Experts gather in Bonn to share ideas on urban responses to climate change.

By Philip Monaghan

In the spirit of the theme of the conference I attended in Bonn (Resilient Cities: 2^nd Annual World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change), I was pleased to overcome the shock and surprise of Icelandic volcanic ash cloud and an e-coli food outbreak to share my latest research insights with 500+ delegates from local government and global finance from around the world.

In the same week of the news that record-breaking CO2 emissions put the world on fast track to irreversible climate change, I and other delegates noted the gathering marked a tipping point in a key debate to tackling climate change.

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The insurance industry can be a key player in helping the world mitigate and adapt to climate change - but only if it can adapt to climate change risks itself.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Francesca Rheannon

The weather just seems to be getting crazier and crazier. First, the Mississippi River caused record flooding in several communities. Now, it’s the turn of communities along the Missouri River - residents in Iowa displaced by flooding may not be able to return to assess the damage for 10 weeks. Parts of Nebraska and Missouri are, as of this writing, receiving dire predictions that levees will be overtopped in the near future. One lawmaker called it a “slow-motion tsunami.”

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Ethnobotonist Gary Paul Nabhan is following food resilience in the desert Southwest.

By Aaron Kagan

Gary Paul Nabhan wears many hats, but when we recently spoke in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona, he had on a khaki ball cap emblazoned with a caricature of a horned toad.

An ethnobotanist by trade, Nabhan is an enthusiastic desert dweller and a research scientist at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona, where he helps run the program Sabores Sin Fronteras, aka Flavors Without Borders, a multi-cultural alliance dedicated to preserving and promoting the foods and culture of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. He has written and co-written several books including a history of tequila and a guide to foraging for wild edibles such as “sand food” in the Sonoran desert. He also founded Renewing America’s Food Traditions, or RAFT, a group that champions endangered, place-based foods such as Meech’s Prolific quince and the eulachon, a fish with an oil content so high it can be dried and used as a candle.

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Business as usual, the old economy, single bottom line capitalism - these are terms, practices and policies Ceres would like to put behind us. But how?

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

At the Ceres Conference 2011, my eyes were opened to a slew of different approaches to combat the world’s most pressing challenges. From securing efficient energy systems to promoting electrified vehicles to raising awareness on conflict minerals and compliance issues, Ceres assembled a remarkable cast of thought leaders and corporate innovators to address the strengths and opportunities associated with each.

Peter Graf said at the opening of the conference, “sustainability is an opportunity” - and education and communication will lead more opportunity. Actions supporting smart grid development, Millennium Development Goal advancement and a clean energy revolution are waiting to be unleashed. But the power of this “green” revolution is met by a fascinating and fierce barrier: public policy.

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We need to act as citizens of the world to save it.

By Sophie Constance

With Friday marking the 41st anniversary of Earth Day, we need to stop being consumers of the planet, and start being citizens of the world.

“Save the planet,” we hear endlessly. But a planet is just a rock orbiting a star. It’s a self-correcting system and it will be here for a long time after we’re gone. The world, on the other hand, is the interlocking community of people, the environment and millions of species of plants and animals. The planet doesn’t need saving. The world absolutely does.

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Several new and recent books exploring environmental issues are reviewed.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

Earth Day is coming up fast. Writer’s Voice, the weekly radio show and podcast I host and produce, is celebrating Earth Month, featuring interviews with authors of a terrific crop of new and recent books on the environment, including journalist Mark Hertsgaard (HOT), MacArthur “Genius” award-winning oceanographer and conservationist Carl Safina (A SEA IN FLAMES), New Yorker writer Caroline Fraser (REWILDING THE WORLD), sci fi writer Paolo Bacigalupi (SHIP BREAKER) and children’s book author Thomas Yezerski (MEADOWLANDS). Here’s our Earth Month roundup of reviews:

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We’d better wake up or we won’t be able to smell the coffee anymore.

By Dean Cycon

For several years government officials and scientists have argued whether global warming was a man-made or a natural phenomenon. They have wrestled over droughts, air circulation patterns, icecaps and a thousand other indicators of whether global warming was “likely” or “directly” our fault. In spite of the strong belief in the scientific community that all our cars, factories and other activities were speeding up global warming at an alarming rate, the politicians managed to get the official verdict to be “likely.”

High in the Sierra Nevada (“Snow-Capped Mountains”) of Colombia, indigenous Arhuaco coffee farmer Javier Mestres had no such doubts. He did not see things in parts per million. He had never heard of the Global Circulation Model that tried to measure increments of change in the temperature of the ocean or dynamics of the atmosphere. He was unaware the international report stated Colombia would heat up dramatically in the next 20 years and lose 90 percent of its glacial snow caps by 2050. Javier saw the results of a warming planet clearly in the premature flowering of his coffee plants on his four-acre family farm in the slopes above Nabusimake, the capital of the Arhuaco nation. He showed me the smaller, weaker berries that dotted the stems and wondered why the outside world wanted to harm these beautiful plants. Why were we changing the world?  

For centuries the Arhuaco spiritual elders, the Mamos, known in their language as the “Elder Brothers,” have carried out monthly rituals in sacred sites throughout the Sierra Nevada, which they call “the Heart of the World,” to insure the planet is kept in a geo-spiritual balance. But for the past two decades, the Mamos have seen rapid changes in the Heart of the World. They have watched snow caps on their sacred peaks shrink and the plant life change. They have felt the lessening of the water in the air and soil, and noted the changing migration patterns of the birds. They want to share their awareness with the outside world, with us – the “Younger Brothers.”

Last year I went to Colombia to experience the impacts of global warming on the Heart of the World. I met with young Arhuaco farmers and ancient Mamos. They talked about the drying up of rivers due to the lessened snow at the peaks and erratic rainfall of the past few years, and movement of plant species up the mountains as a result of greater heat and less water at lower altitudes.

“It is as if you can see the plants trying to run from the sun and the heat,” one farmer reflected. Eighty-three year-old Mamo, Don Faumbautista, shared his insight with me: “Beyond the Heart of the World, the Younger Brother is changing the whole earth. The Mother is getting warmer. The rain falls differently. It is later, but it falls harder. It is destructive when it should be nurturing. Many of the rivers are dry before they reach the sea. And the snows on the peaks are less each year. It is all happening very quickly. The Younger Brothers are waging a war on the earth and it must stop!”

There is a lot of scientific evidence on the impact of global warming on coffee production (and the lives of producers) around the world. The United Nations estimates 90% of Ugandan low-altitude coffee will disappear in 20 years. During a recent visit to Kenya, I walked through coffee fields scorched to death by a year-long drought. India, Tanzania and other countries will be similarly affected. Yet the most telling evidence comes from the farmers themselves, who are painfully aware of global warming and can’t do much about it.

We can. 

About Dean Cycon

Dean Cycon is a long time lawyer/activist/development worker in indigenous communities throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas. He created Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company 18 years ago to model how a for-profit business could be an effective catalyst and partner for social change in communities where they sources their coffees and cocoa. He is truly a pioneer in combining business and social justice.

Photos: (1) Dean and Wangari Maathai plant a tree in Kenya; (2) Coffee fields desiccated by drought in Kenya.

Talback Readers: What will you do if coffee prices go through the roof? Will you hoard? Fight global warming? Or both? Tell us on Talback!

We can do 100% renewables by 2050.

By Leslie Danziger

The Green Transition Scoreboard® shows $787.6 billion has been invested in renewable energy from 2007–2010 with another $571 billion in firm commitments. Significant momentum in renewables includes growth in solar energy: US solar capacity doubled in 2010 (Bloomberg); US solar power market reached $6 billion in 2010 (Wall Street Journal); US solar grew sharply in 2010 compared to Europe (Reuters). The planet is awash with daily energy from the sun. Reports confirm there is enough solar energy in the southwest US alone to power the entire country (Rep. Giffords, D-Ariz.). Bridgette Meinhold, Desertec Foundation, adds: “If 0.3% of the Sahara Desert was a concentrated solar plant, it would power all of Europe.“

Solar and wind energy have reached maturity and are already cost competitive in many markets, even with the direct and indirect subsidies and other “externalities” – costs not factored into market prices – of fossil fuel and nuclear energy. These externalities often include negative impacts on public health.

Harvard Medical School reports in Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal that “each stage of the life cycle of coal – extraction, transport, processing, and combustion – generates a waste stream and carries multiple hazards for health and the environment…costing the US public a third to over one-half a trillion dollars annually.”

The public is aware of national security threats posed by dependence on foreign oil but less aware “the taxpayers are underwriting the military costs of protecting its delivery from the most dangerous parts of the world and the transportation system that supports oil consumption” (NewEnergyNews.net). 

Japan’s nuclear crisis illustrates the “externalities” of nuclear power that Japanese taxpayers will bear economically and in radiation-related health risks. Heavily subsidized, costly nuclear reactors can cause health risks for thousands of years, yet nuclear is still touted as clean and cost effective. Even without factoring in the cost of these health risks, economist John Blackburn of Duke University shows solar energy is already cheaper than nuclear. Thus, renewable energy wins, even without a level playing field.

Extreme weather in all parts of the world – early indicators of climate change – exemplify “externalities” in burning fossil fuels. Institutional investors are taking these changes seriously (IIGCC). Mercer with 14 other institutional investors in “Climate Change Scenarios – Implications for Strategic Asset Allocation“ calls for shifting 40% of portfolios to hedge against risks and capitalize on low-carbon opportunities. 

Recent reports advocate an orderly transition to a renewable energy future that can provide safe, abundant energy and a healthy, sustainable global economy for generations to come. WWF/Ecofys has mapped out a course to achieve 100% Renewable Energy by 2050 “which is technically and economically possible with concrete steps starting now.” Stanford University’s “Providing All Global Energy With Wind, Water, And Solar Power” and UNEP’s “Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication” all agree with the findings of the Green Transition Scoreboard® that this transition is well under way. 

About Leslie Danziger

Leslie Danziger is Co-Founder and former Chairman of Solaria Corporation, a developer and manufacturer of advanced solar modules and systems solutions and CoFounder and former Chairman and CEO of LightPath Technologies, an optical technologies developer and manufacturer, which she took public. She has been featured in Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. She holds two patents and was named the New Mexico Inventor of the Year. She currently serves on the Advisory Boards of Equal Access, WorldBlu and Ethical Markets Media. She is a member of the Solar Circle and the American Solar Energy Society.

About the Green Transition

“Towards a Healthy Renewable Energy Future” is part four of five exploring the sectors driving the Green Transition. Stay tuned for the final Green Transition Talkback posts on Consumer Demand, contributed by members of the Green Transition Scoreboard® research team. For part one in the series, read Hazel Henderson’s “Good News on the Green Transition;” part two by Rosalinda Sanquiche, “Efficiency: Bedrock of the Green Transition;” and part three by Timothy Jack Nash, “Corporate R&D: Global Investments in Green Innovation.” For more information, please view the associated press release.

Talkback Readers: Do you think we can reach 100% renewables by 2050? What will it take to get it done? Tell us on Talkback! 

It will take a coordinated effort of responsible innovation, smart policy and living well with less to fight the war against climate chaos.

Part Three of a three-part series from CSRwire, “Health Hazards of Climate Change.”

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

Climate change has been called the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Part One of this series covered some of the greatest hazards, including death and injury from extreme weather, hunger, spread of disease carrying pests, water-borne and heat-related illnesses, asthma and lack of medicines due to species loss.

Part Two added the unintended consequences of the rush to replace fossil fuels with technologies that carry high risks to health and safety, like nuclear power and corn ethanol. At the end of that post I asked, “So, what’s a climate hawk to do? We need to consider a sobering truth: there is no ‘free’ energy.”

Even after the disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi, many clean energy advocates are saying we need to continue to build nuclear power capacity. Marc Gunther bemoaned in a recent column:

The fires, explosions, radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will lead to greater scrutiny - and higher costs - for new nuclear plants. That will make it harder to develop low carbon energy to replace fossil fuels and avert potentially catastrophic climate change… Over the past few years…I’ve grown more…inclined to support nuclear power as a low-carbon solution, particularly given that all forms of energy production create risks and require tradeoffs. But the nuclear options look a whole lot less attractive today than it did a week ago. And that’s a problem.

But do we really need to make a Faustian bargain with nuclear energy? Do we need to accept almost any tradeoffs to tackle climate change - nuclear disasters, mass starvation (ethanol), widespread contamination of our water supplies with deadly chemicals (hydrofracking for gas) and even such potentially catastrophic “solutions” like geoengineering?

Only if we lack imagination, courage and the willingness to pull together for the common good. The more dangerous alternatives have, tragically, been the first we’ve turned to, because they have powerful private players behind them that think they will make big profits out of the climate emergency we all face. (Caveat Tepco.) The problem is how the emerging energy technologies market is structured, subordinating long-term common need to short-term private greed. But in the long-term, simple survival means the common interest is the salient one, whether you are the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland or a farmer in Bangladesh.

We don’t need to make Faustian bargains for our future. There are safer, more responsible strategies. Here are seven possibilities:

1. Smart Subsidies: The free market doesn’t reign in energy, nor should it. It can’t price carbon correctly because it leaves out the costs we all bear collectively, like environmental destruction and damage to our health. Since the free market can’t price carbon correctly by itself, government policies need to help the market by rewarding technologies that lessen the cost to society and our environment and punishing those that increase it: R&D subsidies to responsible new technology; clean energy and efficiency rebates to consumers; heavy taxes on profits of fossil fuel companies; and an end to subsidies and loan guarantees to dicey modalities like nuclear, ethanol and gas.

2. Smart Standards: We need to develop common sense standards for new technology so we don’t go halfway down the road to hell paved by our good intentions. The precautionary principle has been adopted by the EU to ensure new chemicals don’t get introduced into industrial processes before they are proven safe. It wouldn’t have taken all that much time for scientists and eco-economists to figure out that corn ethanol violates the precautionary principle. All the billions of dollars wasted on that dead end could have given us a jumpstart on safer forms of biofuels, from algae to switchgrass - and ones yet discovered.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has developed these “Bioenergy Principles” to guide R&D and investment in alternative fuels. A national renewable energy standard would also be smart, enabling innovative technologies to be developed with a national market in mind and improved predictability for investors.

3. Smart Efficiency: Some criticize efficiency efforts, pointing out that while vehicle efficiency has increased, overall vehicle emissions have stayed the same, because people are driving more. Increasing use as efficiency goes up is called the Jevons effect; it’s real, but doesn’t apply everywhere and can be minimized. For example, making buildings more energy efficient will decrease total emissions because people won’t jack up the heat or AC beyond the level of comfort. Engineering solutions like smart lighting that goes off when no one is in a room makes efficiency easy, as does architecture that increases available daylight.

Even transportation can sidestep the Jevons effect - if mass transit is made more attractive than driving, as it is in many European cities or the older, dense cities of the US Northeast. Make trains affordable, available, with good connections and clear and frequent scheduling and many will give up driving with relief. Smart traffic lights can decrease fuel use and ease driving for those who must use cars. Discouraging sprawl and encouraging urban density will help too.

4. Smart Transition: We need to get serious about shortening the transition time away from fossil fuels to clean, responsible renewables. But we can also lighten the impact of fossil fuel production by adopting more stringent standards for pollution control and efficiency. Cars - even gasoline engines - can be much more fuel-efficient than current standards mandate. Coal plants can scrub their emissions better than they do now. Companies will scream and moan about costs, but, as the case of vinyl chloride shows, when they finally have to knuckle down and do the right thing, they will probably find a healthier bottom line. And a government mandate would level the playing field between companies and encourage a smart approach. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, “Addressing all four major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and CO2) at once allows utilities to take an integrated approach to pollution control, reducing industry costs and greatly increasing the public health benefits.”

The war against climate chaos isn’t just about technology and efficiency. It’s also about hearts and minds.

5. Smart Patriotism: The war metaphor is apt: just like the Allies did during World War II, citizens need to pitch in together so our children will have a chance. We need to make it unpatriotic to waste energy; we need to engage communities with Clean Energy Challenges, tree planting and climate resilience projects, and community wind developments; the list is endless. We need to redefine security to conform more to the real threats - wars over climate and dwindling resources - so we can take money from bloated defense budgets and use it to change the climate calculus to lessen the threat.

6. Smart Engagement: Many European cities use their trash to generate energy, but I heard a radio report on WNYC in New York that discounted that possibility for the city - a city which is now burning tons of carbon (and cash) to truck its mountains of trash away. The report said residents would never accept trash-to-energy installations. Well, maybe community education and engagement, along with incentives in the form of lower energy costs - and disincentives to continue business as usual - might change some hearts and minds. It’s worth a try. We need to educate and engage citizens in being part of the solution, not the problem.

7. Smart Consumption: And that bring us to the final strategy. Let’s redefine the good life to value quality over quantity; the commons we share over the stuff we hoard (or heedlessly discard); the things that are free and priceless, like health, community, compassion, conviviality and a shared investment in our human future.

It’s up to us.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: Can we fix the planet? What suggestions do you have on how to become more energy efficient? Share on Talkback!

U.S. naval forces need to plan for national security threats from global warming.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

U.S. naval forces need to prepare for serious national security threats stemming from climate change impacts that are “certain,” happening now and being caused by human activity, according to a just-released report by a blue-ribbon committee convened by the National Research Council.

Frank L. Bowman, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report and a retired U.S. navy admiral, warned, “Even the most moderate predicted trends in climate change will present new national security challenges for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. Naval forces need to … start preparing now for projected challenges climate change will present in the future.”

The threats include:

• International conflicts – potentially armed – over boundaries and exclusive economic zones in the Arctic region, as well as a new “Great Game,” as countries compete for new resources opened up due to melting Arctic ice sheets. These conflicts could involve the U.S. in disputes with Russia and Canada, among other nations.

• Serious strains on the financial and logistical ability of U.S. naval forces to respond to geopolitical and natural emergencies caused by climate disruption.

• Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of naval coastal installations at risk of destruction due to sea-level rise and more frequent and severe storm surges.

• National security threats from mass migrations out of neighboring countries fleeing climate catastrophes, such as floods and droughts.

The committee members, who were drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine, were unequivocal in their assessment of the reality, increasing pace and severity of climate instability and its impacts—and not just in the long term. For example, the report, “National Security Implications Of Climate Change For U.S. Naval Forces,” states, “Among the many manifestations of climate change projected for the next several decades, sea-level rise is both highly certain to occur and highly certain to come with economic costs.”

Sea-level rise is already occurring at the “upper limit” of predictions made in the first IPCC assessment 20 years ago. Moreover, the reports states, the rise will not be uniform over the globe. It will strike certain coastlines much earlier and more severely than others – a little-recognized fact that must be taken into account: “It is the regional variations that are of most serious concern to naval forces and their installations. Worst-case regional changes are more than an order of magnitude greater than the global mean.” (Italics added.) The global mean predicted by the report is between .4 and 2 meters of sea-level rise by the century’s end.

The report identifies climate change “hot spots” of special security concern to the United States, including mass migrations from Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America as climate change erodes the region’s “most critical ecosystems.”

The emerging giants of India and China are “especially vulnerable,” according to the report. And, despite common expectations that Russia will benefit from a warming climate, it “will contend with serious challenges, particularly to its energy sector, as permafrost thaws earlier and deeper—impeding construction of new production areas. This could have material negative impact on Russia’s oil and gas industry, the single greatest source of income to the Russian state.”

Anti-piracy and counter-terrorism missions now being conducted off Somalia (at least partially caused by environmental destruction) were listed as examples of the kind of responses U.S. naval forces are already involved in, but escalating climate disruptions could lead to wars over water resources in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, ratcheting up the need for more – and more costly – interventions that will stretch the capacity of the military to respond.

The report recommends increasing investments in technological research and development to help naval forces operate and train in the Arctic, as well as other areas, and to expand climate-related research that may not be undertaken by other groups.

It also recommends U.S. naval forces work together with NATO and other allies to improve international responses to climate challenges worldwide. But its most prominent advice to U.S. naval leaders is to “stress to Congress” the importance of ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in order to tamp down the threat of military confrontations with competing nations.

One question remains: with a U.S. Congress under the influence of climate-change deniers and the fossil fuel interests that fund them, will the prestige and power of the military be enough to bring it to its senses about the reality of the threat? The fate of the planet hangs in the balance.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: Will the Navy lead the country in climate change action? Tell us what you think on Talkback!