Sustainable Development | Andrea Brennen | Tuesday 16th March 2010

There is a general agreement about the problem at hand: the climate is changing and the sea levels will rise; burning fossil fuels is bad and the projected business-as-usual scenarios are dismal; buildings are significant consumers of energy and there is a desperate need to rethink the way they work.

There is less accord and more debate, however, when it comes to deciding how, exact

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	Skin Deep: A Lens into CSR in the Cosmetics Industry Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 5th March 2010 Interesting CSR fact: most people don't put their money where their mouth is when it comes to their purchasing power. Asked whether they would pay more for an environmentally-sound product, many people eagerly nod yes, but follow them to the grocery store and their wallets speak differently. The one exception to this may hold in situations where the person believes that s/he may actually be directly harmed by a purchase. To get a sense of what I am discussing, I urge you to visit Skin Deep, a database produced by the Environmental Working Group to share safety information about cosmetics. The results are pretty alarming, and demonstrate what an uphill battle cosmetics companies face in reforming their products. Reading through the website, it would seem that toxicity is absolutely inescapable (Mom, stop reading here). To illustrate, I will lead you through my morning routine as evaluated by Skin Deep. In the morning I wash my hair with Estee Lauder's Aveda shampoo and my body with Dove Beauty Bar, exposing myself to ingredients linked with "allergies/immunotoxicity", and harmful effects such as neurotoxicity, en...

	Some parents still fear vaccines Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 5th March 2010 It's a rite of passage for babies, toddlers and even teenagers: rolling up the sleeve, dropping the drawers and bracing for the vaccine. The effort to get children protected against measles, mumps and other childhood scourges has saved countless lives over the decades. But a new study finds that more than half of all parents continue to fear serious side effects of vaccines despite other medical studies that have given the shots the all clear. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that while 90 percent of parents say vaccines are a good way to protect their kids, and 88 percent follow their doctor's vaccination recommendations, 54 percent are worried about serious side effects. That worry has translated into a delay in getting vaccines - which opens children up to the risk of contracting a potentially fatal yet preventable disease - and in some cases parents' refusal of certain vaccines altogether. Researchers found that 12 percent of parents have refused at least one of the vaccines recommended to them by their child's pediatrician. The vaccines most often shunned were newer ones, including those for chickenpox, meningococcal conjugate, and human papilloma...

	A Rare Breed: Why Oddball Animals Matter in the World of Sustainable Food Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 5th March 2010 The few weeks ago, I listened to an interview. The interview was with a woman who had given up her job as a university professor and had become a farmer. Instead of studying the demise of rare animals, she was now fostering the survival of these rare breeds. The world of sustainable food seems to be populated with a strange mix of family farmers and activists, those who have moved from being entranced with organic, sustainable and heritage breeds into growing these plants and animals for their life's work. Yesterday, my daughter received her monthly nature magazine. At the front of each magazine is the part that I liked best as a child: a "who's that?" photo of an animal that the average North American or European child has never seen. In fact, since many of these animals are endangered or very specific to one area of the world, most of the planet's children have never seen them. The animal of the month was one that looked like a cross between a big-eyed deer and an elephant. I found it intriguing, to be sure. Aside from being intriguing, what's to be gained by saving rare breeds of farm animals? Well, diversity, for one. You may have heard the story o...

	Health reform needs a referral Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 5th March 2010 Health care in the US suffers from poor delivery. Sam Wertheimer recently pointed to RAND research showing that American's only receive recommended care about 55% of the time. Sometimes that's because we just don't know what's best or decided "what's recommended," but often it's a side effect of poor systems-performance. New research is emphasizing the need for some exceedingly basic system-wide reforms that improve the way that health care is delivered. Researchers from Indiana University and the VA have found that only 71% of patients 65 and older who receive referrals to see specialists actually get appointments, and only 70% of them show up. That means only 50% (70% of 70%) of patients in that age group who need specialist care are receiving it. After looking at over 6700 patient records, researchers concluded that there are a number of reasons for this shortfall in care: Primary care docs who fail to call the specialists, failure of specialists to receive requests for consultation, and a lack of transportation among the elderly, to name a few. Information technology holds some promise of improvement here: "Using electronic medical records and other health IT to ...

	Decisions Under Uncertain Climate Change Conditions Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Friday 5th March 2010 Recently, I read a story about a town in Venezuela that reemerged from the depths of a reservoir after being covered for years. The church steeple is poking up from the waters due to a drought that can be blamed in part on El Nino. However, it raises a scary prospect for Venezuela's energy system if climate change dries the area out. Despite being the fifth largest oil producer in the world, Venezuela gets 70% of its electricity from hydropower. Is it possible dams will be obsolete in Venezuela? According to the 2007 IPCC report, Venezuela is likely to be dryer in the both the dry and wet seasons. Not all climate models agree on this, though. So Venezuela (or any other country such as Costa Rica that gets a lot of its energy from hydroelectricity) has a calculated decision to make in the near future. Keep building dams at the risk of seeing their energy return diminish in a drying world or look into other energy sources. Venezuela has an enviable position in the sense that if it needed to, it could rely more on oil, though that's clearly fraught with other problems. Other countries that are resource poor might not be so...

	Green Buildings are Smart CSR Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 5th March 2010 Open up a CSR report these days and there is a good chance that there will be some mention of green buildings. No longer a novelty, environmentally-sound buildings are becoming mainstream as firms seek to save money by doing good. In light of this, I thought it would be interesting to spend a few minutes talking about the benefits of green buildings. Before we begin, I want to spend a moment defining what I mean by "benefits". A natural question for you to ask would be: benefits for whom? This is in fact the beauty of green buildings. Benefits abound, not only for the environment (and the people who will benefit from it), but also for the companies themselves. From the environment's perspective, the advantages are numerous. According to the U.S. Green Buildings Council, buildings in the United States use 40% of the country's energy and correspondingly give off 39% of the nation's C02 emissions. These results are particularly impressive when compared to the impact of transportation, which many estimate accounts for roughly 30% of C02 emissions. To echo a theme that I have discussed throughout this...

	Porsche Reveals Hybrid Electric Concept Cars Energy & Emissions \| Brian Coppa \| Thursday 4th March 2010 Who is to say that electric cars have to be slow and boring? This week Porsche released three hybrid electric vehicles, which are redefining how people view the future of high-performance sports cars and the like. The 918 Spyder is one of three Porsche models with hybrid electric vehicle technology, which made their world debut at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. The 918 Spyder prototype integrates hybrid electric mobility with race car characteristics for an exciting blend of qualities such as: an emission level of approximately 70 grams of CO2 per 0.62 mi on fuel consumption of 94 mpg, acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in just under 3 seconds, top speed of 198 mph, and a lap time faster than even the Porsche Carrera GT, which is a far cry from a Toyota Prius. The energy reservoir is a fluid-cooled lithium-ion battery positioned behind the passenger cell. One of the benefits of a plug-in hybrid is that the battery can be charged on the regular electrical network. In addition, this car's kinetic energy is converted into electrical energy fed into the battery when applying the brakes; thus providing additional energy for rapid and dyna...

	From Collaboration to Convergence Social Enterprise \| Gib Bulloch \| Thursday 4th March 2010 The Perfect Storm Globalization, the leitmotif of the past two decades of human development, has lost some of its shine. Our world in 2009 appears to be in the eye of a perfect storm; a fuel crisis, followed by a food crisis, exacerbated by an economic crisis. And lurking in the background is of course, the over-arching threat of climate crisis. Quite a year by any standard! The sad irony is that the countries and populations of the so-called developing world, who have been least responsible for the causes of these crises, are the ones who bear the brunt of the effects. Experts warn that we're in danger of losing a decade of development, as great strides in lifting people out of poverty, improving health outcomes and advancing education are under threat. So whose responsibility is it to solve these problems? In a developed country context, citizens look to governments to take the lead on global problem solving, lobbied into action and held to account by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society. Business has largely been left to its own devices; creating wealth, providing employment and paying tax. Is that not enough? Is that not their ro...

	Health response during disaster: Considerations before lending a hand Health \| Ano Lobb \| Thursday 4th March 2010 First Haiti, then Chile. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, people displaced by famine and drought. Disasters strike with unfortunate frequency, impacting health, economies, development, stability the world over. With each event, humanitarian efforts are launched, leaving many people to ponder their role. Send money? Jump on a plane to lend a hand? A perspective just published in the New England Journal of Medicine lists key considerations for potential responders. Even those with advanced medical training, or much needed search and rescue, civil engineering, logistics or epidemiology skills, can contribute to disaster if they simply show up. It's not enough to arrive with valuable skills and good intentions, you must be prepared to operate in an extremely challenging, low resource environment. So the authors, who include an emergency physician from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Agency for Health and Human Services, advise the following: 1. Seek formal training in working in disaster areas. If you have medical training, organizations such as the Red Cross, medical asso...

	New faces of Development: growing older Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Thursday 4th March 2010 The classic - and much bemoaned and critiqued - mental image of the developing world is of a woman carrying a baby and a pot of water or wood on her head. In different variations, it has served as a rallying cry to give donations to large and small organisations, and, for others, is a testimony to the physical, mental and spiritual strength of women the world over. Regardless of your opinion of this image (it certainly doesn't capture most African women I've met) something is shifting on the ground, though it has yet to catch up to the images of development - or indeed what it means to pursue sustainable development. The global population is both a) getting younger and b) getting older. In Africa, it is common that in many countries, at least 40% of the population is below age 15. In Uganda, its over 50%. This is a result of wars, migration and epidemics - not least AIDS, which has wiped out significant portions of the adult population. This has been a well documented trend in recent years, and has gained a fair amount of attention - often, it lies at the heart of analysis on some of the rise of youth violence and social exclusion and political unrest - n...

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	Skin Deep: A Lens into CSR in the Cosmetics Industry Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 5th March 2010 Interesting CSR fact: most people don't put their money where their mouth is when it comes to their purchasing power. Asked whether they would pay more for an environmentally-sound product, many people eagerly nod yes, but follow them to the grocery store and their wallets speak differently. The one exception to this may hold in situations where the person believes that s/he may actually be directly harmed by a purchase. To get a sense of what I am discussing, I urge you to visit Skin Deep, a database produced by the Environmental Working Group to share safety information about cosmetics. The results are pretty alarming, and demonstrate what an uphill battle cosmetics companies face in reforming their products. Reading through the website, it would seem that toxicity is absolutely inescapable (Mom, stop reading here). To illustrate, I will lead you through my morning routine as evaluated by Skin Deep. In the morning I wash my hair with Estee Lauder's Aveda shampoo and my body with Dove Beauty Bar, exposing myself to ingredients linked with "allergies/immunotoxicity", and harmful effects such as neurotoxicity, en...

	Some parents still fear vaccines Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 5th March 2010 It's a rite of passage for babies, toddlers and even teenagers: rolling up the sleeve, dropping the drawers and bracing for the vaccine. The effort to get children protected against measles, mumps and other childhood scourges has saved countless lives over the decades. But a new study finds that more than half of all parents continue to fear serious side effects of vaccines despite other medical studies that have given the shots the all clear. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that while 90 percent of parents say vaccines are a good way to protect their kids, and 88 percent follow their doctor's vaccination recommendations, 54 percent are worried about serious side effects. That worry has translated into a delay in getting vaccines - which opens children up to the risk of contracting a potentially fatal yet preventable disease - and in some cases parents' refusal of certain vaccines altogether. Researchers found that 12 percent of parents have refused at least one of the vaccines recommended to them by their child's pediatrician. The vaccines most often shunned were newer ones, including those for chickenpox, meningococcal conjugate, and human papilloma...

	A Rare Breed: Why Oddball Animals Matter in the World of Sustainable Food Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 5th March 2010 The few weeks ago, I listened to an interview. The interview was with a woman who had given up her job as a university professor and had become a farmer. Instead of studying the demise of rare animals, she was now fostering the survival of these rare breeds. The world of sustainable food seems to be populated with a strange mix of family farmers and activists, those who have moved from being entranced with organic, sustainable and heritage breeds into growing these plants and animals for their life's work. Yesterday, my daughter received her monthly nature magazine. At the front of each magazine is the part that I liked best as a child: a "who's that?" photo of an animal that the average North American or European child has never seen. In fact, since many of these animals are endangered or very specific to one area of the world, most of the planet's children have never seen them. The animal of the month was one that looked like a cross between a big-eyed deer and an elephant. I found it intriguing, to be sure. Aside from being intriguing, what's to be gained by saving rare breeds of farm animals? Well, diversity, for one. You may have heard the story o...

	Health reform needs a referral Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 5th March 2010 Health care in the US suffers from poor delivery. Sam Wertheimer recently pointed to RAND research showing that American's only receive recommended care about 55% of the time. Sometimes that's because we just don't know what's best or decided "what's recommended," but often it's a side effect of poor systems-performance. New research is emphasizing the need for some exceedingly basic system-wide reforms that improve the way that health care is delivered. Researchers from Indiana University and the VA have found that only 71% of patients 65 and older who receive referrals to see specialists actually get appointments, and only 70% of them show up. That means only 50% (70% of 70%) of patients in that age group who need specialist care are receiving it. After looking at over 6700 patient records, researchers concluded that there are a number of reasons for this shortfall in care: Primary care docs who fail to call the specialists, failure of specialists to receive requests for consultation, and a lack of transportation among the elderly, to name a few. Information technology holds some promise of improvement here: "Using electronic medical records and other health IT to ...

	Decisions Under Uncertain Climate Change Conditions Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Friday 5th March 2010 Recently, I read a story about a town in Venezuela that reemerged from the depths of a reservoir after being covered for years. The church steeple is poking up from the waters due to a drought that can be blamed in part on El Nino. However, it raises a scary prospect for Venezuela's energy system if climate change dries the area out. Despite being the fifth largest oil producer in the world, Venezuela gets 70% of its electricity from hydropower. Is it possible dams will be obsolete in Venezuela? According to the 2007 IPCC report, Venezuela is likely to be dryer in the both the dry and wet seasons. Not all climate models agree on this, though. So Venezuela (or any other country such as Costa Rica that gets a lot of its energy from hydroelectricity) has a calculated decision to make in the near future. Keep building dams at the risk of seeing their energy return diminish in a drying world or look into other energy sources. Venezuela has an enviable position in the sense that if it needed to, it could rely more on oil, though that's clearly fraught with other problems. Other countries that are resource poor might not be so...

	Green Buildings are Smart CSR Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 5th March 2010 Open up a CSR report these days and there is a good chance that there will be some mention of green buildings. No longer a novelty, environmentally-sound buildings are becoming mainstream as firms seek to save money by doing good. In light of this, I thought it would be interesting to spend a few minutes talking about the benefits of green buildings. Before we begin, I want to spend a moment defining what I mean by "benefits". A natural question for you to ask would be: benefits for whom? This is in fact the beauty of green buildings. Benefits abound, not only for the environment (and the people who will benefit from it), but also for the companies themselves. From the environment's perspective, the advantages are numerous. According to the U.S. Green Buildings Council, buildings in the United States use 40% of the country's energy and correspondingly give off 39% of the nation's C02 emissions. These results are particularly impressive when compared to the impact of transportation, which many estimate accounts for roughly 30% of C02 emissions. To echo a theme that I have discussed throughout this...

	Porsche Reveals Hybrid Electric Concept Cars Energy & Emissions \| Brian Coppa \| Thursday 4th March 2010 Who is to say that electric cars have to be slow and boring? This week Porsche released three hybrid electric vehicles, which are redefining how people view the future of high-performance sports cars and the like. The 918 Spyder is one of three Porsche models with hybrid electric vehicle technology, which made their world debut at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. The 918 Spyder prototype integrates hybrid electric mobility with race car characteristics for an exciting blend of qualities such as: an emission level of approximately 70 grams of CO2 per 0.62 mi on fuel consumption of 94 mpg, acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in just under 3 seconds, top speed of 198 mph, and a lap time faster than even the Porsche Carrera GT, which is a far cry from a Toyota Prius. The energy reservoir is a fluid-cooled lithium-ion battery positioned behind the passenger cell. One of the benefits of a plug-in hybrid is that the battery can be charged on the regular electrical network. In addition, this car's kinetic energy is converted into electrical energy fed into the battery when applying the brakes; thus providing additional energy for rapid and dyna...

	From Collaboration to Convergence Social Enterprise \| Gib Bulloch \| Thursday 4th March 2010 The Perfect Storm Globalization, the leitmotif of the past two decades of human development, has lost some of its shine. Our world in 2009 appears to be in the eye of a perfect storm; a fuel crisis, followed by a food crisis, exacerbated by an economic crisis. And lurking in the background is of course, the over-arching threat of climate crisis. Quite a year by any standard! The sad irony is that the countries and populations of the so-called developing world, who have been least responsible for the causes of these crises, are the ones who bear the brunt of the effects. Experts warn that we're in danger of losing a decade of development, as great strides in lifting people out of poverty, improving health outcomes and advancing education are under threat. So whose responsibility is it to solve these problems? In a developed country context, citizens look to governments to take the lead on global problem solving, lobbied into action and held to account by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society. Business has largely been left to its own devices; creating wealth, providing employment and paying tax. Is that not enough? Is that not their ro...

	Health response during disaster: Considerations before lending a hand Health \| Ano Lobb \| Thursday 4th March 2010 First Haiti, then Chile. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, people displaced by famine and drought. Disasters strike with unfortunate frequency, impacting health, economies, development, stability the world over. With each event, humanitarian efforts are launched, leaving many people to ponder their role. Send money? Jump on a plane to lend a hand? A perspective just published in the New England Journal of Medicine lists key considerations for potential responders. Even those with advanced medical training, or much needed search and rescue, civil engineering, logistics or epidemiology skills, can contribute to disaster if they simply show up. It's not enough to arrive with valuable skills and good intentions, you must be prepared to operate in an extremely challenging, low resource environment. So the authors, who include an emergency physician from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Agency for Health and Human Services, advise the following: 1. Seek formal training in working in disaster areas. If you have medical training, organizations such as the Red Cross, medical asso...

	New faces of Development: growing older Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Thursday 4th March 2010 The classic - and much bemoaned and critiqued - mental image of the developing world is of a woman carrying a baby and a pot of water or wood on her head. In different variations, it has served as a rallying cry to give donations to large and small organisations, and, for others, is a testimony to the physical, mental and spiritual strength of women the world over. Regardless of your opinion of this image (it certainly doesn't capture most African women I've met) something is shifting on the ground, though it has yet to catch up to the images of development - or indeed what it means to pursue sustainable development. The global population is both a) getting younger and b) getting older. In Africa, it is common that in many countries, at least 40% of the population is below age 15. In Uganda, its over 50%. This is a result of wars, migration and epidemics - not least AIDS, which has wiped out significant portions of the adult population. This has been a well documented trend in recent years, and has gained a fair amount of attention - often, it lies at the heart of analysis on some of the rise of youth violence and social exclusion and political unrest - n...