Greenpeace rates tech companies on their data centers. Oxfam America ranks food brands on the sustainability of their supply chains. The League of Conservation Voters scores elected officials on their voting records.

But who rates, ranks and scores Greenpeace, Oxfam America and the League of Conservation Voters​?​ ​Or The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International or WWF? ​For now, no one. No independent organization has made a serious effort to evaluate the performance of environmental organizations. Nor, for that matter, do many environmental nonprofits report publicly on their effectiveness or admit their errors. Put simply, many green groups lack the accountability they demand from business and government.

That’s a problem for donors, volunteers and staff members who want to spend their time or money doing as much good as they can for the planet. If, for example, you had $1,000 to donate to help curb climate change, should you help The Nature Conservancy plant a billion trees by 2025, or support the fossil fuel divestment movement at 350.org or support the market-friendly partnerships of the Environmental Defense Fund? How could you decide where it would make the most difference?

What’s more, and perhaps more importantly, measuring effectiveness and sharing findings would provide valuable information environmental groups could use to learn from one another’s successes, failures or insights.

“Performance is a very hard problem for the nonprofit sector,” says Brett Jenks, the president and CEO of conservation group Rare. “It’s never in your best interest to outline failures. It’s never in a donor’s interest to admit they’ve made a bad investment. But it’s clearly in the public’s interest to better understand nonprofit performance.”

Growing pressures

The encouraging news is that efforts are underway by big foundations and independent evaluators to better judge the effectiveness of all nonprofits, including green groups.

Among the leaders in this movement is GuideStar, which harbors ambitions to become a Bloomberg-like information portal about nonprofits, to enable smarter decision-making by donors and NGOs alike. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last year pledged $3 million to help GuideStar bulk up its offerings.

Jacob Harold, the 37-year-old president and CEO of GuideStar, is in the thick of the conversation about nonprofit performance. A Stanford MBA, Harold worked as a climate change campaigner for Rainforest Action Network and as a grant-maker focusing on effective philanthropy at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, so he’s thought a lot about how to measure the impact of environmental groups.

It doesn’t make sense, he says, to try to devise a single metric or set of metrics to compare all green groups. But it might be possible to come up with ways to compare organizations within focus areas such as conservation, education, research or advocacy.

In fact, a coalition of conservation groups and their funders formed the Conservation Measures Partnership more than a decade ago to seek better ways to measure and improve performance of nonprofits focused on conservation. “There’s increasing pressure to show that spending leads to measurable outcomes,” says Nick Salafsky, co-founder and co-director of Foundations of Success, which manages the partnership. “Accountability is coming.”

But comparing one conservation group to another, or even comparing projects, is harder than it might seem, since it would require judgements about the relative value of, say, tropical rainforest, Rocky Mountain wilderness and suburban parkland. The partnership has yet to introduce tangible tools for measuring whether and how much conservation organizations create change.

Evaluating the effectiveness of advocacy groups is even harder than evaluating conservation groups because of, as Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt wrote in Stanford Social Innovation Review, “the complex, foggy chains of causality in politics, which make evaluating particular projects — as opposed to entire fields or organizations — almost impossible.” But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who made his fortune in the data industry, gave $80 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, but only after insisting that the organization set targets and timetables for itself. “Bloomberg wanted the group to create better ways of gauging the success of its efforts,” Politico reported.

Insiders often have a sense of which groups perform well and which do not. That’s the impetus behind Philanthropedia, a crowdsourcing website (acquired in 2011 by GuideStar) that collects opinions about non-governmental organizations from experts much as Amazon collects critiques from book reviewers. The effort remains a work in progress, but some of the anonymous reviews of green groups can be insightful.

“We can’t let the difficulty of measuring advocacy stop us from trying,” Harold says.

The largest and most influential evaluator of nonprofits, Charity Navigator, has by its own admission yet to venture into the realm of measuring results. The organization rates charities on two metrics — financial health and accountability/transparency — that are useful for spotting fraud or waste but don’t get to the key question of performance, its former CEO, Ken Berger, told me recently.

Setting goals and timetables

How can green groups be more explicit about their goals and whether they have achieved them? Charting Impact — a project of GuideStar, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Independent Sector — has developed five deceptively simple questions designed to promote self-reflection and examine organizational missions, results and goals. They encourage nonprofits to answer them and publish the answers. The questions are:

1. What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
2. What are your strategies for making this happen?
3. What are your organization’s capabilities for doing this?
4. How will your organization know if you are making progress?
5.  What have and haven’t you accomplished so far?

“This is the baseline,” says Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector. “This is what every organization should be doing.”

Since Charting Impact became part of GuideStar’s database about 18 months ago, about 5,000 nonprofits have answered the questions — out of about 105,000 that provide information to GuideStar.

Five snapshots

Here are snapshots of how five environmental groups are measuring their impact:

The Nature Conservancy

FY2014 revenues: $1.1 billion

A decade ago, as part of an initiative called Conservation by Design, The Nature Conservancy pledged that by 2015 it would “work with others to ensure the effective conservation of places that represent at least 10 percent of every major habitat type on Earth.”

How’s that going? Unclear. TNC’s latest annual report makes no mention of the goal, which receded after Steven McCormick, the CEO who set it, left.

Today, as a sprawling, global organization with staff in hundreds of communities, and five key initiatives — land, water conservation, ocean conservation, climate change and sustainable cities — TNC resists simple characterization.

“We’re kind of like GE,” says chief external affairs officer Glenn Prickett. “We’ve got a bunch of business lines, and we want to be the best at all of them. They can’t be consolidated into a single yardstick.” The group is developing a set of new goals, he says, to reflect its broader strategies. Prickett adds: “I don’t know if any of the conservation groups have a strong enough culture of evaluation.”

Oceana

FY2013 revenues: $45.2 million

Established in 2001 by a group of foundations, Oceana says it is “dedicated to achieving measurable change by conducting specific, science-based campaigns with fixed deadlines and articulated goals.” Its chief executive, Andrew Sharpless, says: “We set the deadlines for getting policy outcomes, and those deadlines are never more than five years after we start a campaign.”

In 2013, for example, the Chilean government announced its first set of science-backed fishing quotas for four critical species of fish: common hake, anchoveta, sardines, and jack mackerel. This followed years of campaigning by Oceana, along with local scientists and activists.

Currently, Oceana is running a seafood fraud campaign that aims to establish a traceability system for the U.S. seafood supply that tracks fish from boat to plate, keeps illegal fish out of the supply and provides consumers with more information about the seafood they purchase. The group says it hopes to achieve that by 2017.

New policies, though, don’t necessarily translate into changes on the ground — or in the water. Laws need to be enforced. So, Sharpless says: “We are now reporting to the board on whether we see more fish in the ocean, in the places we are campaigning. That’s the best possible way to measure our impact.” Those reports are not public, at least not yet.

Greenpeace USA

FY2013 revenues: $33 million

Annie Leonard, who became executive director of Greenpeace USA last year, says the question of which environmental groups are most effective is “almost an unanswerable question. Most effective? Most effective at what?”

For its part, Greenpeace USA intends to build a stronger environment movement. “We have so much science, we have so much data, we have so many economic studies, but are we building power?” Leonard asks. Twenty million people participated in the first Earth Day in 1970, she notes, and major legislative victories followed.

Greenpeace USA wants its members to do more than sign a petition or make a donation. “Our new slogan is, you’ve signed up, now you’ve got to show up,” Leonard says. “We are doing lots of rigorous, ambitious, extensive testing around the question of how we get people more engaged in the our movement.”

So far, though, Greenpeace USA hasn’t set any specific, public goals, so its progress will be hard to measure.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation

FY2014 revenues: $30.6 million

Perhaps because it is dedicated to a single body of water — albeit a body of water that depends upon a 64,000-square-mile watershed that spreads across six states — the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has a clear goal: To save the bay, which it defines as reaching a score of 70 on CBF’s Health Index, a comprehensive measure incorporating data about water quality, pollution, habitat and fisheries.

Currently, the index stands at 32, up from the low 20s back in the 1980s. It’s the equivalent of a D plus, according to Will Baker, the foundation’s president. “Hardly what your mother would be happy with, but we’re going in the right direction,” he says.

All of CBF’s varied activities — lawsuits, lobbying, restoration projects and educational programs — are designed to improve the bay’s health. Having a specific goal “has paid dividends for us in terms of focus, in terms of asset allocation and in terms of being able to raise the funds to support our work,” Baker says.

Rare

FY2014 revenues: $17.5 million

An unusual conservation group, Rare works with partners in the developing world to run marketing campaigns, called Pride campaigns, that are intended to inspire communities to protect their natural resources. It is explicit about its theory of change and tracks the results of campaigns, not just in terms of changed attitudes, but in terms of the health of the species or habitat being targeted for protection. The group has helped organize more than 250 campaigns in more than 50 countries.

Ongoing campaigns are rated red, yellow or green, according to Brett Jenks, Rare’s president and CEO. The ratings are used to allocate resources and to evaluate staff members, and they are shared with its staff and board, but not the public. “You know which ones work well because those are the ones on the front page of the website,” he jokes.

Being more public about projects that fall short of expectations would discourage bold bets, he explains. One of the risks of public reporting on successes and failures is that groups could choose to play it safe. “In your quest for efficiency, you don’t want to wipe out the potential to waste some money on the road to creating a big impact that the world needs,” Jenks says.

None too soon

For anyone who cares about the environment, the ongoing efforts to improve effectiveness, accountability and transparency — however imperfect — can’t come too soon. Without them, it’s all but impossible to know whether all the money flowing into green groups is having the impact it should.

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“We are experts in mining, we are not experts in community development,” says Valerie Pascale, Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility at Goldcorp Inc. So, the company relies on organizations that have experience with development to help it resolve challenges, she said.

And since NGOs and extractive companies do not have a long history of working together, the Devonshire Initiative (DI) is hosting a discussion forum where non-governmental organizations and mining companies can smooth out their differences and make sure they are creating lasting benefits for communities.

Having a social license to operate, which means getting the support of a community to do business, is becoming increasingly important for successful mining operations, says Andrew Crane, director at the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business at Schulich School of Business.

Unfortunately, getting a social license is not as straightforward as getting a legal license. “You may have met all the legal hurdles, but the community can pose all kinds of obstacles to mining operations,” said Crane.

Companies have adopted a number of strategies to try to address their social license problem, including showing citizens how much money they have paid host governments for access to their resources.

The Mining Association of Canada and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) teamed up with transparency organizations last January to write a set of recommendations that would make it mandatory for extractive companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges to disclose how much they pay governments for each of their projects.

As Corporate Knights reported earlier this week, the details of such a rule are hard to nail down, and companies are still trying to boost their reputations on the ground by working with NGOs on community projects.

But, Stephen Brown, a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, says simple partnerships between companies and NGOs are not enough. When development programs are run separately from the mine’s day-to-day operations, the projects become incentives for the community to welcome the mining company, rather than a mechanism for real change because they do not improve the company’s business practices or respect local rights, he says.

Instead, a well thought out partnership with shared objectives is needed to have a positive impact, says Alanna Rondi, Executive Director of DI.

Part of DI’s mandate is to create a space where mining companies and NGOs can learn from past partnerships and anticipate challenges that might arise during the project, she says.

“There is a recognition that mining companies and NGOs working together is complex and it’s not the type of partnership you enter into lightly,” she adds.

“Mining folks tend to be engineers and science-oriented, and NGO folks tend to be people-oriented and those don’t always match in terms of conversation,” says Harry Kits, Senior Advisor, Corporate Engagement at World Vision. “So it’s important to be clear on the development outcome you are trying to achieve.”

While there is potential for the private sector to play a constructive role in development, its methods and practices are still in the experimental phase, says Kits.

“The key thing is to understand what the development outcomes are and try to ensure that the overall impact…is positive,” he says. “The first thing is the people you are trying to support.”

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Enter the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC), launched this past summer. The non-profit’s mission is to provide a space for measuring, guiding and recognizing leadership in sustainable purchasing. One of its greatest strengths, the broad stakeholder representation, also provides one of its greatest challenges: How to prioritize so many different interests? It’s a challenge the council’s interim executive director and members say they’re eager to face.

According to SPLC executive director Jason Pearson, the council’s ambitions within sustainable, institutional purchasing are analogous to the accomplishments of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“One of the reasons that USGBC has been successful is that it has identified a place in the marketplace where some very important decisions are made by a relatively small group of people,” says Pearson. “We see the decisions that are being made by the procurement profession as a similar type of decision, a very important decision that once made has significant economic, social and environmental consequences.” By the council’s calculations, institutional purchasing in the U.S. alone accounts for 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The SPLC grew out of an earlier initiative, the Green Product Roundtable, which focused on two questions: What is a green product? And what is a credible green product claim? The results of those discussions became the intellectual framework for the council, which is made up of 33 initial members – 15 institutional purchasers, 11 suppliers and seven advisors.

Pearson says one half of what the council will do is coordinate, support and enhance the activities of its members. Second, it will build resources, including a set of principles for leadership, a global survey of existing resources in the short term, and a rating system expected to be in testing by 2015. Although the council is global in aim, the initial system will focus on North America.

To create these resources, the council will have to prioritize the varied interests of its membership. Pearson says the SPLC will likely identify some broad categories of particular importance. “Some examples that I think are obvious would be electricity purchasing, purchasing of food and food services, construction, fuels – we know that these are very important categories to understand and focus on.”

Pearson uses institutional food purchasing as an example of how prioritization will also need to be done at a sub-category. Some organizations might be inclined to focus on whether food is organic, others on whether it’s local and still others on how much food is being wasted, he says. “The question of what leadership looks like and how much weight you assign to any of those actions – buying organic, buying local, reducing food waste – will be an interesting conversation,” says Pearson. “One that we look forward to, but one that will be challenging to resolve.”

From a seller’s perspective, a major challenge in the past has been what CarbonNeutral’s Mark LaCroix calls the “institutional inertia” of large, bureaucratic organizations. “My hope is that we stop looking at sustainability as this separate department or program and we start integrating it into the lens through which we view the entire business,” says LaCroix. “We offer a service or a product that is, frankly, not well understood,” he says, referring to environmental credits. A typical corporate procurement group, according to LaCroix, won’t know what questions to ask.

“We need help,” agrees Kent Allin, chief procurement officer for the state of Minnesota. “Cleaning products is one example of where you start looking at those environmental labels and your head starts to spin.” Without support, Allin says, “The issues get so complex that the buyers really can’t be experts in all the things they need to know.”

Billy Goldsmith, U.S. national coordinator for Fair Trade, a founding member of and market advisor to the SPLC, describes the council’s challenges as opportunities. “I have not seen a more diverse, yet focused group of stakeholders come together for something like this before,” Goldsmith says. “In my mind, the challenge is really going to be navigating all those opportunities and just figuring out the most strategic steps forward.”

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The source of Napier’s value as an environmental leader, Ward added, was his ability to see industry as an opportunity, not a threat, which allowed WWF to foster “ethical partnerships that brought not just financial benefits but changes in working practices and attitudes, too.”

The environmentalist community, of course, did not exactly give Napier the warmest of welcomes when he was appointed in 1999. Traditionalists could not get past the fact that he was a former Rio Tinto mining executive who didn’t despise the corporate sector.

After Napier took charge at WWF-UK, celebrated British activist and occasional Corporate Knights contributor George Monbiot raised the alarm over a “corresponding decline in the radical content of the organization’s work.”

Environmental groups, Monbiot argued in The Ecologist, should never get into bed with business people because fiduciary duty forces them to pursue “the most unsustainable development they can get away with.”

Since then, the environmental landscape has shifted dramatically. So-called “dark greens” like Monbiot continue to play an influential role confronting evil as they see it. But like it or not, they are now surrounded by “bright greens,” meaning business-friendly earth lovers like Napier.

Indeed, as Yale environmental management grad Ben Goldfarb points out, “the stereotype of the conservationist hurling himself between the whale and the harpoon is increasingly anachronistic and so too is the image of courageous litigators taking down evil polluters.” For better or worse, he wrote in a Guardian column earlier this year, the “modern environmentalist is more likely to partner with a chemical company than prosecute one.”

That might be a stretch. Nevertheless, the shifting landscape has had a profound impact on today’s environmental organizations, which are nothing like your grandparents’ NGOs.

Forget tree-hugging liberal arts grads sporting ponytails. Thanks to bright green thinking, international environmental organizations are now stocked with MBAs, lawyers, engineers and professional policy wonks. Determined to use their expertise to help clean up capitalism, they jump back and forth between environmental organizations and the private sector.

Believe it or not, it is now even relatively common for environmentalists to work corporate assignments while still at NGOs. In Canada, for example, Pembina Institute, a non-profit focused on sustainable energy solutions, generates a significant proportion of its revenue from a for-profit consulting arm, which has a client portfolio ranging from Albertan oil plays to Bay Street financial institutions.

As an early adopter of this semi-business business model, you might expect Calgary-based Pembina to have been ostracized by its peers. But according to former Pembina executive director Marlo Raynolds, now a private sector executive with renewable-energy developer BluEarth Renewables, the organization was flooded with requests to assist other NGOs in figuring out how to make some green by helping corporations reduce their carbon footprints and develop sustainable practices.

College of the Atlantic president Darron Collins, a former WWF managing director who worked with global retailers such as WalMart to reform procurement policies, says the rising tide of business-friendly environmentalists stems from a realization in the 1980s that activists and scientists alone can’t solve the world’s problems.

“It didn’t take that long to recognize that the private sector is the ultimate driver of change,” Collins says, noting he was attracted to the WWF as a young anthropology PhD precisely because of its willingness to work with the corporate world. “I always believed that if you are not playing with the private sector, you are not going to effect change.”

Not everyone, of course, has noticed the growing environmentalist appreciation for the suit-and-tie crowd. Earlier this year, Joe Oliver, Canada’s natural resources minister, generalized environmentalists as left-leaning activists with one goal: “No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.” The sheer ignorance of that comment almost makes bright greens laugh.

“I am a radical,” jokes Mark Tercek, head of The Nature Conservancy, America’s largest environmental group, which seeks non-confrontational, market-based solutions to conservation challenges. “After all, I am willing to work with the other side.”

Tercek, a former partner at investment bank Goldman Sachs, wrote the bookNature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature to promote even closer relationships between bright greens and the corporate world. Under his leadership, The Nature Conservancy passionately pursues working with companies such as Dow Chemical to incorporate the value of nature into corporate goals, strategies and business objectives.

Bruce Lourie, president of Canada’s Ivey Foundation, which also takes a pragmatic approach to conservation, realized about 20 years ago that NGOs had to reinvent themselves. After launching a consulting company to build relationships among government, the private sector and environmental organizations, he was surprised to learn that young people joining his company had no interest in working for traditional NGOs, which were seen as “so 1970s.”

These were smart individuals determined to change the world, he says, “but they thought the best way to do that was by working with the corporate sector.” Lourie blames misconceptions about modern environmental organizations on the media. “One of the big frustrations we have is a lack of balanced reporting. You can have a thousand scientists say climate change is real and reporters seek out ones who say it isn’t, or they take extreme views and write a confrontation story.”

As part of its Conserving Canada’s Forests Program, Ivey was a major driver of the coalition building that led to the landmark Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA) in 2010. The deal was a historic truce between 21 members of the Forest Products Association of Canada and nine environmental organizations, who agreed to work together on a comprehensive set of goals and activities designed to make Canada the world’s leading jurisdiction in forest sustainability.

But it was just one initiative supported by Ivey’s program, which helped create more than 2,500 new parks or protected areas covering 60 million hectares as well as increase the number of hectares certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by 5,130 per cent. And yet, media coverage has pretty much focused on Greenpeace’s decision to opt out of the CBFA, despite the fact that other environmental groups are still cooperating with industry on the initiative.

“Environmental confrontations make good stories,” Lourie says, “but focusing on them doesn’t provide an accurate account of what’s happening.”

Dark greens see pragmatic environmentalists as stooges who naively put themselves at risk of being used for green-washing purposes. But Collins insists there is really nothing to lose being “cautiously optimistic that cooperative relationships will do more good in the long run.”

And as far as Tercek is concerned, building trusting relationships with the private sector is the only way to address big, critical and complex issues. He simply does not see the value in deploying scare tactics to push for blanket bans on existing industry practices such as hydraulic fracturing without first exploring possible solutions that are not at odds with economic growth.

“I have tremendous respect for everyone in the environmental movement,” Tercek says. “But we all say we are driven by science and the facts tell us the job is not getting done. We have less forest, fewer coral reefs, less topsoil and biodiversity, more greenhouse gases. So something is wrong. The old fashioned way of doing environmental work is insufficient to the challenge.”

While bad corporate apples will always exist, the bright greens point out that there’s nothing about fiduciary duties that forces business people to support unsustainable practices, especially today. A trash-the-earth culture also makes recruiting and retaining good people difficult while putting companies at risk of revenue disruption and reputation destruction, which executives have a duty to prevent.

Furthermore, as global warming concerns among consumers increase, Tercek insists responsible companies will gain an ever-increasing competitive advantage. “People are smart,” he says. “If you live in New York or New Jersey, you understand risks that storms like Sandy pose. People in areas suffering from floods or droughts right now don’t need environmentalists to tell them they have a problem.”

When Monbiot dismissed Napier’s value as an environmentalist because of his business experience, Jonathon Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future, a UK-based non-profit that works with business and government to create a sustainable future, offered a rebuttal. Simply put, he argued Mother Nature could not afford a single-minded environmental movement committed to just “the easy option,” which he described as looking down with moral superiority on the corporate world, secure in the absolutist view “that multinationals are the principal engine of environmental destruction, that the individuals who work for those companies are amoral, incapable of being influenced by cogent analysis or moved by fears for their own children, and that those who work with them must by definition be morally inadequate and politically compromised.”

Today, with the window to address climate change closing, Porritt firmly stands by his position. “We have no choice,” he says, “but to find the most intelligent and robust ways of working with the private sector. Given that the quality of leadership in the private sector is, in my opinion, infinitely greater than the quality of leadership in the political sector, it would be insane not to try and make those relationships work.”

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Today, as program manager of EcoMentors, the environmental youth leadership program established by Earth Day Canada (EDC), I work with people between the ages of 14 and 25 who have no shortage of ideas to change the status quo.

The energy and ingenuity of young generations has carried me to peaks of optimism in the bipolar emotional terrain of the environmentalist. For now at least, it looks to me that our hopes of someday getting this right aren’t yet vanquished.

Admittedly, I’m looking out from inside an oasis. The youth I work with are outliers championing environmental and social sustainability to their peers and the community.

Their biggest limitation, contrary to popular perception, is not apathy. Rather, it’s a model of education in Canada and the United States that doesn’t empower them to take action; it’s an institutional structure that offers little guidance on how to carry a sustainability mindset into a future career. What skills are needed? What post-graduate programs are available? What kind of jobs can be pursued that allow an individual to make a positive change in the world?

As Simon Jackson, founder of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, tells me: “If today’s youth are given a positive and tangible opportunity to take a stand for nature, major progress can be made towards sustainability.”

But without the proper institutional support, their ideas are at risk of burning out. Which is why programs like EcoMentors or Jackson’s new international campaign, CoalitionWILD, are striving to provide platforms for bringing youth-led sustainability solutions “from dream concepts to reality.”

The impetus is there. Young people are connecting in great numbers at events like EDC’s Beyond Green Youth Summit, organizing at pivotal Keystone XL and divestment rallies across the U.S., and courageously leading grassroots movements such as Canada’s Idle No More.

Still, despite this increasing engagement, sustainability is barely addressed in the formal curriculum outside of a few modules in a biology or geography course.

Jayden Rae is a high school student and founder of the Whitby Environmental Youth Alliance in Ontario. She has grown frustrated with schools’ inability to educate for sustainability.

“The curriculum is outdated and limits teachers’ ability to teach students about current issues,” she says. “Most lesson plans are based on events or issues of the past when it’s more important to be considering the future.”

Her recommendations on how it could be improved are noteworthy.

“We need to get outside of the classroom to learn about sustainability,” Rae says. “Teachers need to make real life connections to what it’s all about so we can understand how it impacts us now and how it will in the future.”

The non-profit organization Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF) seeks to accomplish exactly this, working with students, educators and administrators to create a model of education that uses experiential learning across subjects.

“The current method of education has prevented students from exploring and understanding the interconnectedness of these complex issues,” says Angela Kielbowski, project coordinator at LSF. “Sustainability, by its nature, is interdisciplinary – so it requires interdisciplinary education to understand it.”

In the U.S., the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, is leading the way on embedding sustainability into the classroom within the K-12 range through active consulting, complementary resources and a national food reform program in schools. Its guiding principles reflect a need for what it refers to as a “systems perspective” in the classroom. To deal with what it calls a “host of pressing and often escalating issues” the center stresses that students need to understand “the patterns of relationship that connect them.” Until schools deal seriously with sustainability in such a way, they are relying on students to make the necessary connections.

Of course this is not unique to high schools. As students enter the post-secondary system it’s also common to encounter a lack of dialogue or research across academic borders.

Blair Feltmate, associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED) and chair of Climate Change Adaptation Project Canada, echoes Kielbowski when he tells me an interdisciplinary approach is our best hope at adapting to climate change.

Unfortunately, he says, that kind of skill set is “virtually non-existent” in corporations and most research.

“We’re lacking broad-based generalists who can look at climate change from multiple angles and perspectives,” says Feltmate. “We still need a specialized depth of analysis – but we’ve unfortunately got a system that favours the specialist at the expense of the generalist.”

Tyler Hunt, project coordinator at the University of Toronto St. George campus sustainability office, tells me that in addition to an interdisciplinary effort by the institution, many collaborations and initiatives are happening at the student level.

“There has been a significant growth in environmentally-focused student clubs and groups organized across disciplines,” says Hunt. “There is a strong beekeeping group who produces honey, a campus agriculture group that uses vacant spaces on campus to grow produce, a student-run food co-op cafe that sells local and organic food – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

He is eager to illustrate the student-driven initiatives on campus, and I completely identify. When looking for hope in this space, I’ve also seen it most prominently in the hearts and minds of groups he is describing. But Hunt’s final metaphor has me thinking, because it may be more apt than he intended. Icebergs melt. They calve off from receding ice-sheets and take shape as dynamic marvels. While they impress and inspire onlookers, they are heading into waters they can’t possibly endure alone.

What we need, it strikes me, is an amassing of glaciers – an accumulation of energies that if supported by a solid base will eventually reshape the lay of the land.

If our schools could commit to dealing with sustainability as an interdisciplinary and deeply embedded subject right from the start, it might just provide that platform youth need to carve out a new course.

The post Teaching sustainability appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The biggest jump is expected from coal production in China’s five northwestern provinces. These projects will increase coal production by 620 million tonnes by 2015, adding 1,400 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere a year. Other large projects include potential oil drilling in the Arctic, expanded shale gas production in the United States and increased coal exports from Australia, among others.

“These governments claim they want to prevent catastrophic climate change, but shamefully continue to approve and promote major fossil fuel projects,” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace. 

If the 14 projects are cancelled, the chances of keeping global temperatures from rising more than two degrees are greater than 75 per cent, according to the report. The calculations, however, do not account for emissions offset by some of these 14 projects. In the U.S., for example, shale gas has displaced many older coal units, resulting in a net reduction of C02.

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