policy (see Figure 1). This additional employment is equivalent to 2.36 million job-years by 2025 and represents an incredible opportunity to domestically employ Americans in the new energy economy. The additional jobs include gains of 116,000 in the wind industry, 60,000 in biomass, 50,000 in solar, 34,000 in hydropower and 15,000 in waste‐to‐energy. A separate 2009 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists predicted a similar job growth if a 25% by 2025 RES is enacted.

Increase in Renewable Electricity Supported Jobs: 2009-2025

The Alliance predicts that every region of the United States would see the creation of new renewable energy jobs. While many of the states with renewable generation gaps relative to RES targets currently do not have state‐level renewable energy standards, they are likely to witness a spur of renewable-energy-supported jobs with a strong national RES. Regions are expected to take advantage of the abundant forms of renewable energy found across the country. The Southeast would see biomass jobs double, particularly in Louisiana and Florida, with hydropower and waste‐to‐energy jobs also expanding throughout the region. Under a strong national policy, the states of the Great Plains and Midwest would employ thousands developing their wind resources, while the Western United States would see job gains in its solar and hydropower industries.

[Fig 2A.jpg and Fig 2B.jpg]

Gross Increase in Renewable Electricity Supported Jobs: Cumulative 2009-2025

While the study shows the potential for hundreds of thousands of jobs supported by renewable electricity by 2025, it also reveals that without a strong national policy, the United States actually sheds clean energy jobs in many states: North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.

Arguing that aggressive near‐term RES targets are critical to ensure global competitiveness for the US renewable energy industry, the study recommends federally legislating 12% by 2014 and 20% by 2020 RES. While 37 countries around the world, including China and all of the European Union member countries have set renewable energy targets, U.S. policy has lagged behind. The near‐term renewable targets in other countries will draw the growing renewable energy manufacturing sector to those countries if the U.S. does not set its own aggressive targets. Strong long‐term targets are key to investment and jobs in the renewable electricity industry.

The study further suggests that a strong long‐term target, such as the 25% by 2025 RES, will be needed to attract long‐term manufacturing investment and project development. While production tax credits are critical to the survival and growth of many renewable electricity technologies, the hard targets in a national RES will ensure a growing market demand for renewable power since manufacturers rely on these long‐term market signals to make significant capital investments in new facilities. The pie chart in Figure 4 illustrates the distribution of direct jobs supported by the renewable electricity industry under a 25% by 2025 RES, 52% of which would be in the manufacturing sector.

The entire “Jobs Impact of a National Renewable Electricity Standard” report can be viewed here.

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp’s sixth session served as an introduction to sustainable design. Nathan Shedroff provided an overview of the principles, frameworks and tools employed by sustainable product designers and discussed some of the design strategies implemented today by leaders in this field.

by Aysu Katun, Green Economy Post

As part of the Sustainable Brands Boot Camp online seminar series, Sustainable Life Media invited experience design pioneer Nathan Shedroff to be guest speaker at its sixth session on “Sustainable Product Design – An Overview of Prevailing Approaches”.

Shedroff is chair of the Design Strategy MBA program at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and has written extensively on design and business issues, including Experience Design 1 and Making Meaning, along with his website.

The session served as an excellent introduction to sustainable design. Shedroff provided an overview of the principles, frameworks and tools employed by sustainable product designers and discussed some of the design strategies implemented today by leaders in this field. He also provided valuable resources on each topic he covered, which many may find helpful. A summary of the key takeaways from his session are presented below along with suggested resources.

FRAMEWORKS

There are three frameworks used in sustainable product design: natural capitalism, natural step, and cradle to cradle.

1. Natural Capitalism is based on the notion that the global economy is dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services that nature provides. It recognizes the critical interdependency between the production and use of human-made capital and the maintenance and supply of natural capital, and is based on four principles:

• Radically Increase the Productivity of Natural Resources
• Shift to Biologically Inspired Production Models and Materials
• Move to a “Service-and-Flow” Business Model
• Reinvest in Natural Capital

2. The Natural Step: While Natural Capitalism takes into consideration manufactured, financial, human and natural capital, The Natural Step framework concentrates on financial, social and environmental impacts. The strategies developed as a result of the Natural Step framework depend on four “systems conditions”.

1. Substances from the Earth’s crust should not accumulate in the environment
2. Substances produced by society should not increase in the biosphere
3. We must preserve the productivity and biodiversity of the ecosystem
4. Resources should be used fairly and efficiently to meet human needs

3. Cradle to Cradle design takes its inspiration from nature, in which there is no place for the concept of waste, but in which waste = food. The purpose of the Cradle to Cradle design is to restore continuous cycles of biological (organic materials) as well as technical nutrients (non-toxic synthetic materials that have no negative effects on the environment) with long term positive effects on profitability, the environment and human health. Some of the underlying principles of Cradle to Cradle framework include:

• Eliminate hazardous materials
• Consider the entire lifecycle of products
• Materials should be upcycled (the process of converting waste materials into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value)
• Less bad does not equal good

TOOLS

Shedroff concentrated on five tools that aid in the design process of sustainable products.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a technique used to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process, or service. It involves making detailed measurements during the manufacture of the product, from the mining of the raw materials used in its production and distribution, through to its use, possible re-use or recycling, and its eventual disposal.

Shedroff states that while there are many challenges involved in conducting LCAs such as a lack of water or energy usage tracking systems in most companies, the act of conducting an LCA for even one product can be a great learning experience for companies who want to identify where in a product’s life cycle resources are consumed the most so that they can take actions to minimize this usage.

Total Beauty is based on the notion that while products may look attractive on the surface, they may have hidden ecological and social impacts. Total beauty is a technique created to score a product so that businesses will know where to focus their improvement efforts. Scoring is based on whether a product is:

• Efficient: The product in manufacture and use requires 90% less materials, energy and water than products providing equivalent utility did in 1990
• Cyclic: The product is made from compostable organic materials or from minerals that are continuously recycled in a closed loop
• Solar: The product in manufacture and use consumes only renewable energy that is cyclic and safe
• Safe: All releases to air, water, land or space are food for other systems
• Social: Product manufacture and use supports basic human rights and natural justice

Biomimicry: “is an emerging discipline that studies nature’s best ideas
and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems”.

Social Return on Investment (SROI) “is an attempt to measure the social and financial value created by a non-profit, NGO or business.” The measurements include tracking social outcomes of ordinarily difficult to monetize measures of social value, such as increases in self-esteem and social support systems, or improvements in housing stability. As Shedroff admits, this is a new tool that needs to be developed further.

Sustainability Helix is a tool that helps organizations assess their level of involvement as well as ways to integrate sustainability over time across many organizational functions. It tracks efforts in six categories of key business functions (management, operations, HR, product innovation, marketing, stakeholders) through five levels of commitment (no commitment, exploration, experimentation, leadership, restoration) to sustainable principles and actions.

DESIGN STRATEGIES

Shedroff recommends the implementation of the following design strategies that are being employed by leaders in the field and have proven to be successful. The strategies are listed under four categories: reduce, reuse, recycle, restore.

Reduce

• Design for use – make things that truly improve people’s lives, give them meaning, and are usable and useful to them.
• Dematerialization – reduce the material and energy used in the manufacturing, use, recycling, and disposal of products and services.
• Materials and energy substitution – substitute more sustainable and less toxic materials and energy.
• Localization – design solutions and systems to reduce material and energy travel and support local communities.
• Transmaterialization – redesign and deploy products as services that focus on customer value instead of physical things (e.g. Zipcar).
• Informationalization – translate solutions into data and send the recipe for the solution, not the solution itself (e.g. digital music, videos).

Reuse

• Design for durability – the most sustainable solutions are products that don’t need to be quickly discarded or wholly disposed of when one part breaks.
• Design for reuse – intended reuse of products in other contexts can extend product life and divert them from disposal.

Recycle

• Design for disassembly – clearly marked and easily disassembled products will more likely be recycled.
• Close the loop – systems that create solutions across a myriad of stakeholders are more robust and more sustainable.
• Design for effectiveness - dematerialization and increased efficiency is a great start but there is higher fruit to pick that involves rethinking value.

Restore

• Design for systems – transforming systems at higher levels creates the most radical, sustainable change.

You can get more detailed information about these strategies from Shedroff’s book,Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable. Nathan Shedroff’s other books include Experience Design 1.1, an update to his 2001 book; and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool based on his book that helps designers put the approach into practice.

Resources

• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
  by Janine M. Benyus
• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
  by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
• Leading Change Toward Sustainability: A Change-Management Guide for Business, Government and Civil Society, 2nd Revised Edition
  by Bob Doppelt
• Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
  by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
• The Next Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-in (Conscientious Commerce)
  by Bob Willard
• Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking
  by Roger Martin
• The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products
  by Edwin Datschefski
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer
  by Donella Meadows

Join us on Tuesday, March 23, when author and green career expert Carol McClelland comes to Green Economy Post to answer your green career questions.    She will be available all day to answer your questions and to help you figure out how to advance your green career.

Carol is the author of Green Careers For Dummies and the founder and executive director of Green Career Central.   Green Career Central is designed to provide career guidance, coaching, and resources to clarify the ever-evolving world of green career possibilities for professionals, students, and career counselors.

About Green Careers for Dummies

Whether you’re a recent or looking to make a career change, Green Careers For Dummies is designed to be a resource for finding your fit in an environmentally responsible job for both those looking to make a career change and recent college graduates. The book is also designed to assist career counselors by providing them with a comprehensive overview of the green career sectors that they refer to in their work with students and clients.

Carol McClelland Phd, Author of the Green Careers For Dummies

• What it takes to thrive in a green economy
• Advice on whether a green career is right for you
• Ways to green your current job
• Guidance on greening up your resume
• Advice for interviews
• Green job search 2.0 techniques
• Green career resources
• Definitions of industry-specific terminology
• Strategies on how to target the right eco-friendly companies and find openings for your talents
• Tips on recognizing industry opportunities and threats
• Information on emerging green jobs that will be created in the next five years and beyond
• The huge variety of job titles in the more than 50 industries that make up the green economy

In addition to Green Careers For Dummies and  Green Career CentralCarol has a number of useful free resources for green job seekers, see two of them below:

UNCOVERING YOUR GREEN NICHE – One of the most important skills you can have as a green career seeker is being able to articulate your green career niche. This free ebook shares the secrets of finding your green niche.

SIX STRATEGIES TO FIND YOUR GREEN CAREER – This free ebook is a step-by-step process helping green career seekers use their passions, interests, experience, and training to plug into the green economy.

Don’t forget to drop by on Tuesday, March 23, to submit your green career questions to Carol.

Amid a growing call for reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 350 parts per million, a group of economists maintains that striving to meet that target is a smart investment — and the best insurance policy humanity could buy.

by Frank Ackerman, senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute at Tufts University – Yale Environment 360

The climate change news from Washington is cautiously encouraging. No one in power is listening to the climate skeptics any more; the economic stimulus package included real money for clean energy; a bill capping U.S. carbon emissions emerged, battered but still standing, from the House of Representatives, and might even survive the Senate. This, along with stricter emission standards in Europe and a big push for clean energy and efficiency standards in China, provides grounds for hope for genuine progress on emissions reduction.

But while climate policy is finally moving forward, climate science is moving faster. One discovery after another suggests the world is warming faster, and climate damages are appearing sooner, than anyone had expected. Much of the policy discussion so far has been aimed at keeping the atmospheric concentration of CO2 below 450 parts per million (ppm) — which was until recently thought to be low enough to prevent dangerous levels of warming. But last year, James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, argued that paleoclimatic evidence shows 450 ppm is the threshold for transition to an ice-free earth. This would imply a catastrophic rise in sea levels, eventually flooding all coastal cities and regions.

To avoid reaching such a crisis stage, Hansen and a growing number of others now call for stabilizing CO2 concentrations at 350 ppm. The world is now around 390 ppm and rising; since CO2 persists in the atmosphere for a long time, it is difficult to reduce concentrations quickly. In Hansen’s scenario, a phaseout of coal use, massive reforestation, and widespread use of carbon capture and storage could allow the world to achieve negative net carbon emissions by mid-century and reach 350 ppm by 2100.

Can we afford to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 350 ppm by the end of this century? To address this question, Economists for Equity and Environment (www.E3Network.org) — a group dedicated to applying and developing economic principles to protect human health and the environment — conducted a study of “The Economics of 350.”

Why the wide range of cost estimates?

At first glance, there is a bewildering range of estimates of the costs of climate protection. Look more closely, however, and there are just a few projections of economic disaster, out in right field by themselves. Other estimates range from modest costs to small net economic gains.

The outliers are the handful of private consultant studies funded by partisan lobbying groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. Using proprietary models (or their own adaptations of standard models), and pessimistic economic assumptions, these studies forecast that even mild U.S. proposals, such as last year’s Lieberman-Warner bill, would cost many thousands of dollars per household and would cause widespread unemployment and economic dislocation. An analysis by journalist Eric Pooley documents the excessive, often uncritical attention given to these studies by the media.

These projections of economic ruin have not been reproduced by any major academic or non-profit research group. Many economic models find that the modest steps called for in recent U.S. proposals would have very small costs and virtually undetectable effects on total employment — as documented in a report by Nathaniel Keohane and Peter Goldmark for the Environmental Defense Fund.

But to reach 350 ppm, we will have to go far beyond the emission reductions considered in recent U.S. proposals. How much will it cost to reach this more ambitious target? Until recently, most economic research focused on higher targets such as 450 ppm or more. There are, however, four major climate economics modeling groups — all at European universities — that have analyzed the costs of reaching 350 ppm.

One group starts from the (realistic) assumption of high unemployment, and finds that long-run employment and economic growth would be increased by a program of public investment in green technology and emissions reduction that leads to 350 ppm. The other three groups adopt the common assumption that short-run unemployment can be ignored in long-run models. They generally find that the needed emissions reductions will cost an average of 1 to 3 percent of world economic output, for some years to come.

Other studies have reached more optimistic conclusions about costs. McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm, has carried out detailed studies of the costs of hundreds of emission-reducing technologies. They find that some emissions can be eliminated for no cost or even an economic savings; more than half of worldwide business-as-usual emissions in 2030 could be eliminated at very small total cost. The net costs of reducing carbon emissions (i.e. investment costs, minus the value of energy saved) go down when the price of oil goes up, and vice versa. McKinsey’s entire package of reductions, eliminating more than half of world emissions, would have zero total cost if the price of oil were $90 per barrel.

Studies from major environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), have reached even more optimistic conclusions than McKinsey. Both Greenpeace and UCS project substantial economic savings from emission reduction, with fuel savings much larger than the costs of investment. Both assume high oil prices — up to $140 per barrel for Greenpeace — along with rapid change in emissions-reduction technologies.

Deciding whether it’s worth the price

The range of cost estimates for reaching 350 ppm, combined with uncertainties about oil prices and future technologies, make it difficult to choose a single estimate of the total economic cost. Suppose that, for the sake of argument, 2.5 percent of world output must be spent on climate stabilization for years to come. Is that an unacceptably large number?

Imagine an economy growing at 2.5 percent every year (a little slower than the recent U.S. average). Suppose it skips one year’s growth — all too easy to imagine in 2009 — and then resumes growing. That makes GDP 2.5 percent smaller than it would have been, forever. So the “skip year” has the same effect as spending 2.5 percent of output on climate protection every year. Household incomes would take 29 years to double, instead of 28.

Alternatively, we know we can afford to devote 2.5 percent of income to protection against a remote but disastrous threat — because we already do,

We can afford to protect the climate, and leave a livable world to future generations.

year after year. In 68 countries, military spending exceeds 2.5 percent of GDP. In the United States and China, the top greenhouse gas emitters, military spending absorbs more than 4 percent of GDP. Both countries would be safer, not more vulnerable, if they diverted half of their defense spending to defense against climate crisis.

The most important conclusion of our research involves what we did not find. There are no reasonable studies saying that a 350 ppm stabilization target will destroy the economy. This is not surprising. The ominous recent research on potential climate damages does not examine the cost of doing something; instead, it looks at the cost of doing nothing about emissions.

If the worst happens, our grandchildren will inherit a degraded Earth that does not support anything like the life that we have enjoyed. On the other hand, if we prepare for the worst but it does not quite happen, we will have invested more than was absolutely necessary — in perfect hindsight — in clean energy, conservation, and carbon-free technologies. Which extreme presents the greater danger?

Climate risk and insurance

Think about climate risk as an insurance problem. You don’t buy fire insurance because you’re sure your house will burn down; rather, you are not, and cannot be, sure enough that it will not burn down. Likewise, projections by Hansen and others of dangerous climate risk from staying above 350ppm CO2 are not certainties; they are necessarily uncertain (although becoming more likely as temperatures rise).

The analogy to insurance is important but inexact; there is no climate insurance company to which the world can hand 2.5 percent of output, if that is what it costs. There is, however, a need for large-scale investment, both in proven emissions-reducing technologies and in research and development. The role of government in climate policy is not only to set appropriate price signals through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system; the public sector must also guide research on clean energy technologies. Despite free-market mythology to the contrary, this has worked well in the past. Wind power is profitable today as a result of decades of government investment in the United States and Europe. In another arena, the U.S. government essentially invented microelectronics in the 1950s and 1960s: At first, almost all transistors, integrated circuits, and the like were bought by agencies such as the Pentagon and NASA, because no one else could afford them. Just a few decades of massive government purchases of these items turned microelectronics into the premier private-sector success story of the late-20th century, transforming everyone’s life in countless unexpected ways.

The climate crisis challenges us to do it again, to invent the new technologies and industries that will transform life in the mid-21st century and beyond. We know it’s possible: We can afford to protect the climate, and leave a livable world to future generations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Ackerman is an economist specializing in climate change. A prominent critic of conventional economic approaches to climate policy and the abuses of cost-benefit analysis, he has written extensively for academic, policy and general audiences and has directed studies for clients ranging from Greenpeace to the European Parliament and U.S. federal and state agencies. He is also the author of Can We Afford the Future? Economics for a Warming World His other recent projects include The Economics of 350: The Benefits and Costs of Climate Stabilization (E3 Network and Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution (Island Press, 2008).  Ackerman is also a senior economist and director of the Climate Economics Group at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. Center, an independent research affiliate of Tufts University in Somerville, Mass.  He is a founder and steering committee member of Economics for Equity and Environment (the E3 Network) and a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform in Washington, D.C. He is also a senior research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University.

Educating employees about energy efficiency,conservation, recycling, waste reduction and other similar measures benefit not only the companies that institute them, but also the organization’s employees, but also the communities in which they operate.

by Green Economy Post Staff

A new study by the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) finds that environmental and sustainability (E&S) employee education and engagement initiatives help companies achieve a range of business objectives from attracting and retaining employees to boosting the bottom line.

“While in the past, most environmental education programs were primarily for environmental safety and health employees, many companies now realize that to achieve their sustainability goals, they need to involve the entire workforce (or all their employees),” said Diane Wood, president of the National Environmental Education Foundation. “Successful employee engagement programs motivate employees and can be an asset in recruitment and retention.”

But educational programs must compete for resources, so building a strong business case for an E&S education program can be as important as building the program itself. The publication also includes best practices, next steps and resources for making the business case for E&S education.

Best Practices

The following are best practices in employee environmental and sustainabity education that have been identified and successfully implemented.

• Companies should link environmental and sustainability (E&S) education initiatives to key business objectives and frame them in terms of management risks and opportunities.
• Take a top-down, bottom-up and sideways approach when engaging employees. A culture shift has to include everyone, not just those dedicated to sustainability.
• Stress the shift in societal and stakeholder expectations. Sustainability is no longer just “nice to have” and employees are an important resource for addressing and benefiting from this shift.
• Complement education with incentives (e.g., bonuses and awards) to improve environmental performance.
• Build momentum for the E&S actions by recognizing work that is already being done.
• Create E&S education pilot programs that require few resources and measure the impacts of the pilot to build the case for a larger program.
• Regularly report back to employees on how their E&S actions are making a difference.
• Understand that each geographic region has its unique problems and opportunities.

Documentation is Crucial

Documentation is crucial for strengthening the future business case for investment in employee E&S education and engagement.  So, measuring the impacts of E&S education programs.   The National Environmental Education Foundation, makes the following recommendations:

• Gather data by mining and adapting routine surveys of prospective, new and established employees, asking specific questions about E&S education and engagement, and establishing correlations between responses to the questions and outcomes such as satisfaction rates and acceptance of job offers.
• Survey customers on the extent to which their satisfaction is influenced by the environmental
  knowledge of the company’s customer service representatives.
• Correlate measures of employee engagement to environmental results.
• Survey community members and other stakeholders to determine to what extent their perceptions of the company are influenced by employee engagement in environmental and sustainability activities.
• Correlate some measure of education (e.g. training hours) with results relative to operational efficiency improvements.

The publication takes an in-depth look at examples where companies saved money, improved efficiency, built stronger customer relations — or succeeded in doing all three — through E&S education programs, presenting a compelling business case for environmentally literate employees. Company examples indicate that while there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to E&S education, engaging employees at every level of the company is essential to successful initiatives.

Some examples highlighted in the report include:

• Environmental initiatives at Baxter International Inc. totaled nearly $91.1 million in savings and cost avoidance over the last six years.
• Lockheed Martin “Green Teams” improved energy efficiency at company sites nationwide, reduced waste and saved money by better managing the use of lighting and air conditioning. Lighting system upgrades at one facility have saved more than $300,000 and reduced carbon dioxide reductions by 2,511 metric tons.
• A similar employee-led team at eBay’s headquarters encouraged the company to build the largest solar installation in San Jose, Calif., reducing carbon dioxide emissions by more than one million pounds per year and saving the company $100,000 in energy costs – so far.

“When it comes to looking at ways to reduce our footprint, we see a direct correlation between reducing our costs and engaging our employees. The Business Case white paper highlights such correlations,” said Carrie Freeman, corporate sustainability strategist at Intel.

“The case studies in this report demonstrate that employee environmental education and engagement helps a business achieve its sustainability goals while also reducing costs,” said Margaret Lindeman, sustainability strategist at Lockheed Martin.

The white paper is a companion publication to “The Engaged Organization,” released last spring. A survey undertaken as part of the publication found that a majority of companies surveyed (65 percent) value environmental and sustainability knowledge in their employees and that more than three out of four surveyed said that knowledge will increase in importance as a hiring factor within five years.

Visit the National Environmental Education Foundation web site to download  The Business Case for Environmental and Sustainability Employee Education.

The Sustainability Professional: 2010 Competency Survey Report provides insights into what sustainability professionals see as important skills needed and what are their most critical challenges.

by Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

Late last week, the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP) published The Sustainability Professional: 2010 Competency Survey Report. The study, conducted over a 9 month period, sought to answer the question, “What should a sustainability professional know how to do?” A survey tool was administered to nearly 400 sustainability professionals working in the field. This report summarizes the competencies identified as being most critical to the successful performance of professionals working in the field of sustainability.

With so many looking to break into the sustainability, many interested will likely be able to use the study to gain a clearer understanding of what sustainability professionals are called upon to know and do. It could also prove to be a useful resource for those working in sustainability training and education, as well as employers seeking to define sustainability job descriptions.

Check out Considering a Career in CR or Sustainability?

Check out Survey Says Green Professionals are Well Paid, Happy and Have Job Security

The Respondent Profile

Most of the respondents work in North America (79%), with 53 % being male. This group is highly educated with 93% having at least a bachelor’s degree, 60% having a master’s degree, 10% having doctorates and 19% having completed a sustainability certificate. This includes 20% that are currently pursuing some sort of training.

The majority (63%) has three or more years of paid work experience in the field, and 27% have 10 or more years. Consultant make up 36% of the group and 56% work in organizations with fewer than 100 employees. Compensation for 47% of U.S. residents was between $50,000 and $99,999 per year.

What are The Most Important Challenges That Sustainability Professionals Face?

The top two most important issue facing their organizations (or their clients’ organizations) were: 1) promoting an understanding of the value of sustainability (34%), and 2) dealing with climate change and related energy needs (29%).

Gaining the support of management and customers, proving fiscal viability and attracting funding were most often cited as the other very important issues they faced. Also included at the top of the list of competencies needed were change management—dealing with changing business priorities, overcoming resistance to change, redesigning products and services to be more sustainable, and ensuring environmental compliance. Social responsibility performances tended to be less important than environmental concerns.

North American Sustainability Professionals Stress Different Important Core Competencies than Their Counterparts

The study revealed that North American sustainability professionals are more focused on establishing and managing priorities and facilitating or training groups as compared to their non-North American counterparts. North Americans also cite vendor management and financial analysis -specifically ROI (47%), and systems thinking (59%) were more important as more important. Those outside North America were more concerned than North Americans with policy expertise and risk assessment.

Organization Size Impacted Important Core Competencies Cited

Larger organizations seem to value internal communication skills mores as they see it as a stumbling block for implementing sustainability programs. Whereas, smaller organizations are more concerned with external stakeholders and influencing change outside the organization. Sustainability accounting and reporting was cited as extremely important no matter what the size of the organization.

The Impact of Organization Structure on Needed Competencies

The need to develop the business case for sustainability was considered more critical by smaller organizations. Consultants were more concerned with developing business cases and getting buy-in from top management, and benchmarking. Funding for individual initiatives was somewhat more important to consultants and those in government, education and nonprofits than to those in manufacturing/services Those working in non-consulting organizations tended to be more concerned than consultants with educating customers and with staying current with scientific findings.

Innovation is also seen as much more important to consultants and those in manufacturing as not-for-profits (including government and education.) Those working in manufacturing/ services were more likely than those in other industries to think designing or redesigning product and service offerings is very important. Financial analysis/ROI, auditing (GHG, sustainability) and risk assessment were cited as very important by all types of organizations.

A Look at the Soft Skills Needed

Respondents cited soft skills as much more important than hard skills. Respondents said “soft” skills will continue to be needed in the future because they are necessary for bringing about transformational change. The soft skills most often cited as needed for success as a sustainability professional are communication skills (written & verbal). The most critical soft skills for sustainability professionals surveyed include communication with internal and external stakeholders, problem solving and inspiring and motivating others.

Non-consultants felt more strongly than consultants about the importance of networking and
influencing change. Several skills were cited as most important to those in government, education and non-profits: those included flexibility or adaptability, inspiring and motivating others communication with internal stakeholders, and consensus building.

Change Management is a Key Theme

Sustainability professionals across all organization sizes and types cited change management is important. As a result, “soft” skills such as communication, facilitation, consensus building and networking are deemed of especially high value by the group as a whole. Demonstrating financial viability and return on investment are considered by respondents to be important enablers of change.

A Look at the Hard Skills Needed

Other skills were mentioned less often by the group as a whole. Respondents said most hard skills will continue to be needed in the future because they are necessary for enabling a strategic approach, competing in a business climate, are fundamental to change, and/or allow performance tracking. The most important hard skills cited were strategic planning, project management and systems thinking. Scientific expertise and sustainability accounting/ reporting tended to be more important to larger organizations than to smaller ones.

Required Technical Skills are More Industry Specific

With the exception of planning and project management, many hard skills needed seem to vary in importance by industry. The one exception to this rule is in the area of greenhouse gas auditing and action planning. The survey results indicate that organizations in all sectors will need help in managing, mitigating and monitoring greenhouse gases.

A Look Down The Road

Looking ahead five years, researchers found that soft skills are considered important for change and transformation purposes, whether applied inside the organization or in dealings with suppliers and partners. Promoting understanding was expected to decrease in importance in five years, while climate and energy issues were expected to increase in importance in five years.

Proposals for virtual presentations are invited for the Sustainability Virtual Summits to be held in March, September and November of this year. The three summits will feature virtual conferences and exhibitions focusing on sustainability issues pertaining to the Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Smart Business Operations and Smart Infrastructure industry sectors respectively.

The Sustainability Virtual Summits, being organized by G2 Events, Inc., are designed to be very similar to a physical event, but without the cost and trouble of travel, or the associated greenhouse gas emissions.

These events will bring together global corporate visionaries, policy makers, environmental advocacy groups and leading experts to showcase financially profitable practices and strategies that address and mitigate corporate and government impact on long-term health of the earth.

The first summit, to be held on March 30, 2010 (USA time zones), will focus on the ICT industry’s role in facilitating energy efficiency and low-carbon development. Some of the key issues to be discussed include dematerialization opportunities and Smart ICT solutions such as virtualization of resources, efficient cooling techniques and cloud computing.

The theme of the second virtual summit, scheduled for September 14, 2010 (USA time zones), will be Smart Business Operations, that not only contribute to global citizenship and sustainability goals, but also provide competitive advantage to businesses. The preliminary topics that shall be covered in this summit are Smart Supply Chain, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Transportation and Logistics, and Smart Packaging.

The third and final summit of this series, to be held on November 30, 2010 (USA time zones), will focus on the Smart Infrastructure sector. Smart Buildings, Smart Grids, and Smart Water and Sanitation are key issues included in the agenda.

Confirmed speakers at these virtual events include market experts and industry leaders representing leading firms such as Cisco Systems, Danone, France Telecom – Orange Group, Intel Corporation and Hewlett-Packard among others.

Submission Guidelines:

Corporate, academic, nonprofit, and political entities and organizations are encouraged to share and present new ideas, technologies, strategies, practical outcomes, research and case studies in line with conference themes.

Telepresence technology will be used to facilitate interaction and participation between presenters from around the globe.

Presentation proposals can be submitted by completing an online form here.

Participation is also invited from industry leaders, researchers, engineers, scientists, architects, economists, consultants, and policy-makers.

Participation as an attendee is free of charge.

Contact:

Anne Feldmann (PR/Publicity)

Phone: 970-879-8140
Fax: 781-394-7982
Email: Anne@G2events.com

For more detailed information:

For additional participation, sponsorship and registration details, summit agendas as well as a live demo of virtual event environment, visit the Sustainability Virtual Summits website.

Companies are now requiring their suppliers to address carbon management as a core business issue.  A plan to deselect some suppliers in the future for failing to meet carbon management criteria set by the companies.  These organizations are increasinigly developing strategies for engaging with suppliers on carbon related issues amd have emissions or energy reduction plans in place.

Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

According to the second annual CDP Supply Chain Report summarizing the climate change information from 710 suppliers, there is a growing trend among global organizations of requiring that suppliers disclose their green house gas data and to demonstrate GHG management and to take action in order to maintain their business relationships.

Participating companies include:Acer, BAE Systems, Bank of America, Baxter International, Cadbury, Carrefour, Colgate-Palmolive Company, ConAgra Foods, Dell, EMC Corporation, ENEL, FIJI Water, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, H.J. Heinz Company, HP, IBM, Imperial Tobacco Group, Johnson & Johnson, Johnson Controls, Juniper Networks, Kao, L’Oréal, Logica, National Australia Group, Europe, National Grid, Newmont Mining Corporation, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble Company, Reckitt Benckiser, Royal Mail Group, Sony Corporation, Unilever, Vivendi, Vodafone Group.

The majority of CDP Supply Chain members (56%) have stated they actually expect to deselect some suppliers in the future for failing to meet carbon management criteria set by the companies. This is an increase from just 6% of members who would deselect suppliers today for failure to manage carbon. Some also indicate that they intend to develop contracts which require improved carbon management.

”It is clear that some companies are now requiring their suppliers to address carbon management as a core business issue. This is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for the leaders, it is becoming a ‘need to have’ and we expect to see this trend growing across the whole business sector,“ said Paul Dickinson, CEO, CDP.

89% of CDP Supply Chain members have an established strategy to engage with suppliers on carbon related issues.   91% of members have a board level executive responsible for climate change, compared to 80% within the Global 500 constituents. 90% have an emissions or energy reduction plan in place, compared to 51% in the Global 500.**

The report shows that the importance granted by CDP Supply Chain members to managing carbon targets versus classic procurement targets is expected to triple in the next five years.

“We see carbon management as an increasingly important part of supplier engagement. It makes good business sense for us to work with suppliers who understand how climate change is impacting their business and manage these issues properly,” said Brad Minnis, director of Environmental, Health, Safety and Security at Juniper Networks.

However, the report shows that despite the fact that a significant proportion of carbon emissions are typically found in the supply chain, it is still a challenging area for member companies to measure and just 20% report figures for supply chain emissions.

A.T. Kearney partner and study co-leader Daniel Mahler said, “Major corporations are taking carbon reduction seriously and are developing strategies to address carbon emissions in their supply chains. Corporate CEOs and boards of directors are demanding results from company carbon reduction programs not only for the environmental benefits, but for cost-reduction benefits as well. The challenge moving forward is for additional corporations and suppliers to operationalize their carbon-reduction strategies.”

In 2009, of the 710 suppliers disclosing to their customers through the CDP Supply Chain program, 48% were reporting for the first time. The majority (60%) have appointed a board member responsible for climate change and while 56% have a reduction plan, 38% have committed to clear targets; which tend to be short term (majority under two years). Companies are also reporting considerable cost benefits of carbon reduction programs – HP and Allianz report significant commercial benefits in addressing climate change related issues.

Download a full copy of the CDP Supply Chain Report 2010

The European Space Agency is now accepting proposals from young researchers undertaking innovative research projects that are focused on understanding Earth’s systems.  This call for proposals is headlined under the Changing Earth Science Network Initiative.

The Changing Earth Science Network Initiative, which was launched last year accommodates post-doctoral scientists for two years to undertake research projects that address challenges to the ESA’s science strategy for earth observation.

This initiative outlines 25 major scientific challenges in which earth observation may contribute to the better understanding of earth’s systems and how they are affected by changes in our planet.

This program will foster the development of an outstanding community of young scientists in Europe with detailed knowledge of the ESA as well as the ESA’s Earth Observation programs.

The call for proposals was issued on January 29, 2010 and the ESA will be selecting 10 postdoctoral scientists.

Following the ESA’s first call for proposals in 2008 11 programs were selected ranging in components of the earth system including oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere and solid earth.  The first group of selected scientists presented their results at a workshop held at the ESA’s Earth Observation Centre (ESRIN) in Frascati, Italy.

The topics addressed covered cutting-edge research in oceanic, land, atmospheric and solid Earth thematic areas, including improvements in the retrievals of atmospheric carbon dioxide from Envisat’s Sciamachy instrument; assimilation of ocean color data from Envisat’s optical MERIS instrument into biogeochemical ocean models in order to gain a more precise insight into the carbon fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere; and the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar data to understand the geophysical processes leading to the formation of the rift valley in East Africa.

The Changing Earth Science Network was developed as one of the main components of the Support to Science Element (STSE).

Submission Guidelines:

Proposals can be submitted via email to

EOScience@esa.int, including:

• The research proposal (Annex B of the present call);

• A letter of support from the Host Institution supporting the candidate, the project proposal and accepting the conditions of the draft partnership agreement (Appendix 2 of the present call);

• Two additional letters of support from key scientists in the relevant field, supporting the candidate and the scientific proposal;

• A CV of the candidate including a list of publications;

• The financial information in the PSS form provided (Annex C)

Deadline:

The deadline for the proposal submission is 29 March 2010.

For more detailed information:

Visit the STSE website

The call for proposals package can be downloaded from the STSE Documents Page.

Proposals will be selected on the basis of a peer review process by a Scientific Committee. The selection process will be carried out on the basis of the following criteria:

1. Scientific background and experience of the candidate as well as the host institution, including the adequacy of the proposed laboratory facilities, data sets availability and required EO data.

2. Relevance of the proposed work responding to the specific challenges of the Living Planet Program maximising the use of ESA EO assets;

3. Excellence of scientific proposal demonstrating a contribution to science beyond the state of the art and providing a significant advancement towards the achievement of the scientific challenges of the Living Planet program;

4. Adequacy of the proposed methodology, work plan, scientific approach, proposed EO data procurement and available data sets;

5. Impacts of concrete project outputs in terms of scientific results, data sets, products, models and target publications and potential further developments;

After the selection process ESA will send an e-mail only to the selected candidates informing them about the positive result of their application.

Note: Please do not contact the Green Economy Post regarding this opportunity.  We are not affiliated with the sponsoring organizations, and therefore have no additional information. Sometimes the link is changed for the opportunities.  When this happens, go to the home page of the organizers to locate information on the opportunity or contact the organization directly.

If we express our values through our community investment, then to substantiate our authenticity, we need to be consistent in applying those values to our core business.

by Kevin Moss, Head of CSR at BT Americas.

I was honored to be the keynote presenter recently at the PR News 2009 CSR Awards at the National Press Club in DC. The awards program has been running since 2005 with an ever broadening range of awards categories. It is much broader than the PR News title might lead you to expect.

In my keynote I addressed how we can rebuild trust in business. All the trust surveys aside, I find it most notable that three of this year’s Oscar best picture nominations, Avatar, District 9 and Up in the Air have large corporations as their main protagonists. Each of these corporations is portrayed as distant and as societally and environmentally oblivious. If this represents the public perception of corporations, and I think it does, we have a long way to go.

Authenticity is key to trust. We judge whether a person is authentic by the consistency with which they apply their values. I imagine people judge corporations in the same way.

So if we express our values through our community investment, then to substantiate our authenticity, we need to be consistent in applying those values to our core business; our products, our employees, our customers and our public voice as expressed in our brands, advertising and lobbying. My challenge is to the CR practitioner, myself included, is to increase the proportion of time spent in the core business.

I also see a key role for community investment, not just as an end in itself but as a means to increasing sensitivity and awareness amongst our employees that they can take back and incorporate into their jobs. Volunteering is especially important from this perspective. But beware, community investment can undermine authenticity if we do not follow through and apply the same values in our core business.

Lastly, I see a role for social networking to bridge that perceived distance between the company and the stakeholders. Frank and engaging exchanges with corporate executives, as demonstrated by Bill Marriott of Marriott and by Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters, and with our employees, can be one of the best ways to demonstrate authenticity and to bridge the perceived distance between the stakeholder and the corporation.

Please let me know what you think of these ideas.

A recent study by A.T. Kearney indicates that firms with “true commitment to sustainability” outperform industry peers in the financial markets.  Companies that embraced sustainability before it became in vogue, now have the competitive advantage.  These companies increased production volume while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, decreasing water consumption, optimizing packaging volume.

by Jennifer Rice, Principal, Fruitful Strategy

A recent study by global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney indicates that firms with “true commitment to sustainability” outperform industry peers in the financial markets. The study, called Green Winners: The Performance of Sustainability-Focused Companies During the Financial Crisis, found that in 16 of 18 industries, sustainability-focused companies outperformed their peers by 15% in a six-month period. The performance differential translated to an average of $650 million in market cap per company.

The big takeaway for me is seeing that the companies prospering now were the companies who embarked on this journey ten years ago, well before it became a media-worthy item. Now these companies have pulled ahead of the pack in terms of competitive advantage and are building momentum.

The report cited as an example a global consumer packaged goods company that “views sustainability as not just a philanthropic endeavor but a fundamental part of its business strategy.” It began its sustainability efforts more than 10 years ago and has incorporated sustainability practices in every link of the value chain.

And it’s not just about savings.

IBM has generated $500 million in new contract signings in 2 quarters from their Big Green initiative. Clorox is projecting $40 million in first-year sales from its GreenWorks line.General Electric vowed to improve the energy efficiency of its operations by 4% a year and double its revenues from relatively clean products to $20 billion by 2010.

This is a trend that is not going away. If your business hasn’t committed to baking in sustainability (and/or a social-good outcome that’s more directly related to your business) into your business strategy, the mounting data on both consumer expectations and competitive advantage suggest that you will be left behind.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) jobs appear to have been another casualty of the global economic recession. But, the good news is that, like other economic indicators, this one appears to be on the upswing.

by Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

Sustainability Recruiting’s recently releasedCSR Jobs Report shows CSR job postings dropping 68% between Q3 ’08 to Q3 ‘09. The worst of the decline (61%), mirrored the drop in the stock market and occurred between Q3 and Q4 of 2008. CSR job listings declined even further through Q1 ’09, leveling off through most of the year at a low point not seen since mid-2006. Surprisingly, the picture is not all gloom. Q4 ‘09 saw a noticeable 33% up-tick in listings, although it remains to be seen whether this will continue in 2010.

Drawing on Business for Social Responsibility’s (BSR’s) CSR Jobs Page, the industry’s primary resource for non-administrative CSR job postings, the report examines 819 CSR jobs that were posted in the period 2004 – 2009 and identifies several key trends.

CSR gains credibility in corporate sector

Among the most notable findings is the increase in senior-level corporate positions—those with VP and Director titles. Before 2006, none of the job postings had a title of VP or above. According to Ellen Weinreb, SOM 98 and CEO of Sustainability Recruiting, cites the increased value being placed on CSR as a component of corporate strategy as one of the key factors influencing this trend of elevating the importance of positions performing this role.

“The emergence of the VP of CSR and VP of Sustainability titles seems proof of the growing strategic business position of CSR,” said Dave Stangis, Vice President of CSR and Sustainability at Campbell’s Soup.

Optimistic Outlook for Smart Jobseekers

According to Weinreb, there is enormous demand for CSR jobs from jobseekers.

“The catch-22 is that employers require candidates for these positions to have previous experience,” said Weinreb.

“Understanding the inner-workings of the business is critical to success,” says Liz Maw, Executive Director of Net Impact, an international nonprofit organization of professionals and students who are leveraging business to improve the world.

“Jobseekers must “demonstrate experience in driving change. That really is the key success factor,” recommends Stangis.

“More and more employers are broadening the definition of CSR to include not only corporate citizenship, but also a focus on energy and environmental management issues,” said Katie Kross, author of Profession and Purpose: A Resource Guide for MBA Careers in Sustainability.   “I also see employers posting job openings in traditional roles like operations and marketing that include some CSR responsibilities,” she added.

“We encourage jobseekers not to discount a traditional role. They can build relevant experience through our Impact at Work program, which helps them lead change initiatives, regardless of their title,” added Maw.

If you can’t get that internal CSR corporate job you are seeking  Weinreb  offers the following strategies:
• Take a tangentially-related job in another corporate function
• Look for jobs that include some aspect of CSR, even it they don’t have “CSR” in the title
• Develop in-house experience as a change agent building support across teams
• Try looking in the service or independent category

Download the CSR Jobs Report.

View Jobs on Business for Social Responsibility’s (BSR’s) CSR Jobs Page

View CSR Jobs at Sustainability Recruiting

For more resources for finding CSR jobs, visit Sustainability Recruiting’s CSR and Sustainability Job Listing Sites Page.

In the wake of a new report revealing that a clean-energy grant program in the stimulus has paid out more than $1 billion to foreign manufacturers, U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Bob Casey (D-PA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT) urged the Obama administration Wednesday to suspend the program indefinitely until the law can be fixed so that funds only flow to projects that will create jobs in the United States.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the senators pushed for a moratorium on all payouts from a clean-energy grant program until Congress can consider new legislation that they introduced Wednesday.

That new proposal would require that aid flow only to clean-energy projects that rely on materials manufactured in the United States and create the bulk of their jobs here at home, rather than overseas. If approved, the legislation would stop payments to projects like a controversial wind farm in West Texas that is on the verge of receiving $450 million in stimulus funds even though most of the jobs created by it will be in China.

Administration officials have said they do not have the authority to prevent that payment. If the aid goes through, it would be just the latest example of a larger trend, according to an independent report conducted last month. The Investigating Reporting Workshop found that 79 percent of the $2 billion in grants doled out by the clean-energy program in the stimulus so far went to foreign companies.

The four senators said this flow of stimulus dollars overseas must be stopped.

“It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas,” Senator Schumer said. “These wind projects have a lot of merit, but the manufacturing should be happening here, not in China. The administration hasn’t committed to denying this project from receiving funds, so we will act instead. Our domestic clean-energy sector has the potential to emerge as a global leader and it is counterproductive to invest U.S. stimulus funds in Chinese companies rather than our own. We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country’s expense.”

“It’s simple: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act should reinvest in America and help America and American workers recover,” said Senator Casey. “For example, one wind turbine manufacturer in Pennsylvania laid off workers last year because they didn’t have enough orders. Thanks to a Recovery bill project announced two weeks ago, some of those Pennsylvanians will be hired back. If we increase work orders, we can put Americans back to work.”

“We cannot sit idly by while China races to the forefront of clean energy production at the expense of U.S. manufacturing, U.S. jobs, and U.S. energy independence. And we certainly can’t shoot ourselves in the foot by helping to finance Chinese clean energy production.  Taxpayers expect the government to use their dollars to support American jobs. This legislation ensures that will happen,” Senator Sherrod Brown said.

“I voted for the Recovery Act because we need to get our economy turned around and the way we do that is by investing in infrastructure and new technologies. Supporting wind production here at home will help lead to American energy independence while creating good paying jobs,” said Senator Tester.

The $1.5 billion West Texas project took a step forward two weeks ago when the Chinese government gave it final approval. The Chinese-based manufacturer will now begin shipping foreign-made turbines to Texas this month. The project’s organizers have said since November that they will seek to defray up to 30 percent of the project’s cost, or $450 million, with funds authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Schumer has been trying to block the project from receiving any stimulus aid. In November, he sent a letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu, demanding that the project receive no stimulus dollars unless it relied on American-built products rather than the Chinese turbines. The Energy Department responded that it was powerless to stop the project from receiving federal aid.

The project is a joint venture comprised of China’s Shenyang Power Group, a Texas company called Cielo Wind Power and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group. It would build a 648-megawatt wind farm in west Texas, covering 36,000 acres. The electricity generated by this wind farm will be enough to power 135,000 to 180,000 American homes every year.

The senators said the project was certainly worthwhile, but it should not be eligible for stimulus funds since it did not rely on U.S. manufacturing. While the project is anticipated to generate as many as 3,000 jobs in Shenyang, China—which, according to the project’s announcement, will be the main site of the wind turbines construction—its job impact in the United States will be roughly one-tenth that amount. According to the New York Times, the project will only generate 330 jobs in the United States—and 300 of those are temporary positions.

The new legislation unveiled Wednesday would make this project, and others like it that do not have a substantial job impact in the United States, ineligible for stimulus dollars.

Under the so-called “Buy American” provision contained in the ARRA, government projects financed in part by the stimulus must, with few exceptions, rely on iron, steel and manufactured goods produced in the United States. But the provision does not impose a similar requirement on private projects, such as the proposed wind farm in West Texas, that seek stimulus grants. The proposal announced by the four senators today would apply the “Buy America” standard to all renewable energy projects, no matter public or private, that seek stimulus funds. The proposal also would ensure that grant money is distributed only to renewable energy projects that preserve and create jobs in the United States.

The new push to improve the stimulus was hailed by leaders from two top U.S. manufacturing unions.

“The efforts of Senator Schumer and his colleagues will help make sure that the promise of green jobs doesn’t turn out to be just another empty promise.   Energy is critical to America’s future and we should ensure that domestic manufacturers help fuel the future development of this sector,” said Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steel Workers (USW).

“Stimulus money should be targeted at creating jobs here at home, not in China. We commend Senator Schumer and his colleagues for providing much needed legislation which will lead to closing the door on projects like those that led to the Texas wind farm fiasco,” said International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers President, R. Thomas Buffenbarger.

A copy of the senators’ letter to Geithner appears below. A version of the letter was also sent to Chu.

The Honorable Timothy F. Geithner

Secretary of the Treasury                            
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20220

March 2, 2009

Dear Secretary Geithner,

A recent report highlights the distressing fact that Recovery Act funds are being used to finance wind and other clean-energy projects that source major components and create manufacturing jobs overseas.  We propose to stop Treasury from using American taxpayer dollars to support foreign manufacturers and foreign jobs, and respectfully request that you place a moratorium on distribution of section 1603 grants until our legislation becomes law.

The purpose of the Recovery Act was to jump-start the U.S. economy to create and save jobs – American jobs.  Our bill, the American Renewable Energy Jobs Act, would do just that by amending the Recovery Act to ensure that stimulus funds are distributed only to clean-energy projects that preserve and create jobs in the United States.  The legislation also would make the section 1603 grants subject to Buy American provisions.

We are deeply concerned that the United States is falling behind our trading partners in wind and other clean-energy investment.  A February 8^th report by Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop shows that 73 percent of the $1.9 billion in section 1603 wind-energy grants distributed by the U.S. government since September 1, 2009, have gone to foreign-owned companies.  The majority of turbines purchased with that money have been built by foreign manufacturers – of the 28 wind farm projects that have received grants to date, 1219 of the 1807 wind turbines installed were built by foreign manufacturers.  Most of economic activity created by investing in wind energy comes from the turbine manufacturing, which means that the bulk of the wind-related manufacturing jobs financed by section 1603 grant money are being created overseas.  This is not the intended use of Recovery Act funds.

Our legislation would help reverse this trend by ensuring U.S. government support is focused on the domestic clean-energy industry.  Companies located in New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere across the United States are fully capable of manufacturing the range of clean-energy components, and U.S. wind farms and other clean-energy projects financed with stimulus money should be buying American-built parts.

A critical Recovery Act priority is investment in the domestic renewable energy industry, not investment in foreign manufacturers.  We believe Treasury has the discretion to consider domestic job preservation and creation when distributing section 1603 grants for wind and other clean-energy projects.  Grant programs by their very nature require discretion because there are limited funds available.  If Treasury chooses not to exercise its discretion, we respectfully request that you defer distribution of section 1603 grants until after our legislation becomes law.

Thank you for your time and attention to this important issue.

Sincerely,

Charles E. Schumer, United States Senator

Robert P. Casey, Jr. , United States Senator

Sherrod Brown, United States Senator

Jon Tester, United States Senator

The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world’s first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?

by David Biello, Editor of Scientific American   – Yale Environment 360

On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning. A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant’s complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant’s owner, American Electric Power.

But just beyond Sporn’s waste ponds stands the steaming cooling tower of American Electric’s Mountaineer Power Plant, which burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to produce steam in a single massive boiler and generate up to 1,300 megawatts of electricity. Roiling white water vapor billows out of its 100-story smokestack, a visible sign of the scrubbers and other technology that remove as much as 98 percent of the plant’s sulfur dioxide emissions and 90 percent of its nitrogen oxides.

And to top it off, since October, an oversized chemistry set employs baker’s ammonia (ammonium carbonate) to strip more than 90 percent of the CO2 from a small portion of the Mountaineer plant’s waste gas and turn it into ammonium bicarbonate. Heat and pressure in another part of the carbon-capture machine turn that back into baker’s ammonia, delivering a nearly pure stream of CO2 gas that is compressed into a liquid and pumped into two wells that drop 1.5 miles beneath the earth. There, the captured CO2 is stored permanently between grains of rock.

If Sporn represents the dirty past of coal-fired electricity generation, Mountaineer is the future — the first power plant in the world to both capture and store underground any part of its CO2 emissions. At this point, Mountaineer stores less than 2 percent of the more than 500,000 metric tons of CO2 pumped out each month by the power plant, which generates enough electricity for 1 million American homes.

So does Mountaineer mean that coal has a future?

President Barack Obama seems to think so, even as he continues to push for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by more than 80 percent by mid-century. To meet that goal, Obama said during his State of the Union address in January, the U.S. must not only develop renewable sources of energy but must also invest in clean coal technologies. A week later, the Obama administration created an interagency task force to develop a federal strategy by August for carbon capture and storage (CCS), the underlying principle of so-called “clean coal.” The goal is to make carbon capture and storage widespread within a decade.

In fact, the administration wants at least five demonstration projects to be in operation by 2016. After all, the U.S. gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from burning coal. “If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future,” Obama said in a speech to the nation’s governors on Feb. 3.

The technology exists to extract CO2 at coal-burning power plants. The main questions now are cost and safety. Storing liquid CO2 far below the ground provokes a deep unease in some people, who worry that a sudden release could end in asphyxiation as the liquid turns to gas when it rises to the surface. It’s also not necessarily easy to find a geologic formation — or abandoned oil and gas wells — that will safely store the greenhouse gas.

And, ultimately, CCS will do one thing for sure: raise electric bills. In some regions, adding today’s CCS technology would double the cost of electricity and stretch the financial resources of utilities.

Nevertheless, Mountaineer represents the first small-scale demonstration project to integrate both carbon capture and storage, and American Electric Power may receive $334 million in federal funds to scale up the project to capture 20 percent of the plant’s CO2 emissions.

The Obama administration also has resurrected a planned CCS project known as Futuregen, abandoned by the Bush administration in 2008. A consortium of countries, utilities, and companies with an interest in CCS — ranging from China to coal giant Peabody Energy — has pledged $400 million to build the plant in Mattoon, Ill., with the federal government covering the rest of the $1.5 billion cost.

The proposed plant would first turn coal into gas, and the gas combusted to spin a turbine to produce electricity. The result of this technology — known as integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) — is expected to be the removal of roughly 90 percent of the CO2 and almost all of the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from the power plant’s emissions.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that such an IGCC plant would produce electricity at a cost of $103 per megawatt-hour, compared to just $63 per megawatt hour for a pulverized coal-fired power plant without CO2 capture. That math would change if the U.S. Congress one day places a price on carbon dioxide. Various U.S. national laboratories and research universities — as well as the companies commercializing the technology — are striving to reduce that cost further, to as low as just $10 per metric ton of CO2 captured, says CO2 sequestration project leader Rajesh Pawar of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Despite the costs, utilities are moving forward with carbon capture and storage at existing and new coal-fired power plants. The primary driver seems to be the reality of governments eventually placing a cost on carbon dioxide emissions, both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Duke Energy has partnered with China’s Huaneng Group to develop carbon capture and storage technology and is considering a plan to capture 18 percent of the CO2 from its planned 630 megawatt, $2.35 billion IGCC plant in Edwardsport, Ind. Carbon capture and storage “is going to cost us money,” says Monte Atwell, general manager of General Electric’s gasification group, which designed the IGCC technology at Edwardsport. But, he added, “That plant is going to work. Failure is not an option.”

Oklahoma-based Tenaska aims to build a $3.5 billion IGCC power plant in Taylorsville, Ill. that would capture 50 percent of its CO2 emissions, and the Erora Group is planning a similar power plant in Henderson County, Ky. Existing power plants are also getting into the act, including the Southern Company, which plans to add its own chemistry set — known as amine scrubbers, which employ a different compound to capture the CO2 — to a power plant near Mobile, Ala.

CCS projects also are moving ahead in Europe. In the vineyards of Jurancon in southeastern France, a project to integrate both CO2 capture and storage is now complete. Last month, an old oil-fired boiler there was converted to burn natural gas in pure oxygen — so-called oxyfuel — and thereby create a relatively pure stream of CO2 that can be siphoned off and stored. The Lacq project will transport roughly 60,000 metric tons of CO2 per year 17 miles to a depleted natural gas field for storage.

The engineering firm, Alstom, which supplied the technology at Lacq, has installed an oxyfuel boiler for a coal-fired power plant in Germany, known as Schwarze Pumpe. That plant also demonstrates, however, one of the main challenges of carbon capture and storage: acceptance from the people who would have to live over the stored CO2. Plans to store the greenhouse gas from Schwarze Pumpe in a nearby natural gas field have foundered on resistance from the local government. A similar CO2 storage effort by Shell in the Netherlands has also been stopped by public resistance from the town of Barendrecht. Residents there fear a leak or declining property values as the ground deep beneath their feet literally fills up with CO2.

Nor are those concerns confined to Europe. “It’s supposed to be better down there than in the air,” says Mayor Scott Hill of the town of Racine, Ohio, directly across the river from the Mountaineer and Sporn power plants. “I wonder what happens long-term… You know, they just tell you what you want to hear.”

Nevertheless, experts from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the International Energy Agency have identified carbon capture and storage as a necessary technology to combat climate change, particularly in developing countries like China, which meets most of its growing demand for electricity by building coal-fired power plants. The Chinese government, for its part, is partnering with its largest coal supplier, Australia, to build several demonstration projects, including one in Beijing that uses an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a power plant that produces both heat and electricity. And ground has been broken on China’s version of FutureGen, dubbed GreenGen. The 650-megawatt, IGCC power plant is now under construction and could begin storing CO2 in depleted oil fields near the city of Tianjin as soon as 2015.

“Even with the most optimistic [projections] on renewables and nuclear, you still have 60 percent fossil fuels by 2030 with massive emissions,” said Philippe Paelinck, director of CO2 business development at Alstom. “If CCS technology is not accepted by the public, we will not be able to arrive at the necessary levels of emissions — and those are zero for the power sector by 2050.”

After all, the coal-fired power plants already built or planned in just the first 10 years of the 21st century would end up emitting more carbon dioxide in the next 25 years — 660 billion metric tons — than the 524 billion metric tons that have been emitted since the dawn of the Industrial Age in 1751, notes George Peridas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a properly selected storage site would safely stow away 99 percent of the CO2 generated by a coal-burning power plant for at least 1,000 years.

But even if all that CO2 is captured and stored, coal will not be entirely clean, whether because of the impacts of the mountaintop removal mining that provides some of the fuel or the toxic ash that burning coal leaves behind. The ash ponds at the Sporn power plant, just over a grassy berm from Mountaineer, have been identified as a “high hazard” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Mountaineer has captured and stored more than 3,000 metric tons of CO2 in the Copper Ridge dolomite formation since Oct. 1, and the company aims to capture as much as 100,000 metric tons a year in the future. “As with any new technology, it’s had its ups and downs,” says Gary Spitznogle, the project’s manager at AEP. “[But] it’s run long enough that we’re confident it works.”

High-profile leaders gathered to discuss opportunities in the world of environmental capital at the Eco:nomics Conference, and the identify what the best practices where when applying green marketing.  The include: looking for the “low-hanging fruit” for quicker ROI, giving customers reasons to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors, making the message personal by explaining how a consumer’s purchase has direct environmental results, and avoiding a hard sell on environmental benefits.

by Sofia Ribeiro, Founder and co-owner of Kiwano Marketing

The Eco:nomics Conference, one of the most popular conferences in the green industry, took place a few weeks ago in Santa Barbara, California. High-profile leaders from Walt Disney, RecycleBank, Yale, GE and The Climate Group, as well as Wall Street Journal’s editors, got together to talk about the real risks and opportunities in the fast-changing world of environmental capital.

One of the topics discussed was green marketing and best practices. These were the main outcomes:

What works

- Companies should focus on improving their own energy efficiency, while emphasizing benefits to local communities. Look for the “low-hanging fruit” for quicker ROI.

- Companies should give customers reasons to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours.

- When it comes to green marketing, provide information about a product’s environmental benefits close to the point of purchase. Make the message personal by explaining how a consumer’s purchase has direct environmental results.

- When providing information to stakeholders, avoid a hard sell on environmental benefits. Instead, engage stakeholders in a dialogue.

- In green marketing, explain the benefits to the environment as part of a bigger value proposition.

- Consider how waste can be an opportunity, not a cost or liability.

- Get a double whammy by undertaking a project that will boost productivity at the same time as cutting emissions.

- When working with nongovernmental organizations, there must be a shared understanding of the goals and constraints of a partnership, with both sides understanding and respecting the rules of engagement.

- To get a project off the ground, consider new forms of financing, both public and private. For instance, it is possible to add solar panels at no upfront cost using a power purchase agreement (PPA).

What doesn’t work

- Participants suggested that the government should not be put in a position “to pick winners and losers” for any technology or business process. Instead, the government should help develop technology-neutral standards.

- Companies cannot use uncertainty over government action on climate change as an excuse to stop innovating.

- Firms cannot simply talk about being green. Sustainability must become part of a company’s DNA.

- Avoid politicizing sustainability. Instead, explain the economics behind adopting energy efficiency and reducing environmental impacts.

- When working with nongovernmental organizations, do not strike a deal that has no substance. Be sure to carefully consider the people and resource needs of a partnership.

- For best results when financing energy efficiency or other environmental projects, the market requires more certainty in government policy.

Are there any green marketing practices that you’ve seen working that are not featured in this article? Share your thoughts below.

Ceres has released the first comprehensive assessment and ranking of water disclosure practices of 100 publicly-traded companies in eight key sectors exposed to water-related risks: beverage, chemicals, electric power, food, homebuilding, mining, oil and gas, and semiconductors. The report highlights best practices, key gaps and trends in water reporting and lays out a set of recommendations for companies and investors.

Despite growing water-scarcity risks in many parts of the world, the vast majority of leading companies in water-intensive industries have weak management and disclosure of water-related risks and opportunities, according to a first-ever report issued recently by the Ceres investor coalition, the financial services firm UBS and financial data provider Bloomberg.

The report evaluates and ranks water disclosure practices of 100 publicly traded companies in eight key sectors exposed to water-related risks. The report shows that many companies are not including material water risks and performance data in their financial filings, nor are they providing local-level water data, particularly in the context of facilities in water-stressed regions.

Using a scoring scale of 0 to 100, the three highest scoring companies were UK beverage company Diageo, Swiss mining company Xstrata and U.S. electric power company Pinnacle West (owner of Arizona Public Services) with 43 points, 42 points and 38 points, respectively. Eighty of the 100 companies scored fewer than 30 points.

“Water is integral to the global economy. Whether you’re in California or China, clean potable water is an absolute must for sustaining communities and sustaining economic growth,” said Jack Ehnes, chief executive officer of the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). “This report makes clear that companies are not providing investors with the kind of information they need to understand the risks and opportunities posed by water scarcity.”

With analytical support from UBS, the report evaluates the quality, depth and clarity of water risk disclosure in both voluntary and mandatory corporate reporting through June 2009. The data for the report was provided by Bloomberg’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data and analytics service. The report assesses companies in eight key sectors: beverage, chemicals, electric power, food, homebuilding, mining, oil and gas and semiconductors.

“We chose sectors where water security concerns are likely to have a material impact on business, whether through regulatory, legal or reputational constraints that in some cases can go so far as to threaten a firm’s very ‘license to operate’,” said Julie Hudson, global head of SRI and Sustainability Research at UBS Investment Bank. “It is clear that any threat to water security could have a significant impact on the bottom-line of such companies.”

The report scored the companies based on five key categories of disclosure: water accounting, risk assessment, direct operations, supply chain and stakeholder engagement.    The mining sector scored highest overall, followed by the beverage industry. Companies in the homebuilding sector had the lowest overall scores.

Only 21 companies disclose targets to reduce water use, and even fewer – just 15 companies – had goals to reduce wastewater discharge.  Only 17 companies’ report local-level water data and only a handful provide the information in the context of operations in water stressed regions.

Among the key company scores:

The report comes as rising populations, rapid economic growth in developing countries; climate change and growing regulation are triggering growing water availability concerns in the U.S and abroad. The report cites numerous examples where impacts are already being felt by vulnerable industry sectors, including:

• In 2009, water shortages in California devastated the state’s agricultural industry, leading to an estimated loss of 21,000 jobs and more than $1 billion in revenues.
• During the 2007-08 drought in Georgia, a severe reduction in hydropower generation due to low water levels forced electric power firm Southern Co. to buy $33 million in fossil fuel-based energy.
• Mining company Newmont faced protests by thousands of local residents near its gold mine in Peru due to water concerns that led the company to relinquish access to 3.9 million ounces of gold reserves in 2004.

The report comes at a time of increasing pressure from investors for improved corporate disclosure of environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks that they face. On Jan 27, in response to investor requests, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued formal “interpretive guidance” clarifying the type of information that companies should be disclosing regarding material climate change risks and opportunities, including those relating to water-availability risk.

The report builds on the SEC’s guidance with specific recommendations for companies to improve their water-related disclosure. It recommends that companies:

• include material water risk factors and performance data in their financial filings;
• provide water performance data broken down to the facility level for operations in water-stressed regions;
• outline actions and policies for assessing and managing water risks, including quantified targets for reducing wastewater and water use;
• disclose how they are collaborating with stakeholders and suppliers on water risks, including setting performance goals for key supply chains;
• Outline specific strategies for developing water-related products with strong market potential in a water-constrained world.

The report also recommends that investors:

• engage the companies they own in water-intensive sectors about how they are assessing and disclosing water risks and related performance information;
• ask their asset managers to assess and engage companies on water and other ESG risks and opportunities– and make this a stipulation in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and annual performance reviews;
• Support investor initiatives, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment’s work with the CEO Water Mandate, to achieve increased water disclosure.

Download The full report: Murky Waters? Corporate Reporting on Water Risk.

A new report released by independent research firm, Verdantix, explains why firms are floundering with carbon management and putting the future of the business at risk due to flawed governance and strained business processes.  It warns that unless CEOs take ownership of carbon management as a business transformation challenge their firms will fail to achieve absolute reductions in CO2 emissions.

by Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

According to a new report release by independent research firm, Verdantix, unless CEOs take ownership of carbon management as a business transformation challenge, their firms will fail to achieve absolute reductions in CO2 emissions.  While hundreds of companies have implemented sustainability programs designed to reduce CO2 emissions, surprisingly, very few have been successful.    One fatal flaw with many carbon management strategies is that that it is handled like a social responsibility issue.  Verdantix advises that world class carbon management requires the appointment of a Chief Sustainability Officer, a cross-functional strategy for reductions with a 2020 target, coordinated business process changes and an integrated carbon management technology platform.

“Dumping carbon management responsibility on CSR Directors without providing them with the authority or budget to execute dooms many carbon reduction plans,” warned Peter Charville-Mort, the Verdantix Analyst who led the study. “Evidence of failure includes CSR and energy managers who don’t get the opportunity to explain carbon issues to senior execs, decision-makers who struggle with terrible energy data, unachievable CO2 reduction goals and initiatives that progress at a snail’s pace due to insufficient staff and funds.”

The Verdantix report, Best Practices Carbon Management, provides detailed advice on the development and implementation of a carbon business transformation plan based on four best practice strategies uncovered based on interviews with 33 industry experts.  They site the following organizations, as having already harvested the benefits of carbon management and carbon accounting;  BAE Systems, BHP Billiton, BP, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company, HP, Proctor & Gamble, SAP and Wal-Mart they cite as having success with their carbon management programs.

To achieve absolute CO2 reductions year-on-year firms need to:

Strengthen governance to deliver transformational change.  Dumping a broad, carbon-related change program on the CSR Director is doomed to fail. Best-in-class carbon management requires a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) with a small Program Management Office that quantifies value and risk, co-ordinates initiatives and engages stakeholders. The CSO should be picked from a general management role internally.
Create a 2020 strategy for carbon management. CEOs first need to get the right people on the bus – with the CSO in the driving seat – and then buy into the carbon journey to 2020. Post-2020 firms need a transformation vision due to much tighter regulation and intense customer pressure for sustainability credentials.

Design cross-functional process changes across energy, operations and finance. Ongoing cuts in carbon emissions require a portfolio of projects such as building management systems and electric vehicle fleet trials. To succeed with multiple, simultaneous changes firms need a program based on granular energy and fuel data, financial analysis of projects and assessment of unintended consequences.

Implement integrated carbon management systems technology. To reduce carbon emissions firms need accurate, timely and complete data on energy and fuel consumption. World class carbon management requires not just energy and carbon software,  but also metering systems that track energy consumption or refrigerant leakage at the asset level.

“Absolute reductions in CO2 emissions require transformational change across governance, strategic thinking and process redesign. But today, firms only achieve incremental change.” added Verdantix Director, David Metcalfe. “Time is running out for CEOs to act before the jaws of GHG compliance regimes and competitive pressures on sustainability close around them. Seventy-six per cent of the global industry expert panel believes weak carbon management will pose a material risk by 2012.”

Women’s History Month is here! Let’s take a look at some of the women who are shaping wind and solar energy as renewables plays an expanding role in all our lives.

by Jeremy Gross, Green Economy Post

Women’s History Month began in 1978 as “Women’s History Week” in Sonoma County, California. Then in 1981, Congress passed a resolution that made the history week a national event. Finally, in 1987, Congress expanded the celebration to a month, officially declaring March as Women’s History Month.

At Green Economy Post, in honor of Women’s History Month, we celebrate women who are making great strides in the green economy and renewable energy – areas which will continue to have a tremendously positive impact in all our futures.

Here are 10 women who are players in our renewable energy focused future:

Marlene Brown is an Electrical Engineer and a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs. Marlene is a former President of the New Mexico Solar Power Association (NMSEA), and is currently on the Board of Directors. She has worked with photovoltaic (PV) systems for over 15 years, installing hundreds of systems throughout world.  She has also taught solar energy installation classes for over 10 years and spends many hours promoting renewable energy technology as a career choice for women.  Using an all female class, she put photovoltaics on her house in May 2004.  Marlene was the 2009 Winner of the American Solar Energy Society’s “Women in Solar” award.

Katherine Kent has been President of the Solar Store since 1998. The Solar Store provides both remote and grid tie solar energy systems for rural and urban homeowners.  Katherine earned a BS in Chemical Engineering, an MS in Nuclear and Energy Engineering, and an MBA! She is also a licensed professional engineer in Arizona, a Certified Energy manager, and has commercial and residential Arizona contracting licenses in electrical and plumbing with solar.  Katherine has received numerous awards throughout her career: the Department of Energy’s presented her with the Energy Innovation award for work on passive cooling strategies for desert climates; she was named 1995’s Distinguished New Engineer by the Society of Women’s Engineer’s; and was named the 2007 Woman in Solar Energy by the American Solar Energy Society.

Alison Kwok, AIA, Ph.D., LEED AP, is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene where she teaches design studios, seminars in climatic design, lighting, and building performance in addition to classes in environmental technology.  Her current research interests include thermal comfort, air movement patterns in naturally-ventilated spaces, physical building performance measurement, and environmentally-responsible design.  Over the years, Alison has encouraged her students to study passive solar design through case study investigations and she received the American Solar Energy Society’s 2008 WISE (Women in Solar Energy) Award.

Dr. Jan Hamrin is founder and president of the Center for Resource Solutions, a national nonprofit working to fight climate change by building policies and consumer-protection mechanisms in renewable energy, greenhouse gas reductions and energy efficiency.  Jan has served the Commission for Environmental Cooperation as an advisor to on renewable energy policy issues, and the G-8 Renewable Energy Task Force.  She led a team towards designing the implementation of the California RPS program and developing a western renewable energy tracking system and a tracking system association for North America.  Jan has a Ph.D. in Ecology, with a focus on public policy evaluation of environmental and energy programs, from the University of California, Davis.  She also has Masters degrees in Public Administration and Consumer Science from U.C. Davis as well as a B.S. from the University of New Mexico.  Jan received the “Green Power Pioneer” award from the Department of Energy and Women of Wind Energy’s 2007 Woman of the Year Award.

Jan Blittersdorf is CEO and President of NRG Systems, a wind measurement systems manufacturer that she joined in 1987 as CFO and vice president.  In 2006, Jan was the first woman to be recognized as the Wind Woman of the Year by WoWE (Women of Wind Energy), and is currently on the WoWE’s Board of Directors.  Additionally, Jan is a member of the Audit Committee for the American Wind Energy Association. She is also on the Board of Directors for Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, on the Advisory Boards for the University of Vermont School of Business and Vermont Technical College, as well as a member of the Business Advisory Council for the Vermont Speaker of the House.  Jan received bachelor’s degrees in nursing and human development from the University of Vermont.

Lisa M. Daniels is the Executive Director and founder of Windustry, an organization that promotes renewable energy solutions and empowers communities to develop and own wind energy assets.  She has been providing wind energy information and assistance to farmers, ranchers, elected officials, rural utilities and other interested groups since 1995.  Lisa leads Windustry’s contracts with the US Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is a Wind Powering America partner. She serves on the American Wind Energy Association Community Wind Work Group Steering Committee, and the National Wind Coordinating Committee’s Steering Committee.  Lisa is also a founding member and on the Board of Directors for Women of Wind Energy (WoWE).  The Wind Powering America program honored her in 2004 with the Chicago Regional Office Wind Advocacy Award for regional leadership, creativity, and commitment to wind energy development – and also in 2005 for her work with the Agriculture Outreach Team.

Karen Conover has over 20 years of experience with wind energy technology and other renewable energy applications.  She co-founded Global Energy Concepts (GEC) in 1994, growing to 100 employees and two offices.  GEC was acquired in 2008 by DNV as part of the Cleaner Energy group and is currently the Director of Wind Business and Strategy Development.  Her work includes wind resource assessment, project design, technical due diligence, site selection, feasibility studies, financial and economic analysis, bid preparation and evaluation, project development, policy evaluations, training, testing, construction oversight, performance evaluation, and O&M planning.  Karen has been an active American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) board member since 1995 where she was the first woman and also the youngest person appointed to the board. She was also named WoWE’s 2009 Woman of the Year.  Karen holds an M.S. in Energy Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science from Duke University.

Rachel Shimshak has been the Director of the Renewable Northwest Project (RNP) since its inception in 1994. Under her leadership, RNP has supported the Northwest’s implementation of more than 2,700 MW of wind, geothermal, and solar projects.  In 2005, she was chosen by the Governor of Oregon to represent the state on the Western Governor’s Association Clean and Diversified Energy Advisory Committee, and she was chosen by the four Northwest Governors to serve on the Comprehensive Review of the Northwest Energy System in 1996.  She has served on the Boards of several, non-profit, clean energy and educational organizations and is currently the Secretary of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Rachel was also named WoWE’s 2008 Woman of the Year.

In the wind technology field since May 1994, Trudy Forsyth is currently a Senior Project Leader for the National Wind Technology Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).  Trudy is also the NREL liaison with the AWEA Small Wind Turbine Committee, which wrote and published the AWEA Small Wind Turbine Industry Roadmap, a multi-year strategy for the small wind industry.  Trudy is currently part of the National Organizing Committee for ASES 2009, is a member of the Small Wind Certification Council, chairs the ASES Small Wind Division, and serves on the steering committee for Women of Wind Energy.  She received an NREL 2003 Staff Award for Outstanding Community and Professional Service and special recognition from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council for her strategies to promote the use of renewable energy.  Trudy has a B.S. and M.S. in  Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Denver.

Sarah Wright is the Founder and Executive Director of Utah Clean Energy (UTC), a non-profit public interest organization working to build a new clean energy economy.  Sarah also serves on the Governor’s Energy Advisory Council and the Blue Ribbon Advisory Council on Climate Change.  She was previously an environmental consultant focused on occupational health and ambient air quality permitting.  She won the 2009 WoWE Rising Star award for her accomplishments in promoting wind, renewable energy and efficiency within the state of Utah.  Sarah holds a B.S. in Geology from Bradley University, and an M.S. in Public Health from the University of Utah.

Who else would you like to acknowledge?  Please leave us a note below to celebrate other women in renewable energy.

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After a banner year in 2008 of investments directed to capital-intensive technologies like solar and wind, US venture capitalists backed away from that plan in 2009. So where are they putting their money now? Where the fastest payback is likely to be. New analysis shows a surge of investments in energy efficiency solutions —such as smart grid, and commercial and residential energy management.

by Debbie Van Der Hyde, Green Economy Post

US venture capital investment in clean technologies dropped by half in 2009, and shifted away from capital-intensive technologies to energy efficiency solutions, according to a new analysis released by Ernst & Young LLP.

Investment in 2009 reached $2.6 billion in 193 financings rounds, a decline of 50 percent in terms of dollars and 16 percent in terms of deals compared to the record investment levels of 2008. The transition can be tracked readily in final quarter numbers, which shows a lower dollar amount spread over more deals. Compared to Q3 2009, venture capital investment decreased 45 percent to $564.5 million in Q4 2009 while the number of deals climbed 21 percent to 62.

“These results reflect the easing of an investment cycle largely driven by the significant capital demands of solar companies and a shift toward energy efficiency products with lower funding requirements and potentially faster commercialization,” says John de Yonge, Ernst & Young LLP, Associate Director, Americas Cleantech Network.

Investments Move Toward Smart Grid, Energy Management Solutions
In 2009, the number of financing rounds in the Energy Efficiency category—encompassing technology areas such as smart grid, and residential and commercial energy management solutions—grew in absolute terms by 11 percent to 61, making it the number one area of clean technology deal activity.
The Energy Efficiency category share of total financing activity in 2009 rose from 24 to 32 percent.  At the same time, the share of financing rounds directed to the more capital intensive Energy/Electricity Generation category fell from 30 to 18 percent.  Similarly, the share of deals going to Alternative Fuels declined from 13 to 8 percent.

“Energy efficiency is in the sweet spot of many venture capital investors in terms of skill sets and funding parameters, particularly given its basis in information technology.  Consequently, we may see investor participation in clean technology broaden,” says de Yonge.

Investment in Top Clean Technology Categories
The Energy Efficiency category received the most US venture capital investment in Q409, with $252.8 million and 22 deals, compared to $133.7 million and 14 deals in Q309. This category raised $593.3 million for all of 2009.  The largest deal of Q409 in Energy Efficiency—and across all clean technology segments—was the $105.0 million investment in Silver Spring Networks Inc, a provider of networking infrastructure and services for smart grids, based in Redwood City, CA.

The Energy/Electricity Generation category garnered $118.5 million with 11 deals in Q409, down from the $316.5 million invested in eight deals in the prior quarter; $654.6 million was invested in this category in 2009.  The largest deal in Q409 was the $38 million raised by Nordic Windpower Holdings Inc., based in Berkley, CA.

The Industry-Focused Products and Services category raised $76.7 million in Q409 with 11 deals and $608 million throughout 2009. The funding in this segment was led by the transportation industry, which raised $33.8 million in Q409 and $362.7 million for the year, propelled by investments such as the $82.5 million in the electric car company Tesla based in San Carlos, CA.

Clean Technology Market Drivers Beyond Venture Capital
The US government continues to serve as an influential clean technology investor. Under the Section 48C Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, $2.3 billion was recently awarded to 183 clean technology manufacturing projects in 43 states.

The US Patent and Trademark Office is further supporting government commitments to clean technology solutions by examining certain green technology applications to reduce the time required to patent these technologies by an average of one year.

US public markets investment in clean energy totaled $2.8 billion in 2009, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.  With capital markets showing signs of improvement, three clean technology companies recently filed to raise up to $500 million in initial public offerings, according to Thomson Reuters. The largest transaction is expected to be the offering by Solyndra, Inc., which anticipates raising $300 million.

US clean technology merger and acquisition activity reached 53 transactions with a disclosed value of $3.5 billion, according IHS Herold. Nearly half of this activity took place in Q4 2009, which saw 22 transactions with a disclosed value of $1.7 billion. One notable fourth quarter deal is the acquisition of Clipper Windpower by United Technologies Corporation for $327.4 million.

While women are more eco aware than men, they are are underrepresented  in green jobs.  This includes jobs created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  However, there are a growing number of programs that are designed to address these inequities.

by Claire Morgenstern, Content and Communications Manager, The Conservation Law Foundation

A report by the U.N. recently released  found that women eat more vegetables, use less fuel for travel, and are more likely to buy eco-friendly products than men. Yet in the biofuel and energy sectors, women comprise only 18.7 and 7.6 percent, respectively, of the total workforce in those industries. Moreover, the numbers for minority women were even lower—only 4 percent of green jobs are held by African-American or Latino women, according to a study by the Women of Color Policy Network.

What gives?

“What we’re seeing now is result of historic labor segmentation where women are underrepresented in fields considered green—bioengineering, construction et cetera—for a long time,” said C. Nicole Mason, Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network. “When we look at administrative efforts to create jobs and who those jobs go to, women are left out of those fields.”

In other words, most of the green jobs available—positions in the bio fuels, green building, energy, and transportation industries—require employees from fields that are male-dominated, from agriculture and forestry to electrical engineers and metal workers.

That includes those created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which has allotted $200 billion for programs related to the creation of green jobs, according to the Green Equity Toolkit, a report recently issued by the Applied Research Center. The Toolkit provides a blueprint for the steps communities should take to ensure gender and race equality in the creation of their local green-collar workforce.

So why can’t more women get into these fields? It’s not that simple. When those green jobs become available, it’s employees already working in those fields, who are mostly male, who will find out about those positions and apply for them, and who already have the training to fulfill the duties of the job.

Read our post: The Green Economy – An Opportunity for Women to Excel

As a result, women, particularly single women and their families, the group hardest hit by the recession, are not competitive applicants for these positions. In addition, women tend to have a different set of needs than men do to make an employment opportunity a viable option for them—for example, the availability of childcare of the accessibility of the job site via public transportation—even if green job training is available.

“On the local level, women don’t have institutional support to go through green job training,” said Yvonne Yen Liu, Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center and co-author of the Green Equity Toolkit. “What the toolkit does is to encourage communities to identify participation goals—the types of people they want to reach through creating green jobs.

For example, a lot of money is available to create green jobs as a ‘path out of poverty,’ but if you don’t offer something basic like childcare, women can’t participate. Single women-headed households have been the hardest hit by the recession. Women of color, women receiving food stamps or cash assistance—those types of participation goals help insure that more women are included.”

Both Liu and Mason advocated for long-term federal policy changes that would both decrease the legal levels of pollution in cities, creating the need for more green jobs, and create pathways for women to be included in the expansion of the green economy. However, in the meantime, independent organizations in communities around the country are pioneering green initiatives to create more opportunities for women to procure green jobs and/or green jobs training.

In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance and Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) worked together to pass an ordinance to establish the Green Retrofit and Workforce Program last April, which includes the establishment of the Green Career Ladder Training Program to train 2,000 public and private-sector green-collar workers in green building construction and maintenance. In New York, community organization Sustainable South Bronx runs the BEST Academy to train Bronx residents for green-collar careers and put them to work on green infrastructure projects throughout the borough. Non-profit Green For All runs a program called Green Pathways out of Poverty, in which representatives work with communities throughout the country to develop programs to prepare the local available work force for green-collar careers; it also runs Retrofit America’s Cities, which helps communities develop energy retrofitting projects and train local community members to work on those projects.

All of these programs have been developed to help groups that have been left out of the mainstream green job market, particularly women, people of color, and low-income communities.

“Ideally, in ten years we’d have a thriving green economy that takes care of women and workers everywhere, that thinks of building based on community needs rather than desire to make profit, and that reduces impact on planet and creates communities that are thriving,” Liu said.

LCA Sustainable Supply Chain USA (‘Measuring and Addressing Environmental & Social Impacts Throughout the Entire Life Cycle and Supply Chain’) is the 7th event in the International Carbon Footprinting conference series. The previous summits have been hugely successful with over 900 delegates attending from major brands and international retailers. This event will address the latest sustainability and corporate social responsibility topics, featuring more than two dozen speakers from leading business firms.

Date: April 28-29, 2010

Location: Marriott Chicago Midway, Chicago, IL

Web Address: www.lca-sustainable-supply-chain-usa.com

Contact Information: (Tel) 1-800-721-3915, (Fax) 1-800-714-1359

Email: info@american-business-conferences.com

Exhibition and Sponsorship Inquiries: Jane Thomas (Tel) 1-800-721-3915, (E-mail) jane@american-business-conferences.com

The purpose of the LCA Sustainable Supply Chain USA summit is to give companies strategies from the pioneers in the field, which they can take away to measure, prioritize and reduce their social and environmental impacts in the most effective manner. It will also provide insights on creating more transparency in reporting and how companies can capitalize on trends in the future.

This two day summit offers a diverse, yet focused perspective for companies involved in the consumer goods industry. Apart from the plenary sessions offering fresh perspectives to all companies, break-out sessions will specifically focus on the food and drink companies, and consumer products companies (including electronics).

Some of the key learning benefits of the event include: practical examples and case studies on how to address specific areas of the life cycle and supply chain, insights from companies doing life cycle assessments of their products, identifying opportunities for mutual cooperation with suppliers, applying the latest standards for business decision-making, discovering how to capitalize on future policy and economic trends, and learning how to communicate the complicated sustainability message to key stakeholders.

The event will feature several industry experts representing some of the leading business firms. Speakers include Coleman Bigelow – Product Director for Sustainable Brand Marketing, Johnson & Johnson; Sherilyn Broderson – Ethical Sourcing Manager, Cadbury USA; Jay Celorie – Global Program Manager for Supply Chain Energy, Hewlett-Packard; William P. Flanagan – Ecoassessment Leader, General Electric Company; and Chrystina Gastelum – Manager Supply Chain Program, Carbon Disclosure Project. The complete speaker list can be found here.

Conference attendees will include senior decision makers from the Retail, Consumer Products, Electronics, and Food and Drink industry sectors as well as representatives from environmental consulting firms and national government organizations. Senior managers in the areas of corporate social responsibility, environmental/sustainability affairs, health and safety, research and development, and procurement should especially consider attending.

Registration for the LCA Sustainable Supply Chain USA 2010 summit can be done online by clicking here.

Green Economy Post is a media partner of the LCA Sustainable Supply Chain USA 2010 summit.

Sustainable packaging is becoming a fact of life for companies that seek to remain competitive. Companies employing sustainable packaging report cost savings, improved environmental footprints, brand image and company reputation among other benefits. Those businesses that take the lead now will be ahead of the curve and enjoy the benefits in the future.

by Aysu Katun, Green Economy Post

Companies continue to face growing pressure from consumers, government and the media to make their operations and products more sustainable. One area that companies are increasingly focusing on is sustainable packaging. Internationally, the environmental impacts of packaging are subject to an increasing number of government regulations and co-regulatory agreements. A report from independent market analyst Datamonitor also identifies sustainable packaging as a growing consumer issue, revealing that while sustainable packaging is not yet a primary motivator of purchases, it is increasingly expected by consumers.

While there is no consensus on what actually constitutes sustainable packaging, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) defines it as packaging that is “sourced responsibly, designed to be effective and safe throughout its life cycle, meets market criteria for performance and cost, made entirely using renewable energy and once used, is recycled efficiently to provide a valuable resource for subsequent generations.”

According to a study by AMR Research, 76% of sustainability efforts are focused on reducing packaging waste. A recent Pike Research study also found that sustainable packaging is expected to grow to 32 percent of the total global packaging market by 2014, up from 21 percent in 2009.

Cost Savings

In spite of these growth projections, critics of sustainable packaging point to higher cost as a reason for companies to avoid its adoption. Yet, according to an IndustryWeek article, companies employing sustainable packaging report cost savings, not increases.

In his article, “Sustainable Packaging Initiatives Are a Viable Cost-Reduction Solution in a Downward Economy,” Ryan Humphrey, Director of Professional Services at ModusLink Global Solutions, urges companies to take a holistic approach that “affords visibility into the entire product lifecycle, from manufacturing and packaging, to delivery, recycling or disposition. When sustainable improvements are considered from this perspective, most organizations will realize a cost savings and positive impact on the bottom line.”

Humphrey further states that companies should analyze product packaging and supply chain processes to develop a model that reduces packaging size and minimizes operational and logistics activities that contribute to GHG emissions. “More compact packaging will result in a reduced material cost. By simplifying the packaging process with fewer pieces, you can extend the savings with less labor. The amount of warehouse space required is reduced, further impacting logistics costs. The domino effect continues through redesigning pallet configuration and shipping more product per pallet.”

Moreover, lighter packaging is cheaper and more efficient to transport, and requires less energy to manufacture. Therefore, a change in packaging creates a ripple effect throughout the supply chain producing efficiency gains, cost-savings and reduced energy consumption.

A recent survey conducted by the Supply Chain Consortium in which 79% of survey respondents stated that sustainable packaging has the most impact on energy and material costs, supports Humphrey’s argument.

Many companies are reporting savings achieved through sustainable packaging. Ben Sligar, a global packaging engineer for ModusLink, in the article, states that they have seen cost savings in almost every project by using recycled materials and increasing the product to package ratio. He adds, “For example, by moving clients to a trapped paperboard blister design and away from traditional clamshells that are not consumer friendly, we are able to reduce the amount of plastic and package size while increasing pallet density.”

Humphrey mentions that a global leader in computer hardware and accessories was able to realize savings of more than $500,000 in packaging and eliminated 99,183 pounds of packaging on 4.3 million products shipped. P&G has reduced the packaging weight of Pantene Pro-V bottles, which are forecast to save over 450 tons of plastic per year, which is the equivalent of over 13 million bottles of Pantene Pro-V. For Olay Total Effects, P&G has reduced the plastic in its pump to save 800,000 pounds of plastic per year, equivalent to the weight of a Boeing 747. Companies in the beverage industry report similar savings.

In addition to operational cost savings, companies report reduction in their environmental footprints, improved brand image and company reputation, greater market share, access to new markets, reduction in legal compliance costs and increasing global competitiveness as other benefits of adopting sustainability packaging.

Therefore, while many industries are still stagnating in the current bleak economy, sustainable strategies can provide the packaging industry with a silver lining to the downturn.

Recommendations

For companies considering adopting more sustainable packaging practices, a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) offers some very useful advice:

• Review your customer base to understand which of them have made public announcements on their commitment to sustainability and begin talking to them about what their pronouncements mean in practice for their packaging needs.
• From your common understanding agree with your customers what criteria (e.g. carbon footprint, energy usage, waste, etc.) you could monitor and report to them to demonstrate your ongoing improvements on the sustainability of their packaging.
• Investigate what other market segments you could serve where your packaging technology could legitimately be argued to be more sustainable than the competition. Target the “sustainability aware” customers in these new markets.
• Include sustainability as a key consideration in your new product development process.
• Provide your sales and marketing team with both qualitative and quantitative arguments that allow them to place the superior sustainability of your product as a differentiator in their value proposition.
• Work in collaboration, up and down the value chain, and use techniques such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or environmental input-output analysis to identify value chain hotspots. Consider whether it is commercially advantageous to you or your customers to work with other players in the value chain to address these hotspots and improve the overall sustainability of a product. Be sure that you can quantify any improvement for your customer.

Overall, companies engaged in sustainability efforts should focus on meeting consumers’ needs, reaching corporate objectives, and doing so in a way that demonstrates continuous improvement with regard to how it positively affects people and the environment. Sustainable packaging is becoming a fact of life for companies that seek to remain competitive. Those businesses that take the lead now will be ahead of the curve and enjoy the benefits in the future.

While other industries are sputtering along or even tanking, as a result of the global recession, the emerging  Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) software market is experience a phase of phenomenal growth.  The number as providers has almost doubled, venture capital money is flowing freely and  Groom Energy predicts that ECA software purchases will increase 600 percent by 2011.

By Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

In spite of the gridlock in Washington over climate change legislation, and one of the worst  economic downturns in the last century, 2009 was a year of growth for the emerging Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) software market. According to a research study recently released  by Groom Energy Solutions, EnerNOC , IHS and SAP made acquisitions in the sector, software giants Computer Associates and Microsoft entered the market, and more than $46 million in venture capital was invested in ECA startup companies.   Meanwhile,  the number of corporations now disclosing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) increased significantly in 2009 and Groom Energy predicts that ECA software purchases will increase 600 percent by 2011.

The research report, “2010 Enterprise Carbon Accounting: An Analysis of Corporate-Level Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission Reporting and a Review of GHG Software Products,” presents three principal factors that are  behind the momentum of the ECA market.

1. Increased pressure from customers and investors for companies to create a ‘greener’ public image
2. Cost and energy savings from sustainability investments
3. Mandates from buyers, like the Walmart Supplier Sustainability Assessment Program that was implemented to measure the environmental impact of supplier operations.

“In light of the economic climate, sales growth for ECA software shows the importance of this emerging category,” said Paul Baier, report author and vice president of consulting   services for Groom Energy. “From politicians like Al Gore and Condoleezza Rice getting involved with startups, to Microsoft, CA, and SAP, entering the market, our prediction that 2009 would be the year of enterprise carbon accounting came to fruition. Our on-going customer and vendor research reinforces our belief that the ECA market will see explosive  growth in size and global importance in 2010 and 2011.”

The first version of the report was released in Jan. 2008 with an addendum in May of 2008, to provide a guide for organizations beginning to track and report their GHG emissions.  At the time 40 vendors were already present in the market and it appeared that  that many companies had grown beyond the use of spreadsheets, which was the traditional tool used to track GHG emissions.  Despite the early stage of the current ECA market, the 2010 report now identifies a total of 60 vendors and profiles 20 of them in four category types: environmental health and safety vendors (EHS), new products from large firms, startup companies, and energy  management firms.  Market consolidation is expected to occur in the next two years.

Eight companies were named 2010 ECA Emerging Leaders in the report. Ranking was weighted and determined by: number of customer deployments, technology features, market vision and financial stability.

The current leaders are:

Enablon – Enablon offers management and performance software solutions for: corporate responsibility and QEHS management; risk management and internal control; and corporate governance and legal management. Enablon software solutions are used by more than 200,000 users in 250 global companies and ten thousands SME’s around the world.  Customers include Airbus, Carrefour, PGE, Timberland,Tyco, Armstrong, Beiersdorf, Del Monte, L’Oréal, McGraw Hill, Pinnacle West, Texas Instruments and Woolworths.  Enablon is the world’s largest sustainability software provider,

Enviance - The Enviance Environmental ERP system is comprised of the three components of sustainability: air, water and waste.  It is a Cloud-based, on-demand platform, that comes with a Software Developers’ Kit (SDK) so clients can integrate the Enviance system with other information systems,  and has a mobile platform.  There are 12,000 users from 45 countries that use the Enviance System.

Hara - Hara attracted investor attention recently, securing $20 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, JAFCO Ventures, and Nth Power.  The startup has seen significant recent customer success, having closed a number of deals in 2009 with industry leaders including Coca-Cola, News Corporation, the City of Palo Alto and the City of San Jose.

IHS – The 50 year old company provides a full suite of environmental and chemical management software and service solutions for EHS and sustainability management.  Solutions include: greenhouse gas management from compliance to emissions trading; material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and chemical lifecycle management; air, water and waste data management; sustainability tracking, management and reporting; regulatory compliance management; chemical supply chain greening; and REACH.

Johnson Controls - The Energy and Emissions Management System provides global organizations with the capability to analyze energy trends and calculate greenhouse gas levels. The Web-based system measures, manages and forecasts activities related to energy cost, consumption, energy efficiency projects, fleet emissions, and waste.  Johnson Control annually monitors 63 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions for 5,000 buildings in 88 countries. The system has identified more than 8,000 energy and cost savings solutions for global organizations such as Pfizer, Dell and Xerox. They currently manage $1 billion in annual energy spend.

PE International - SoFi-Software provides data collection supported by interfacesto ERP systems; carbon footprint measurement in compliance with requirements of CDP and the ISO 14064 standard; performance tracking; and the ability to identify cost reduction opportunities. Gabi Software provides tools and databases for product and process sustainability analyses.

ProcessMAP – ProcessMAP’s software platform measures and tracks environmental and carbon footprint as well as, inform on their performance in the Global Citizenship and Annual Sustainability Reports.Customers include:  Allergan, Cardinal Health, CR Bard, Ingersoll Rand, ITT, John Deere, Shaw (Berkshire Hathaway), and Watson Pharmaceuticals.  ProcessMAP was also recently recognized as a leading provider of Carbon Management Software by Verdantix, business research firm focused on climate change, carbon markets and corporate responsibility.

SAP- Carbon Impact – Carbon Impact enables reporting from a single repository to voluntary or mandatory registries, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and U.S. EPA Climate Leaders Program; allow you to conduct abatement analysis by using financial insight to find the optimal mix of reduction projects and offsets; gain insight via pre-built dashboards for emissions trending analysis and visualization to help identify problem areas; you can also consolidate environmental impact data into a single repository, and organize emissions data by using flexible hierarchies that represent your facilities, departments, product lines and other operational entities.

Both Enablon and Hara are newcomers to the list, while the others were named 2009 ECA Emerging Leaders.

Surprisingly, the top driver among purchasers, is not pending GHG regulation, but rather protecting and enhancing company image.
Responses among many purchasers indicate that supply chain initiatives like the Walmart supplier assessment program will motivate purchases.

Accord to the Groom study, the number of organizations using ECA software is expected to increase five fold by 2011 and much of the investment will be made by companies that have not traditionally invested  in environmental software.   A report a recently released study from Pike Research backs up these figures. Spending for software and services in the carbon management market between 2008 and 2009 grew nearly 84% globally, representing a total market of $384 million. That same report forecasts that in North America alone, the 2008-2017 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be more than 44%.

According to Stephen Stokes, an analyst at AMR Research, companies offering a “one size fits all” package that not only tracks greenhouse gases but performs sophisticated analysis of things like water consumption were most likely to succeed. Otherwise, companies that excel at one niche aspect of emissions management, such as in the transportation sector, likely will gain an edge.

From Christi Graham, Founder & CEO, West Coast Green…..

We are deeply invested in our faculty – who are often our own heroes – and dedicate an incredible amount of time to their leadership development.  Our speaker faculty is unique: they are able to dynamically share their technical knowledge, on-the-ground expertise, and visionary wisdom while inspiring extraordinary action. Their knowledge spans all the way from building science and public policy to technology and innovation.

If you become a member of our faculty, we will give you training sessions to further your public communication skills and help introduce you to successful teaching styles. You’ll be invited to join private roundtable discussions, numerous networking events, and become part of the West Coast Green faculty family.

In 2009, we welcomed 230 speakers to the conference. In 2010 we will have fewer than 150 faculty positions – requiring us to be extremely selective. However, once you are a faculty member you are always considered a part of West Coast Green; we will honor your faculty registration discount even if you are not speaking this year.  Most of our 2010 speakers will be of either a “master speaker” level or play a facilitator role. Facilitators design, develop and host intimate roundtable discussions amongst industry thought leaders and infuse their knowledge and skill in this process.

How We Select Speakers

West Coast Green’s speakers come from diverse backgrounds and are carefully screened, interviewed and trained to ensure that they are not only experts in their fields but also experts at the art of speaking—delivering information for maximum effectiveness.
We look for…

• Engaging presenters who design their presentations for maximum interactivity and share advanced technical knowledge, on-the-ground expertise, and visionary wisdom on a wide range of topics.
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More than 80 CEOs from U.S. businesses, from eBay to PG&E to Virgin America, have sent a letter to President Obama and members of Congress asking them to create the impetus to achieve these goals by enacting climate and energy legislation.

by Michael Tam, Green Economy Post

Job creation.  Innovation.  U.S. competitiveness.  In the eyes of the top CEOs in the U.S., before these goals become reality, the foundation of policies and comprehensive climate and energy legislation needs to be laid by those who reside in Washington D.C.  As such, more than 80 CEOs from U.S. businesses, from eBay to PG&E to Virgin America, have sent a letter to President Obama and members of Congress asking them to create the impetus to achieve these goals by enacting climate and energy legislation.

In the letter, the CEOs call for a more forceful push by leadership in the developing global clean energy race.  With the passing of legislation, the U.S. government could unleash innovation, drive economic growth, bolster energy independence and lower our carbon emissions.  With the history of leadership and innovation throughout U.S. business coupled with the misfortunes of the current economy, Americans, from large corporations to the average citizen, cannot afford to be falling behind in the global clean energy race.

Signed by 84 CEOs from some of the nation’s largest electric power, manufacturing, clean tech, technology and consumer facing companies, the letter implores the government, stating, “It is time for the Administration and Congress to embrace this policy as the promising economic opportunity that will empower American workers to compete and American entrepreneurship to lead the way.” Click here to view the full text and the list of signatories.

The leaders of today’s American businesses, large and small, recognize this global opportunity that is rising in all countries and have begun to respond by employing innovating business practices and ideas.  But like a contest with no stated rules and parameters, the legislative environment has not yet been set.  As a result, as the letter states, “Today’s uncertainty surrounding energy and climate regulation is hindering the large-scale actions that American businesses are poised to make.”  The letter calls for, “Strong policies and clear market signals that support the transition to a low-carbon economy and reward companies that innovate,” support that will facilitate the necessary investment in developing technology and jobs.

The urgency felt by businesses is further demonstrated by the Race for American Jobs & Clean Energy Leadership, a coast-to-coast virtual race to drive home the economic benefit of national climate and energy legislation.  Sponsored by We Can Lead, the campaign is collecting hundreds of business leader endorsements as it crosses the country supporting the case that strong climate policies are needed to create jobs, promote technological innovation, and boost energy independence.  And to achieve such advances, the Senate must act now on stalled legislation.  The race kicked off a few weeks ago at Nike headquarters in Oregon and traveled to Ohio, New Hampshire and Washington.

According to a recent study by the University of California, in Colorado alone, comprehensive climate and energy policies such as those in the proposed Senate legislation could create up to 30,000 jobs, raising average household income by as much as $1,138 per year, and grow the state economy by $1 billion by 2020.  At the national level, up to 1.7 million new jobs could be created, while GDP could be boosted by $39-$111 billion.

“What investors need most from national and state legislatures are transparency, longevity and certainty,” said Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Asset Management and member of Deutsche Bank’s Group Executive Committee.  “Until the U.S. Congress passes climate regulation, America will be at a competitive disadvantage in the development of renewable energy and other climate change industries.”

“Investors are poised and ready to scale up investments in building the low carbon economy, but without policies that create a stable investment environment our hands are tied,” said Anne Stausboll, chief executive officer of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation’s largest public pension fund with more than $205 billion in assets. “U.S. leadership is critical in this regard, including U.S. Senate action to limit and put a price on carbon emissions.”

However, this is easier said than done when the Obama Administration, in a re-election year, goes through the balancing act of maneuvering the partisan debate over global warming and trying to keep a number of Congressional seats in the hands of Democrats.  With many Americans skeptical of global warming, the passage of climate legislation has been difficult.  Conservative commentators in the media and high-profile talk-radio hosts state that climate change is a hoax.  On a global level, the Pew Research Center found last year that concern over global warming was far less pronounced in America than elsewhere, finding that 44% of Americans considered it to be a “very serious problem” versus 90% of Brazilians.  In France it was 68% and in Japan 65%. Other polls support such significant differences.

In addition, the incoming executive director of conservation group Sierra Club, Michael Brune, points out that, “The mechanisms to address climate change can incite long-held fears by many people about government involvement in their lives.”  This American way of life, which relies on prevalent car ownership, heavy resources consumption, consumerism, and an economy dependent on fossil fuels such as oil and coal, is viewed by some as in danger due to the exaggerated and fraudulent claims of climate change.

Great challenges, whether they be social, political, or economic, have always spurred innovation and improvements in practice.  In this current case, comprehensive climate and energy legislation is that challenge.  The question is, will the U.S. government tackle it head on in time to keep the U.S. in the lead of the global economy?  More than 80 U.S. CEOs certainly hope so.  We will learn more when President Obama addresses a roundtable of American business leaders February 24 on the issue of energy strategy.

US Climate Change Policy

The debate surrounding global climate change has been a hot button issue for the past few years.  In most cases, the average person doesn’t know enough about the science behind this issue to make an informed decision.  The fact is that climate change will become a major issue within the next two decades and will have a host of environmental as well as economic impacts in the United States.  Climate change will play a major role in the way our economy functions as well as the way our legislators make decisions.

by Nicholas Varilone, The Green Economy Post

Cause and Effects of Climate Change.

Our climate is being affected by the emission of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere through various human industrial processes.  A greenhouse gas is a gas that traps solar radiation reflected off of the earth’s surface, not allowing excess heat to escape into space.  The majority of the harmful gases being trapped into our atmosphere are Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) and Methane (CH₄₎.   Without the interference of humans these gases stay in relative balance in the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide is emitted and absorbed in the natural environment through a process known as the Carbon Cycle_.

The growing supply of these gases in our atmosphere is causing extreme changes in our environment.  The polar ice caps are melting, sea-level is rising, the concentration and frequency of tropical storms are growing, the flow of rivers are changing, and certain regions are experiencing extreme rainfall while others extreme drought.  The possibility of major shortages in food production as well as access to fresh water is also a major consequence associated with climate change.  Without the reduction of these gases in our environment our planet faces serious peril in the 21^st Century.

Costs of Climate change.

Most people do not realize that inaction against climate change will not only have a serious environmental impact, but an extremely viable economic impact as well.   A recent report by economist Nicholas Stern of the British government known as the Stern Review accesses the damage climate change will have on the global economy.

MAJOR CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THE STERN REVIEW

1. 5% of global Gross Domestic Product per year will be lost.  This is compared to the 1% of global GDP that would be necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
2. If no action is taken the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions could double pre-industrial levels by 2035.  This would result in a global mean temperature increase of 2 degrees C.
3. The worst effects of climate change can be managed if greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere can be stabilized between 450 and 550 ppm C0₂ equivalent.
4. In order to stabilize global climate greenhouse gas emissions must bet cut down to more than 80% current emission levels.

This report assesses the major economic problems that will arise if no action is taken to combat climate change.  The temperature change proposed in this review is equivalent to the temperature change from the last ice age to today!  Such a radical temperature change would no doubt result in many economic problems.  We may experience mass migrations from drought ridden civilizations, as well as having our coastlines swallowed by the ocean.  The time to act is now, there can be no delay.

What is Being Done?  Barriers to a Solution.

Fortunately, progress is being made in this arena.  In late 2009, the United Nations Climate Change Conference or Copenhagen Summit was held.  This summit was a major step forward and brought the issue of climate change to the attention of world leaders from countries such as the United States, China, Brazil, and South Africa.  On December 18^th, 2009 the Copenhagen Accord was ratified.  This document recognized that serious action should be taken to keep global mean temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees C.

In order to actively combat climate change strong direct policy action must be taken now.  Policy must be designed to not only achieve its goal on an environmental level, but also must be economically viable.  The reliance on dirty non-renewable energy sources such as oil and coal must be averted.  As long as there is a market for fossil fuels, no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will be achieved.

This should awaken legislators to realize that action combating climate change can be a boost to economic growth and not a deterrent.    Already in the United States we are seeing an explosion in the clean and renewable energy sectors.  New alternative energy technologies are becoming more efficient, affordable, and easier to access.  This stimulus to the economy is due in part to legislation designed to promote growth in these sectors.  The 48C: Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit was written into law by the Obama administration and will provide $2.3 billion in tax incentives for the manufacture of renewable energy technologies.

Such a dynamic problem as climate change is bound to have barriers toward a solution.  The most important barriers toward a solution are as follows:

• Climate Change is Global- The fact that climate change transcends all borders makes it one of the most difficult problems to solve in human history.  Current legislation designed to buy and trade permits to emit greenhouse gases are not solving the problem.  By reducing emissions in one sector then selling permits to pollute in a different sector is redistributing the problem not solving it.   Also without an international governing body documents such as the Copenhagen Accord can never be legally binding.  This problem needs to be dealt with through a legally binding international framework and an understanding of long-term goals.

• Belief in the Science- The fact that this is a relatively new problem discourages acceptance of this problem’s existence.  Scientific data in this area goes back only 40 or 50 years.  Without concrete scientific data on the amount of pollution created and if this will have a serious impact on the general public’s way of life, no resolution will be reached. A recent poll conducted by the Washington Post showed that only about 70% of Americans believe that climate change actually exists!

• Economic Growth- From a cost-benefit standpoint most people believe that the investment in legislation, research, technology, and policy implementation to combat this problem will be much too costly.  They believe the cost is too high to risk on impacts of a problem that cannot be explained in the short run.

There is no doubt that Global Climate change will be a defining characteristic of the way the global economy will be moving in the 21^st century.   While progress is being made, many obstacles stand in the way of such a dynamic problem.  As our society moves forward we must invest in the R&D, technologies, and policies that will drive our civilization into a much brighter tomorrow.

Verdantix, recently released a free report, that explains why the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is needed, defines the role of the CSO, and provides a profile to guide the appointment of the CSO.  It also explains why organizations face a climate change and sustainability management deficit, why fixing sustainability governance gains is becoming a major priority by a growing number of firms, how the CSO can spearhead business transformation, who the ideal candidate for the chief sustainability officer role is, and what are the three priority areas of domain expertise.

by Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post

The independent research firm, Verdantix, recently released a free report, Who Should Be The Chief Sustainability Officer, which explains why the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is needed, defines the role of the CSO and provides a profile to guide the appointment of a CSO.

Case studies of the following companies used in the study: Allianz Insurance, British Airways, BT, CA, Carbon Systems, CH2M Hill, Chrysler, Cisco, Deloitte, The Dow Chemical Company, ECX, Fiat, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Hara, IBM, IHS, Kroger, McKinsey &  Company, Microsoft, Norman Broadbent, Orange, SAP, Shell, Siemens, Tesco, Toyota, Unilever, UTC  The responsibilities for the CSOs in these organization are similar: develop climate change strategy, improve sustainability governance, launch climate change and sustainability products and implement policies that move the organization on a global basis towards strategic sustainable business goals.  These organizations have appointed senior executives to lead their companies’ sustainability initiatives.

Organizations Face a Climate Change and Sustainability management Deficit because of:

• A combination of new regulations and uncoordinated climate change and sustainability initiatives.
• Ambitious climate change and sustainability plans initiated prior to the economic meltdown, suffered when it came to implementation because many organizations had hiring freezes.  This forced them to overload staffing and forego bringing in the necessary expertise.
• C-suite disinterest in sustainability risks and opportunities has created huge competitve gaps.
• Lack of attention and understanding of boards of directors regarding the long-term impact of climate change often leads to a piecemeal approach to climate changes and sustainability challenges, which over the long run will disrupt value chains.

Fixing Sustainability Governance Gains Urgency in 2010

• Transforming an organization’s business model often takes decades.  Creating a low carbon business model is no exception, so it is likely most companies will not achieve their target emissions goals by 2020.
• Climate change and sustainable growth markets offer many organizations an opportunity to rebuild profits after a global trend of cost cutting with companies seeing untapped operational efficiencies dwindle.
• Global adoption of climate change regulations has raised compliance risks, with company director being held responsible for the compliance data reported to government. Most companies are increasingly exposed to inaccurate carbon reporting risks as they are still using Microsoft Excel.
• Firms with less developed climate change and sustainability strategies will become less competitive as an increasing number of organizations appoint senior executives to lead climate change and sustainability programs, as well as back them with the finding to drive competitive advantage.

The Chief Sustainability Officer Spearheads Business Transformation

Firms who address climate change with stop gap measures will find that they are not adequate to implement necessary complex sustainable business strategies. This management deficit is exacerbated by market trends which increase risks and highlight opportunities.   To tackle these issue organizations need to abandon tactical approaches and switch to a strategic program. They should also appoint a senior executive who

• Defines a five to 10 year sustainability strategy with the executive team, which will establish the missing interface between funding priorities and the pool of business cases circulating in functional areas like supply chain and IT.
• Implements a CEO backed multi-year sustainable business transformation program.
• Identifies significant revenue opportunities requiring C-Level investment, making it a strategic priority, which is necessary for the climate change and sustainability to gain traction with the organization.
• Creates organization-wide sustainability data management and metrics initiatives to ensure accuracy and consistency, which ultimately enables him/her to set targets and make operational improvements.
• Ensures that the firm achieves energy efficiency and carbon reduction goals
• Engages with policy makers to align strategy with forthcoming policy and regulatory decisions.

Who is The Ideal Candidate For The Chief Sustainability Officer Role

• The Chief Sustainability Officer requires board functional experience and a strong personal network within the firm based on at least 10 years of services.
• Business transformation experience (post-merger integration or restructuring) to management complexity.
• Ten Years of general management experience in the same firm so that he or she knows what makes key decision-makers tick and the climate change and sustainability program with existing priorities and big personalities.
• Innovation expertise to evangelize disruptive change as he or she needs to work with with product, marketing and sales leaders to design, launch and succeed with new climate change and sustainability offerings.

Industry expertise have also prioritized three areas of domain expertise.

• Corporate social responsibility for reporting and communications to stakeholders
• Understanding of energy management to deliver efficiency gains and CO2 reductions which supports initiatives to identify and report back on energy cost savings and to ensure data collection for GHG reporting and brand communications.
• Manufacturing expertise to enhance natural resource efficiency

So who is the idea candidate for the Chief Sustainability Officer Role?  Download the Verdantix free document Who Should Be The Chief Sustainability Officer? to view the five key capabilities and example behaviors, as well as the CEO Checklist to Appoint The Ideal Chief Sustainability Officer.