Gary Gardner and Thomas Prugh
To critique the dominant economic system of the twentieth century would seem a fool's errand, given the unprecedented comfort, convenience, and opportunity delivered by the world economy over the past 100 years. Global economic output surged some 18fold between 1900 and 2000 and reached 66 trillion in 2006 . Life expectancy leaped ahead in the United States, from 47 to nearly 76 years as killer diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis were largely tamed. And labor-saving machines from...
The Solid Foundation of Ecoefficiency
The ability to produce cheap goods and ship them around the planet derived in part from abundant supplies of cheap energy. Using this inexpensive oil, gas, and coal has polluted the planet and dangerously warmed the climate. In a carbon-constrained world, survival depends on finding ways to produce goods and services in dramatically more energy-efficient ways. The concept of making things using fewer resources is far from new, but it remains the cornerstone in producing goods and services more...
Moving Down the Industrial Food Chain
For the poor, whose diets might be confined to starchy staple crops, meat and seafood bring both increased status and added nutrition. For the wealthy, a meal is not complete unless it includes chicken, pork, or beef, while health-conscious consumers often replace the traditional meat serving with tuna, sword-fish, or some other seafood. But consumers need to rethink their relationship with all these foods in order to keep them on the menus in fine restaurants as well as on the plates of people...
Water in Todays Economy
More than 70 percent of the world's water is used for food and fiber production in agriculture see Table 8-1 , a source of livelihood for some 80 percent of the world's poor. Industry consumes an additional 20 percent, and less than 10 percent of global freshwater abstraction is used for drinking water and sanitation. Water used to sustain ecosystem services is left out of these global calculations, as are navigational, recreational, and other direct and indirect uses that do not involve...
Shareowner Activism
Shareowner activism, a core strategy of SRI and sustainable investing, is as old as share-ownership. The Dutch East India Company was the first enterprise ever to be listed on a stock exchange, in 1602. On January 24, 1609, it received history's first shareowner petition from Isaac Le Maire, the largest minority investor, who railed against the management as absurd and impertinent and a kind of tyranny, according to Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, and David Pitt-Watson in The New Capitalists How...
Box Dockside Green Developers Taking the Lead
Until recently, the 15-acre Dockside Lands parcel in Victoria, British Columbia the province's capital on Vancouver Island was the epitome of an underused property. Purchased by the city for a single dollar in 1989, this prime real estate lay largely ignored for years, crippled by an industrial legacy that left the soil saturated with petrochemicals and toxic heavy metals. Now the site is poised to become the greenest neighborhood in Victoria, thanks to collaboration between the city and two...
Five Microeconomic Objectives
Some of the most innovative sustainability initiatives are being undertaken at the institutional level by businesses, schools, and NGOs. To measure effectiveness, a wide range of micro-level metrics are being deployed and used as benchmarks of organizational success. Table 2-3 provides a small sample of these. Increasingly, sustainability metrics are being reported side by side with more-traditional financial indicators to satisfy investor and stakeholder demand for accountability with respect...
Christopher Flavin
Over the past half-million years, the world's climate has seen four ice ages and four warm periods separating them, with extensive glaciers engulfing large swaths of North America, Europe, and Asia and then retreating, thousands of species displaced, and the shape of coastlines rearranged as sea levels rose and fell. Yet throughout these hundreds of thousands of years, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide CO2 , which plays a key role in regulating the climate, has never risen above...
Ricardo Bayon
Protecting the world's biodiversity requires answers to a few not entirely rhetorical questions Assuming agreement of the need to protect Earth's biological wealth, how much would you be prepared to pay to protect an endangered fly Would you spend 1.50, 15, 150,000, or more How about society as a whole, how much should society spend on the protection of this fly Does the answer depend on the nature of the fly itself On its role in the ecosystem Or is the calculus based on something else perhaps...
Government Programs Benefits and Drawbacks
Outside the United States, several other countries are also experimenting with regulated biodiversity offsets. See Table 9-1. For instance, the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales either already have or are setting up schemes similar to the U.S. system, although with a few important differences. The BioBanking system in New South Wales has proposed a scheme whereby some areas would be deemed too sensitive for development. These would be red-flagged and would ideally be the sites...
The Economics of Change
When oil was first discovered in western Pennsylvania in the 1860s, it was virtually useless far more expensive than coal and, prior to the development of the refinery or internal combustion engine, useless for transportation. Even as oil became widely used for lighting in the late nineteenth century, the idea that it would become a dominant energy source let alone reshape the global economy was inconceivable. The history of economic transformation follows a familiar path. Dominant technologies...
Cradle to Cradle Extending a Products Life
Cradle to cradle is a concept introduced by Walter Stahel more than 25 years ago in Europe. In 1976, as Director of a project on product life extension at Battelle research laboratories in Geneva, Stahel embarked on a program to return products to useful lives. He analyzed cars and buildings on micro-economic and macroeconomic bases and concluded that every extension of product life saved enormous amounts of resources in contrast with turning virgin material into a new product, and it also...
The Iron Cage of Consumerism
Left to their own devices, it seems, there is not much hope that people will spontaneously behave sustainably. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has concluded, sustainabil-ity just doesn't come naturally to humankind. But it is a mistake to assume that evolutionary motivations are all selfish. Evolution does not preclude moral, social, and altruistic behaviors. Social behaviors evolved in humans precisely because they offer selec Figure 4-3. Domain Satisfaction by Social Group, England...
Conceptual Reform in Economics Seven Big Ideas
As understanding of humanity's interactions with nature evolved and economic liabilities expanded, reformist economists have developed corrective lenses to shed light on the blind spots of the conventional economic worldview. At least seven key areas of revisionist thinking scale, growth versus development, prices, nature's contributions, the precautionary principle, the commons, and women are influencing economic theory and helping to turn economic activity in more-sustainable directions. See...
Jason S Calder
Niger was all but given a death sentence in the 1970s when drought-propelled desertification, rapid population growth, and unsustainable farming practices threatened ecological collapse and mass human suffering. Women on average each gave birth to more than seven children, and the population was expected to double in the next two decades. Families who had worked their land for generations could see the tell-tale signs it was taking longer and longer to get to trees and fresh water, and the...
Voluntary Biodiversity Offsets
Beyond government regulation, numerous companies have begun to set up biodiversity offsets voluntarily in places like Qatar, Madagascar, and Ghana because they think it makes good business sense to do so. Like the voluntary carbon markets described in Chapter 7, the number and investment in such offsets is presently modest. But they are likely to become much more widely used as a part of standard business practice. Some observers believe that they could serve as the precursors to larger, more...
Socially Responsible Investing
Some four decades ago, the foundations of sustainable investing were established with the advent of modern socially responsible investing, or SRI, which broke new ground by marrying social and environmental considerations with traditional financial considerations. SRI has since grown by encompassing three elements shareowner activism, screening, and community investing all of which now inform sustainable investing. Modern shareowner activism where stockholders engage with companies on...
International Trade Help or Hindrance
Ever since David Ricardo explained the Law of Comparative Advantage in 1817, it has been an article of faith that international trade is a good thing. Trade contributes to prosperity not only by rewarding the successful trader but by expanding the size of the overall economic pie so that, with good governance, there should be adequate slices for everyone. See Box 14-1. Trade contributes Mark Halle is Director, Trade and Investment, at the Geneva Office of the International Institute for...
Project Finance and the Equator Principles
Project finance the funding of major infrastructure projects such as dams, oil wells and pipelines, and mines is one of the most significant investment strategies driving a top-down integration of sustainability principles. Because these projects have such high-profile environmental and social impacts, they expose companies to community and NGO opposi-tion which has in turn driven corporations to pay more attention to social and environmental management in project finance. For example, the...
Avoiding Catastrophe
Only recently have scientists understood that changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other less common gases could trigger an ecological catastrophe of staggering proportions. The climate, it turns out, is not the vast, implacable system it appears to be. Past climate changes have been caused by tiny alterations in Earth's orbit and orientation to the sun providing, for example, just Figure 6-1. Atmospheric Concentration of Carbon Dioxide, 1744-2004 1740 1770 1800 1830...
Ger Bergkamp and Claudia W Sadoff
Water is as essential to economies as it is to human life. Clean drinking water is needed for the health of productive populations, but only 10 percent of global water use is actually for household consumption. Agricultural water is needed to produce food and fiber. Water is a direct input in virtually all industrial production processes, and it is needed to produce hydropower and to cool thermal power plants, which together account for the vast majority of world energy supplies. In lakes and...
Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg
Walk into any kitchen around the world and there's a good chance that meat or seafood sit neatly at the center of the meal. This is especially true at any top restaurant in New York, Rio, or Beijing. But billions of people all over the world have hamburgers or pork chops or fish fingers with their families at home every night. Even the poorest people often spend their extra income on some odd cuts of meat or fish bones for soup. In fact, meat and seafood are the two most rapidly growing...
Box What Is a Community
Community typically refers to a wide range of groupings of people a church, a city, a political party or other affiliation. But more fundamentally, a community suggests a group of geographically rooted people engaged in relationships with each other though many of the examples of community discussed in this chapter have relevance to broader definitions of community as well . Through these relationships, members in a community have shared responsibilities as the Latin roots of the word suggest...