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Adaptation: ‘Facing the Elements: Building Business Resilience in a Changing Climate’ (Report)

From Adaptation to Climate Change Team:

The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRT) has just released a three-report series titled Facing the Elements: Building Business Resilience in a Changing Climate. This is the fifth report in the Climate Prosperity series by the NRT that emphasizes the critical, yet largely unexplored role of Canadian business in defining our ability to prosper in a changing climate.

Since 1988, the NRT has been Canada’s leader in fostering a stronger relationship between the environment and the economy. Its recent works are in areas as diverse as Climate Change Prosperity, Water Sustainability, Life-Cycle approaches to Sustainable Development, and Biodiversity.

Despite the pro-active work of the NRT since 1988, the federal government recently announced in its Budget that the NRT will be eliminated as of March 31, 2013. Notwithstanding this news, the NRT continues to release groundbreaking reports that outline the importance of better addressing climate change in Canada, among other topics.

Here is a snippet of its recent report Facing the Elements: Building Business Resilience in a Changing Climate:

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“Climate change means business. And businesses are already on the frontline of climate change. The effects of more volatile weather and gradual changes in climate conditions will touch all facets of Canadian business in the decades to come. Despite growing awareness of the risks and opportunities that changing climate presents, few firms are adjusting business strategies and practices to adapt to this inevitable reality. Canada’s future economic prosperity relies on the continued resilience of Canadian business in a changing climate. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRT) has spent more than a year considering how we can act and adapt – business and government together – to prosper through climate change”

Check out the rest of the article here and the report here.

Related:

- ‘Not thinking green will hurt Canadian businesses internationally: NRTEE panel’ (Postmedia News)

- ‘Canada axes green advisory body’ (The Guardian)

(Graphic source: NRTEE via ACT)

The “false economy” of delaying action on climate change 

Details here, here, and here.

Study: ‘97% of Americans Overestimate Cost of Installing Solar Panels’

Source: CleanTechnica

From The New York Times:

IT’S a lot like one of those math problems that gave you fits in sixth grade: a salesman leaves home in Denver and drives his electric car to a meeting in Boulder. At the same time, a physicist driving the same model electric car sets out from her loft in Los Angeles, heading to an appointment near Anaheim.

For both, the traffic is light, and the cars consume an identical amount of battery power while traveling the same number of miles. Being purely electric, they emit zero tailpipe pollutants during their trips.

The test question: are their carbon footprints also equal?

The answer may be a surprise. According to a report that the Union of Concerned Scientists plans to release on Monday, there would be a considerable difference in the amount of greenhouse gases — primarily carbon dioxide — that result from charging the cars’ battery packs. By trapping heat, greenhouse gases contribute to climate change.

The advocacy group’s report, titled “State of Charge: Electric Vehicles’ Global Warming Emissions and Fuel Cost Savings Across the United States,” uses the electric power requirements of the Nissan Leaf as a basis for comparison. The Leaf, on sale in the United States for more than a year and the most widely available electric model from a major automaker, sets a logical baseline.

The California part of the story is upbeat: a hypothetical Los Angeles Leaf would be accountable for the release of an admirably low level of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, about the same as a gasoline car getting 79 miles per gallon. But the Denver car would cause as large a load of greenhouse gases to enter the atmosphere as some versions of the gasoline-powered Mazda 3, a compact sedan rated at 33 m.p.g. in combined city and highway driving by the Environmental Protection Agency. In simple terms, the effect of electric vehicles on the amount of greenhouse gases released into the environment can span a wide range, varying with the source of the electricity that charges them. California’s clean power makes the Leaf a hero; the regional mix of coal-dependent utilities serving Denver diminish the car’s benefits as a global-warming fighter.

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According to 2010 data from the United States Energy Information Administration, 45 percent of the country’s electricity is generated by burning coal, the dirtiest fuel. Natural gas, a much cleaner fuel, accounts for 24 percent of electricity production, a figure that is shifting rapidly with price swings. Nuclear plants generate 20 percent of the nation’s power, while wind, solar and geothermal sources provide 3 percent.

While the report puts hard numbers on the current situation, it also points out the need for fundamental changes.

“To prevent the worst consequences of global warming,” the report concludes, “the automotive industry must deliver viable alternatives to the oil-fueled internal-combustion engine — i.e., vehicles boasting zero or near-zero emissions.”

Check out the rest of the article here and a map of the GHGs associated with driving an electric car in specific regions of the U.S. here.

(Infographic credit: Union of Concerned Scientists)

BBC:

The US has regained top spot from China as the biggest investor in clean energy in 2011, according to global rankings.

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Globally, overall financial backing in clean energy technologies hit a record $263bn, up 6.5% from 2010 levels.

The report, Who is Winning the Clean Energy Race, showed that G20 nations accounted for 95% of the investment in the sector (which does not include nuclear power).

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Over the course of the year, an additional 83.5 gigawatts (GW) was added to the world’s clean energy generation capacity, including almost 30GW of solar and 43GW of wind.

“The sector continues to expand and is outpacing growth in the overall (global) economy. The sector reached its trillionth dollar of investment last year,” observed Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew’s Clean Energy Program.

“We now have 565GW of installed (generation) capacity around the world. That outstrips nuclear installed capacity by 47%.

Check out the rest of the article here. And an interactive map of the report here.

(Photo credit: Pew Charitable Trusts)

From The New York Times:

Suppose you don’t need your car today. And suppose, as it happens, that a stranger in your area does need a car. Would you be willing to rent yours out?

Several car-sharing start-ups, including Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt are eager to connect car owners with renters this way. The companies use different formulas, but participating owners receive, generally speaking, about two-thirds of the rental proceeds. RelayRides says an owner of a midsize, late-model sedan who rents out a car for 10 hours a week could expect to clear about $3,000 a year.

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The newer start-ups say peer-to-peer sharing is an environmentally friendlier option because it allows an existing car to be used more fully. 

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Car sharing is just one form of “collaborative consumption,” the clunky catchphrase that encompasses Airbnb’s space sharing and is commonly used to suggest an ideological or moral imperative to share more things. Who knows? In the future, car sharing may become so accepted that we can eventually return to that bygone age when licensed drivers actually outnumbered licensed vehicles.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out an animated infographic about car sharing here.

(Image credit: New York Times)

Clean Energy Future: ‘Solar Cheaper Than Oil in Long Run’

From Bloomberg:

Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Ali Al-Nuaimi, a member of one of the ruling royal families in the United Arab Emirates, talks about his efforts to change the way his country makes and consumes energy, and the outlook for the growth of renewable energy sources. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness with Margaret Brennan.”

Al-Nuaimi was also recently profiled by CNN in the article, ‘From polluter to protector: The UAE’s Green Sheikh’.

(Photo credit: Masdar City)

From Business Green:

Businesses have been urged to accelerate their environmental footprinting strategies to include emerging economies, after new research by the Carbon Trust revealed young people in China could hold the key to unlocking mass demand for greener products.

The survey of 2,800 young people across six countries carried out by TNS found 83 per cent of 18-25 year-olds in China would be more loyal to a brand if they could see it was reducing its carbon footprint. In contrast, just 57 per cent of US respondents and 55 per cent of young people in the UK made the same claim.

Globally, 78 per cent of young people said they want their favourite brands to reduce their carbon footprint, but again those in Chinese showed the highest demand for emission reductions with 88 per cent calling on firms to cut their footprint.

South Africa came in second place with 86 per cent of respondents calling on blue chips to reduce their impact, followed by Brazil at 84 per cent. Again the US and UK lagged far behind with only two thirds of respondents demanding more action from big brands.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out an infographic of the study here.

(Image credit: Carbon Trust) 

From The Province:

Karin Boriss is thrilled to be taking her Vancouver house apart instead of just knocking it down.

Boriss and her husband Alex Holmes are the first homeowners in the city to get a deconstruction permit instead of simply demolishing their 1940s-era home on West 18th Avenue.

They purchased the home in order to build a new house and tried to sell it to someone who would move it. They couldn’t even give it away, though, so it had to come down.

But they didn’t want to just send the house to the landfill.

“We were thrilled when we found out about the deconstruction process,” Boriss said Thursday during a city tour of her house being carefully torn apart to salvage anything of value.

“It cost us less to do than demolition,” she said.

The process takes longer, two to three weeks compared to two to three days for demolition, but that’s where the city steps into the process by speeding up the permitting process.

Sadhu Johnston, the deputy city manager, said a pilot program tested deconstruction on two homes.

“We found we could actually keep 93 per cent of the houses out of the landfill,” said Johnston.

He said that 80 tonnes of housing materials were diverted from the landfill with each house. With 800 house demolitions a year in Vancouver, the rough estimate of diverted material is 64,000 tonnes.

“We think we can create good green jobs, apply less pressure on the landfill and pursue our Greenest City goals,” said Johnston.

Check out the rest of the article here and TV news coverage of the story here. The Tyee article, ‘Building Jobs By Tearing Down Houses The Green Way’ is also worth a look if you’re interested in deconstruction.

(Photo credit: The Tyee)

From CSR Wire:

Ethical Markets Media, LLC (USA and Brazil), released their 2012 Green Transition Scoreboard® tracking private sector investments since 2007 in green companies and technologies globally, now totaling more than $3.3 trillion.

The 2012 Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS) report finds Asia, Europe and Latin America catching up with the USA in total non-government investments and commitments for all facets of green markets.  2011 ended with a GTS total of $3,306,051,439,680, starting from 2007.  Given the many studies indicating that investing $1 trillion annually until 2020 will accelerate the Green Transition worldwide and the over 100 research reports and articles referenced in this years’ update, the”Green Transition Scoreboard® 2012: From Expanding Cleantech Sectors to Emerging Trends in Biomimicry” definitively shows green investments are becoming the norm.

More here.

(Graphic credit: Green Transition Scoreboard)