India's culture of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has helped produce a wide range of sustainable breakthroughs. Are there lessons there for the rest of the world? Ian Thornton meets the innovators.
"What we're doing is essentially space technology at low cost", says Lakshminarayan Kannan, Founder of Vortex Engineering, laughing. "To do anything in rural India it has to be cost-effective, robust, reliable and energy-efficient", he adds. "It's like sending something to Mars. You can't send an engineer up there to fix it. The only difference is that you don't have budget constraints in space technology!"
Climate change, deforestation, sustainable sourcing. Voices of concern over these issues – and more – aren't only those of activists or the environmental community. Increasingly, disparate stakeholders and investors are chiming in. What was once a murmur is now a chorus, often built into business plans and integrated into corporate agendas.
In a recent preview of the 2013 proxy season, Ernst & Young reported that 45% of shareholder proposals focus on environmental and social topics. Interestingly, nearly one third of climate change and other sustainability proposals were withdrawn, indicating dialogue between corporations and shareholders on these issues that has satisfied both parties.
Shareholder expectations have historically pushed the corporate agenda, but why the growing interest in greener topics? Environmental and social issues – in other words sustainability issues – interest shareholders because they are strategic risk-management issues. Leading companies are taking their cue accordingly, renewing their focus on the need for resource efficiency and scenario planning. This response spans large industrial sectors including oil and gas, agriculture, food and beverage, manufacturing and utilities.
China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has ordered companies in its most polluting industries to cut emissions by 30 per cent over the next four years.
The directive, which will compel firms to improve their pollution control equipment and will fine those responsible for excessive emissions, is designed to defuse growing public anger at the country’s appalling environmental record. It is seen as the first stage of President Xi Jinping’s promised reforms to reduce atmospheric pollution and raise food and water safety standards.
“Reducing air pollution is about people’s welfare and the country’s economic future,” the State Council said in a statement. “On the one hand, smog is visible and affects the life of everyone, rich and poor. It has proven that environmental crises can stir controversy and greatly undermine social stability.”
“The haze comes from Sumatra and Kalimanthan. Which companies own the estates? Malaysian and Singaporean as well as local plantation owners,” he said. As a result, “Malaysian and Singaporean companies in Indonesia also have to bear the responsibility of open burning, of slashing and burning, that is happening within their estate territories.”
Moreover, he added, “it is the respective governments’ responsibility to take them to task. Just because they operate in a foreign country, they can’t wash their hands and say it does not affect us” when it actually does.
The issue is flaring up again because the smoke, which tends to appear at least once a year, is intensifying again.
It might seem easy to write off global warming as a crisis that isn’t yet affecting us. However, says Dr. Marshall Shepherd, the early effects of warming are already here in everything from the price of Cheerios to extreme weather to the Dow Jones average. In his talk at TEDxAtlanta, Dr. Shepherd goes on to dispel some common myths about our changing climate. (Filmed at TEDxAtlanta)
I’d literally worship the ground that this man walks on. Not because my dream car is currently a Tesla, but because Elon Musk is doing something that a lot of entrepreneur people sort of forget about – Doing REAL things that actually have big implications for humanity, as opposed to the currently popular (or should we say, “low barrier to entry”) industries of mobile games, convenience apps and Social [Insert New Buzz Word].
A message from Waste Management and Recycling Association Singapore:
Taking place in Singapore on 2 July 2013, the Waste Management Symposium is jointly organised by Waste Management and Recycling Association of Singapore (WMRAS), National Environment Agency (NEA) and International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) and supported by Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA).
The symposium will provide insights into developments and opportunities in key Asia markets as well as showcase novel approaches into promising solutions and technologies for waste management and recycling industry.
A networking lunch and an evening cocktail reception are included in the full-day programme and do not hesitate to contact us at (65) 6403 2550 for more information.
Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt.… So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then “supersize” to sell more.… And advertise/promote to lock in “heavy users.”
Bees are an absolutely essential part of our eco system, something that Albert Einstein knew only too well. He predicted that "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more man!" A dramatic statement yes, but when you stop to consider the fact that bees pollinate around a third of everything we eat in Europe and are worth over £1bn to the UK economy annually, you start to see just how vital they are to our well-being. Sadly however, we haven't been giving our honey making friends the kind of respect they deserve and if we don't act soon we could see them disappear from Britain completely by 2018. Luckily there are people out there that do give a damn and they have the ambition of 'creating the biggest bee keeping network in the world'. Their name is The Honey Club and they mean business, good business.
Tesla Motors today announced significant expansion of the Tesla Supercharger network. Supercharging enables Tesla Model S drivers to travel long distances, for free, indefinitely.
The expansion of the network builds upon the success of the Tesla Supercharger network that covers California and Nevada on the west coast and the Washington, DC to Boston region on the east coast. The Tesla
Supercharger network has enabled an estimated 1 million miles of driving since going live in October 2012. Superchargers are designed for city to city travel, enabling Model S electric vehicle drivers to travel for about three hours, take a 20 to 30 minute break to grab lunch or a soda or coffee, and get back on the road charged up. For free.
With a belligerent, nuclear-armed neighbor led by a messianic millennial on its border, you’d think that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would rank low on South Korea’s to-do list. Yet the country plans to launch the world’s most ambitious carbon-trading market in a bid to cut its planet-warming spew 30% by 2020.
The world will be watching not only to see if South Korea can fix the flaws that have plagued the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme but also avoid hurting the industrial conglomerates, or chaebols, that supply the planet with computer chips, flat-screens and smartphones. (Samsung, for instance, is responsible for 2% of South Korea’s greenhouse gas emissions subject to the carbon regulations.)
“Such ambitious levels of abatement will come at a high price,” wrote Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) analyst Richard Chatterton in a detailed analysis of the carbon market, which is set to go live on Jan. 1, 2015. “If the target is retained, it may place a high cost burden on South Korea relative to other countries.”
That’s because South Korea has closed many of the loopholes that led to carbon price crashes in Europe and allowed polluting industries to weasel their way out of taking the hard steps to reduce their emissions.
If it were possible to bring back to life Alexander Bell, the father of telecommunications, to show him how things have changed, our telecommunication systems, including mobiles and the internet, would be utterly unrecognisable to him. Why then, when so many areas of our lives have been transformed beyond recognition, has the energy sector remained until now largely unchanged for more than a hundred years? In fact across all areas of our economy we remain mind-bogglingly wasteful in our use of not just energy, but water and raw materials too. Our buildings leak valuable heat, often running air conditioning and heating units at the same time; we generate enough electricity at all times to meet potential spikes in demand, use what we need at the time, and let the rest dissipate; the inefficiency of our cars and lorries in their use of fuel is a travesty and we are drowning in mountains of potentially valuable waste.
Singapore is embarking on an ambitious five-year plan to take stock of and monitor the entire island's carbon emissions.
The National Parks Board (NParks) wants to set up a system which will allow it to track emissions and how much of it is absorbed by the country's greenery.
The project, which is expected to start by the end of this year, will even include roadside trees and playing fields, according to a tender document posted by NParks on procurement website GeBiz last month.
Carbon-accounting experts believe the data could help Singapore improve its plans to take better care of the environment.
Maybe it's due to growing up in a family who always kept things "in case they came in handy one day", but I've spent much of my life around objects others would have thrown away. As I write, I'm sitting on a 1960s swivel chair that came out of a skip and I'm surrounded by an array of repurposed objects, from a dishwasher cutlery basket that is now a screwdriver rack to a bent piece of Meccano holding a phone.
Many of us do this sort of thing, of course, but, growing up in 1990s Britain, it seemed eccentric to want to fix things. It was the preserve of old men in overalls and railway arches; young people, in contrast, were expected to be obsessed with brands.
Can Harvard professor Michael Porter do for wellbeing and happiness what others have so far failed to achieve?
The creator of the shared value concept, who has the ear of both big business and governments, has unveiled a "rigorous" new Social Progress Index (SPI) that hopes to put social and environmental considerations at the top of the policy and corporate agenda.
He believes that a strong foundation of knowledge and analysis is essential if government, business and civil society are going to be able to collaborate to create new measures that look beyond gross domestic product (GDP), which has dominated the post-war global economy.
Porter hopes that the SPI will become as prominent as the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness report in driving best practice and a race for the top.
Ever wondered what's underneath the ice--sometimes up to three kilometers thick--that covers Antarctica?
Until very recently, we weren't really sure; maps were based on guesses and older technology. But NASA just released a video showing the results of what's called Bedmap2, the newest and most accurate look ever at the actual landmass of Antarctica.
It was assembled by the British Antarctic Survey from millions of datasets, lots of which were supplied by NASA's own Operation IceBridge. Operation IceBridge uses airplanes, rather than satellites, to monitor changes in polar ice, using a DC-8 and several other general-purpose airplanes. Laser altimeters, RADAR, and some odder tools like a gravimeter and magnetometer help NASA figure out what the land of Antarctica actually looks like.
There's a purpose to Bedmap2 beyond just curiosity; the ice sheets covering Antarctica are constantly shifting and melting and freezing, and what happens down there can have major effects on our lives up here, from changing sea levels to altering the migration patters of animals. But it does also sate our curiosity.
The 2007-2008 financial crisis, you might think, was an unpredictable one-time crash. But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment when any bubble is about to pop. (And he’s seeing it happen again, right now.)
The resulting collection One Third is both beautiful and politically repugnant. The name of the collection signifies how much food we waste globally every year. Underneath each photo Klaus notes food miles, carbon footprint, and water used.
Members of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who authored the food waste report, were the first to see the collection in a special showing in Rome.
Right now, One Third is in Nairobi, with stops in Moscow, Vienna and California to follow. However, we've posted some choice examples here.
So next time we chuck out something grisly from the fruit bowl or vegetable crisper, maybe pause and think how it could have been used before heading to landfill.
“Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are a key component of green buildings and Carriercontinuously innovates and develops solutions that improve efficiency and save energy,” said Oon Wee Chin, managing director, Carrier South East Asia. “We create cool and comfortable building environments that are environmentally responsible with low-energy consuming technologies.”
Effortless Energy, a startup based in Chicago, is trying to change the way we finance efficiency. Instead of asking for upfront payments, it pays for your improvements, then sells the loan to investors. All you need to do is sign up for an energy audit, which estimates the cost of the work. Effortless arranges for contractors to come by. And then you get an additional fee on your bill. Crucially, the overall amount--the investment plus energy costs--will still be less than what you were paying previously.
Effortless says someone currently paying $200 in monthly energy costs could cut their bill in half, with about 80% of the savings going to investors and the company, and 20% going to the owner. That’s $20 a month for not doing very much.
"Nobody wants to make an investment that only starts producing returns in six years," says co-founder Claire Tramm, who previously worked on efficiency issues at McKinsey. "Most people don’t make calculations in their head like businesses do, and it’s likely they value other uses for their funds before energy efficiency."
The lead research economist at the World Bank, Branko Milanovic, will be reporting soon, in the journal Global Policy, the first calculation of global income-inequality, and he has found that the top 8% of global earners are drawing 50% of all of this planet’s income. He notes: “Global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country,” because the stark inequality between countries adds to the inequality within any one of them, and because most people live in extremely poor countries, largely the nations within three thousand miles of the Equator, where it’s already too hot, even without the global warming that scientists say will heat the world much more from now on.
For example, the World Bank’s list of “GDP per capita (current US$)” shows that in 2011 this annual-income figure ranged from $231 in Democratic Republic of Congo at the Equator, to $171,465 in Monaco within Europe. The second-poorest and second-richest countries respectively were $271 in Burundi at the Equator, and $114,232 in Luxembourg within Europe. For comparisons, the U.S. was $48,112, and China was $5,445. Those few examples indicate how widely per-capita income ranges between nations, and how more heat means more poverty.
Wealth-inequality is always far higher than income-inequality, and therefore a reasonable estimate of personal wealth throughout the world would probably be somewhere on the order of the wealthiest 1% of people owning roughly half of all personal assets. These individuals might be considered the current aristocracy, insofar as their economic clout is about equal to that of all of the remaining 99% of the world’s population.
IN HIS inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that “more than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of those people.” It has taken much longer than Truman hoped, but the world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, their number fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people.
Now the world has a serious chance to redeem Truman’s pledge to lift the least fortunate. Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. Starting this week and continuing over the next year or so, the UN’s usual Who’s Who of politicians and officials from governments and international agencies will meet to draw up a new list of targets to replace the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), which were set in September 2000 and expire in 2015. Governments should adopt as their main new goal the aim of reducing by another billion the number of people in extreme poverty by 2030.
The “next big thing” lists are a well-worn staple of technology analysts and consultants, typically delivered just before the calendar turns to a new year.
A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, delivers a twist on the art form, and the difference is more than the timing. The 154-page report not only selects a dozen “disruptive” technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact.
By 2025, the 12 technologies — led by the mobile Internet, the automation of knowledge work, and the Internet of Things — have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.
That would be a sweeping and disruptive effect indeed, since economists project that by 2025 global economic output will be about $100 trillion.
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