Topic: food

Climate Science Research Review Answers Climate Change Questions

Kevin Lustig — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:32:44 -0400

Update [10/17/2011]: WRI has released the latest edition of Climate Science. After you check out the resources below, take a look at our Q&A with the authors on WRI Insights or read the full report.

With wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and other dramatic weather events making front page news around the world, many people are asking questions about the signs and impacts of a changing climate. Climate Science is the World Resources Institute’s periodic review of the state of play of the science of climate change. With summaries and explanations of recent peer-reviewed research from a host of scientific journals, Climate Science is a window into what scientists are discovering about how climate change affects the living things and complex systems of our planet.

The latest edition, Climate Science 2009-2010 will be released later this year. In the meantime, we have assembled a preview of some of the research covered in the report. Take a look at our slideshow detailing the huge variety of impacts we are already seeing from warming global temperatures, including insights into sea-level rise, human migration, weather extremes, and the shrinking habitats of wildlife. Then, use our interactive map to learn more about the regional consequences of climate change around the United States.

Slideshow:

Climate change impacts around the world

» Explore all of WRI’s work on solutions to the climate challenge.

The Global Impacts of Climate Change

Use the arrows above to explore a preview of the research from WRI’s upcoming release of Climate Science 2009-2010 and a small selection of the changes facing our warming world.

WRI is working on solutions to the challenges illustrated in this slideshow. Click here to learn more about our work on climate and energy.

Photo Credit: flickr/NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Uneven global sea level rise

Researchers estimate a global sea level rise of approximately 3.26m resulting from the instantaneous melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Notably, they find that the impacts of the sea level rise would not be uniform around the globe. Because of perturbations in Earth’s rotation and shoreline migration, the impacts are predicted to be most pronounced on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the United States, where sea level rise could be 25% higher than the global mean.

Source(s): Bamber, J.L.; Riva, R.E.M.; Vermeersen, B.L.A.; and A.M. LeBrocq. (2009). Reassessment of the potential sea-level rise from a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science. 324 (901), doi: 10.1126/science.1169335

Photo Credit: flickr/NOAA Photo Library

Changing patterns for wildfires

Increases in both the frequency and extent of wildfire are salient examples of the effects of climate change that can have immediate and significant impacts on human communities. However, there is variation in this trend. Different regions of the world can expect increases or decreases in wildfire distribution from climate change, largely mediated by regionally-specific vegetation and precipitation changes. Notably, the increases in wildfire extent are projected to be in the United States and Canada, Europe and western China. Decreases in wildfire extent are predicted for parts of East Asia, Africa and Australia.

Source(s): Krawchuk MA; Moritz MA; Parisien M-A; Van Dorn J; and K. Hayhoe. (2009) Global Pyrogeography: the Current and Future Distribution of Wildfire. PLoS ONE 4(4): e5102. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005102.

Balshi, M.S.; McGuire, A.D.; Duffy, P.; Flannigan,M; Kicklighter, D.W.; and J. Melillo. (2009). Vulnerability of carbon storage in North American boreal forests to wildfires during the 21st century. Global Change Biology. 15: 1491-1510.

Flannigan, M.; Stocks, B.; Turetsky, M.; and M. Wotton. (2009). Impacts of climate change on fire activity and fire management in the circumboreal forest. Global Change Biology. 15: 549-560.

Photo Credit: flickr/slworking2

Growing unpredictability in India’s monsoons

A century’s worth of weather data show that summer monsoon rains are becoming less predictable. Agriculture and flood control in India have relied on the predictability of the monsoon over centuries to millennia. A reduction of the predictability of these events has profound implications for the region’s agriculture and communities’ ability to prepare for oncoming extreme events.

Source(s): Mani, N. J.; Suhas,E; and B. N. Goswami (2009), Can global warming make Indian monsoon weather less predictable? Geophysical Research Letters. 36, L08811, doi:10.1029/2009GL037989.

Photo Credit: flickr/Carlo_it

Extreme heat and the loss of land suitable for human habitation

Human metabolism cannot handle extremely high temperatures well, and a global temperature increase of 7°C, which is the upper limit of current projections, would make ~~large~~ some portions of the world uninhabitable. A global temperature increase of 12°C, which could occur solely from the combustion of all fossil fuel reserves, would render much of the globe uninhabitable by humans. In exploring this possibility, researchers point out that current economic models treat a 10°C rise in temperature as having an equivalent economic effect to a major recession, when it might actually render half the planet uninhabitable.

Source(s): Sherwood, SC and M Huber. (2010). An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (21): 9552-9555.

Photo Credit: flickr/coda

Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching

As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations rise, the concentration of dissolved CO₂ in the oceans has increased as a result, increasing the acidity of ocean water. Acidification can cause great harm to calcifying organisms, such as corals, as their calcium carbonate shells cannot form and, in some cases, dissolve. Research shows that the predicted impacts of ocean acidification are already occurring on the Great Barrier Reef, impacting the health of the reef ecosystem and the livelihoods that depend on such ecosystems.

Source(s): De’ath, G.;, Lough, J.M.; and K.E. Fabricius. (2009). Declining coral calcification on the Great Barrier Reef. Science. 323: 116-119.

Photo Credit: flickr/babasteve

Billions in losses for U.S. fishing industry

Researchers set out to assess the economic effects of ocean acidification using a simple model which links projected declines in mollusk populations from ocean acidification to projected declines in the U.S. commercial mollusk harvest. Using the 2007 harvest as a baseline, the authors calculated potential future losses under different emissions scenarios. Even a modest estimate of 10-25% aggregate decrease in U.S. mollusk harvests could cause anywhere from $1.7 billion to $10 billion in losses to the U.S. fishing industry by 2060.

Source(s): Cooley, S. and S. Doney. (2009). Anticipating ocean acidification’s economic consequences for commercial fisheries. Environmental Research Letters. 4: 024007.

Photo Credit: flickr/marbla123

A later start to a shorter rainy season in the dry Sahel

In the Sahel region of North Africa, climate-induced alterations of rainfall will have profound impacts on agriculture and the resilience and adaptability of human communities. Recent research demonstrates that, by the end of this century, under a mid-range warming scenario, the rainy season will start later by 3-4 days and have a shorter duration by 5 days in the Sahel. These delays and shortenings, while seemingly small, are likely to reduce anticipated crop yields with profound consequences for agricultural production in the region.

Source(s): Biasutti, M.; and A. H. Sobel (2009), Delayed Sahel rainfall and global seasonal cycle in a warmer climate, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L23707, doi:10.1029/2009GL041303.

Photo Credit: flickr/SOS Sahel UK

Reduced water supply from the Colorado River

The combined effects of warming temperatures on snowmelt, evaporation, and precipitation will likely have profound influences on river flows, which are critical for human consumption and irrigation of farmland. Researchers estimated the impacts that climate-change induced reductions in runoff from the Colorado River will have for humans’ future use of the river’s water. Their study predicts a 10-30% reduction in Colorado River run-off by 2050 because of anthropogenic climate change. This will result in significant and regular failure to meet scheduled water deliveries in the American Southwest.

Source(s): Barnett, Tim and David W. Pierce. (2009). Sustainable water deliveries from the Colorado River in a changing climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (18): 7334-38.

Photo Credit: flickr/victorfe places

Hotter growing seasons and widespread crop loss

Researchers have assessed the impacts of increasing temperature on global food supply and found that in the tropics and sub-tropics, it is highly likely (greater than 90% probability) that the average growing season temperature during the last decades of the 21st century will exceed the most extreme temperatures experienced during the 20th century. In temperate regions, temperature extremes like those experienced during the 2003 heat wave in Europe will become the norm. Higher temperature alone will have significant negative effects on crop yields, even without the predicted impacts of associated drought.

Source(s): Battisti, D.; and R. Naylor. (2009). Historical warnings of future food insecurity with unprecedented seasonal heat. Science. 323:240-244.

Photo Credit: flickr/CIMMYT

More destructive hurricanes

Projecting hurricane activity over the rest of the 21st century, researchers found that the frequency of intense hurricanes (category 4 or 5) is likely to increase significantly. Their model projects an increase in the number of intense storms by 80% by the end of the 21st century. They attribute this change to warmer sea surface temperatures. While the overall frequency of hurricanes is likely to decrease, the model suggests that there is a pronounced increase in the frequency of powerful storms after 2070.

Source(s): Bender, MA, Knutson, TR, Tuleya, RE, Sirutis, JJ, Vecchi, GA, Garner, ST, and IM Held. (2010). Modeled impact of anthropogenic warming on the frequency of intense Atlantic hurricanes. Science. 327: 454.

Photo Credit: flickr/NOAA Photo Library

Widespread loss of lizard species around the world

While many reports about climate change focus on projected future impacts, one study set out to assess the impacts of warming temperatures that have already affected populations of lizards around the globe. Analyzing studies of 30 species of Mexican lizards from 1975-2009, they find that 12% of local populations of lizards have gone extinct. Based on the Mexican observations, they estimate that globally, 4% of lizard populations have become extinct since 1975 as a result of climate change. On the basis of the observed trends, the authors find that by 2080, 20% of global lizard species will be extinct.

Source(s): Sinervo, B, Mendez-de-la-Cruz, F, Miles, DB, et al. (2010). Erosion of lizard diversity by climate change and altered thermal niches. Science. 328: 894-899.

Photo Credit: flickr/NOAA Photo Library

Extreme temperature highs in the United States

Researchers project that over the next three decades extreme warm temperatures will increase significantly in the United States. Even when global average temperatures do not rise more than 2°C, one study predicts that by 2030-2039, 38 days of the year will be in the top 5% of current temperature extremes, and that there may be at least seven record setting temperature days per year. Extremes in temperatures can have significant impacts on human health and lives, and reductions in soil moisture and precipitation will have implications for the viability of crops and ecosystems.

Source(s): Diffenbaugh, NS and M Ashfaq. (2010). Intensification of hot extremes in the United States. Geophysical Research Letters. Vol. 37: L15701.

Photo Credit: flickr/yeppiyeebo

Cold winter extremes in Europe and other northern regions

Winter sea ice in the Barents and Kara Seas, portions of the Arctic Ocean north of Russia, has been greatly decreasing due to warming temperatures. This reduction in sea ice cover causes the lower troposphere, (the portion of the atmosphere close to the earth surface) to warm slightly because of the heat trapping ability of the open ocean. On study suggests that this warmer air may create a pressure and temperature gradient that sucks heat out of Europe, resulting in an anomalous continental cooling of -1.5°C (averaged across the continent) in the winter.

Source(s): Petoukhov, V and VA Semenov. (2010). A link between reduced Barents-Kara sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents. Journal of Geophysical Research. VOL. 115 doi:10.1029/2009JD013568.

Photo Credit: flickr/neiljs

Major increases in human migration

Changes in land-use patterns and agricultural policies in Mexico and other Central American countries have already been leading to large numbers of migrants into the United States. Climate change is likely to augment this trend as it impacts crop yields in some of the hardest hit and poorest areas of southern Mexico. One study predicts an average of an additional 20,000-100,000 “climate-immigrants” per year over the next decades (assuming a linear rate of increase - Ed, 12/9/11).

Source(s): Feng, S, Krueger, AB, and M Oppenheimer. (2010). Linkages among climate change, crop yields, and Mexico-US cross-border migration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Photo Credit: flickr/Ben Amstutz

Reduction and loss of major Asian sources of drinking water

One of the greatest concerns about the pace and magnitude of human-induced climate change impacts is the water security of the over one billion people in Asia, mostly in India and China, who live in river basins that are fed by Himalayan glaciers and snow. The flows from these water resources are essential to agricultural production and maintaining drinking water supplies. As temperature rises, there are concerns about the long-term stability of these flows. Research has determined that the Indus and the Brahmaputra are most susceptible to climate-induced changes in snow-melt water flow.

Source(s): Immerzeel, WW, van Beek, LPH, and MFP Bierkens. (2010). Climate change will affect the Asian water towers. Science. 328: 1382-1385.

Photo Credit: flickr/reurinkjan

Short-term loss of cloud cover

The sensitivity of the Earth’s climate system to changes in cloud coverage is one of the key uncertainties of the impacts of a changing climate. With a warmer climate, will there be more clouds that reflect more sunlight and thus induce a negative feedback, cooling the earth’s surface, or will there be fewer clouds, and thus a warmer world as more solar radiation hits the earth’s surface? A recent study analyzes data from 2000-2010. Over this time frame, it finds that there appears to be a positive feedback, meaning that warming-induced decreases in cloud coverage has led to more incoming solar radiation, which in turn increases warming.

Source(s): Dessler, AE. (2010). A determination of the cloud feedback from climate variations over the past decade. Science. 330: 1523-1527.

Photo Credit: flickr/Kevin Dooley

Threat of near extinction for Emperor penguin population

Using climate models and observations of Emperor penguin populations over forty three years, researchers found that populations are projected to decline, with the probability of ‘quasi extinction’ (greater than 95% decline) by 2100 at 36%. The impact of early sea ice break up on breeding could have direct effects on penguins’ population growth. Reduced sea ice will likely have indirect impacts on the food web by reducing krill, the primary food source for the fish that penguins eat.

Source(s): Jenouvrier, S.; Caswell, H.; Barbaud, C.; Holland, M.; Stroeve, J.; and H. Weimerskirch. (2009). Demographic models and IPCC climate projections predict the decline of an emperor penguin population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (6): 1844-47.

Photo Credit: flickr/Martha de Jong-Lantink

Faster glacial melting due to black carbon

Black carbon, or soot produced from biomass and fossil fuel burning, can alter surface reflectivity, making surfaces darker and warmer, much like a dark shirt on a summer day. Researchers have found that levels of black carbon on Tibetan glaciers are high enough to decrease their surface reflectivity by 10 to 100%. Tibetan glaciers represent the largest stores of freshwater on the planet outside of the polar ice caps. As these glaciers melt rapidly and meltwater seasonality is altered, heavier spring floods and longer dry periods are anticipated throughout East and South Asia.

Source(s): Xu, B.; Cao, J.; Hansen, J.; Yao, T.; Joswia, D.; Wang, N.; Wu, G.; Wang, M.; Zhao, H.; Yang, W.; Liu, X.; and J. He. (2009). Black soot and the survival of Tibetan glaciers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (52): 22114-18.

Photo Credit: NASA

Additional sea level rise in the northeast U.S.

There is a difference in the elevation of the sea level near the U.S. coast, with sea levels lower near the coast than further off shore. This “slope” of sea level is a result of a system of robust ocean currents. According to one study, ice melt and precipitation in the Arctic, combined with increased temperatures, are predicted to slow down these currents and eliminate the difference in sea level height. This will increase coastal sea levels an estimated 0.2-0.3m for Boston, New York and Washington, DC by the end of the century in addition to sea level rise from other causes.

Source(s): Yin, J.; Schlesinger, M.E.; and R.J. Stouffer. (2009). Model projections of rapid sea-level rise on the northeast coast of the United States. Nature Geoscience. Doi: 10.1038/NGEO46.

Photo Credit: flickr/InAweofGod’sCreation

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Related Information

Agricultural Land Grabs Threaten Local Property Rights and Sustainable Development

Mercedes Stickler — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:09:27 -0400

With large-scale agricultural investments on the rise, the rights of local people must be protected.

Large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural use by both local and foreign commercial entities – often dubbed “land grabs” - are on the rise worldwide. Often touted as a form of economic development, these investments could have profound negative effects on the environment and rural livelihoods if transactions go through without the meaningful participation of affected peoples and due consideration for the many benefits they derive from nature.

Land provides the very platform on which sustainable lives and livelihoods are built. As a result, the land on which people build their homes and organize their communities is directly linked to their quality of life. Seventy-five percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and a majority of rural livelihoods depend primarily on natural resources to provide food, fresh water, and a healthy environment, among other benefits. Reliable access to land and the ability to make decisions about land use is therefore critical to rural economies.

The Importance of Recognizing Local Land Rights

In many developing countries, however, local peoples’ rights to land are not recognized or enforced by governments. Often times, governments make decisions about how land and natural resources will be used without consulting the people who depend on those resources for their livelihoods. People who rely on customary or traditional rights are particularly vulnerable to losing their land because there is little or no official documentation of their rights to protect them from their land being taken by someone else. This is a serious problem in Africa, where formal tenure covers only some 2 – 10% of all land.

The Risks and Opportunities of Large-Scale Agriculture Investments

Rising global demand for food and biofuel crops has driven a recent wave of large-scale agricultural investments in the Global South. Following the food price spike in 2007-08, media reports suggest that up to 56 million hectares of land were targeted for agriculture and forestry investments in less than one year, compared with an annual average cropland expansion of 1.9 million ha between 1990 and 2007.

Case studies have found that land transfers of hundreds and even thousands of hectares have been made without due consideration of existing rights or potential impacts on ecosystem services and the livelihoods they support. As a result, these investments may undermine sustainable development in countries already struggling to escape poverty.

In Ethiopia, for example, official government data in five of its nine regions indicate that a total area of at least 1.2 million ha – roughly 8.6% of the country’s cultivated area – were transferred to domestic and foreign commercial entities between 2005 and 2010. Although production data are scarce, media reports indicate that land acquired by Saudi Arabian companies in Ethiopia will be used to produce vegetables, flowers, and rice for export to nations in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Ethiopia is due to receive food aid for 5.7 million people in 2011 from the United Nations World Food Programme.

The size of individual deals can be staggering – in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a Chinese company has reportedly acquired rights from the central government to some 3 million ha of forest land across three provinces where indigenous people and other communities still rely on forests for their livelihood and culture. This transaction represents roughly two-thirds of the entire area in DRC that is potentially suitable for growing oil palm but not yet cultivated.

The scale of these transactions alone makes it even more imperative that the customary rights of local people be recognized and the impacts on existing land uses, especially forests, be considered. Large-scale land acquisitions that ignore customary rights not only risk undermining local livelihoods; illegitimate deals can slow investment implementation, damage company reputation, and even undermine regional stability – as demonstrated by the role that a high profile 1.3 million ha deal in Madagascar played in that country’s 2009 coup.

Governments often justify these transfers by citing their potential contribution to economic growth – however, any gains in national accounts (which to date appear few) risk being greatly outweighed by negative impacts on local livelihoods. Increased investment in agriculture can be used to promote sustainable development through the introduction of new technology and improved management of natural resources using an integrated planning approach. To achieve broad-based economic growth and increased standards of living, however, major agricultural investments must respect customary and traditional rights and mitigate or compensate negative impacts on the ecosystem services that support local livelihoods.

As food production will likely need to double in the next forty years to feed an additional two billion people by 2050, demand for agricultural land is likely to remain high. There is therefore an urgent need for governments, civil society, and the private sector to work together to improve the governance of agricultural investments in ways that are environmentally sustainable and accountable to local people.

WRI at the World Bank Land Conference

WRI is excited to be participating in this year’s Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, April 18-20, 2011, in Washington, DC. Below are several events that feature WRI staff and research:

April 19th 4:00-6:00 PM (panel): Monitoring Land Acquisitions from Different Angles: Is There Scope for Collaboration? - Manish Bapna, WRI Executive Vice President and Managing Director, will chair a panel addressing monitoring land acquisitions with regard to IFC performance standards, lessons learned on participatory monitoring of large land deals, and civil society responses to large-scale land acquisitions.
April 20, 8:00-9:30 AM (panel): Land Tenure in the Context of REDD+ and Climate Change - Fred Stolle, WRI Senior Associate, will present on “Shifting cropland expansion to degraded areas: Experience from Indonesia’s POTICO project.” This panel will also address country-level perspectives on making REDD operational, tenure issues at REDD project sites, and the large-scale acquisition of forest rights.
April 18-20th (exhibit): Focus on Africa: An Interactive Educational Tool on Land Tenure and Property Rights. The Focus on Africa website, a joint initiative of WRI and Landesa, with support by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to inform policymakers and development practitioners on critical land tenure issues. The tool provides land tenure experiences and lessons from six sub-Saharan African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. Please visit the site - http://www.wri.org/property-rights-africa/.

For more information about WRI’s participation, please contact Emily Norford at enorford@wri.org or +1 (202) 729-7754.

Environmental Stories to Watch in 2011

Maggie Barron — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:53:43 -0500

WRI President Jonathan Lash previews the key environmental issues to watch in 2011.

On January 6th, journalists gathered at the National Press Club for WRI President Jonathan Lash’s 8th annual “Stories to Watch” presentation. The briefing previewed key environmental issues that will likely emerge throughout 2011. Our resources from the event, including audio and video, are below.

Jonathan Lash on E&E TV, summarizes the Stories To Watch in 2011.

Browse the presentation
Listen to the audio
Twitter archive
Watch the video
Read the full transcript
Media advisory

This year, the issues included:

Energy in a Policy Vacuum: The United States must make a range of energy choices in what is essentially a policy vacuum, given the lack of climate legislation. What decisions will businesses, especially utilities, make? And what role will the EPA play?
Food, Fuel, Water, and Land: Rising demand for biofuels, food, and water will increase pressure at the agricultural-forest frontier. Will this lead to an emerging emphasis on food efficiency and the use of degraded lands, rather than virgin forest, for agricultural expansion?
Electric Vehicles and Mobility: In 2011, a slew of electric cars will hit the U.S. and global markets. How will this transition take place, and what will the environmental benefit actually be? And how will innovations like high speed rail and bus rapid transit help rapidly growing economies like India, China and Brazil tackle their congestion and traffic problems?
International Climate Action - Post COP-16: While there was modest success at the climate talks late last year, the response to climate change is expanding outside the UNFCCC negotiations to become a very significant part of development planning globally. What next steps will China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries take? And how far can the United States go towards meeting its own commitments?
Political/Business Gap on Climate: While many members of the U.S. Congress seem to be increasingly hostile to climate action, companies are putting more emphasis than ever on being green. Why is it that the politics seems to be going one way while corporations and consumers seem to be going another?

Video

Powerpoint Presentation

Audio

Download (MP3, 15.6 Mb)

Twitter Archive

WRI Environmental Stories to Watch 2011

Transcript

JONATHAN LASH: Thank you all for joining us. It’s a pleasure to be with you this January morning.

Before I get started, I did want to just recognize one dear, old friend who’s joined us this morning, my friend Dr. Tom Lovejoy. Tom is a world-leading ecologist, and I think has taught more people about the importance of the Amazon than any other five people in the world. Tom, it’s really great to have you with us this morning.

So before looking ahead to 2011, it’s worth a quick look back at 2010. It was a tough year for the environment and a tough year for environmentalists, especially in the US. You all know that it was probably the hottest year in recorded history. This charts the number of locations that recorded the hottest temperatures ever recorded. It was marked by an enormous range of damages from natural disasters.

This is a story about one insurance company’s totaling of the efforts. And many of these disasters were at least in line with what climate scientists are predicting with warming. A hundred-square-mile sheet of ice broke off Greenland early in the year. There was unprecedented heat in Russia and fires all across Siberia, at the same time that much of Pakistan was under water.

And there were a series of tragedies that occurred at the extractive interface where human kind if going in its ever-greater effort to find fossil fuels – the Massey coal mine disaster and, of course, the Deepwater Horizon spill.

But maybe the most important event of the year, from a US environmentalist’s point of view, was the failure of Congress to act on global warming legislation. And that really leads directly to the first story I wanted to talk about – the range of energy changes that the nation will be making in what is essentially a policy vacuum.

The energy economy in 2010 was a little less than 10% of the whole US economy by value. And as the US economy recovers and energy demand increases in the US, both companies and energy producers face a range of important choices. Those are especially tough for utilities trying to decide how to make $100 million/billion investments in capital stock that will be functional for 20 to 50 years.

And there are a number of drivers of change that they’re trying to respond to. The price of coal is going up, both because of global demand, and now because of the floods in Queensland. The price of gas is dropping; and you all are following the story of the increasing belief that we will see vast supplies of unconventional gas entering the US supply chain. Federal regulation is uncertain; I’ll get to that a little later. And there are enormous variations in state regulation of energy production and state policies are shifting.

So the result is enormously difficult choices for utility investors trying to understand what costs will be over the coming decades. What we have seen, because of the slowdown in policy in the US, is we’re lagging far behind now in terms of clean energy investments, and the clean energy sector appears to be slowing down. As a result, there’s been some withdrawal of funds from clean energy investment funds. And recent reports suggest that the shares of stock in publicly traded clean energy investment funds are falling. There have been cancellations of coal-fired power plants. There have been cancellations of planned new nuclear units.

So 2011 is going to be a year to watch which way all of this goes. And here are some things that you might particularly focus on:

In the next several months, the CEOs or CFOs of utility companies will be doing their outlook briefings for Wall Street investors. In most cases, you are invited to join those calls, and they will talk about their plans. And my guess is, you will hear them talk a lot more about gas and probably wind than you will about coal. In fact, I think you will see a surprising surge of investment in wind, as well as in gas.

You can look at decisions that regulators make about whether they’re willing to approve long-term gas supply contracts. Ever since the deregulation of natural gas prices in the US caused a certain amount of chaos in US markets, there have been very few long-term natural gas contracts. Utilities are pushing those again now for obvious reasons.

You can look at whether other states follow Colorado with its Clean Power Act, or North Carolina with its Clean Power Act, both of which have led to conversions of power plants from coal to gas and rising levels of renewables. Or Massachusetts with its new requirements for long-term contracts with renewables producers.

You can look at whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission endorses the efforts of those trying to build new transmission lines to get renewable power to the market to distribute those costs broadly across utility customers.

You can look at whether Senator Lugar reintroduces his Energy Efficiency and Clean Power Bill, and whether it has a broad range of Republican sponsors. That would be the clearest indication that there was some possibility of policy initiatives in the current Congress.

And finally, of course, you all are already watching the story at EPA. It’s been very much a front-page story in the last few weeks. In the pipeline at EPA are rules dealing with emissions of greenhouse gases, so-called conventional air pollutants, water discharges from power plants, and ash disposal.

In moving ahead with those regulations, EPA is doing the job that was assigned to it by Congress under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Toxic Substances and RCRA, as instructed by a score of outstanding court decisions. This is not an area in which EPA has broad flexibility to move or not to move. In fact, at the current time, the only requirement that has taken effect is not a requirement in a new rule; it is a Best Available Control Technology requirement for large, new facilities that stems directly from the Clean Air Act, not from a new rule.

So as you listen to the debate about the EPA overreaching and the flood of regulation, you have to understand there actually isn’t any yet.

This slide gives you a picture of EPA’s plans to deal with some of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US economy – transportation, electric power and industry. It is the utility sector that will come under these requirements soonest, if EPA moves forward.

And the Best Available Control Technology, or BACT, requirement will be administered by the states, because that authority’s delegated by EPA. All of the states have agreed to move forward with that, except Texas.

My colleague, Franz Litz, is sitting back there nodding yes, because he’s instructed me on all this. And I think I got it all right, Franz. And if I didn’t, he’ll correct me. Or answer your more detailed questions.

My view of this is the EPA is doing everything it possibly can to proceed reasonably and pragmatically to answer a set of questions that have to be answered and create huge and very expensive uncertainty that will be an obstacle to economic growth if the questions aren’t answered. I mean, I have to put my spin out here; I am an environmentalist and follow this fairly closely.

And there are some companies, including some utilities, that strongly agree. You’ve seen Exelon and Pacific Gas & Electric out in public, in the Wall Street Journal, talking about these issues. But of course, you know there is a thunderous chorus from much of industry demanding that these regulations be blocked, and it seems a certainty that the House at least will vote a series of different kinds of measures designed to either strip EPA of authority to move ahead, or slow it in moving ahead.

So there is a Congressional Review Act that enables them to take up a resolution to disapprove rules, if rules are promulgated. But none of these rules have been promulgated yet.

There are opportunities in the Continuing Resolution and Appropriations Acts to attach legislation forbidding EPA to move forward. There will be opportunities to attach such legislation to multiple important decisions of the Congress.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to those when they get to the Senate, if any will get to the White House, and, if they do, what the White House will do. It will surely depend on the context, and everybody’s going to be watching that anyway.

So let me just suggest one thing: If six months from now there has not been any significant change in EPA’s authority to move ahead, and this is still moving, you should watch for initiatives by the utility industry to get these questions answered, to either get legislation through this Congress or find a way to reach an agreed-upon settlement with the EPA.

So, from energy choices to food, fuel, water and land tensions, which are going to reemerge with a vengeance this year. You remember a few years ago when the story was all about biofuels driving up food prices. We’re going to see that story again. This particular issue was sort of an ode to the complexity of reality. The food story is not a simple story.

Food prices are going up. They’ve been going up for some months now. Farmers are happy. It is not yet having a significant impact politically, but last time around, a few years ago, before the recession, there were food riots all over the world because of the cost of basic commodities. This is in part driven by oil prices going up. There’s a close tie between energy and food. But that is by no means the whole story.

We live in a world with a growing population, and global economic growth has been restored. As population grows and the people in the world reach a higher standard of living, the demand for meat grows. As you know, every pound of beef requires many pounds of grain or soy to produce. So as human wellbeing improves, the demand for agricultural products expands.

At the same time, the demand for biofuels, biodiesel and ethanol, corn-based ethanol, is rapidly expanding. That went on right through the economic recession, and is continuing. Those are products produced on the same land, by the same farmers who would otherwise be producing feed and food.

And this tendency is exacerbated by the kinds of climate events that we’re seeing all over the world. So floods, droughts, storms disrupt agricultural supplies; that has a significant effect in 2007/2008.

Generally historically, the way we have increased food production as population and wealth increased was to add fertilizer. This is a projection of future fertilizer use: The purple line is what one would expect as business is usual with expected food growth. The dotted line represents a set of policy changes that might somewhat reduce that demand. This is an important factor in a number of agricultural/environmental tensions, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The second measure that has been taken to expand agricultural production historically has generally been to add water.

Add fertilizer, add water; you can get more food out of the same piece of land. So what you see here is very little increase in total land under cultivation while we’ve had a massive increase in actual food production.

But we may be seeing that change.

So issue number one coming out of this, we already have high levels of surface water pollution, high enough to be significantly destructive of productivity and at high economic cost across the world, largely from agricultural nutrients.

And we’re also seeing conflicts over water availability growing worldwide. The number of people subject to water scarcity – having on the average less water than is deemed necessary for basic survival – has doubled in the last 20 years.

All of that, I think, is going to lead to significant new land use conflicts. Just at the point where we have an agreement coming out of Cancun on forest preservation, we’re going to see increased pressure at the agricultural forest frontier.

In Indonesia, for example, there’s just a sharp rise in very profitable palm oil production, which is both for food and for biodiesel. In Brazil, there’s a sharp rise in both cattle and soy production; again, pushing on the Amazon frontier.

This will be a year in which the commitments of countries like Brazil and Indonesia to reduce deforestation come up against the pressures created by the demand for biofuels for meat and for food. And I think that you can look for increased pressure on both the companies that produce biofuels – for instance, palm oil producers, who are already responding to pressures to make their activities more sustainable – and increased pressures on food producers, particularly meat importers, to find ways to produce at the frontier without destruction of forests.

So Tom could tell us more about this, but there have been some significant agreements by some of the major multinational companies who are meat producers in Brazil to stay away from the use of land that has been just cut from the forest.

There’s one other very interesting new factor here. You know how in the 1970s, as energy prices went up, there began to be an emphasis on energy efficiency. And we’ve had a sort of 40-year discussion about how much you could get the same services for less energy. It’s still going on; it’s still the best opportunity.

Well, the same is true of food. The estimates for the United States, I think, are that 40% of food is wasted. I think we’re going to see an emerging emphasis on food efficiency. And I think we’re going to see an emerging emphasis on the use of degraded lands, rather than virgin forest, for agricultural expansion, which will reflect new technology. There’s about a billion acres of degraded forestland that would be used for agriculture to protect the Amazon and the Indonesian forests.

Energy choices, energy fuel, water, land choices. The next is about mobility. I love this story.

During 2011, something like 20 to 25 new all-electric vehicles or plug-in electric hybrid vehicles are going to hit the US market. GE, Hertz, Enterprise, numerous companies and the Government Services Agency have all announced in advance that they will make very large-scale fleet purchases of EVs during the coming year. GE has committed to 25,000 EVs; basically, their whole sales force will be driving electric vehicles.

And Americans are going to have their first large-scale experience with what many people think will be the car of the future, and will encounter some important issues. For instance, because there haven’t been electric vehicles, we don’t have high-speed charging stations at every service station yet. So there’ll be real issues as people begin to demand that the transition is made so that they can use their new Leaf or their new Coda as they please.

We will get to see whether people are concerned that the range for existing pure electric vehicles is limited, or whether in fact most of us spend most of our time driving short distances, and people are looking for an electric vehicle to serve that need. That will drive the shift between a plug-in hybrid and a pure electric.

As you see from the prices on these cars, they all cost close to twice what an equivalent internal combustion-driven car would cost. We’ll see whether consumers decide that the annual savings and the other benefits of these vehicles are sufficient to make it worth purchasing them, and how quickly the fleet purchases drive down the prices.

So if you were to drive one of these vehicles at current gasoline prices, you’d – depending on your driving habits, obviously – save something close to $1,000 a year. You wouldn’t pay yourself back for the difference in cost, not at current gasoline prices, not at these purchase prices. But you’d get a significant benefit.

There also are interesting questions about the degree of environmental benefit from shifting to electric vehicles. If you drive an electric vehicle in an area, most of whose electricity comes from coal, you get about a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions. If the mix goes to gas, you’ll get much higher reductions in CO2 emissions. That’s going to be an important challenge for you as policymakers; for instance, as EPA makes the decision about how it’s trying to shift the US fleet in the future.

So the advent of electric vehicles is one issue. It will also be a global issue. The Chinese are trying to put a million of these on the road in the next couple of years. They have subsidies for buyers that are much larger than US subsidies, as does Europe.

But the other, second issue about mobility can’t be solved by electric vehicles. Congestion is the same whether your car burns gasoline or runs off a battery. Safety issues are the same whatever kind of vehicle. And for rapidly growing economies like India, China and Brazil, this is becoming an issue of intense importance.

China has made a very interesting call on this. Their intercity air transit is already totally jammed, and the demand for mobility is steadily rising. In 2011, or more probably in 2012, China will reach the point, after four years of working on a high-speed rail, where they have more miles of high-speed rail in China than all the rest of the world combined. They are going to invest $120 billion in the next two years. The trains are now traveling at over 200 miles an hour, and within another year or two will be traveling at over 300 miles an hour, thereby completely eliminating all the benefits of air travel for less than a 1,000-mile trip.

These are spectacular new technologies. And a key issue that’s emerging here is the Chinese are making such a massive investment that they’re going to dominate the technology in this, and they will be the world’s suppliers of high-speed rail. While they’re investing over $120 billion, we’re mostly canceling the plans that had been made for high-speed rail and investing a few billion dollars out the stimulus.

So this is intercity transit. There’s also the question of within-city transportation. I don’t know if you get to travel very much in developing country megacities, but movement is a major challenge. In Washington, you can schedule six meetings a day and actually imagine that you could do it. In Sao Paulo or Mumbai, two is the absolute maximum, because it’s so difficult to move around.

I just wanted to talk about one trend and brag a little bit. This is my one advertisement for WRI. We have a Sustainable Transport Center that has been a catalyst for the development of what I see as a solution that’s just going to explode in the coming years – rapid transit buses traveling on dedicated lanes on a schedule, moving huge numbers of people. We are a think tank. We’re an analytical organization, but this little Center has already moved over a billion of people, saving them 350 million hours of transit time and avoiding huge amounts of pollution.

Bus rapid transit is cheap. It can be implemented fast. And we’re going to see it expanding rapidly because developing country megacities just need to do something immediately, the jam is so bad.

That is particularly going to be true of Brazil. Brazil is glad to be the host for the Rio Plus 20 meetings in 2012, the World Cup, and the Olympics; the World Cup in multiple venues.

It is absolutely essentially that Brazil solve transportation problems in order to entertain those events. The last time I headed for the airport from downtown Sao Paulo, the trip, which is less than 17 miles, took close to three hours.

And Brazil, in fact, has a massive investment plan under way. This will be an interesting challenge for the new president Dilma, a huge infrastructure challenge. They plan to build 500 kilometers of bus rapid transit, 27 kilometers of light rail, 48 kilometers of monorail, and a high-speed rail link between Rio and Sao Paulo in the next two years.

Will it happen, Tom? If you were under the illusion that China might be moving quickly, and maybe India, but Brazil wasn’t, it’s wrong. There’s just going to be an explosion of change around all of this. And transit is going to be a symbol of it as they develop these new facilities.

So 2010 ended with an environmental success, a modest one, the agreement in Cancun. I wanted to talk a little bit about a couple things to look for coming out of the Cancun meetings, and then say why I actually think that’s not where the action is.

I refer to Cancun as “Copencun”, because I think that it essentially finished the business that was done at Copenhagen. The world accepted what was done at Copenhagen and ratified it in Cancun. The targets that had been included in the Copenhagen Declaration were legitimized in an agreement at Cancun. They’ve become part of the Framework Convention, and the follow-up on those targets will be under the Framework Convention.

There was an agreement about transparency and reporting that was a very important step forward. There was an agreement about funding. There was an agreement about forests. If anybody has questions, we can talk more about this, but you all covered it a month, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it.

It was very important not to fail in Cancun. A failure could have obstructed action. But the success isn’t going to drive action. It’s the other way around; the action drove the success. The action is at the national level and the sectoral level.

So some things to look for. Well, I’ve listed some of the decisions that still need to be made following up on Cancun, but I think the bigger things are not up on that.

First, there’s the question of whether Europe decides to up its target from 20% to 30% reduction. That issue is very much alive and will be resolved soon in a difficult time for Europe economically.

But much more interesting is what’s happening in China, India, Brazil, and in fact in the poorest countries in the world. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan is full of powerful commitments for reduced carbon intensity, improved energy efficiency, changed technologies. They will reduce by six billion tons from business as usual.

They have not only massive renewables investment, they have a very strong renewables law that requires utilities to buy clean energy, which they are enforcing. I talked about their investment in high-speed rail. They’re making massive investments in smart grids so they can move their renewable power around the country.

They have a huge building energy efficiency plan, which will be expanded in the 12th Five-Year Plan. They’ve made a commitment at the regional and local level to greater transparency, so the government can better track compliance with the 12th Five-Year Plan, which is quite remarkable in a society which doesn’t make data publicly available. And the Party Congress was full of clear commitments to reduce carbon intensity.

What’s said in Congress here isn’t necessarily a way to tell what the future of the country is, but the dialogue in the Chinese Communist Party Congress is much more controlled. And when the country that has, for 20 years, put absolute, total emphasis on growth and development begins to talk about a kind of growth, low carbon growth, it’s a very significant shift.

India was an interesting player at Cancun, some people would say rescued the Cancun Agreement by advocating the notion that developing, as well as developed, countries should make commitments. But that reflects what India is doing domestically. India has adopted a coal tax. The funds are being used to be part of a 20-gigawatt commitment to renewables. They have an energy efficiency trading scheme; essentially a cap and trade scheme, and set of other clean energy incentives.

I talked a little bit about Brazil. Dilma, in her inaugural address, committed to continuing the strong environmental policies and climate commitments of her predecessor, a very interesting move for someone who was perceived as not very interested in the green agenda. This is a very strongly populist politician who had been one of the advocates against the green agenda within the previous administration. But you’ll recall in the elections, the Green Party candidate got 20% of the vote. And I think that got the president’s attention.

Brazil is the only developing country that’s made a commitment to an absolute cap, 2.1 billion tons per year. They have a large-scale energy efficiency program. They have the best biofuels program in the world, sugar cane ethanol. There will be breakthroughs probably in this year in terms of the capacity to produce ethanol from sugar cane, improved sugar cane.

Sao Paulo’s state, which is 30% of the Brazilian economy, has a statute that was enacted last year based on the California commitment, which commits them to major reductions in technology shifts. In fact, the company Johnson Controls, which sells a lot of energy efficiency materials, did a worldwide survey and found business executives outside the United States, in the developing world, twice as likely to say they would make major investments in energy efficiency in the next year as those in the US.

Okay, that’s China, India and Brazil. One more observation about this. Every five years, the World Bank’s client countries submit development strategies. In 2005, those countries submitted their development strategies and 15% of them mentioned climate change. In 2010, they submitted the strategies and 81% put climate change as one of the top three priorities.

This is an issue that has moved outside the negotiations among environment ministers to become a very significant part of development planning globally. Those countries, those poorest countries, are in fact where some of the most rapid economic growth is taking place, and they see it as a necessity to deal with climate issues.

Which brings us to the other outstanding issue to watch about the follow-up on Cancun, the one country that everybody thinks probably will not meet its commitments, the US. WRI did a study – Some of you have seen it. Are there copies in the back? There are copies in the back, yes – of all of the existing authorities that the federal government and state governments have to reduce emissions over the next ten years, and how much could be achieved under those.

I’m not going to go into a detailed discussion. Franz is one of the authors of that study. He’d be happy to talk to anybody who’d like more information. I would just point out, how far we get with that depends not only on whether the Congress tries to block EPA action, but how far the Administration decides to go, because it’s not just about EPA. It’s about EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture.

If there is a government-wide push to meet the President’s 17% commitment, which was reiterated by our negotiators in Cancun, it is possible to do that. If there is not a government-wide push, the US will be one of the countries that does not fulfill its commitments.

One last set of comments. This is really a perplexity. It’s a question to watch. It’s absolutely clear that the rhetoric in the 2008 (sic) Congressional elections was pretty anti-environmental, and especially anti-climate and anti-cap and trade. That’s the received wisdom out of the election.

But we’re seeing companies pumping money into green advertising. There was one just this morning, I found it in my Times. This is a Panasonic ad. So what’s going on here? This is GE; GE’s been at it for six years now, with ecoimagination. Caterpillar. Nike. Why is that the politics is going one way and the corporate advertising and the corporate commitments are going another?

I’ve asked a number of business executives, and it is certainly clear that they continue to get in their consumer surveys strong indications that their customers care about whether the company is environmentally sensitive and whether the products are environmentally preferable. Not necessarily that they’ll spend twice as much, but they care. So companies are investing real money in positioning themselves as green.

Secondly, I think there’s another phenomenon, and I’ll end with this. There are a number of companies we’ve worked with over the last five years who are very strong advocates of the need for energy policy and greenhouse gas reduction. And they’re looking up and they’re saying, “The government should have done this. We thought the government was going to do this. It isn’t going to. Now we have to figure out what we’re going to do on our own.”

That’s something to watch: What do they do in the coming year? Not in terms of policy, not what do they advocate in Washington, but what do they actually do in the coming year?

Thank you all very much. Let’s go to questions. Yes?

ED FELKER: Hi, I’m Ed Felker with Energy/Guardian. Could you talk about the future of the Climate Action Partnership? Do they have a role in this town anymore? Or is it more a state and, as you say, an individual company issue?

JONATHAN LASH: The United States Climate Action Partnership was formed four years ago by a set of companies and environmental groups who coalesced around the notion that it was essential that the US enact economy-wide, mandatory legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, and ultimately agreed that cap and trade was the right way to proceed.

We were very actively engaged in the debates in 2008/2009/2010. Obviously, the legislation didn’t pass, and it’s not going to pass this year, or next year.

USCAP met recently. The members have agreed that they continue to be committed to that set of principles, the notion that we need mandatory, economy-wide legislation to move ahead, not only for environmental reasons, but, much more importantly, for competitiveness and economic reasons, that the kind of partnership we have can be useful, and we’ve agreed to keep USCAP in existence for the time being and reassess what’s going to be possible.

ZULIMA PALACIO: Zulima Palacio, Voice of America Television. I wonder if you left, I think, an important factor to watch around the world, which is called population, did you leave it out on purpose? Because I think it’s quite important. How do you see the factor of population playing a role here?

JONATHAN LASH: So I did mention it in terms of the food/fuel/land/water issue. It’s a fundamental driver. I didn’t talk about it because I don’t see a particular story to watch about it in the current year. Of course, the expansion of population, with the expansion of economies is what creates the demands that cause the problems that environmentalists try to address. But I didn’t see the hook for this particular year around that issue.

JEFF JOHNSON: Jeff Johnson, with Chemical Engineering News. You mentioned earlier, when you were talking about Congress, you said if Congress didn’t come up with some sort of an action dealing with climate change over the next six months, utilities were going to – I guess that’s what you meant – were going to ask for that. I’m just kind of curious, if you would elaborate a little bit on that.

But also, are there other areas that, despite the posturing that’s going on now in the House and inaction, confusion on the part of the Senate right now, what other issues like that might come to the fore, despite the fights in Congress?

JONATHAN LASH: So what I said was, after the question of whether Congress is going to block EPA action plays out, and people have a clearer idea of where we’re going, if there hasn’t been a significant change, utilities have an urgent need for certainty. They need answers to the question of, what’s the future cost of CO2 emissions, what are the regulations going to be for conventional pollutants, and so forth, and therefore, have an interest in having Congress address that question. I wouldn’t say that’s highly probable, but I think it’s something to watch for. I know that there have been discussions of under what circumstances they might seek legislation.

Your broader question, I do think there is a possibility, not a large one, that a bill like the one Senator Lugar introduced in the last Congress might move, that deals with a broad range of energy efficiency issues. There’s huge potential for economic savings with energy efficiency investments, and the number of structural obstacles to that taking place. So I could imagine a debate on that issue.

I know there are a number of advocates for some kind of clean energy standard that would either create incentives for, or require a percent of electricity come from non-carbon sources. I think that’s a more difficult possibility at the current time. But the most likely outcome is nothing.

LISA FRIEDMAN: Hi, I’m Lisa Friedman from ClimateWire. I have a question on the international stuff. When we came back from Copenhagen last year, there was a lot of talk, and at your beginning-of-the-year talk as well, about the C5, about Brazil, India, China, South Africa, the basic group, and how they acted as a negotiating force. And I’m wondering, outside of the individual actions that are happening in some of the countries that you talked about, how did you see this group play out as a negotiating group on the global stage since Copenhagen and going forward? Are they still the force to be reckoned with that you kind of described this time last year?

JONATHAN LASH: Let me make a couple of comments and then ask Jennifer to add something.

First, I think it is remarkable that the outcome tracked as closely to what the US was hoping for as it did. Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing played a hand of ones and twos, and managed to win pretty big. They should really be congratulated for that.

But that was possible because of the rule that China, India, Brazil, in particular, played. China appears to have come to Cancun – I hope you will correct me; Jennifer was there, I was not – but they appear to have come determined not to be blamed for a failure. Jairam Ramesh came prepared to take significant risks to create success. Brazil was very interested in keeping this issue moving. And I think those three made a huge difference in what was possible.

Jennifer, anything to add?

JENNIFER MORGAN: I would agree with that. I think the additional factor that occurred over the year though was, with those actors, the C5 moving, and then the Cartagena Dialogue, which was a group of smaller developing countries – Colombia, Costa Rica, even small island nations – working with Europe, and Australia – which is another country to watch, because they’re going to be maybe putting their target up a bit more as well – to create a coalition of the willing, so to speak, within the negotiations, to basically operationalize the Copenhagen Accord.

JONATHAN LASH: I haven’t been looking over to this side. Further questions? All the way in the back.

KATE SHEPPARD: Kate Sheppard from Mother Jones Magazine. Also going back to the international front, how much of an issue, do you think, Cancun, Kyoto continue to be a huge issue, they didn’t really answer that question, they pushed it off till next year, it’s not going to get any easier? How much of an issue is that going to be going forward in the international conversation? The US role it would be interesting to draw upon as well since they keep saying, “We had nothing to do with Kyoto,” which is clearly not the case.

JONATHAN LASH: I’d better let Jennifer take that, because I’m likely to say something I shouldn’t.

JENNIFER MORGAN: Jennifer Morgan. I think it’s going to continue. The Kyoto Protocol and the future of it is going to continue to be a major issue in the negotiations. But I think things have gotten much harder, rather than easier. And I think if you watch the developments of what is occurring in Japan and Russia and their stances on it in Cancun, you see that the will is not building; it’s rather receding on the Kyoto side.

I think that the real question looks to both Europe and Australia as two major kind of players in that, to see if they want to continue. But it’ll continue to be a conflict moving forward.

JONATHAN LASH: An unresolved issue.

ALAN SCHLAIFER: Alan Schlaifer with the Wharton Club Green Business Summit. One of the areas that you haven’t dealt with that might have a tremendous impact in reducing pollution, congestion, energy use is telework in the United States and abroad. What do you see as the potential? How can it best made to be consistent with workplace needs now and in the future?

JONATHAN LASH: I’m not an expert, but I do see companies increasingly adopting flexible telework policies, in part because it just is so difficult for their workforces to live close to where they end up. They travel so much, so flexibility adds to productivity.

We certainly, WRI increasingly uses that. And as organizations are globalized, it’s inevitable that you rely on different forms of communication anyway.

But in terms of the numbers, I haven’t tracked the numbers. Maybe you have, and I don’t know whether that’s becoming a significant factor in reducing vehicle-miles-traveled. There’s nothing that reduces emissions faster in the US than reducing vehicle-miles-traveled.

RAPHAEL ISAAC: Raphael Isaac. I’m an independent consultant in transportation and energy issues. I have just a couple quick questions. You talked a lot about BRT becoming more common and having a strong role in developing countries’ megacities. I’m wondering what you see, if you see that potentially happening here in the US, or if you see potential obstacles to BRT. That’s my first question.

My second question was, there was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, I think in November, some policy folks over in California, and they were saying that, at least in the US, one issue is that maybe the government, both at the federal and state levels, is investing primarily in the current technologies and incentives for companies to build on those, and not enough on research for improving the technologies so that the technologies can become less dependent on these incentives. I’m wondering kind of what your, if any, input on how you feel about that.

JONATHAN LASH: Let me respond to the second question, and I have two of my colleagues from EMBARQ sitting right behind you, who I’ll ask to respond to the first.

That’s why carbon price would be a great measure, whether through the direct imposition of a price, or through cap and trade, because then it leaves it up to investors to decide which technologies are going to provide the best opportunity to reduce carbon in the future.

I actually think the investments that were part of the Stimulus Bill were pretty well distributed between current development and future investment in future technologies. But there are some problems that need to be solved now, like the grid. We have a grid that just won’t support full clean energy development, and it’s important to invest in changing it.

Aileen or Marissa, do you want to–? Introduce yourself first and then–

AILEEN CARRIGAN: My name is Aileen Carrigan and I’m a transportation planner with EMBARQ, which is the sustainable transportation group at WRI.

It’s a great question about BRT in the US. Most of EMBARQ’s work is outside of the US, and we’ve been involved in a lot of the successful BRT projects in South America, and increasingly in Asia. And it’s a question we get a lot – is it feasible to implement BRT in the US? And I think that there have been some successes already. New York City’s just opened a rapid, we could say BRT-lite system in New York City. LA has the ~~Silver Line~~ [Orange Line]. Cleveland has the Healthline. So there are smaller-scale BRT systems already.

I think there will continue to be a dialogue here in the US. I think one of the challenges is getting the US audience to understand the full benefits of BRT, and that it’s possible to move a high capacity of passengers with a bus-based system, as opposed to a rail system.

The most famous system in Bogota moves 1.6 million passengers a day. Whereas, I believe Washington’s Metro moves just over a million passengers a day. So it’s very possible to move those volumes of people with buses.

And I think the critical question is not BRT versus a rail system. I think where cities are short on capital funds, it becomes BRT versus no transport investment at all.

So I think those are important questions and difficult questions that the US is facing. But there is some movement in that area now.

JONATHAN LASH: I have to say, I was not a BRT believer when we started working on this. And one of the first projects we got involved with is Avenida de los Insurgentes in Mexico City, which is one the longest, largest avenues in any major city in the world.

The notion that you were going to clear traffic out of two lanes of Avenida de los Insurgentes and move scheduled buses up and down it just seemed far-fetched to me. But it’s running. It’s moving, how many passengers a day, Aileen, do you know?

AILEEN CARRIGAN: 450,000 passengers. [Note: this is the number of passengers Mexico’s entire BRT system moves per day.]

JONATHAN LASH: And these are people who were spending four hours getting to and from work, and how it’s a half-hour trip. And it costs a tiny fraction of what a subway costs, can be built in a tiny fraction of the time, which is why I’ve become a believer. It’s a solution that mayors can implement during their term.

I’ll take two more questions.

CATHY CASH: Cathy Cash with Platts Electricity Publications. Just revisiting the potential for action on Capitol Hill, if Congress is, as expected, unlikely to act on climate legislation for the next couple years, and they also do not get the support to block EPA going forward on regulations, can EPA give the power sector the certainty it needs on carbon prices?

JONATHAN LASH: This is the question I’ve been waiting to toss to Franz, who is an expert. I think that’s exactly what EPA’s going about doing. The question is, can they do it in an adequately flexible way. And do you want to talk about that, Franz?

FRANZ LITZ: Sure, happy to. The administrator of EPA has said what she’d like to do, and not just in the power sector, but in sector by sector, is attempt to create that kind of certainty. And so, early this year, we will have, by mid-spring, new, what are called map[?] standards, toxics from power plants. We have new regulations for conventional pollutants affecting power plants. And so, part of that regulatory certainty angle is to address all of the various regulatory burdens that the power sector will face together.

I think Jonathan’s point that you might see utilities come back to Congress is a good one, because it’s not as clean and neat and simple as you might get from Congressional action. And so, that’s a key issue to watch.

And the role of states is a key issue, because the Clean Air Act, in particular, is a state/federal balancing and partnership. And so, there’s necessarily in that mix some differences across the states. Which, of course, if you’re a utility that operates across multiple states, you’d rather see uniformity nationwide. Which is one of the reasons why Jonathan’s point about watching utilities to see if they’ll [1:02:28] to ask for uniformity is very much on point.

MARC GUNTHER: I have sort of a nitpicky question and then a general one. The nitpicky one is, on your slide about projected emissions under different scenarios, I see a gap between what you call the go-getter scenario and the 17% reduction. And I thought you had said if the government acts aggressively, you could get to the 17%.

JONATHAN LASH: I was hoping nobody was going to notice that, but I can answer the question.

MARC GUNTHER: Okay, and it relates to the second questions, which is, on your most optimistic day, what is the path that you see to getting emissions reductions that scientists say would be prudent? Like what’s your best case scenario for getting to where we need to go?

JONATHAN LASH: I want to get to the chart first. There it is. What we looked at were existing authorities on which there is clear peer-reviewed data on what kind of reductions you can get. So there were a lot of things that we didn’t even look at to get this scenario.

We didn’t look at what the Department of Agriculture or Interior could do with land use, because we didn’t have peer-reviewed data, so there was just no way to give you a legitimate estimate. But if they push hard, they can make a significant different there. That’s why I believe that extra 3% could be achieved.

But your other, bigger question, that’s one we obviously agonize about all the time, because the science says that we should be doing way more than what was agreed to in Copenhagen, and then essentially legitimized in Cancun.

And my premise has always been that once we begin the process of decarbonization, there will be business and economic incentives that essentially create a competition among countries to be the producers of those technologies. And that competition will start what is essentially an avalanche of a shift. So it’ll go much faster than required, driven by factors other than policy. But policy is necessary is to get it started.

So I think one of the most interesting phenomena is China is moving so far into the lead in competition a number of clean energy technologies that we don’t have to worry as much about whether they’ll really keep their commitments because they have a commercial drive to do it. This is what they’re selling to the world.

I think that phenomena can happen more broadly. And frankly, it’s the reluctance of the US that’s the biggest restraint right now.

But this is going to look different in 2020.

END

NEWS RELEASE: New Maps Show Economic Opportunities for Poor Livestock Farmers in Uganda

Jessica Forres — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:25:53 -0400

The World Resources Institute (WRI) is unveiling today a new set of maps illustrating possible market opportunities for Uganda’s livestock farmers living in poverty. The maps compare for the first time 2005 poverty levels with livestock data from the 2002 population and housing census and the 2008 national livestock census.

“Seven out of ten households in Uganda own livestock, making it an integral part of Ugandans’ diet, culture, and income,” said Hon. Hope R. Mwesigye, Ugandan Minister of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries and co-author of Mapping a Better Future: Spatial Analysis and Pro-Poor Livestock Strategies in Uganda. “The maps are meant to guide the government’s future investments to reduce poverty while strengthening the livestock sector.”

  Hon. Syda N.M. Bbumba, Uganda Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, said, “Examining the spatial relationships between poverty; livestock systems; location of livestock services, such as dairy cooling plants; and livestock disease hotspots can provide new evidence-based information to help craft more effective investments and poverty reduction efforts.”

  While Uganda’s total agricultural output has declined, livestock figures have increased dramatically in the last decade due to strong domestic and regional demand for livestock products, according to the report.

“Increased livestock production carries both economic opportunities for Ugandans and greater risk for transmission of animal diseases,” said Nicholas Kauta, Commissioner of Livestock Health and Entomology at the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries. “The maps included in this report will help Uganda’s leaders understand market opportunities and, at the same time, target at-risk areas for disease outbreaks with appropriate health intervention plans.”

For instance, maps showing milk surplus and deficit areas can highlight geographic differences in market opportunities for poor dairy farmers. According to the maps in the report, about 3.5 million people live in subcounties identified as producing more milk than their residents consume and approximately 0.8 million poor people live in areas where the demand for milk is greater than supply. This information can help policymakers, dairy researchers and development agencies gauge market opportunities and invest in infrastructure where it is needed the most.

“By combining social data and livestock information and analyzing the map overlays, decision-makers from different sectors can work together to identify solutions to complex problems facing communities such as diseases that affect both people and livestock,” said Norbert Henninger, senior associate at WRI and co-author of the report.  

John B. Male-Mukasa, executive director of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, said, “Uganda’s government acknowledges the importance of livestock to the nation’s economic development and food security, and as part of its 2010-2015 National Development Plan, it plans to invest in improved livestock breeds, water infrastructure, and livestock land management. The maps in this report will be useful in identifying the regions where investment is needed most dearly.”

Mapping a Better Future is the third installment in a series of publications using maps and spatial analysis to reduce poverty in Uganda, following two previous reports which targeted wetlands and water and sanitation.

Otarian Restaurant in New York City Uses WRI’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol

Laura Pocknell — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:12:13 -0400

Update from the star-studded launch of a new chain of sustainable restaurants.

On the evening of April 14th, WRI filled a role not normally reserved for environmental think tanks: VIP guest at a high-profile New York restaurant opening. Otarian, now open in New York City’s West Village, is a new boutique fast-casual restaurant chain based on the principles of sustainability and vegetarianism. Otarian is also the first global restaurant chain to track the carbon footprint of all of its menu items.

“I am putting myself out there and standing behind my statement that Otarian is the world’s most sustainable chain of restaurants,” said Radhika Oswal, owner and creator of Otarian. “The sustainability of Otarian comes from all aspects of the restaurant, from the way we have decorated, to the ingredients, and much much more.”

WRI Managing Director Manish Bapna, Otarian Owner Radhika Oswal, and WRI Board Member Todd Thomson

Otarian is one of over seventy organizations road testing WRI and WBSCD’s new GHG Protocol standard on Product Life Cycle accounting. This participation will help diners better understand the environmental impact of their food choices in a highly measureable and quantifiable way. The product standard measures the emissions from all parts of a product’s lifecycle. For example, an Otarian VegO burger represents 1.32kg of CO2-equivalent, taking into account the growing, harvesting, and processing of all the ingredients, as well as transportation, packaging, sale and waste disposal.

Around 60 people were in attendance at the Otarian launch. The vibe was intimate and buzzing, the small space packed with a crowd including celebrities, media, influencers and owner Radhika Oswal accompanied by her husband Pankaj Oswal.

The menu at Otarian

Manish Bapna, Managing Director of WRI, attended the event alongside WRI Director Todd Thomson. Manish was invited by Mrs. Oswal to give the only speech of the night after she delivered her welcome and thanks. “We are delighted that Otarian is so dedicated to the cause of measuring the footprint of its food products. A lot of big companies recognize the business case behind measuring and managing emissions, they see that it can improve their profitability,” said Manish. “There are a few organizations, however, that also recognize the need to make a low carbon economy a reality. Otarian is in this category.”

Celebrity guests included Mary Kate Olsen, a regular on the New York scene and star of many movies and TV shows alongside her twin sister Ashley Olsen. Vanessa Williams and Mark Indelicato from the ABC TV show ‘Ugly Betty’ attended along with Judah Friedlander from the popular NBC TV show ‘30 Rock’.

WRI’s Laura Pocknell with 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander

“I wanted to attend tonight to set precedence for others to uphold and follow suit. I’m very happy that restaurants like Otarian are the new trend.” said Vanessa Williams. Mark Indelicato added “my eyes were opened to vegetarianism and sustainability by Ana Ortiz, who plays my Mom on Ugly Betty. I was shocked to find out that the methane cows emit is a bigger polluter than emissions from planes or trains.” “I’m here tonight because it’s very important to protect the earth,” said Judah Friedlander about what the opening of Otarian means to him. “It is not only good, but important to eat tasty, sustainable food like Otarian is offering.”

For more information about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the road-testing process, visit http://www.ghgprotocol.org.

NEWS RELEASE: Asian Food and Beverage Sector Vulnerable to Climate and Water Risks

Jessica Forres — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:35:19 -0400

Environmental trends could have significant financial repercussions for the $40 billion food and beverage industry in South and Southeast Asia, according to a report released today by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and HSBC’s Climate Change Centre of Excellence.

“The food and beverage industry is particularly vulnerable to climate change and water scarcity in Asia. The region is already struggling with increased water demand because of population and economic growth,” said Dana Krechowicz, a WRI associate and co-author of the report.

The industry’s dependence on agriculture, aquaculture and water resources for business operations makes it particularly susceptible in a region where climate change is projected to severely intensify water scarcity problems.

WRI’s report, Weeding Risk, examines the impacts these growing trends will have on seven economically important food and beverage sub-sectors in six countries – India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The report’s findings suggest that the edible oils, starches, and sugar sub-sectors will be most vulnerable to increasing agricultural prices, while aquaculture, poultry, and dairy will be vulnerable to disease and contamination. As part of the study, HSBC’s analysis on an Indian sugar company shows that a sugarcane price increase of 1 percent can lead to a decline in profit of up to 10 percent.

The risks identified in the report are already affecting some food and beverage sectors. Drought during the monsoon season in India caused sugar prices to reach a 28-year high in 2009. This is particularly troubling considering experts estimate that by 2020, the demand for water in India will exceed all its sources of supply.

“Water stress is set to have a growing role in shaping the sector,” said Nick Robins, head of the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC. Roshan Padamadan, a HSBC analyst at the Centre stated, “The strategic choices made by a company along its value chain can mitigate these risks, making it important for investors to understand its sourcing, inventory, and operational performance.”

Weeding Risk is the first report in a three-part series. The second report, Over Heating, analyzes the power sector in South and Southeast Asia. Surveying Risk, Building Opportunity, assesses the environmental risks to commercial real estate in the region.

EPA Partners With WRI to Heighten Awareness of Ecosystem Services

Paul Mackie — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:13:15 -0400

The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced a collaboration to deliver improved science and practical tools to help companies and governments protect ecosystems and address climate change.

“This is an important collaboration in bringing research on ecosystem services into the mainstream of science, business and public policy,” said Rick Linthurst, national program director of the EPA’s Ecological Research Program.

WRI’s ecosystem services brochure

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems. A forest, for example, not only provides wood for timber and paper but also controls erosion, purifies water, stores carbon dioxide, and offers recreation.

The partnership will bring a greater recognition and understanding of the importance of ecosystems to economic development and human well-being. It will also help planners better determine development options that allow affected natural resources to continue to produce services that meet the needs of current and future generations. Craig Hanson, acting director of WRI’s People and Ecosystems Program, added, “This collaboration will link EPA’s quality scientific research on ecosystem services with WRI’s work to help private- and public-sector leaders make the connection between healthy ecosystems and the attainment of their economic goals. This partnership will make our Corporate Ecosystem Services Review, mapping of ecosystem services, and economic valuation efforts even more powerful.” Businesses, local and state governments, researchers, and international organizations - which are increasingly retooling their environmental-management systems to address ecosystem services - will benefit from the partnership. As part of the collaboration, Dr. Suzanne Marcy, lead for outreach and education in the Ecological Research Program of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, will be based at WRI’s headquarters. She will focus on linking emerging scientific data about the health and economic value of ecosystem services with WRI’s various projects on water quality, biofuels, coral reefs, and business sustainability, among others.

In addition, WRI’s research will inform the EPA Ecological Research Program’s initiatives in the Coastal Carolinas, the Willamette Valley in Oregon, Tampa Bay, the upper-Midwest, and the Southwest.

Percentage of Population that is Undernourished

Payson Schwin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:54:34 -0400

Food or Fuel? The Bioenergy Dilemma

Karen Bennett — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:04:21 -0400

The cost of grain-based staples–such as tortillas in Mexico, beef noodles in western China, and bread in the United States–has increased around the world. There are several reasons why prices have jumped, but there’s one getting a lot of attention: the global rush for bioenergy.

Crops can be used as a food or fuel; both are important [ecosystem services](node/9222) that nature provides to people. But as countries set aside more corn and other agricultural products for use as fuel, fewer crops are available to produce food and world-wide prices increase.

Over the past few years, industrialized countries have set increasingly higher mandates for the use of bioenergy, which has been touted as a clean, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels and a way to combat global climate change.

Europe has mandated that biofuels make up 10 percent of its transport power by 2020. Similarly, in 2005, the United States federal government passed legislation requiring that the corn-based ethanol supply increase from 2.3 billion to [7.5 billion gallons](node/5025) per year by 2012. This year alone, the US will dedicate [30 million more tons of corn](http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...)– half of the global grain stock–to ethanol production.

Meanwhile, global food prices are up [nearly 50 percent](http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/faq/ffpfaqs.htm) in the past year. The price of basic staples, such as corn, oilseed, wheat, and cassava, is predicted to [increase 26 to 135 percent](http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/10/opinion/edholt.php) by 2020.

Rising food prices deeply affect the world’s poor, who spend up to 80 percent of their household income on food. The impact can be especially acute in urban areas. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization ([FAO](http://www.fao.org/)), [37 countries](http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai465e/ai465e02.htm) are now facing a food security crisis. [Food riots have erupted](http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/14/world.food.cris...) in many developing countries, including Bangladesh, Haiti, and Egypt.

While the benefits of bioenergy range from reduced greenhouse gas emissions to renewability and energy independence, increased biofuel production can lead to tradeoffs across other ecosystem services. Besides decreased food supply, other tradeoffs include poor water quality associated with increases in aggregate fertilizer use, nutrient runoff and erosion. Further research is needed to assess the [tradeoffs among ecosystem services](http://www.wri.org/publication/beyond-rfs-environmental-and-...) related to biofuels and other emerging sources of bioenergy, such as cellulosic technology.

Even though many of the economic, social and environmental effects of the recent biofuel push are not yet fully understood, many countries continue to dedicate more of their agriculture output to biofuels.

Given that globally many ecosystem services are [already degraded](http://www.maweb.org/), it is important to reduce demand for energy through energy efficiency measures, while managing land in ways that do not impinge on nature’s ability to provide ecosystem services–including food, an already scarce commodity in a majority of the world.

Food Price Crisis Triggers Questions about Global Food Security

Zachary Sugg — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:00:17 -0400

Skyrocketing food prices have triggered riots across the developing world and forced the world’s largest food aid agency to confront a $500 million deficit. The media are focused on short-term consequences, but there are also concerns about the long-term forecast for global food security, poverty, and hunger.

A food line in Africa

Global food prices have been rising steadily since 2000, and are up almost 50 percent in the last year alone. Low-income countries that import more food than they export have been hit hardest. Thirty-seven countries—21 of which are in Africa—are in a food security crisis, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The World Bank recently announced that the current food situation could push 100 million people into deeper poverty, undoing years of progress in the fight against global poverty and hunger. Poor households spend between 60 percent to 80 percent of their income on food, compared to only 10 percent to 20 percent in most industrialized countries.

FAO Food Price Index: February 2007 - January 2008.
Source: FAO, 2008

What Are the Causes?

Despite several record-breaking harvests, world cereals production between 2000 and 2007 fell well short of consumption. The shortfall has forced the depletion of world grain stocks—a useful proxy for global food security—which are now at their lowest levels in 25 years.

There are several commonly acknowledged drivers behind the current food price spikes, including:

High price of oil, manifested in increased fertilizer and fuel costs
Increased demand for meat and dairy products in the developing world, which requires more grain be fed to livestock
Diversion of crops for biofuel production
Adverse weather conditions, such as the recent six-year Australian drought that decimated rice production
Commodity speculation by investors, and
Lack of access to improved inputs and markets amongst smallholder farmers in the developing world—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—which limits their ability to react to the incentives created by increased demand, and
Domestic policy responses to higher food prices in developing countries—such as export taxes, bans, or other restrictions—which exacerbate the problem.

These factors together have created a “perfect storm” that has driven food prices up. Although adverse weather conditions and commodity speculation may nudge food prices up in the short term, the rest of these drivers appear to be longer-lasting, and their effects are likely to be felt for several years.

Short-Run vs Long-Run Measures for Global Food Security

The FAO forecasts a 2.6 percent rise in cereal production in 2008, which would result in a record harvest of over two billion metric tons. If this prediction materializes—much depends on unpredictable weather—the current food crisis should ease somewhat. Even so, experts predict that prices will remain high at least through 2015, indicating that short-term policy interventions are necessary to combat hunger over the coming decade. These actions should include targeted safety nets for vulnerable populations, such as the urban poor; increased support for food aid agencies; and short-run trade policy measures, such as reducing tariffs and taxes on key staples.

Over the long-run, ensuring global food security will require greater effort. While most experts believe that the world’s agro-ecosystems, coupled with improved technology, have the physical capacity to satisfy demand through the 21st century, this will not happen if current circumstances prevail. Agricultural trade barriers, environmental degradation, and the under-performance of African agriculture, energy efficiency, and the restoration of marginal lands must all be addressed.

Furthermore, climate change threatens to exacerbate food insecurity in the world’s poorest regions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that rising temperatures will decrease yields in 40 developing countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, and that three degrees Celsius of warming will increase the price of food by 40 percent. Without concerted global action to help vulnerable populations adapt to a warming climate, while also addressing the other drivers of food security described above, global hunger will not be tackled this century.

*Photo by Peter Casier via Flickr

Leading Companies Responding to Ecosystem Degradation

Paul Mackie — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:35:37 -0400

Corporate Ecosystem Services Review road-tested by Akzo Nobel,

BC Hydro, Mondi, Rio Tinto, and Syngenta

Global warming may dominate headlines today. Ecosystem degradation will do so tomorrow.

To prepare businesses for this new landscape, three organizations today launched a set of guidelines designed to help companies proactively develop strategies to manage risks and opportunities arising from ecosystem degradation.

The guidelines, called the “Corporate Ecosystem Services Review,” were developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with the Meridian Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Five WBCSD members - Akzo Nobel, BC Hydro, Mondi, Rio Tinto, and Syngenta - “road-tested” the methodology and provided input to its design.

“The world’s forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems are under tremendous pressure due to climate change, land conversion, and many other factors,” said Jonathan Lash, president, WRI. “As ecosystems degrade, companies will face operational, regulatory, and reputational risks while those that offer solutions may find new business opportunities and new sources of revenue.”

Ecosystems provide companies with a wide variety of benefits or services including freshwater, wood, pollination, climate regulation, and protection from natural hazards, to name a few.

“Ecosystem services are often unacknowledged, yet they underpin many corporate activities,” said John Ehrmann, managing partner of the Meridian Institute. “I am pleased with the feedback from company managers who are finding the guidelines helpful for developing strategies that improve both corporate performance and ecosystem stewardship.”

The road-testers found that the guidelines can provide a number of other benefits as well. They can help companies anticipate new markets and government policies that may emerge in response to ecosystem degradation. They can strengthen corporate environmental impact assessments by adding considerations traditional methods may overlook. They also can help companies better manage conflicts over resources, identifying options for better trade-offs between ecosystem services.

“The methodology helped us identify and rank emerging problems, and provided us with a framework for turning risks into opportunities,” said Peter Gardiner, natural resources manager at Mondi, a leading international paper and packaging manufacturer.

Mondi’s newfound strategies include a number of operational changes that will increase the company’s efficiency in using freshwater, a scarce ecosystem service, and lead to new markets for the company’s byproducts.

“The Corporate Ecosystem Review helped us to better understand how a number of emerging environmental changes are likely to affect our business and how our company might best position itself to respond to these changes,” said Steve Hunt, senior vice president, Asia-Pacific, Eka Chemicals, a division of chemical giant Akzo Nobel.

Some road-testers, such as Mondi and BC Hydro, used the guidelines to gain insight into the direct implications that ecosystem trends pose for them. Other road-testers, such as Akzo Nobel and Syngenta, applied the methodology to understand the risks faced by a segment of their customers due to ecosystem degradation and, in turn, discovered opportunities for new products or services that address these risks. The guidelines profile these and other road-test experiences.

“We’re going to be hearing a lot about the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review. A couple dozen more WBCSD members are already taking it up this year,” said Björn Stigson, president of the WBCSD. “Leading companies realize that they need to be prepared for the business challenges posed by ecosystem decline.”

The guidelines were launched at WBCSD’s annual conference of delegates in Switzerland. For a copy of The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review, visit http://www.wri.org/ecosystems/esr.

Nature's Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

This report provides a new approach to examining the links between ecosystem services (the benefits derived from nature) and the poor.

Through a series of maps and analyses, the authors focus on the environmental resources most Kenyans rely on such as soil, water, forest, rangeland, livestock, and wildlife. The atlas overlays georeferenced statistical information on population and household expenditures with spatial data on ecosystems and their services (water availability, wood supply, wildlife populations, and the like) to yield a picture of how land, people, and prosperity are related in Kenya.

While the maps and analyses presented here will not provide easy answers to questions concerning the causes of poverty in Kenya and how ecosystems can best be managed to increase economic growth and improve livelihoods, they are a first step toward stimulating more informed dialogue and provoking questions for which answers may be found.

The final section of the atlas provides general findings about the use of the introduced maps for sociogeographic analysis. It concludes with four recommendations that are expected to advance a more comprehensive accounting of ecosystem services and to improve the understanding of poverty-environment relationships in Kenya.

Topic: food

Climate Science Research Review Answers Climate Change Questions

Slideshow:

Climate change impacts around the world

The Global Impacts of Climate Change

Uneven global sea level rise

Changing patterns for wildfires

Growing unpredictability in India’s monsoons

Extreme heat and the loss of land suitable for human habitation

Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching

Billions in losses for U.S. fishing industry

A later start to a shorter rainy season in the dry Sahel

Reduced water supply from the Colorado River

Hotter growing seasons and widespread crop loss

More destructive hurricanes

Widespread loss of lizard species around the world

Extreme temperature highs in the United States

Cold winter extremes in Europe and other northern regions

Major increases in human migration

Reduction and loss of major Asian sources of drinking water

Short-term loss of cloud cover

Threat of near extinction for Emperor penguin population

Faster glacial melting due to black carbon

Additional sea level rise in the northeast U.S.

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Interactive map:

How is climate change impacting the United States?

▲ Back to Top

Related Information

Agricultural Land Grabs Threaten Local Property Rights and Sustainable Development

The Importance of Recognizing Local Land Rights

The Risks and Opportunities of Large-Scale Agriculture Investments

WRI at the World Bank Land Conference

Environmental Stories to Watch in 2011

Video

Powerpoint Presentation

Audio

Twitter Archive

Transcript

NEWS RELEASE: New Maps Show Economic Opportunities for Poor Livestock Farmers in Uganda

Otarian Restaurant in New York City Uses WRI’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol

NEWS RELEASE: Asian Food and Beverage Sector Vulnerable to Climate and Water Risks

EPA Partners With WRI to Heighten Awareness of Ecosystem Services

Percentage of Population that is Undernourished

Food or Fuel? The Bioenergy Dilemma

Food Price Crisis Triggers Questions about Global Food Security

What Are the Causes?

Short-Run vs Long-Run Measures for Global Food Security

Related Links

Leading Companies Responding to Ecosystem Degradation

Corporate Ecosystem Services Review road-tested by Akzo Nobel,

BC Hydro, Mondi, Rio Tinto, and Syngenta

Nature's Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being