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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:.
“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)
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NotesThinking Globally: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’
From Planet Under Pressure via Vimeo:
A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
More here.
(Image credit: IGBP)
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NotesResilient Cities: Rethinking the Urban Landscape
From The New America Foundation:
The ability to bounce back, to absorb shocks, to persevere, to retain functionality over time, to endure, to adapt, to succeed, to survive, to sustain… so many verbs are conjured up by the term “resilience.” Whether we’re talking about our bodies, our minds, our communities, our institutions or our natural environment, the R-word provides a conceptual framework for designing a better tomorrow. Please join us for a wide-ranging inquiry on what it means to be resilient and what a resilient future could look like.
The discussion features:
Kaid Benfield – @Kaid_at_NRDC
Director of Sustainable Communities, Natural Resources Defense CouncilJustin Hollander – @justinhollander
Professor, Tufts University
Author, Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation, and Urban Planning in the American SunbeltSander van der Leeuw – @ASUGreen
Dean, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University
Co-Chair, Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, Arizona State UniversityModerator
Andrés Martinez – @NewAmerica
Vice President and Editorial Director, New America Foundation
(Image credit: Common Current)
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NotesBuilding Urban Resilience: ‘Saga City - Our Communities Facing Climate Change’
Urban planning has great effects on collective choices that contribute to climate change. By defining the shape of a community, urban planning determines part of its energy consumption, and thus, the quantity of greenhouse gases released by dwellers. Nevertheless, it remains largely out of the general debate on this issue. SAGA CITY invites you to learn more about these stakes through to story of the city of Colvert.
More here.
(Photo credit: Vivre en Ville via Saga City)
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Notes"The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it. Think of what’s coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.
After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change. We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather.
In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold.
To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government. Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?
It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.
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Christian Parenti, author of ‘Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence’, in the conclusion of his article, ‘Why climate change will foster strange bedfellows’. You can read the rest of it over at CBS News.
(Photo credit: CBS News)
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Changing Paradigms: New vs. Old Thinking
Last week I went to a talk on “leadership and creating a sustainable future” out at UBC’s brand new and ultra green Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. (I’ll post some shots of the building in another post).
Above is a slide from Göran Carstedt’s presentation highlighting the “new logic” central to creating large-scale, transformational change. If it’s the type of thing that floats your boat check out his 2010 TEDxAthens talk, which covers much of the same territory.
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Notes Study: U.S. green economy lost fewer jobs in recession
From USA Today:
The green economy lost fewer jobs than did the overall economy during the height of the United States’ recent recession, finds a study out today on California’s experiences.
The state’s overall economy lost 7% of jobs from January 2009 to January 2010 while its “core green economy” lost 3%, according to the study released by San Francisco-based Next 10, a non-partisan research group focused on innovation. The time period did not cover the collapse of California-based solar manufacturer Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2011 after receiving a half-billion federal loan guarantee.
Longer term, from 1995-2010, the study found that job growth in the wider economy grew 12% but jumped 53% in businesses devoted to clean energy, recycling, reusing materials, conserving natural resources and reducing pollution.
Check out the rest of the article here and full report here. You might also want to check out Fast Company’s profile of the ‘10 Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade’.
(Graphic credits: Next 10 via Grist; Fast Company)
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NotesSustainability: ‘The Story of Bill Rees and the Ecological Footprint’
“Do you know your ecological footprint?” You can measure it here.
(Graphic credit: Global Footprint Network)
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Notes‘What Peak Oil Is & What It Is Not’
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Matt Simmons, a.k.a. ‘The Republican Who Dared Tell the Truth About Oil’ was an energy investment banker, author and one-time advisor to George W. Bush. He passed away in 2010. This YouTube video features him discussing what peak oil is and is not.
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You can check out the slides from one of his last presentations, including the one below, over at Business Insider.
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Notes"The chief characteristic of sustainable systems is resilience, or the capacity of the system to “absorb disturbance, to undergo change and still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks.” It is a concept long familiar to engineers, mathematicians, ecologists, designers, and military planners.
Resilient systems are characterized by redundancy so that failure of any one component does not cause the entire system to crash. They consist of diverse components that are easily repairable, widely distributed, cheap, locally supplied, durable, and loosely coupled. However, resilience differs from sustainable development in one critical respect. Sustainability is sometimes described as an end-state as if it could be achieved once and for all. The goal of resilience, on the other hand, implies the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic, and ecological conditions.
In practical terms, resilience is a design strategy that aims to reduce vulnerabilities by shortening supply lines, improving redundancy in critical areas, bolstering local capacity, and solving for a deeper pattern of dependence and disability.
"Writer David Orr explaining the relationship between sustainability and resilience in his article, ‘Sustainability as National Security’.
(Image source: Green Flow)
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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Nature inspires more creative minds
The more you get away from the stresses of daily life and the more time you spend... -
The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History
In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three month, it’s...
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Walkable neighborhoods now more valuable than car-centric ones
If you can walk to the post office, library and eateries, your real estate could... -
Ride. a short film on bike commuting.
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Urbanized, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban...
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
