The transition to net-zero is one done for the long-term health of ourselves and our planet. It is one that helps guarantee a livable world for future generations. Net-zero is a journey, one that will take trillions in new investments, continuous innovation and a shift in the way we procure and develop the goods we consume, the places we live and work, and the way we move about.

It’s a conscious decision for our future, one that involves making notable investments that will scale back our reliance our carbon-emitting fuel sources. These investments will affect every stage of project development, from design and procurement to construction and operation. Investments in low- or no-emissions technologies will be at the heart of the way we look at our infrastructure.

So how do we actually get there? What decisions should be made now to ensure that the journey toward net-zero is on the right path? As a company at the forefront of the transition to net-zero, helping companies and governments take action to meet this massive climate objective, WSP is working to introduce low- and no-carbon solutions that chart a course to eventual net-zero.

Consider emissions early

The carbon footprint of a project needs to be considered in the development of a hospital, house or high-rise condominium. Emissions savings must be factored at the earliest stages of all projects, as this is the best time for integrating the most impactful solutions in a cost-effective manner.

It’s important to set goals for overall emissions right from the start, and then look at the number of potential ways that emissions can be reduced as part of the project’s development. Here are some key questions to be asked that can lead to solutions that will reduce emissions:

• For building solutions, what materials will the structure, mechanical/electrical and building envelope systems be built with? Is mass timber an option? Can recycled steel be used? Could modular construction be considered to reduce material waste?
• There are also considerations related to energy: How can natural sunlight be used to heat or light the building? Can the building be electrified by using heat pumps instead of fossil-fuel-burning boilers? Is there an opportunity for on-site renewable-energy generation? Can the building envelope be improved to reduce how much heating and cooling is needed?

All of these, and more, are key considerations for the earliest stages of project development, having a lower financial impact when considered early. These questions can and should be applied to all forms of buildings, from residential and commercial towers to hospitals and transit stations. Each action can lead to a significant emissions reduction itself, but combined can help the project reach toward net-zero.

A plan for existing buildings

For existing building infrastructure, new approaches have been adopted for making significant strides in reducing the emissions footprint. More than 80% of existing buildings today will still be in operation in 2050. There is no path to net-zero without tackling existing buildings.

There are two key things to focus on when talking about the existing buildings:

1) Existing buildings contain a lot of embodied carbon that we cannot afford to waste by demolishing the building. Reusing an existing building, even if major retrofits are required, will most often if not always reduce embodied carbon compared to demolishing and building anew.

2) Making them as energy-efficient as possible and switching to clean energy sources, which has led building owners to consider using a deep energy retrofit.

A deep energy retrofit focuses on two key areas, building systems and building envelope, to create well-insulated, airtight and highly energy-efficient buildings. The result of the retrofit is a 50% or greater reduction in energy use and a 90% or greater reduction in operational carbon emissions. This means targeting envelope assemblies (windows, doors and insulation) and HVAC systems, to reduce the demand for energy as much as possible and enable the electrification of building systems.

While the focus has been on large-scale structures, such as office towers and older apartments/condominiums, there is also a drive to test the viability of deep retrofits at a smaller scale, including individual housing units. FortisBC recently conducted a deep-energy-retrofit pilot program to demonstrate its effectiveness and affordability. The program focused on 20 residential homes and four fourplexes, targeting the 50% threshold. The program is currently in the construction and evaluation phase and will provide valuable information on the fiscal/environmental value of deep energy retrofits for smaller buildings.

Regardless of the building’s footprint, a deep energy retrofit represents a notable investment for the property owner, but one that can be recaptured through energy and carbon tax savings, government grants (in some jurisdictions) and a higher resale value for the structure.

Considering district energy

The installation of district energy systems poses an opportunity for meaningful emission reductions, especially where clusters of buildings are owned by the same entity such as institutions, municipalities and business parks.

There are already several successful examples of district energy systems installed in communities across Canada, including Guelph, Ontario, and Prince George, British Columbia, but the flagship project is the ESAP program in Ottawa/Gatineau. ESAP, the Energy Services Acquisition Program, services multiple government structures on both sides of the Ottawa River, including the Parliament buildings. It is currently in the midst of the energy services modernization, an upgrade of the system to provide heating for 80 buildings and cooling for 67 buildings.

By sharing heating and cooling resources through a complex piping network served by four energy centres, an estimated 63% emissions reduction will be achieved compared to 2005 baseline emission levels, with further emissions reductions expected for stage two of the project.

In communities across Canada, where carbon-emitting energy solutions are still being used, there are investments that can be made today to drastically reduce the emissions footprint in buildings. And when the emissions are eventually removed from the energy mix, the energy savings will continue to provide economic benefit for the property owner.

To reach net-zero by 2050, it’s important to take strides now, be it during the earliest stages of project procurement or through retrofits to existing buildings. These emissions savings will be paramount in creating healthy, resilient communities for generations to come.

Need help taking the first step? WSP has experts in more than 100 cities across Canada, with additional resources around the world, that can help any asset owner better understand how to reduce the emissions footprint of any structure. For more information, visit: https://www.wsp.com/en-ca/services/green-building-design

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As a strategy, the net-zero target has been criticized by climate advocates; at its worst, it can be a vague, unenforceable greenwashing program. But global efforts are underway to write standards for what makes a good one – and hold the target-setters to them. The net-zero targets that have actually been adopted display a surprisingly wide variety in terms of their substance: some refer to all greenhouse gas emissions and others only to carbon dioxide. The strongest include sector-specific implementation plans and credible near-term targets and cover all three emissions scopes up and down the value chain.

On Monday, the Net Zero Tracker, a collaboration between four climate organizations, released its most recent “Net Zero Stocktake” – a survey of the world’s climate pledges, including evaluations of how serious the plans are to actually follow through on them. Since the group began publishing such reports annually since 2021, it has found that, at the national level, after years of more and more countries setting net-zero targets, the growth of such pledges has now levelled off, with 147 countries, as well as the European Union, having now set targets. They include most of the highest-emitting countries. China, the world’s largest emitter, committed to carbon neutrality by 2060 in 2020 at the UN General Assembly. A significant exception is Azerbaijan, the oil-rich, gas-leaking host of November’s COP29 UN climate change conference, which has no net-zero target.

But net-zero targets continue to proliferate in subnational governments, especially at the state and regional levels, and in the private sector. In the 18 months since the 2023 report was published, the number of companies with net-zero targets has increased by 23%, and local regions by 28%. (Cities’ pledges increased by only 8%.)

The growth of regional targets is important because local governments play an important role in helping countries actually achieve decarbonization. “Subnational regions have huge responsibility for realizing net zero on the global scale,” Sybrig Smit, a co-author of the report, said in a press briefing, adding that, in countries that have adopted national targets, “the credibility of those net zero targets simply increases when also on lower levels of government this ambition level is shown.” In the United States, 19 states have net-zero targets – and five of them aim for an earlier deadline than the federal goal of 2050.

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But the pledges vary widely in substance – and very few meet anything like a gold standard. “For all the subnational governments and companies, only a very small percentage of them actually meet all of the robustness or the integrity criteria” that were tracked in the report, Takeshi Kuramochi, another of the report’s co-authors, said in the briefing. For example, of the companies surveyed (the 2,000 largest in the world), only about half of those with net-zero targets covered all greenhouse gases, rather than just carbon dioxide. The metric that companies and governments alike scored worst on was clarity on the use of offsets: less than 10% of the net-zero targets set by companies, cities and regions specify how much they will use offsets to achieve their goals.

While the overall landscape of net-zero targets appears plagued by insincerity, the report’s authors gave credit to those whose pledges were more substantive – and highlighted their role in leading by example, particularly as standards are formalized for net-zero targets. The report spotlights Costa Rica’s 2030 net-zero target, which covers all greenhouse gas emissions and includes sector-specific and interim targets. In the private sector, Google and the Volvo Group received special commendation in the report for covering all three emissions scopes – which means they can’t simply pass their emissions on to suppliers or ignore the footprint of their electricity usage.

Giving credit where it’s due – in the hopes of incentivizing better performance through public scrutiny – is part of the theory of change according to which setting best practices for net-zero targets might actually be an effective mechanism for climate action.

“Ultimately, a lot of things will need to be regulated, and that’s a positive thing,” said Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian environment minister who chaired a UN expert group on non-state net-zero targets, in the briefing. “It creates a level playing field. It means there are consequences if you don’t do the work, and if you are doing the work, then you can demonstrate that you are doing the work. We need to distinguish between those who are and those who aren’t, and [ensure] that the people who are doing the work feel really good.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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Such dramatic moves underscore the extraordinary amount of energy required to power the exponential growth in generative artificial intelligence computing, which completely eclipses many current uses. For example, according to a recent calculation performed by The Washington Post and the University of California, Riverside, a single ChatGPT prompt (say, to construct a response to an email) consumes the equivalent of about a bottle of water (for cooling the massive data centres run by AI giants).   

Here’s another: the energy consumed by a prompt that generates a single high-resolution AI image is about equivalent to the electricity used to recharge a smartphone. It may sound small enough, but in both cases, the sheer scale of the collective impact of millions of users is bracing, and goes some way to explain why the large language models that are driving the massive surge in generative AI usage leave environmental footprints that are only getting larger as the number of users expands.   

The growth, in part, is also attributable to the fact that a steadily increasing number of generative AI users rely on these powerful platforms to carry out tasks that a standard search – which requires far less energy and water – can readily perform, according to some AI experts.      

“Using ChatGPT to generate text uses somewhere between 10 to 90 times more energy per query than a conventional Google search,” Ascelin Gordon, a senior lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, testified earlier this fall before an Australian parliamentary committee investigating the impact of AI. “Producing an image via generative AI uses about 20 times more energy than a generative AI text query. This year, producing videos via generative AI is taking off, and the energy to produce videos is likely to be an order of magnitude higher again.”   

“I find it particularly disappointing that generative AI is used to search the internet,” Sasha Luccioni, the Montreal-based AI and climate lead for Hugging Face, a machine learning firm for builders, told AFP (Agence France-Presse) recently, adding that it’s important for AI firms to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost.”  

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Those costs – hidden and otherwise – have been drawing intense scrutiny from climate researchers and policy-makers who point to the dramatic growth in the data-centre industry and its voracious demands for both power and water. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres and bitcoin mining accounted for 2% of electricity demand in 2022, and the growth in those verticals has exceeded all other drivers of electricity consumption.   

Morgan Stanley published its own projection in September, estimating that the global data-centre sector would emit 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – equivalent to the emissions created by 766 million automobiles – annually by 2030.   

The tech giants driving the generative AI revolution – Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta – all contend that they’re working hard to mitigate the impact of all this consumption with energy-efficiency improvements designed to reduce the carbon intensity of their AI applications, as well as the purchase of “renewable energy certificates” (RECs), which are essentially carbon-offset agreements. Microsoft’s new arrangement with Three Mile Island is an example.  

Yet the use of RECs has come under fire as some climate experts warn that these instruments essentially allow the double-counting of carbon-reduction measures, at both the production stage and at the consumption point, which is to say the AI giants. As an investigation by The Guardian published this past September concluded, the true impact could be in excess of seven times higher than what the tech giants are claiming in their environmental impact disclosures to investors. Soberingly, those conclusions were based on data published between 2020 and 2022 – a year before the advent of image-based generative applications.  

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There are plenty of reasons for this welcome shift. Indeed, building materials and construction account for 11% of all global emissions. The accumulating evidence suggests that our pre-occupation with operational carbon and energy efficiency (i.e., gas for heating and cooling, high-efficiency furnaces, etc.) may be missing the mark. According to the Canada Green Building Council embodied carbon accounts for a whopping 90% of a new building’s emissions over a three-decade span.  

Research carried out at the University of Toronto by a group led by architect Kelly Doran has shown that underground parking garages and concrete foundations are among the major culprits, accounting in some cases for 80% of the carbon expended on a given project over its lifetime.  

“That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings,” says Shayna Stott, a senior City of Toronto planner.  

Toronto City Council earlier this month took a significant step towards reducing embodied carbon in new buildings with a new policy that offers cash incentives – from $2,400 to almost $5,300 per apartment, depending on size – for builders who voluntarily limit the embodied carbon in their projects to a series of caps established for various categories of structures. The move, which will be embedded in Version 4 of Toronto Green Standard, comes less than a year after Council voted to eliminate parking minimums for new condos and rental buildings – a decision that will result in smaller garages and less concrete consumption.  

“We were all focused for a long time on the operational energy,” says Jane Welsh, Toronto’s environmental policy project manager. “Understanding the materials is very important.”  

The new embodied carbon caps – 250 kgCO2e/m2 and 350 kgCO2e/m2 – reflect testing done by the U of T team, which benchmarked about 550 buildings of various sizes and uses and estimated the life cycle carbon for each. The caps are set at approximately the median for embodied carbon, meaning they’re sufficiently aggressive to generate savings but not out of reach of current approaches. 

A more intensive set of caps is applied to all city projects, as well as the thousands of new rental units planned for city-owned land parcels around Toronto. Like B.C.’s Step Code, the Toronto Green Standard is revised regularly, with each so-called tier becoming progressively more stringent; Tier 1 is mandatory. “We will start working later this fall and into the spring [on Version 5],” says Welsh. “We’ll be looking at whether we can move [the embodied carbon caps] into Tier 1, which would be required.” 

That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings.

 

– Shayna Stott, City of Toronto planner

 

Incentivized caps, of course, are only half the picture. The other piece of this puzzle is finding techniques for building that uses less carbon. One obvious candidate, now used increasingly frequently, is tall timber. Modular construction – with building elements, including units themselves – pre-made in a factory and then shipped for assembly to the building site – is another.  

But experts such as Ted Kesik, a U of T engineering professor and an authority on building codes, points out that many projects today are over-built and simply consume a redundant amount of reinforced concrete, largely because it’s inexpensive. He says eight-inch shear walls, which are building code compliant, have gradually expanded to 10 or 12 inches, while sloppy architecture results in the use of massive concrete-and-steel transfer beams.  

Besides dialing back on unnecessary concrete, developers can alter the embodied carbon of their projects by using different forms of cladding, which are commercially available, and low-carbon insulation. “We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe,” says Kesik. But, to get there, he adds, “we’ll have to see a bit of a cultural change.”   

Beyond such moves, developers and their contractors can also use a range of pre-fabricated concrete panels that have voids, which mean they weigh less, or source so-called green concrete, which is made with recycled ingredients, such as waste fly ash from steel plants. 

Kesik adds that the city’s new embodied carbon caps are “very generous” and points out that it’s entirely possible to achieve levels under 200 kgCO2e/m2 using mass timber. 

We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe.

 

– Ted Kesik, U of T engineering professor

Toronto’s move puts it in a growing class of cities, regions and governments that have or are making similar efforts to regulate and push down embodied carbon, among them Vancouver and California. Canada’s federal government has indicated it will require a 30% reduction of embodied carbon in the structural materials of new public buildings as of 2025, according to policy research conducted last year for the Ontario government by U of T, The Atmospheric Fund, the City of Toronto and Mantle Developments. 

New York City, in turn, has employed caps in a more hard-nosed way, imposing a firm emissions cap on all buildings over 25,000 sq.-ft., a collection of some 50,000 structures. The regulation, passed in 2019 and known as Local Law 97, doesn’t bother with carrots: property owners that don’t comply get fined. 

While efforts to drive down building-related emissions also depend heavily on planning factors, such as intensification, and transportation policies that provide alternatives to private vehicles, the important detail in the new embodied carbon policy is the embodied carbon assessments developers will have to undertake to represent a complete accounting. It’s no longer just a case of measuring whether a building is running its HVAC efficiently or if it checks off boxes on a LEED certification program. 

The question now is whether the building industry will take up the challenge. Welsh and Stott say they’re seeing some interest and a more diverse set of builders looking to find out about whether they can take advantage of the incentives. Those signals, says Stott, are “indicative of the commitments to address climate change across the industry, as well as how the program supports making those decisions to get there.” 

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Most of the world’s nations signed on to the Paris Agreement, promising to reduce their carbon emissions, but so far nobody has done very much. It’s hard when you have economies based on digging up fossil fuels and then manufacturing stuff that runs on them, emitting carbon at every step of the way. 

It’s harder when everyone wants more stuff, and the jobs all depend on us buying it. So, the only strategy anyone can think of is to produce more carbon-efficient stuff, to build electric cars instead of gasoline-powered, to burn natural gas instead of coal, to make more wind turbines and solar panels, and to dream of nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen.

This was actually working, to a degree: pre-pandemic, the rate of increase in carbon emissions was slightly less than the growth of the world’s economies. But even with all that greening going on, carbon emissions were still increasing by 1.3% on average, while the global economy expanded by about 3%.

And in 2019, global greenhouse gas emissions from all sources still reached a record high of 52.4 gigatonnes of CO2e. (The e stands for equivalents— other gases like methane or fluorocarbon refrigerants, some of which have many thousands of times the global warming potential of CO2.) When the economy booms, so do emissions.

The world loves growth, and nobody wants to see an economic seizure like we had during the pandemic happen again. Governments have been pouring vast sums into cranking up the economic engines, encouraging us to buy more stuff and more services, while almost completely ignoring the fact that to keep under a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees, we have to reduce our carbon emissions budget to 25 gigatonnes of CO2e by 2030, less than half of what we emitted in 2019.

Norman Mailer wrote, “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” Growth is the law of life, and the engine of growth runs on fossil fuels.

If we have any chance of getting close to the carbon budget for 2030, we have to change the way we think about growth. We have to stop thinking about production, the making of what everyone is selling, and start thinking about consumption, what we are buying.

We have to stop thinking about efficiency, making something slightly better, and start thinking about sufficiency: what do we really need?

The premise of this book, and the research it is based on, is that we are all collectively responsible for reducing our carbon emissions to keep under that 1.5-degree ceiling. We have that carbon budget set in Paris, and if you divide it by the number of people on Earth, we have a personal carbon allocation or budget target of “lifestyle emissions,” those emissions that we can control, of about 2.5 tonnes per person, per year by 2030. Getting by on this is what we are calling the 1.5-degree lifestyle.

But what is living on 2.5 tonnes of carbon actually like? How do you measure it? How much does individual consumption matter? These are some of the questions that this book will try to answer.

We will try and look at the carbon cost of everything that we do in our lives to help people make choices about what makes sense, what’s worth trying to change, and what isn’t. It’s a model that not only can influence our personal lives but also can guide policy, from urban planning to agriculture.

For many people, lifestyle carbon emissions are baked into the way we live and very hard to change without concomitant societal and environmental changes; our developed Western world seems almost designed to emit carbon. We are also creatures of habits that are difficult to shake. However, many habits changed in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was perhaps not the best time to start this journey; much of the planet was now living a low-carbon lifestyle whether they wanted to or not.

On the other hand, it may be the perfect time for changes. We can collectively work for system change, but also for individual change, a 1.5-degree lifestyle. It is based on living within a tight carbon budget, but if one makes the right choices, it is sufficient, and there is enough to go around for everyone.

***

Of course, it requires more than individual action; it requires political action, regulation, and education. Perhaps the best example is the campaign against smoking, where we saw what happens when individuals, organizations, and government work together. Smoking was promoted by the industry, who buried information about its safety and owned the politicians and fought every change. They hired experts and even doctors to challenge the evidence and deny that smoking was harmful. They had a real advantage in that the product they were selling was physically addictive. However, eventually, in the face of all the evidence, the world changed. 

Forty years ago, almost everyone smoked, it was socially acceptable, and it happened everywhere. Governments applied education, regulation, and taxes. There was a lot of social shaming and stigmatizing happening too; in 1988, medical historian Allan Brandt wrote, “An emblem of attraction has become repulsive; a mark of sociability has become deviant; a public behavior now is virtually private.” Instead of virtue-signalling, we had vice-signalling. 

But this shift also took a great deal of individual determination and sacrifice. You can talk to almost anyone who was addicted and has given up smoking, and they will tell you that it was the hardest thing they have ever done. 

Fossil fuels are the new cigarettes. Their consumption has become a social marker; look at the role pickup trucks played in the 2020 American election. Like cigarettes, it is the secondhand externalized effects that are the motivators for action; people cared less when smokers were just killing themselves than they did when secondhand smoke became an issue. I wonder if at some point the big obnoxious pickup truck won’t be as rare as smokers have become. 

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and lectures on sustainable design at Ryerson School of Interior Design.

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Carbon offset projects, including those from forests, aren’t perfect. In fact, there is a history of many such initiatives being revealed as flashy greenwashing endeavours that were built without sufficient assurances about their “additionality” (emission reductions from offsets are “additional” if they happen as a result of a carbon market, and would not have occurred without it). This situation has improved but is still a challenge, with news breaking earlier this year that The Nature Conservancy, creators of some of the biggest forest carbon offset initiatives in the U.S., have undertaken a review of all their projects as a result of concerns that that organization is facilitating the sale of meaningless carbon credits to corporate clients.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a group of thousands of scientists from around the world who put forward recommendations that are subject to line-by-line scrutiny – shows that there’s no scenario where we can avoid the worst-case climate breakdown in the next decade without protecting and restoring forest carbon, including through market mechanisms like offsets. To be sure, the scale of necessary drawdown means that we must employ all tools available to us, and quickly – including robust government regulation or incentives and strong market solutions.

That means that rigorous and transparent forest carbon offset projects are going to play a critical role in incentivizing forest management at a scale that will actually help Canada reach its 2030 climate goals. In the Maritimes, forest carbon offset projects could help support the region’s 80,000 small-scale family forest owners conserve and manage almost five million hectares of forests for climate benefit. The alternative is that these forests continue to be decimated as a result of the only markets currently available to landowners: timber markets that drive widespread clearcutting, which only worsens the climate crisis.

Authenticity is key – so here are five ways to get forest carbon offsets right:

1. Let the people most directly affected make the decisions.

   Carbon offset projects should be led by the people most closely connected to them. The regulations and programs governing those offsets, in particular nature-based ones, should also be designed by those same communities. This is how we ensure that carbon offset projects don’t just devolve into corporate greenwashing initiatives – by supporting Indigenous-led conservation and rural community-led projects, with benefits returning to those communities and the ecosystems that surround them.

2. Make them truly additional.

   Close the loopholes, make offsets programs tight, and don’t leave any cracks open for exploitation. To this end, several national conservation organizations and other experts have said that correct and authentic accounting of the emissions that are driving demand for offsets is important, as is having a clear process on the supply side to verify the authenticity of offsets that are being sold. That means using top protocols, such as those created by long-operating standards associations like Verra and Gold Standard, and closely scrutinizing proposed projects (including third-party verifiers) to ensure that the offsets that are being sold are genuinely additional.

3. Don’t be complacent.

   Climate science and the carbon offsets space are both highly dynamic, and protocols and methodologies are constantly improving. Accept that the protocols that work well today may be improved upon and changed tomorrow – and that’s okay. For example, we’re finally seeing protocols and programs that actually ensure benefits to forest owners and communities, rather than just large corporate interests.

4. The goal should be drawdown, not just net-zero.

   Focusing on “offsets” implies only neutralizing emissions that are currently being produced; it doesn’t address the backlog of historic greenhouse gas emissions that are already in the atmosphere and driving the climate crisis. To make a measurable impact on the climate, we need a drawdown of those historic pollutants, and we need to be carbon-negative. Robust government regulations can drive this, as can more aggressive offsetting programs. With less than a decade left to avoid worst-case climate catastrophe, being net-zero just isn’t good enough.

5. Embed goals of addressing the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.

   Any climate solutions, including carbon offsets, that don’t also protect natural ecosystems and halt the rapid loss of biodiversity are a failure. Globally, we are experiencing the sixth cataclysmic extinction event in history, this one caused by humans. In Canada alone, we have experienced a 68% average decline of birds, amphibians, mammals, fish and reptiles since 1970, a loss that is estimated will be a US$10-trillion hit to the world economy by 2050 under our current “business-as-usual” trajectory. We need nature-based solutions, including carbon offset programs, that directly address habitat loss and destruction of ecosystem services. Otherwise we’re still losing the battle.

All this is to say that carbon offsets, while still imperfect, are one necessary tool in the toolbox of solutions for mitigating, even reversing, climate chaos. And we need all the tools we can lay our hands on, immediately – that’s how we’ll make meaningful gains toward our Paris Agreement goals, and toward a resilient future.

Megan de Graaf (she/her) is a forest ecologist and the Forest Program Director at Community Forests International, and a farm and forest owner in southern New Brunswick, on traditional and unceded Mi’kmaq territory. 

The post Five ways to ensure your forest carbon offsets aren’t just corporate greenwash appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher claimed that the company fired her after she declined to remove her name from a paper on the carbon footprint of language models in AI research. The paper also questioned whether this technology could harm marginalized groups. Two of Gebru’s colleagues rapidly quit over her treatment, a third resigned last month, citing the ongoing controversy, and many others have signed letters of protest. The now-notorious paper has been drawing new eyes to AI’s unintended social as well as environmental impacts.

Gebru and her colleagues are not the first to address this topic. “Green AI” research – AI research that’s more environmentally friendly and inclusive – explores AI’s carbon footprint and ways to reduce it. Green AI researchers see a trend in machine learning (ML) toward programs that require increasing power and that favour accuracy over efficiency, resulting in big experiments run many times without attention to their digital carbon footprints. This is not only bad for the environment; it also makes ML research prohibitively expensive for under-resourced researchers. While green AI addresses many applications of ML, Gebru and her colleagues focused on natural language processing (NLP) models, which improve machine interactions with human languages. In order to train one of the NLP tools powering Google Search, computer scientists run programs that can expend the same amount of energy as a trans-American flight.

Those of us who aren’t computer scientists may have a difficult time disentangling this carbon-footprint revelation from claims about the carbon-saving potential of AI in smart grids, emissions monitoring or precision forestry. The answer is that AI is neither “all good” nor “all bad” for the environment. There are a few core, simple lessons at the heart of this issue: methods matter; hardware, cloud storage providers and regional energy sources matter more; and – as Gebru and her colleagues point out – it’s worth weighing the social and environmental impacts of digital activity against its benefits. 

Methods matter

There are many ways for a machine to learn something new. A machine designed to generate English text could be given the rules of grammar, or it could self-educate from a data set of English writing, find patterns and apply what it has learned. The self-educating machine could train itself on a limited data set, such as movie scripts, or researchers could tell it to search the entire English-language internet. If the machine was carefully designed and debugged, perhaps the process could be finished – if not, the researcher might need to repeat their work, with a significant carbon cost. After the machine has processed its data set, another researcher could use the machine as is or re-educate it with a new data set or modified instructions. 

Unsurprisingly, the amount of energy it takes to train a machine depends significantly on all these choices, and on hardware. Like with other notable digital carbon footprints – such as Bitcoin mining – green AI research tells us to consider what we’re trying to achieve, and whether the same goal could be reached more efficiently.

Operational decisions matter more

Some programs, like many used to power Google Search, are so large that they can’t be run quickly on a personal computer, so NLP researchers often outsource them to big cloud computing centres. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are the three largest cloud infrastructure providers worldwide, followed by Alibaba and IBM. 

A cloud computing centre’s efficiency and regional placement significantly impact its emissions. North America alone has a huge range: one server in Quebec (which is dominated by low-carbon hydroelectricity) emits an equivalent of 20 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour, while another in Iowa (where, after wind energy, coal is the most common electricity source) emits almost 737 grams – more than 35 times more. Electricity sources are the biggest drivers of these differences: low-carbon energy infrastructure can significantly reduce the environmental cost of electricity in a region. Accordingly, where major cloud-storage providers build data centres has a big impact on their climate-friendliness.

Technology users might lack control over the type of energy in their region, but they can select their cloud provider carefully. In 2017, of the top three cloud providers, Google was estimated to have the highest proportion of renewable energy integration (56%) followed by Microsoft (32%) and Amazon-AWS (17%). The same companies have each set carbon neutrality targets, though they all still have data centres that rely on fossil fuels and purchase varying quantities of renewable energy credits (RECs) in atonement.

Social impact endgame matters

It’s notoriously difficult to foresee the social impact of new technology. Like the recruiting algorithm that learned to downgrade women’s resumés because of biased training data, AI can reinforce and worsen human inequality, in the guise of scientific objectivity. Alternatively, it can identify those biases and help us solve them. Gebru and her colleagues discuss language models that have learned racism and the issue of focusing only on dominant, well-resourced languages. They note that the negative impact of climate change is most likely to reach speakers of Dhivehi (the official language of the Maldives) or Sudanese Arabic long before speakers of English.

Researchers in other fields that impact humans, such as social or medical sciences, have long had to balance social benefits and harms in their research design. Some AI conferences and publications have begun to require social impact analyses, but greening AI research asks further: What are the environmental impacts of the experiments being run? Do the experiments improve the lives of those whom climate change will hurt the mosFinally, how does a consumer make an informed choice about what digital tools and infrastructure will minimize their carbon footprint online? While digital carbon footprints are becoming better understood, we need broader public education and open access data from companies that develop and provide AI-powered tools and cloud infrastructure. That way customers can make informed decisions about the social and environmental impacts of the technologies we use daily. 

By Faun Rice, senior research and policy analyst at Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC). Figures by Akshay Kotak, senior economist at ICTC.

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But that’s starting to change.

In past years, for example, the aftermath of the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival has resembled a poorly managed garbage dump—thanks in no small part to an estimated 1.3 million single-use plastic bottles sold during the five-day event.

Yet 2019 will be different. When the festival comes around again in June, such bottles will be banned, according to a recent announcement. It’s part of a larger “greening” trend in the music industry, especially a push to ditch single-use plastics. And though that can’t solve the problem of plastic choking the world’s oceans—roughly half of which comes from abandoned fishing equipment—it has real benefits, experts say, including some unexpected ones.

Last year the U.S.-based Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, announced that it would be banning plastic straws from all 45 of its American concert venues. A number of other music festivals also banned straws, including Coachella and Montreal’s Osheaga. Sixty-one U.K. music festivals have banned the sale of glitter, because it’s made of tiny microplastic particles that end up contaminating watersheds downstream from shower drains.

And REVERB.org, a non-profit that works with some of North America’s biggest music tours to make them more environmentally friendly, has just launched a new partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme for a concerted anti-plastic campaign.

Among many other greening initiatives, which the group says have amounted to a 120,000-ton reduction in carbon emissions, Reverb has a longstanding program to ban single-use plastic bottles backstage among artists and crew. Through its #RockNRefill campaign, Reverb provides free filtered water and branded reusable bottles by donation. Now it will also be inviting concertgoers to sign on to some or all of the waste-reducing measures in the UN’s #CleanSeas pledge, such as giving up plastic straws, trading plastic bags for tote bags, and choosing reusable water bottles, mugs, and takeout containers.

Jennifer Lynes, co-founder of the Sustainable Concert Working Group, which encourages environmental sustainability in the music industry, said there are several drivers of this trend.

Concerts are major money-makers in the music biz these days. Record sales aren’t what they once were, to say the least—and many events have become huge and elaborate, said Lynes, who is also a professor in the school of environment, enterprise and development at the University of Waterloo. More complexity means more waste, an issue that has become more acute lately as the troubled global recycling system has prevented polluters from exporting as much plastic trash to China as they used to.

Larger concerts also mean larger potential impacts. According to a 2015 report from the think tank Powerful Thinking, the U.K.’s 279 summer music festivals are responsible for 20,000 metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions every year—100,000, including audience travel. They also produce 23,500 tonnes of waste, of which less than a third is recycled.

Given how important touring has become to artists, giving it up isn’t in the cards. Carbon offsetting has taken off as an alternative. The San Fran-based rock band Third Eye Blind is planning to counter the effects of its 35-city 2019 tour, including a portion of audience travel, by buying certified carbon offsets from U.S.-based ClimeCo. ClimeCo also offset 3,500 tons of carbon dioxide from Pearl Jam’s 2018 tour.

This speaks to another factor driving the greening trend: leadership from environmentally-minded artists, such as Hawaiian singer-songwriter Jack Johnson.

Johnson’s EnviroRider agreement, which has been in place in various forms since 2005, demands the venues where he performs follow stringent waste reduction, recycling, and carbon offsetting guidelines.

“What (Johnson) has found is that venues will sometimes do this for him, and then say, ‘Well it wasn’t that hard. Why can’t we do it all the time?’” Lynes said.

It’s true, said Tanner Watt, director of partnerships and development at Reverb. It’s no longer just the usual suspects, like Johnson, on the anti-plastic train. Reverb will be working with some of the world’s top pop acts this summer, including Pink and Fleetwood Mac.

Watt conceded that reducing single-use plastics is “low-hanging fruit” as far as environmental impacts of the music industry are concerned. Plastic poses a simple problem with fairly simple solutions that resonate with music fans—especially young ones.

“There’s all this political frustration, and all this easy access to photo and video to see negative issues up close. Young people are excited about (reducing plastic) – but even more than that, they’re excited to say they are being part of that,” he said.

While measures like the #CleanSeas pledge might seem largely symbolic, the anti-plastic campaign doesn’t amount to greenwashing, said Michèle Paulin, a professor at Concordia University who studies corporate marketing from a moral and ethical perspective.

“We start somewhere,” she said. “We understand there are big issues—but big issues like plastic in the ocean have to be dealt with using big resources.”

A measure like replacing single-use water bottles with reusable ones and refilling stations has virtuous knock-on effects, Paulin added. Cutting down on waste helps reduce the indirect costs for municipalities that want to host big events.

And it helps trigger a subtle, positive set of changes in people’s mindsets. Filling up water bottles gets people thinking about the bigger picture, Paulin said. We’ve banned plastic water bottles at festivals—why not entire cities? Next thing you know, your local community is having a conversation about protecting water as a public resource.

At least, that’s the hope.

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