The impact of giant companies

Everybody knows giant companies cause a lot of impact: environmental damages where they produce goods, greenhouse gas emissions while transporting these goods, cultural interferences as they advertise and social issues all along the chain.

German RWE energy company sensitively created a video to question: what if giant companies caused a lot of... POSITIVE impact?

Sustainability in the president's agenda?

"It is quite easy to understand why the possibility of senator and ex-minister for the environment Marina Silva running for President of Brazil, in next year’s elections, can cause such excitement but also so much concern. Millions of Brazilians, sensitive to the ecological cause, to environmental and social sustainability, to climate change and our planet’s destiny, to the devastation of our ecosystems and the quality of life in our cities, yearn for a voice and a chance in the presidential campaign, so far limited to candidates promoting and proposing the classic 1960’s unsustainable model of economic growth. One can also understand the anguish of perplexed politicians asking themselves: is this Marina thing good for me? Bad for me?"

From Green Party leader Sirkis


I completely agree this last week has been very very interesting. The perspective of having a female presidential candidate who embodies ethics, grew up in the middle of the Amazon forest, comprehends some of Brazil's deepest social issues and seriously envisions the country walking on a sustainability path has moved so many smart people that it really seems we can dream with a future in which:
- we put people first
- we think about our grandchildren when taking important decisions
- we value what is typically Brazilian
- we help building the country we all want as participatory citizens
- we have the government as a role model

Impossible?

Writing in O Globo newspaper, columnist Zuenir Ventura said Marina could bring a touch of Barack Obama to the Brazilian elections. "Marina excites young people, those who are disenchanted with the current situation [and] with the Workers' Party … in such a way that she could create a spontaneous and contagious movement within society … as innovative as that which occurred in the US with Obama."

For more, check the article on the UK Guardian

My posts in other (more visited) sites

As the importance of the internet increases for bridging sons and parents, consumers and organisations, research and the public, I’ve naturally started to contribute to other sites and blogs – especially because the number of visitors of those sites are often many times bigger :-)

Two of my favourite follow (unfortunately only in Portuguese).

Peter Senge and social well being: published in my post grad class blog, talks about the amazing experience of bringing Peter Senge to Brazil, leading the working team according to self mastery and shared leadership principles, and hearing what he has to say about the direction we should take as a global society.

If you want to watch the full lecture in English, click here.


End of Slavery and Sustainability: published on Grupo Santander’s sustainability portal on the End of Slavery week in Brazil, draws a parallel between how we treated slaves 2 centuries ago and how we see the environment nowadays. The reflection came up while going to the countryside with friends for a trekking and rappelling long weekend. Good stuff!

What if we carried our trash?

Clearly, one of the most important factors contributing for unsustainability is the scale of everything today: energy production, construction, agriculture and disposing.

Maybe, if we reconnect to the consequences of our own decisions, we would act a little differently. To start with, what if we carried our trash for a week?

1 Million Women fighting climate change

Created by Climate Coolers, a not-for-profit, non-partisan women's organisation, 1 Million Women is the latest cool engaging marketing campaign from the gum trees' land.

Based on the fact women make over 70% of consumer decisions, the campaign's goal is to inspire 1 million Australian women to take practical action on climate change by cutting 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse pollutant causing global warming.



The videos are very well done. Thanks for the lead, Sveta!

Sustainability: simple and fun

At work, we just produced a simple and fun video about sustainability, which intends to bring essential contents about personal responsibility and world issues to everybody.

It is part of a 3 chapters' online course and stars Roberto, a black Brazilian guy who has a typical big city routine.

To see it, click here and turn on the English subtitles. Please comment with your feedback.

Earth Hour

Your action can trigger many others

On March 28th, swich off the lights at 8:30 p.m. for 1 hour

Maybe host your neighbours and friends for a conversation about global warming.

More: http://www.earthhour.org

Systemic reform is the only course for ‘decimated’ investors

Great article! It appropriately questions what we currently understand as sustainable investment.


Author: Sarah Stranahan
Published on January 25th, 2009
http://www.responsible-investor.com/home/article/if_not_now/P0/

"At a recent conference in New York, I was asked to speak about the Needmor Fund’s 20 years of experience as a mission investor. I wrote a paper comparing Needmor’s returns to the returns of a traditional foundation, which was founded by the same family, uses the same investment consultant and has a very similar investment strategy. In the end, I decided not to read my prepared paper. The reason had nothing to do with my conclusions: Needmor in fact outperformed the traditional fund by 4.5% last year, but by only 0.4% over the last five years. My careful analysis revealed the majority of this short-term outperformance was caused by the quality bent of Needmor’s screened equity managers, which basically supports the conclusion that ESG screens are a proxy for good management. This quality bent functions like a hedge, so that one consistent result of Needmor’s mission investing has been to reduce portfolio volatility. No, the reason I decided not to read my paper was that I was embarrassed by its irrelevance. At the conference, I listened to my peers make the case that social (or sustainable or ESG) investing is competitive with the dominant markets and it made me wonder.

Why are we trying to prove that we are as good as the dominant markets? The dominant markets have failed dismally. Needmor did 4.5% better. So what? We still lost 25% of our endowment. We failed in our fiduciary duty and disappointed our grantees and our staff because we had faith in the dominant markets. A generation lost their retirement security, millions lost their jobs and their homes, and the next generation is foregoing or deferring higher education. And we did 4.5% better. Yippee. The word decimated is a Latin military term used to describe an army that has lost 10% of its soldiers. We were all decimated. Why are we talking about a fraction of a point of performance difference within a failed paradigm? That’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to be talking about systemic reform. Let’s look at the paradigm that failed. It can be summarized as: “Unregulated markets are the most efficient allocators of capital and pricers of risk and they will result in the greatest and most sustainable global economic growth.” This was not just a financial paradigm. It underpinned the dominant theories of global development and political progress.

Unregulated markets were supposed to lift the world’s population out of poverty, and this, in turn, was supposed to lead to education, empowerment, and engagement in the political process, which would lead to, “ta da!”, democracy. This entire set of paradigms has failed. Unregulated markets have not only destroyed $12 trillion worth of savings, but they have destabilized emerging economies, erased 10 years of development and created uncertainty, chaos and corruption. They failed utterly, and in the nick of time. The only thing worse than the collapse of the markets would have been their continued success. We all know that maximizing global economic growth is disastrously unsustainable. We were on the brink of resource scarcity in oil, water, rice, wheat, corn and copper when the wheels fell off the car. If they had not fallen off, we would have driven over the cliff. Now at least we are crawling, not speeding, toward environmental disaster. And the dominant paradigm has been discredited. We should celebrate. Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to work. The problem is, we don’t have a nice, shiny, broadly accepted, politically feasible, researched and tested, safe new paradigm to pop in like a fluorescent light bulb. I wonder where we will find one? Who will stay up all night for six weeks straight to save us? If we leave the re-regulation of the financial and economic systems to the same people who became tremendously wealthy and powerful by dismantling the old regulations, they will design a system that preserves their tremendous wealth and power. They will spend trillions of dollars of our money putting the wheels back on the car and then they will drive it over the cliff. We can’t allow this to happen. We have to develop a financial system that is safe, secure and rewards equitable and sustainable economic behavior. We can draw on the ideas of the New Deal and Keynes, but there are new wrinkles of difficulty and complexity that have to be addressed: globalisation, extreme inequality, resource scarcity and global warming. I cannot tell you what the solutions are; but I do know that if we succeed we will build a financial system that rewards long-term thinking, internalizes externalities, reduces speculation, rewards sustainability and increases social equity. In other words, we will build a financial system that rewards investors like us.

We need new analysis and new ideas. And we also need to subject these ideas to rigorous critical review. We already know that the unintended consequences of well meaning reform can be disastrous. It was, after all, activist institutional investors who advocated for stock options tied to quarterly returns in order to align management interests with shareholder interests. The lesson is to be careful what you ask for: you just might get it. But ideas alone are not enough. To succeed we will need to build the political power to move a reform agenda that supports equitable and sustainable markets. We will need to hash out our differences, prioritise our agenda, and organise and educate an informed engaged constituency.

We will need to amass more power than the Wall Street lobby. To succeed we’ll need good ideas and good organising. We are all worried about our clients’ portfolios. No one is paying us to research financial market regulation, engage in public advocacy, or organise a coalition. But no one is going to do this for us. There are many ways to contribute to this collective effort. One is the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets at www.sustainablefinancialmarkets.net. Another, that I am involved in, is a coalition of organisations including The Social Investment Forum and the Community Development Finance Institution Coalition called The New Economy Roundtable.

Our purpose is: “To shift the dynamics of public discourse and public policy in the wake of the global economic crisis to highlight structures and solutions that support equitable and sustainable economies.” I hope you will join one of these efforts. Our experience at Needmor is that ordinary people become transformative leaders when they assume personal responsibility for the systemic problems that affect their communities."


Sarah Stranahan is chair of the Needmor Fund, a Toledo, Ohio-based fund that supports community investing.

A Letter to Mr. Obama from China

Author: Peter Senge
Published on Jan 20th, 2009
http://blogs.solonline.org/users/psenge/blog/

January 12, 2009

On the eve of your inauguration, the world, not just the US is attending to this historic day, perhaps unlike any before in history.

The expectations awaiting you are daunting.

Just last week I received a letter from Andre Beukes, recently retired Commissioner of the South African Police Service. Having lived through another historic transition, he saw powerful parallels between your inauguration and Mr. Mandela coming to office 14 years ago - except that now, “When President Obama moves into the Oval office, he will have to address the incredible task of giving hope to the whole world.”

In a world of unprecedented interdependence, we may continue the conceit that we elect a president of a country. But, in fact, for the U.S. or China or India or Russia, the impacts of our leadership choices reach far beyond our borders. I am sure I do not have to remind you of The Economist magazine’s global internet poll that showed that, although you captured 53% of the US popular vote, you captured over 80 % of their global vote. At no time in history has one country’s presidential election held such meaning for so many.

This seems to me to have one clear implication.

You do not need take on the burden of fixing America’s problems in isolation. Indeed the U.S.’ problems are the world’s problems. The U.S. did not weave the global financial web that shapes investment, and speculation, alone. It did not shape the rules that govern international trade, and massive misallocation of resources toward the wealthy, alone. It did not mold the norms of global consumerism alone. In each of these, U.S. institutions and culture have played a major hand, but hardly left the only handprint. We are not destroying the world’s tropical forests by ourselves, nor species and ecosystems, nor operating unilaterally to steadily worsen the gap between rich and poor. These are the side effects of global industrial expansion driven by systems of investment and commerce that transcend national borders and policies, and these systems will only change through levels of cooperative effort that will be unprecedented.
If ever there was a time for such cooperation it is at hand, not because it is a lofty ideal but an inescapable necessity.

Case in point: climate change, perhaps the archetypal global challenge, also offers a unique opportunity to do just this. Though there are obviously more pressing issues, there are no more important ones. Climate change and the host of related ‘sustainability challenges’ will shape the context for viable economic policies. In countries around the world, people’s views are shifting to no longer passively accept environmental destruction as the inevitable by-product of economic progress. Instead, people are seeing social and environmental damage as the consequences of the wrong products, powered by the wrong energy system, guided by the wrong economic policies. With the Copenhagen climate negotiations looming in December 2009, this year will likely be seen by our children as a turning point in cooperation and collaborative innovation, or a tragically missed opportunity to foster both.

Start with China. I have the good fortune of spending some part of every year in China, and I firmly believe that now is the time for working together on key global challenges like accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels.

Last year, China passed the US as the number one emitter of carbon dioxide. But China’s (gross) manufacturing export flow is over thirty percent of its GDP, almost half of which go to the U.S. So, a large share of China’s greenhouse gas emissions are really contributions to greenhouse gases driven by U.S. businesses and consumer demand. That the emissions are generated outside our boundaries hardly absolves us of responsibility in the matter. Who should be accountable for reducing these emissions when it comes time to commit to global emissions reductions targets in December? Is it the producers alone or the producers and their customers together? (Obviously, a similar argument applies to many other countries who purchase products produced in China, or who purchase services produced India)

So it is disingenuous at the least to point the finger at China and not recognize the three other fingers pointing back at ourselves.

If we approach climate change as a problem created by us all, very different approaches could be devised that would drive collaborative innovation – such as an agreed upon system of carbon labeling that would inform all regarding the embedded carbon in all products. Combined with effective mechanisms for pricing carbon emissions (such as in emerging cap and trade schemes), this could create consistent economic signals linking carbon producers and customers in reducing emissions.

Similarly, both our countries face powerful entrenched political interests aligned behind keeping fossil fuel energy prices artificially low. But businesses and customers alike are awakening to the foolhardiness of these policies. Just as the price of cigarettes hardly reflect their true cost, no one today can think that the low Chinese or US prices of gasoline at the pump or electricity at the socket reflect true cost – neither the costs of US troops in the Middle East nor those, current or prospective, of climate change, which the UK’s Stern report predicted could be comparable to the costs of WWII in the coming decades. Committing to higher fossil energy prices would take immense political courage, but it would create the consistent signals needed to drive innovation in alternatives. (This could be done, for example, by setting a floor under effective prices and taxing the difference if global market prices for fossil fuel energy fall below that floor, using revenues so generated to support investment in energy efficiency, alternative energy, and assisting the poor in adjusting to higher costs.)

And it is the pace and scale of this innovation that will tell the tale – and it is hard to imagine two countries better positioned to co-create this innovation. Together, the markets of these two countries combined for both energy efficiency and alternative energy dwarf the rest of the world. Rising environmentalism is one of the most powerful political forces in China. Rising green entrepreneurialism is one of the most powerful economic forces in the US. (“Cleantech” investment in green energy is already among the largest venture capital flows in the US - some say the largest). No country is better positioned than China to ramp up manufacture of alternative energy, and come down the corresponding cost curves - because of the enormous scale of future energy demand and its equally enormous need for distributed energy production that can slow the tide of mass urbanization (and Westernization) in favor of more balanced and distributed economic development. Just as the U.S. will need to create millions of Greentech jobs to reduce the carbon footprint of our urban and suburban population, almost three quarters of China’s population is still rural and will never be efficiently well served by centralized coal fired power plants.

In a nutshell, there is immense potential for partnerships between our two countries to accelerate the inevitable transition to a regenerative economy. This is what the Chinese call the “circular economy,” one modeled on the principles of the larger living world, versus the linear “take-make-waste” industrial-age paradigm.

It is understandable at times like this for a new President to call upon Americans to step forward and contribute to solving the problems we face. But, I also believe it is a time to reach out to other nations and say that now is the time when we must all step forward to solve the problems that we have all created.

The world has gotten used to an arrogant America. Rather than a sign of weakness, asking for help and partnership might just be the signal of hope that the world is looking for.

Peter Senge is a faculty member at MIT, the founding chair of SoL, Society for Organizational Learning and Chair of SoL China.

He is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and co-author of The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World

Sustainability Online Games

I'm doing a research for a sustainable business online training I'm designing for the bank's employees and came across some interesting free online courses.

The Vinyl game represents a PVC manufacturer. The player should decide on what industrial plants to invest and what sustainability measures to adopt, while managing the cash flow and suffering stakeholders' pressures. I recommend it.

The McDonald's game doesn't allow as many options, but it has at least two merits: promote a more systemic view of the food chain and bring up the power of democracy and decentralised criticism. There's basically no way one can do well!

The animals save the planet

Because of work, I have been involved in a lot of baby talk recently. Let me explain: 4 out of 9 people in my team are either pregnant or had a baby in the last 3 months.

On top of that, there are 2 Mums and 2 Dads of kids up to 4 years old.

As they exchange experiences, ask advice to each other and comment on the latest cartoons, I learn interesting lessons for the future :-)

The series of short cartoons I want to share is 2 year-old Isabelle's hit. Using a simple and funny language, it talks about some of the most important environmental issues.

Here comes Isabelle's favourite:



And this is the one I really like:



You can find all the others at http://www.animalssavetheplanet.com. Engage the kids you know, too!

Green Passport

For the ones taking holidays this summer / winter (depending on your hemisphere), it's worth it checking the UNEP's Green Passport guide for tips on how to reduce your footprint while you enjoy your trip the most!

Living / Dying Planet

In the last week of October, WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network released the 2008 Living Planet Report.

Amongst other warning data, the report reveals that we are currently using 130% of the planet's renovation capacity and that, by the early 2030s, we will need two planets to keep up with humanity’s demand for goods and services.

Check the whole report here. And spread the word.

Linking global problems with individual habits

Recently, as part of an assignment for the BTH Introduction to Sustainable Development course I'm taking, I came across an interesting piece of data: 60% of deforestation in the Amazon forest in 200-2005 was due to cattle ranches.

It can be even more alarming if we cross that with other facts:
- we need 20 kilograms of feed to make a kilogram of beef
- China's per capita intake of poultry, pork, fish and beef has more than tripled since 1970 and keeps on rising (remember that China has 1.6 billion inhabitants)
- 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on Earth have been seriously degraded or used unsustainably

It seems to me it would be smart to reduce or even stop eating meat. Therefore we could keep eating our veggies, eat a portion of the food that is currently directed to cattle raising to compensate the lack of meat, fight poverty and still transform all the cattle raising areas into environmental recovering reserves, at the same time we prevent further degradation of the soil and more deforestation.

Facing such scenario, I've started doing my part by reducing significantly my meat consumption and therefore my individual contribution to the problem.

Data sources: http://www.mongabay.com, http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/05/carnivores_like_us.php, http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx

Great speeches from people who have a lot to say

On this first video, Al Gore, ex vice president of the US, says:
"We are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Golf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that needs to change!"
Really worth it!




On the second, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who never graduated from college himself, tells 3 interesting stories on the graduation ceremony of Stanford University students. Good stuff!

Banco Real is the Sustainable Bank of the Year

Banco Real triumphs in Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards

Banco Real has been named as ‘Sustainable Bank of the Year’ at the prestigious Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards. In a double coup, the Brazilian bank also took out the ‘Sustainable Emerging Markets Bank of the Year’.

Now in their third year, the Awards were created by the Financial Times in association with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. They recognise banks and other financial institutions that have shown leadership and innovation in integrating social, environmental and corporate governance considerations into their operations. The Awards are one of the most important recognitions of sustainable activities in the financial world.

Banco Real was selected from a record 182 entries from 129 institutions across 54 countries and this was the first time the top prize in the global contest has gone to an emerging markets bank. The judges said the bank had pioneered sustainable banking in South America, putting social and environmental issues at the centre of all its business activities and involving its 32,000 staff in the strategy.

"Sustainability is in its DNA," the judges said. "Banco Real has a radical vision for sustainability in Latin America: it believes a bank is only as sound as the society that surrounds it."

More information on the Awards and the judge’s comments can be found on the Financial Times website.

Let my People go Surfing

I've started to read the book Let my People go Surfing, written by Yvon Chouinard. Yvon is a climber, surfer, kayaker, skier and the founder of Patagonia, a company created to provide gear for nature related sports, which has been maintaining a few interesting principles since its foundation in the 70s:

- work has to be enjoyable on a daily basis
- one dresses as it pleases him/her
- colleagues are all friends
- everybody should have flextime to surf the waves when they are good, of ski the powder after a big storm, or stay home and take care of a sick child - the distinction between work, play and family should be blurred
- be aware of one's impact and reduce the environmental damage

This is how Yvon starts its book.

"I've been a businessman for almost fifty years. It's as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer. I've never respected the profession. It's business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and for poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories.

Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these things and make a profit without losing its soul."

Human Scale Development, by Max-Neef

Manfred Max-Neef is a Chilean economist who has worked for many years with the problem of development in the Third World, articulating the inappropriateness of conventional models of development, that have lead to increasing poverty, massive debt and ecological disaster for many Third World communities.

Max-Neef and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy of human needs and a process by which communities can identify their "wealths" and "poverties" according to how these needs are satisfied.

Human Scale Development is defined as "focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy, and of civil society with the state." (Max-Neef et al, 1987:12)

The main contribution that Max-Neef makes to the understanding of needs is the distinction made between needs and satisfiers. Human needs are seen as few, finite and classifiable (as distinct from the conventional notion that "wants" are infinite and insatiable). Not only this, they are constant through all human cultures and across historical time periods. What changes over time and between cultures is the way these needs are satisfied. It is important that human needs are understood as a system - i.e. they are interrelated and interactive. There is no hierarchy of needs (apart from the basic need for subsistence or survival) as postulated by Western psychologists such as Maslow, rather, simultaneity, complementarity and trade-offs are features of the process of needs satisfaction.

Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as below.

Fundamental Human Needs	Being (qualities)	Having (things)	Doing (actions)	Interacting (settings)
subsistence	physical and mental health	food, shelter work	feed, clothe, rest, work	living environment, social setting
protection	care, adaptability autonomy	social security, health systems, work	co-operate, plan, take care of, help	social environment, dwelling
affection	respect, sense of humour, generosity, sensuality	friendships, family, relationships with nature	share, take care of, make love, express emotions	privacy, intimate spaces of togetherness
understanding	critical capacity, curiosity, intuition	literature, teachers, policies educational	analyse, study, meditate investigate,	schools, families universities, communities,
participation	receptiveness, dedication, sense of humour	responsibilities, duties, work, rights	cooperate, dissent, express opinions	associations, parties, churches, neighbour- hoods
leisure	imagination, tranquillity spontaneity	games, parties, peace of mind	day-dream, remember, relax, have fun	landscapes, intimate spaces, places to be alone
creation	imagination, boldness, inventiveness, curiosity	abilities, skills, work, techniques	invent, build, design, work, compose, interpret	spaces for expression, workshops, audiences
identity	sense of belonging, self-esteem, consistency	language, religions, work, customs, values, norms	get to know oneself, grow, commit oneself	places one belongs to, everyday settings
freedom	autonomy, passion, self-esteem, open- mindedness	equal rights	dissent, choose, run risks, develop awareness	anywhere

Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: eg, the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom.

Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organisations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games.

This model forms the basis of an explanation of many of the problems arising from a dependence on mechanistic economics, and contributes to understandings that are necessary for a paradigm shift that incorporates systemic principles.

Source: Rainforest

Blessed Unrest

After seeing a super cool video on the internet (embedded in the end of this post), I decided to read a book called Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken. The book talks about the huge decentralised, democratic, global movement going on at the moment, led by more than 1 million organisations fighting for social justice and the environment, and what it represents in the context we're living in.

Below you can read the passage which inspired the title of the book. Enjoy it!

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. [...] There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others."

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille at Dance to the Piper

Wisdom for the future

In this awesome video Gunter Pauli talks about designing a new system for the future, for

"The wisdom of the past is not the wisdom of today.
[...]
If we only teach our children what we know
they will only do as badly as we do."

Check it out!

Usage of water

Did you know 70% of the global usage of water goes to agriculture?

And did you know how much water is wasted to produce...

- 1 sheet of paper - 1 litre of water
- 1 litre of petrol - 10 l
- 1 kg of sugar - 100 l
- 1 cup of coffee - 140 l
- 1 egg - 200 l
- 1 kg of rice - 2400 l
- 1 kg of chicken - 6000 l
- 1 kg of meat - 15000 l
- 1 car - 1,2 million litres of water

Doesn't it sound wrong?

Source: Veja Magazine, 30/01/2008

First global warming refugees in Tuvalu

The sea level rising is already threatening the existence of a country in the world - obviously with its population, culture and biodiversity. This alarming piece of news testifies the effects of global warming and should be treated with responsability by the international community. But perhaps because Tuvalu is not a big player in the international arena, we don't even get to know the tragedy is happening. Check the details below.

The 11,000 Tuvaluans live on nine coral atolls totaling 10 square miles scattered over 500,000 square miles of ocean south of the equator and west of the International Dateline. Tuvalu is the smallest of all nations, except for the Vatican. Tuvalu has no industry, burns little petroleum, and creates less carbon pollution than a small town in America. This tiny place nevertheless is on the front line of climate change. The increasing intensity of tropical weather, the increase in ocean temperatures, and rising sea level -- all documented results of a warming atmosphere -- are making trouble for Tuvalu.

Tuvaluans face the possibility of being among the first climate refugees. Sea level rise is the greatest problem. Tuvalu's highest elevation is 4.6 meters .
[…]
The islands are not going to go under immediately. Yet the effects accumulate, year by year. "Even if we are not completely flooded, " said Laupepa, "in 50 to 70 years we face increasingly strong storms and cyclones, changing weather patterns, damage to our coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures, and flooding of all our gardens." Not growing enough food and decreasing fish catch if reefs are damaged would mean "importing more food, more foreign exchange, and more health and diet problems, " he said.

Source: http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/rising-seas.html

Global Compact volunteer collaborative initiative

The Global Compact (world's largest voluntary Corporate Citizenship initiative, led by the United Nations) is calling volunteers to review more than 2,000 Communication on Progress Reports (COPs), submitted by its signers from all across the world.

I started doing my part reviewing my first COP this morning. It's really cool to get know what companies are doing, while contributing to an important global initiative.

If you're interested, click here to learn more and join.

Another way of looking at the world

Through a reference in Brett's blog, I found World Mapper, an amazing website that visually disturbs us about the world's current state.

Wealth Distribution

Living over US$ 200 per day

Living up to US$ 10 per day

War Deaths

Mortality 1-4 Years Old

Environment

Biocapacity

Forest Loss

Species Extinct

Gender issues

Female Managers

Girls not at primary school

End of the Australian CSIRO Sustainability Network

Since I arrived in Australia, I’ve been part of a Sustainability virtual network, fed by Elisabeth Heiji from CSIRO, an intelligent, sensitive and very coherent woman. Today the 14.000 people participating in the network received the newsletter with a note saying that was the last one, as CSIRO considered the program a proved success and would move resources to new initiatives.

I’d like to share with you some parts of Elisabeth’s last words to the network:

“Looking around, I see many of us thinking about sustainability – we may even be involved with it in our professional lives – but, whether as a result of inertia, complacency, the entrenched social systems around us, or a mixture of all of these, we are collectively doing very little personally in our homes and lifestyles. Actions such as replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents and installing low-flow shower heads barely scratch the surface and, furthermore, are consumerist solutions based on trading new goods for old. They fail to tackle the very basic issue of our reverence for the natural world and behaviour towards it. When change occurs at this more intrinsic level, it can radically transform for the better both our own wellbeing and our environmental footprint.”

She also quoted Manfred Lenzen saying that “troubling is the fact that research has indicated that there is little correlation between knowledge and concern and action: emissions attributable to households are strongly linked to consumer spending, which doesn’t seem to be affected by environmental issues, even when these issues and problems are well known by those households”

If welfare doesn’t improve our harmony with the planet, why a bigger government?

If wealth doesn’t really bring comfort for societies, why focus on economic development?

And the biggest of all:

If education doesn’t drive action, what does? Should we use the consumerism and create trends and fashions? Should we restrict our freedom and impose certain behaviours through law? Or should we finally accept that we only radically change in extreme situations?

What do you think?

March Against Global Warming

Hello guys! Sorry for being very late with the posts! As I have many things to tell, you can expect quite a lot of news in the next week.

I’m starting with a very old but extremely relevant one. On November 4th, I joined the March Against Global Warming. This movement (http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/) is happening all around the world and had around 20.000 people marching in Sydney, ironically in a cold and rainy day.

What impressed me the most was the common direction among people from extremely opposite political views. There were liberals, socialists, environmentalists, artists, students, famous personalities and obviously lots of anonymous citizens. Is the union against global warming the new common flag in our world?

Amongst all the participants, the ones that called my attention the most was the family below. Extremely coherent, they are being extremely conscious about their own impact and making the needed efforts to cut their emissions in every way possible: eating, clothing, living and having fun sustainably.

Sustainability Learning Circle #2

This week, the theme of our sustainability learning circle was: “Do companies lead the global agenda?” The discussion was quite interesting! Some highlights:

- Companies definitely influence a lot the global decisions, for good (e.g. engaging SMEs and individual entrepreneurs in their distribution chain) and for bad (e.g. fighting for less health regulations or even stimulating war);

- In general, multinationals and governments are not extremely pro-active in driving change, but have a much more responsive attitude in face of public demands. In this sense, size is quite a limiting thing;

- In this sense, it’s more probable that the main paradigm changes will come from individuals, who are visionary, try beyond the others have tried and establish horizontal networks, both to design and spread the new inventions.

Coming back from such interesting conversation (around midnight), Lucy, Jem, Jhow and I played a little bit of soccer in the Centennial Park. Random, we???

Sustainability learning circle

I’ve been reading quite a lot about sustainability. As I shared some ideas with people here in Sydney, I figured out there are some fans of the topic around here. So, I invited these people – Salma, Lucy, Jeremy and Jhow – for a learning circle about the theme.

We discussed our personal connections with the issue and came to some agreements:
- We want to have periodic prepared conversations about different sub topics;
- We think coherency is essential; therefore we started having personal commitments, so that we can act more sustainably;
- We visualise a project that we can potentially run with AIESEC in Sydney.

Good start! Let’s see how it evolves! I’m particularly happy with the volunteer commitment to coherency and with the broad intuitional understanding that all the participants of the group have about sustainability.

Brisbane - green city?

On Monday, I had the chance to spend the morning around the city, which is quite interesting. The weather is great (by the way, Queensland is called “The Sunshine State”), the city is not too crowded and there is a river passing in the middle of the city. Besides, there are some signs of what could be the starting of a green city:

- I saw quite a lot of people riding their bikes;
- There are some parks in the city, including a very nice Botanic Garden, very close to the city centre;
- The new buses of the city are powered by natural gas;
- One of the public transports widely used is a ferry, powered by bio-diesel;
- And the most interesting of all: a green bridge was built just for the circulation of buses, bikes and pedestrians.




After the tour, I went to the university, where I met Angie, who went to the Peace Project with me in Poland, in 2003. Angie is finishing her PhD in Peace and Conflict, in which she studied the genocide in Rwanda. She recently got married, is going to move to Canberra in February to work for the national diplomatic department, and has an old orange kombi van, with which she travels with her husband to different places. After the description, I think I don’t need to say how much I enjoyed to meet her and how cool the conversations were!



As my time in Brisbane finished, I took the bus back to Sydney. As the photo witnesses, I was tired, with blister in my fingers (reminders of the canoeing effort), but extremely happy and inspired by the two awesome women I met there – Anh and Angie. Thanks, girls!

Sustainability in Australia

It took me quite a long time to write about this, right? But subjects that interest us continue catching our attention – maybe even more than before – when we’re abroad.

So, since I arrived in Australia, I’ve been getting involved and meeting people engaged in sustainability related things:
- engaged in a very nice sustainability virtual network, commanded by CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), which produces a high level worth reading scientific newsletter - http://www.csiro.au/;
- engaged in the social investment committee of Colmar Brunton, which is focused on the Habitat for Humanity program - http://www.habitat.org/;
- participated of some events: launch of One at a Time Foundation, GreenPeace renewable energy seminar and social leadership lecture at Sydney University, where I can understand Australian stage in terms of sustainability practices and thinking and, most importantly, connect to locals;
- watched “The inconvenient truth” movie.

Some sad findings:
- Australia is among the top 3 countries in greenhouse emissions per capita (after US and Kuwait);
- 90% (!!!) of Australian energy comes from coal (in Brazil, 96,8% come from water);
- Australia and US are the only developed countries who didn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol;
- More than half of the people drive to work;
- Although Australia produces lots of technology around environmentally friendly systems, it generally exports it without implementing in the country;
- The level of conscience and engagement is still very low and even the ambitions of the environmental leaders is shy – they are fighting to have 15% of the total energy production coming from renewable sources by 2025.

Given this situation, we are planning to start a discussion group on the theme in the upcoming weeks, formed by people with different backgrounds, willing to spread knowledge, create individual commitment and put some actions into practice. Let’s see…