Sustainability

 As part of INESAD’s November Environmental Sustainability month, today’s Monday Graphics series is investigating sustainability in businesses.

This Global Sustainability Scorecard was compiled by McDonalds about its business’s sustainability. Many companies produce graphics like these to make consumers aware of their efforts to protect or contribute to the environment and society (for other big name examples, see the graphics put together by Apple and H&M). While analyzing these, consumers should keep the overall picture in mind: is going green in your office really a mark of sustainability? Are promises that businesses make about one area of their production chain, such as McDonald’s does here about fishing, neglecting their unsustainable habits in other areas? Industrial beef production, for instance, remains a huge problem and causes diseases and deforestation, and McDonald’s happens to be one of its main proponents. Are the businesses really helping the environment, or are they only making their impact ‘less bad’? Read our recently published article on the topic ‘How ‘sustainable’ is sustainable development in the corporate world?’  Read More »

According to the 2005 World Summit on Social Development, sustainability requires the reconciliation of the three elements of economic, social and environmental endurance. Up until not too long ago, companies externalized costs to society and the environment and took advantage of cheaper and more convenient labour in their restless pursuit of profit.  However, activism and awareness campaigns by NGOs have encouraged consumers to demand more sustainable products and services. As a result, today, many companies proudly advertise their sustainable business practices. The ensuing policies of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) are in part motivated  by the long-term financial savings sustainable businesses can make; however, they are also a marketing strategy aimed at convincing people that their money is being invested in something that is good for people and the planet. Read More »

“I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet.” Republican Presidential Candidate Governor Mitt Romney, an interview on “Meet the Press”, September, 2012.

This month, Development Roast has published several posts offering insights into different principles and practices of green accounting. After our overview of European experience with environmental accounting, we now turn to North America. Excluding Mexico (which will be discussed next week in the Latin America update), the two remaining countries show us quite different experiences with greening the national accounts. While Canada has shown to be an example of comprehensive implementation, the United States suspended its national project for environmental accounting in 1995 and hasn’t made large attempts to develop these accounts since. Read More »

By: Miguel Rodríguez Tejerina

Despite half of Bolivia being covered by forest, the forest sector represents only 1-2% of GDP. According to Supreme Decree 26075 of 2001, more than 40 million hectares are destined by the State for sustainable forest use, but currently only about 9 million hectares are being sustainably managed for wood production, mostly by private companies (5 million hectares) and indigenous and peasant communities. The rest is either not being used, or being exploited in an illegal and haphazard manner.

Read More »

To coincide with INESAD’s November Environmental Sustainability month, today’s Monday Graphics series is investigating pollution and sustainable innovations in Latin America.

The first infographic, entitled Pollution in Latin America, was compiled by Hispanically Speaking News using reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Yale and Columbia University, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), to show how pollution is affecting Latin America. In addition to illustrating the health hazards of pollution, such as the two million deaths a year attributed to it, countries like Nicaragua and Costa Rica are exemplified as countries heading towards environmental improvement. In fact, along with ranking fifth globally for its positive treatment of the environment, Costa Rica ranks first in a recent Happy Planet Index released by the New Economics Foundation, which measures how happy people are in relation to their ecological footprint. Read More »

Last night I tagged along to a dinner in Bangkok where I met a couple of executives of Thailand’s national energy company. Needless to say that, as someone with environmentalist proclivities, I was deeply interested in their ‘insider’ views of the industry, as I have learnt from experience that these can be revealing. Although, like taking a ring road bypass to dodge rush hour city traffic, all questions of the environmental impacts of such processes as fracking were skillfully avoided, several things struck me as the conversation turned to the company’s ambitions in the United States.

Fracking is a process of hydraulic fracturing that uses up to 300 tons of chemicals and injects large amounts of explosives and water to crack rock and release natural gases from deep wells. It presents an opportunity to get at previously untouchable gas and every oil and gas explorer wants a piece of the pie. However, according to the executives, the confidence with which the non-renewable industry operates is somewhat geographically determined. Read More »

To coincide with INESAD’s November Environmental Sustainability month, today’s Monday Graphics series is making a case for the worth of stable ecosystems.

 Assessing Forest Growth and Air Quality.

         The first infographic based on a UN Seminar on Energy for Sustainable Development conducted in 2011, despite the increase in Europe’s paper production over the past 20 years, forest growth has exceeded the harvest of forest goods by 45 percent. This translates to an increase in air quality as un-harvested forests provide valuable ecosystem services such as carbon capture. Read More »

According to Conservation International‘s 2009 book, The Wealth of Nature, ecosystems support and regulate all natural processes on earth, while contributing to cultural, social, and economic benefits to human communities. These have become known as ecosystem services and, according to the Rainforest Conservation Fund (RCF), they would cost trillions of dollars per year if human beings had to provide them for themselves. Here are just five types of many of the ecosystem services provided to people and planet by the world’s rainforests: Read More »

“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money,” Native American saying

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” Brundtland Report

It is undeniable that our current way of life is unsustainable; If every country consumed resources and created waste at the same per person rate as the United States, we would need three to five planets to survive. Part of the problem lies in the fact that economics—the major discipline advising global and national policy—has failed to include the environment in its calculations. To rectify this problem, different methods have been proposed, so as to make predictions and come up with better ways of managing the planet’s resources without compromising the future.

Read More »

This month, for our Monday graphics series, Development Roast has teamed up with FSG Books and University of Washington Professor of Economics, the world’s first and only stand-up economist, Yoram Bauman to bring you a sneak peek into the second volume of his book The Cartoon Introduction to Economics. Learning should be fun, so for five weeks during October, to coincide with INESAD’s Fun Economics Month, Development Roast will share one of the fascinating and fun cartoons from Volume Two: Macroeconomics. Today’s cartoon pitches the economic optimists versus the pessimists in the ultimate fate of the planet. Read More »