Sustainable Community: June 2008 Archives

Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. Regions of Focus: North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and U.S. Pacific Islands. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research today released a scientific assessment ("Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate") that provides the first comprehensive analysis of observed and projected changes in weather and climate extremes in North America and U.S. territories. Among the findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases, according to the report. Many types of extreme weather and climate event changes have been observed during this time period and continued changes are projected for this century. Specific future projections include: Abnormally hot days and nights, along with heat waves, are very likely to become more common. Cold nights are very likely to become less common. Sea ice extent is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in the Arctic Ocean in summer in coming decades. Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense. Droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe in some regions. Hurricanes will likely have increased precipitation and wind. The strongest cold-season storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are likely to produce stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.

The Conference Board has published a paper in its Executive Action series, Company Approaches to Green Products and Services: What's Working and What's Not. Unfortunately, the document is available only to Conference Board members, but they've been nice enough to share a copy with me, so I'll provide some highlights.

The report written by Bill Blackburn, a Conference Board Senior Research Fellow, is a primer on green products, from basic definitions to explanations of life cycles to the basics of green marketing.

Blackburn knows from where he speaks: The former head of environment at Baxter International, he is author of The Sustainability Handbook, an authoritative reference for environmental managers. Blackburn's insights are complemented by the findings of a research panel, whose members include Aveda, Coca-Cola, J.C. Penney, Xerox, and others.

According to Joel Makower in Two Steps Forward,   the "best practices" Blackburn suggests include:

• Train and periodically update the company's design and marketing workforce, including their management, on the social and environmental issues and trends that are relevant to the company and the type of products and services it offers.
• Consider the issues and trends relevant to suppliers, wholesale customers and end consumer.
• Support two-way communications to ensure marketing reconnaissance and feedback from other key stakeholders and information sources are shared.
• Stay up to date on green product and service successes and failures of other companies, especially peers.
• Inventory current products and services to see which ones may be considered green.
• Identify potential areas where developing new green products or services might be productive; involve outside experts and/or new personnel to help stimulate the discussion.
• Periodically evaluate your progress in greening and promoting your products and services, and how well they stack up against the competition.

Clean Air-Cool Planet and Forum for the Future have just published Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Climate Neutrality  (Download — PDF), a joint project "developed in the absence of any hard and fast standards for climate neutrality, and out of growing concern that the real value of the concept could be lost in a stream of inflated claims."

"There's no agreed-upon definition of how much of a company's carbon footprint it needs to offset or what's needed to offset it," states Joel Makower in Two Steps Forward.

Getting to Zero attempts to make sense of all this, laying out the boundaries, providing definitions, and recommending company approaches. Among the recommendations:

Embrace a stretching boundary. The key tension surrounding any claim of neutrality remains reconciling the absolute nature of the claim — implying zero net impact — with a practical boundary-setting process. In the spirit of the term, we recommend that companies accept that claiming neutrality implies some responsibility to consider and address broader value-chain emissions. This is not to suggest that companies accept legal responsibility for the direct emissions of others, but rather that indirect emissions be explicitly considered as part of the neutrality process.