When we talk about corporations trying harder to do the right thing when it comes to the environment, it’s important to remember the consequences of not doing the right thing. Both of our guests this week on Sea Change Radio are trying to shine a light on corporate polluters – but in very different ways.
Posted by Daniel Kammen of University of California, Berkeley
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Our cities have the potential to be a key climate change solution. Already they are hot-beds of innovation in local and global approaches to the nexus of sustainability and quality of life. People who live in cities drive less, use less energy to heat, cool, and light their homes, and even their water and sewer lines are shorter and require fewer resources. But all of those advantages – and the ability to save more land for nature and agriculture – will be cancelled out if our cities are ringed with suburbs that are profligate in their use of energy and resources.
As the measurement of corporate sustainability matures to become more commonplace, stakeholders are beginning to ask, "Are these new metrics really measuring true sustainability?" The emerging answer is, "only when applied in proper context." We'll present the state of the art in Context-Based Sustainability, followed by a dialogue on Autodesk's open-source methodology for calculating science-based carbon targets and Q&A, with an opportunity for listeners to send in their questions.
In this op-ed for Reuters, UN Global Compact Executive Director Georg Kell makes the business case for setting a price on carbon and why many businesses are already taking preemptive action on climate change.
A project team at Caterpillar China Machinery Components (CCMC) in Wuxi, China, set a goal to reduce energy, water and steam use at the plant in order to bring down costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The team's suggestions included upgrading air compressors and switching from metal halide to LED lamps in the plant. These two projects have provided a total reduction of approximately 200 metric tons of CO2e annually.
By Laurence C. Smith & Jan-Gunnar Winther, members of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Arctic, | 28 October 2013
The world needs clear-eyed discussion about numerous controversial issues in the Arctic, including the mitigation of climate change impacts, native peoples, economic development, and the region’s growing feedbacks to the rest of the world. Its changing environment means there are many emerging issues which we are becoming more familiar with, yet they persist in their complexity.
Uncle Ben's have used innovative technology to reduce the cooking time of their rice by half which has reduced the average greenhouse gas emissions of preparing this type of rice by 18 percent.
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Since opening the world’s first commercial parboiling rice plant in Houston, Texas, in 1943, we have used innovative technology to reduce the cooking time of our UNCLE BEN'S® rice by half. It now takes 10 minutes to cook, which has reduced the average greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of preparing this type of rice by 18 percent.
Hewlett-Packard has measured the greenhouse gas emissions of its supply chain partners since 2008, when it started reporting on their aggregate impact.
The company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, now called HP, is the first IT company to set a supply chain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction goal. HP recently announced its goal of a 20 percent decrease in its first tier manufacturing and product transportation-related GHG emissions by 2020 from a 2010 baseline. Earlier this year, HP became one of the first companies globally to publicly disclose its complete carbon footprint.
