Yes, concluded Health Canada, some people interviewed and assessed as part of its 1,238 household epidemiological study were shown to get highly annoyed by wind turbine noise and other factors, such as shadow flicker and flashing lights.

While that annoyance has led to increased stress for some, that doesn’t equate to evidence of a health impact, the department reported. “No evidence was found to support a link between exposure to wind turbine noise and any of the self-reported or measured health endpoints examined,” it said in a statement.

It’s important to put this study into context. Launched in July 2012, the research effort was hailed by wind opponents as a major victory, perhaps on the assumption the results would finally demonstrate that wind turbines do make people sick, despite years of research from Europe showing otherwise.

That Health Canada decided to wade into this area also raised suspicion of its motives. After all, it hasn’t done the same for the oil sands, what most would safely consider a bigger health concern. Many in the wind community thought the study would end up being a hit job on wind energy aimed at appeasing the federal Conservative government’s support base in rural Ontario.

And make no mistake, this was a comprehensive study – and likely a costly one. It involved staff from Statistics Canada doing in-person questionnaires with the occupants of more than 1,200 households located near wind farms in Ontario and Prince Edward Island. All households within 600 metres of a wind turbine were included, as well as a random sample of homes between 600 metres and 10 kilometres.

Hair samples and blood pressure data were collected to assess stress levels, such as the degree of concentration of cortisol in hair. On top of that, Health Canada spent more than 4,000 hours measuring different levels of wind turbine noise, including low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Again, they found evidence of stress possibly linked to an annoyance factor. There were people who self-reported sleep disturbance, migraines, dizziness, high blood pressure, and other conditions, but as Health Canada pointed out, “the prevalence was not found to change in relation to (wind turbine noise) levels.” In other words, go to a community without wind turbines and you’re likely to find the same level of complaints.

Perhaps most interesting about this study is data that suggests the highly subjective nature of “annoyance” as it relates to wind turbines. The research found that people studied in Ontario were 3.29 times more likely to be annoyed by wind turbine noise than people studied in PEI. Expressed as a percentage, 16.5 per cent of respondents in Ontario were found “highly annoyed” by wind turbine noise versus 6.3 per cent in PEI.

“Investigating the reasons for the provincial differences is outside the scope of the current study,” Health Canada said.

But it’s an important question: Why the difference? Are people living in PEI more genetically immune to noise? From my own experience, the anti-wind movement in Ontario has clearly been more vocal, creating more awareness of alleged health effects of wind through the media and turning the issue into a political hot potato.

What it amounts to is the power of suggestion. Tell more people that wind turbines make you sick, and more people are likely to interpret and perceive their own conditions as attributable to wind turbines. In science, this is called the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect.

Similar reasoning can be applied to why some areas with wind turbines can experience a temporary decrease in property value while others don’t. Tell somebody something tastes like crap and the odds are they are less likely to take a bite.

Another interesting finding, one that has been found in other studies in other jurisdictions, such as this Dutch study, is that the level of annoyance substantially decreased when the household was benefitting financially from having a wind turbine located nearby.

“Annoyance was significantly lower among the 110 participants who received personal benefit, which could include rent, payments, or other indirect benefits of having wind turbines in the area,” Health Canada said.

“There were other factors that were found to be more strongly associated with annoyance, such as the visual appearance, concern for physical safety due to the presence of wind turbines and reporting to be sensitive to noise in general.”

As mentioned, wind opponents won’t be satisfied by this study. They will continue to call wind expensive and ineffective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as claim negative impacts on property value. They will continue to brand wind turbines bird killers, despite the fact there are far bigger threats to birds than wind, such as skyscrapers and cats.

And while this study undermines their claims of a sickness they call wind turbine syndrome, they will continue to highlight the annoyance factor as a reason to do away with wind, despite the fact that we all involuntarily experience all sorts of similar annoyance factors throughout out lives – from noisy roads and highways to neighbours that drive you batty.

In the case of wind, that doesn’t mean every effort should not be taken to minimize potential annoyance. Quite the opposite, the wind industry has a duty to do so and should be held to account for negligence or poorly managed projects, when complaints raised are found reasonable.

It also doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are particularly sensitive to noise, vibration and other things possibly associated with the operation of wind turbines. The same, of course, applies to people particularly sensitive to pollution, wireless frequencies, and certain smells.

What it does mean is that findings from Canada’s health agency, after doing a local, comprehensive and independent study – research that has been vetted by a wide range of scientific experts – has added considerable weight to evidence that says wind turbines don’t make people sick any more than a neighbour’s incessantly barking dog or a demanding, grumpy boss.

Or, for that matter, angry e-mails sent from wind opponents who don’t agree with what journalists write. Let’s hope this study at least puts to rest silly calls in Ontario for a moratorium on wind energy because of potential health implications.

The post No evidence of wind sickness: Health Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Use of “coffin nails,” as they’re sometime called because of their known contribution to lung and heart disease, is even on the decline within the companies that make them. Just this week, cigarette maker Reynolds American, the second-largest tobacco company in the United States, told its employees they can no longer smoke at work. The company said the new policy was “the right thing to do.”

The trend may be positive for our collective wellbeing, but it has left North American tobacco growers scrambling to find new markets and uses for their crops. Part of the answer, according to one Canadian company, is not what you’d expect: using tobacco plants to help fight the spread of the Ebola virus.

According to one report, health agencies in Canada and the United States have asked Guelph, Ontario-based Plantform to develop preventative vaccines for Ebola strains by genetically engineering tobacco plants. The company’s use of tobacco plants as a living pharmaceutical factory isn’t limited to Ebola. Plantform is also using the plant to make drugs for treating breast cancer, protecting against nerve agents, and fighting HIV/AIDS.

Tobacco plants are known for having unique properties. For example, when bugs land or crawl on a plant its leaves release chemicals that paralyze and kill parasitic insects. For Plantform, tobacco plants are ideal because they grow fast. On its website, the company says it can produce its plant-based vaccine or other drugs in as little as eight weeks, and at a fraction of the cost of using cells from animals or bacteria.

Indeed, even Reynolds American is getting into the business. Its subsidiary, Kentucky BioProcessing LLC, is working with San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical on a tobacco-derived drug for treating Ebola, using a cocktail of antibodies developed at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and licensed to Toronto-based Defyrus.

That experimental drug, called ZMapp, was given to Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, two aid workers who became infected by the virus this summer while in Liberia. Both have made a full recovery, which is probably encouraging to the doctor in New York City who reportedly tested positive Thursday for Ebola.

On its own, it’s a good news story. But the plant-derived Ebola treatment is symbolic of a new area of science that isn’t immune to controversy. Its critics consider it the antithesis of sustainability, while proponents paint it as a more sustainable path to drug development in a growing world filled with pain and poverty.

Health and Social Benefits

Manipulating plants to produce pharmaceutical compounds is a relatively new technique called plant molecular farming, and the results of early experimentation date back about 25 years. More colloquially, the practice is referred to as “pharming” – and it’s not limited to tobacco. Corn, rice, canola, alfalfa, safflower, tomatoes, and potatoes have all been used in laboratory settings as hosts in drug production, tackling everything from cystic fibrosis to tooth decay.

In essence, scientists isolate or synthesize a specific gene that creates certain proteins, such as those in insulin. This DNA is then inserted into a seedling plant, which as it grows creates the proteins as if it were their own. The plants can also be modified so that the target proteins become concentrated in leaves or seeds. The leaves, for example, can sometimes be dried and taken orally, or the proteins can be extracted, refined and used in the production of pills or liquids that can be injected.

In 2012, the first plant-derived drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for human consumption was produced from carrots, which were genetically modified to carry an enzyme that alleviates painful symptoms related to Gaucher disease.

Plant pharming not only allows for faster turnaround of vaccines and other drugs. Biotech companies are lured to its promise because the process is relatively low-tech and, as a result, much less expensive. It doesn’t require the costly and complex bioreactor vessels typically used when working with bacteria and yeast.

This holds great promise for the research of pharmaceutical products for illnesses that, because they are so rare, don’t represent an attractive market for drug developers. The potential for lower-cost manufacturing of drugs would also benefit poorer countries that lack affordable access to medicines and vaccines.

It’s also easy to scale production up or down as demand requires. “It has been estimated that 250 acres of greenhouse space would be sufficient to meet all of South Asia’s requirements for hepatitis B virus vaccine,” according to the Pharming the Future research project, conducted through the University of Calgary. A 2011 study from microbiology researchers at the University of Central Florida contended that an “acre of tobacco could yield up to 20 million daily doses of insulin per year.”

Finally, in the case of vaccines and other temperature-sensitive drugs, the end product can often be in the form of a freeze-dried, edible plant that doesn’t require refrigeration. Its natural “packaging” can be in the form of seeds and fruit, not capsules or vials. The fact it can be stored without needing to be kept cold is a huge benefit in the developing world where electricity is unreliable or non-existent.

Environmental Question Mark

When it comes to genetically modifying any organism, however, there’s always a tradeoff that many are not willing to make. We’re stuck with an enduring question with no easy or obvious answer: Do we take advantage of fairly certain social gains, such as better access to medicine and potentially more affordable drugs, knowing there are environmental and health uncertainties we may regret over the medium and long term? Do we accept what risks exists or fall back on the precautionary principle, as Europeans have when it comes to genetically modified foods?

The controversy came to a head in 2002 when it was revealed that a corn crop engineered to make a protein for a pig vaccine was plowed into the soil, which was used a year later to plant 500,000 bushels of food-grade soybeans. The soybeans became contaminated, and while the problem was discovered before it could affect food supply, it still fed the fury of environmental and food-industry groups strongly opposed to pharming.

Friends of Earth accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture of “endangering the U.S. food supply.” The Grocery Manufacturers of America warned there was “no room for trial and error.” A consumer, environmental and farmer coalition ended up suing the government, calling its subsequent attempts to strengthen regulation too weak and ineffective.

The biotech industry didn’t think so. The new rules proved too heavy-handed – many clinical trials were discontinued and startups working in the area collapsed. “That ended most entrepreneurial interest in biopharming,” Henry Miller, a molecular biologist and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a recent column on Forbes.com. It created a chill north of the border, too. To this day, pharming still hasn’t been approved in Canada on a commercial scale, though more tightly controlled research trials have been permitted in recent years.

The risk to food-grade crops was and is real, and potentially serious. But Miller dismissed this fear as “overblown” and easy to avoid with certain measures. “Production in a non-food crop is an obvious one,” he wrote, pointing out that one developer of a Norwalk virus vaccine used tomatoes at first but then switched to tobacco plants to avoid tussling with regulators and environmentalists.

“The risk of plant-made drugs getting into food products is now virtually non-existent because the companies involved have switched to production in facilities with rigidly controlled environments, using mainly tobacco,” Miller added.

The move toward highly controlled facilities, such as greenhouses and labs, is crucial. The use of open-air fields doesn’t just risk contamination of nearby food or animal feed crops through the spread of pollen and seeds, it also threatens wildlife or livestock that might be grazing in the area. It could also harm or negatively alter organisms that live in the soil, not to mention pollinating and plant-eating insects – and it’s not like bees and butterflies don’t have enough problems with which to deal, such as insecticides sprayed on “normal crops.”

“Compounds from plants developed for plant molecular farming purposes may have physiological effects on humans and other organisms,” warns the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on its website. And while research so far shows no significant behaviourial and reproductive impacts on the pollinators and other organisms that have been studied, it’s still early days. The Canadian government will eventually allow commercial pharming – it seems all but inevitable – but currently it will only say it is “investigating policy options.”

A Net Gain?

Nuclear power. Genetically modified food production. Manipulation of algae to create biofuels. All carry risks. It comes down to what risks we are willing to accept in exchange for the known benefits, such as preventing an Ebola pandemic. It also comes down to the trust we have in the people in charge of limiting those risks.

Clearly, much can be done to minimize any health or environmental threats posed by plant-derived pharmaceutical production. Crops can be grown in specially constructed greenhouses that prevent entry by rodents and insects and stop pollen and seeds from escaping. Such structures can have air-lock entry systems for workers, who can be made to wear protective suits and required to shower down when departing.

There has even been talk of building these facilities in underground caverns and mines, and work has been done to grow sterile plants that can’t reproduce, even if seeds somehow enter wild fields or the food system.

As environmental journalist and Cornell University fellow Mark Lynas once wrote, “this application of modern technology to agriculture need not be remotely scary.”

Some precaution and good old common sense can go a long way. But like the GMO controversy generally, the debate seems destined to continue indefinitely. When it comes to pharming specifically, crisis is what will likely drive us – in one direction or the other.

The post Can “pharming” be sustainable? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The vast mountain range that surrounds the city abounds with fast-moving water, and hydropower is far cheaper in Colombia than any other fuel source. So it just makes sense that the municipal government would want to swap expensive, polluting oil for streams of electrons in its transportation system.

Bogota already has one of the developing world’s most envied and widely copied public transport networks, centred on a 109-kilometre web of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines – dedicated bus lanes linking 125 rail-like stations and nine terminals. About 1.5 million passengers are carried between these stations and terminals every day.

The system traces its origins to a trailblazing decision made by charismatic mayor Enrique Penalosa when he took office in 1998. International experts advised the new mayor to build freeways to alleviate the fast-growing city’s mounting traffic woes. Instead, Penalosa opted to bet big on mass public transit and bike lanes.

Bogota lacked the funds for a subway system, so the city instead chose to borrow the BRT concept from Curitiba, Brazil. In a few short years, Penalosa broke the chokehold that the city’s notorious drug cartels had long maintained on the private bus networks and built a BRT system called TransMilenio. Almost overnight, it became a source of civic pride and an envy of cities across South America.

A key difference between subways and buses, however, is that while the former run almost exclusively on electricity, the latter almost never do. And so as Bogota unveiled ambitious plans this year to start running its BRT network on electricity and even introduce a citywide fleet of 20,000 electric-powered taxis – reducing operating costs and pollution in one grand gesture – it encountered a unique problem. Bogota wants to introduce 790 low-emission hybrid buses next year, and the city plans to entertain bids on a fully electric fleet and convert TransMilenio’s trunk lines exclusively to zero-emission vehicles as soon as possible. The trouble is, no one can readily fill the city’s order. “Producers,” said Susana Muhamad, secretary general, city of Bogota, “don’t have the capacity to meet the demand.”

There is a word, in business circles, for a burgeoning demand that far exceeds supply. That word is opportunity.

Muhamad outlined Bogota’s conundrum as she accepted a laurel in the “urban transportation” category at the inaugural C40 & Siemens City Climate Leadership Awards in London (disclosure: Siemens covered the cost of sending the author to this awards event). The C40 organization is a network of big city governments around the world, and Bogota bested projects based in wealthy First World cities (Stockholm and Paris) in its category. It also beat out Buenos Aires, which qualified as a finalist on the strength of a transportation system that copied Bogota’s own.

Bogota might not be a name closely associated with innovation north of the equator, but it has become a mobility model for the global south – and the supply gap it has encountered holds lessons for sustainable businesses around the world.

It’s taken for granted in urban design circles that cities are engines of innovation. From the agora of Athens to the bohemian coffee houses of Victorian London to the creative-class enclaves of the contemporary metropolis, the city has long been understood as a vital wellspring of new ideas and the primary generator of the intellectual capital that drives modern economies.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that even a global-scale challenge like climate change has found some of its best ideas and most important innovations in cities. Indeed, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group was itself born of a distinctly urban reluctance to wait on the decisions of higher levels of government.

The organization first came together in 2005 to share best urban practices in response to climate change, and in 2009 it staged a high-profile (and much more productive) alternative summit to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The rural-urban balance tipped in favour of cities that same year – more than half of humanity now resides in cities, and 80 per cent of us will be urban dwellers by 2050 – and as most national governments continue to stumble in their flailing search for durable climate change solutions, urban leadership has never been more critical.

Which brings us back to Bogota, whose electric-bus problem is both a welcome model of innovation and an illustration of the city’s limits. Bogota’s TransMilenio is one of the most transformative and easily copied urban infrastructure inventions of the last decade. Though Curitiba’s BRT had been up and running in Brazil since 1974, it was the unprecedented boosts to commuter speed and passenger capacity of TransMilenio, rapidly deployed in the heart of a sprawling, traffic-choked metropolis in 2000, that launched the modern wave of BRTs.

The concept has since spread to 150 cities as far away as Jakarta and Johannesburg, and marks a rare case where industrialized cities – among them celebrated sustainability leaders such as Amsterdam, Melbourne and Vancouver – have widely adopted a developing country’s model. In Buenos Aires, a flagship BRT lane now carries 200,000 passengers per day down Avenida 9 de Julio, Argentina’s answer to the Champs-Elysees. The city’s C40 transportation initiatives borrow as heavily from Bogota as from famously livable Copenhagen.

The spurs to further innovation on Bogota’s streets are not strictly climate-related. In March 2012, riots erupted in the city over TransMilenio, with protestors demanding more affordable fares and a solution to the system’s chronic overcrowding. (Major TransMilenio stations are frequently so crowded at rush hour that passengers can’t even get off the buses, let alone make room for the waiting crowd to board.)

Efforts are already underway to reduce tariffs, and by switching from diesel engines to electric ones, the municipal government hopes to cut costs even further. But of course that goal would require manufacturers in distant lands, subject to national political and economic factors far beyond Bogota’s control, to step up their efforts to bring electric buses and taxis into mass production. Volvo has already tested hybrid buses on Bogota’s streets and the Chinese electric vehicle pioneer BYD has a handful of demonstration electric buses, and Bogota will start considering bids for the larger order next year. There’s no guarantee, however, that any manufacturer will be able to deliver what the city needs. In the meantime, Bogota’s commuters continue to pack into overcrowded stations as they wait for relief.

This is the flipside of the urbanization coin. As humanity crowds into cities, the opportunities for unexpected interactions yielding wild new ideas may well increase, but meanwhile city halls the world over are barely coping with the strain of rapid growth. And just as often as not, they are held back by limited municipal power structures set too low in an entirely different and less urban age.

In London, for example – birthplace of the C40 network under its founder, former mayor Ken Livingstone, and host of the City Climate Leadership Awards – a booming financial and cultural capital is struggling to expand its infrastructure to manage its current transport needs and anticipate the next phase of growth. “The transport system quite honestly is creaking at the seams,” said Jeremy Hinds of Network Rail, a lead partner in Thameslink, a multibillion-dollar commuter rail project.

Thameslink is a staggeringly large and complex undertaking – a new hub in the heart of London for one of the world’s densest and busiest rail networks. Designed to lash together a disjointed tangle of existing rail lines in the north and south and increase train traffic between them by 250 per cent at peak hours, the project has required 15 years in debate and planning and still has five more years of construction to go. Among other challenges, it has necessitated a major overhaul of London Bridge station while keeping it open and busy, as well as the laying of two new rail beds essentially on top of historic Borough Market.

By itself, Thameslink would be the transit project of a generation, but it’s but one piece of London’s transportation puzzle. Crossrail, an east-to-west sister project, comes with a £14.8-billion price tag, 21 kilometres of tunnel, and a radical expansion of Farringdon Station. London’s pioneering congestion charging and Low Emissions Zone systems, meanwhile, continue to grow – and grow in complexity – around the city. (The congestion charging system applies a levy to all vehicles entering central London during working hours, with the £150 million per year spent on public transit; the Low Emissions Zone is a restrictive tariff on large, exhaust-spewing vehicles across a larger patch of the city.) And municipal leaders are also calling for a second high-speed rail line to link London to Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester to the north – a project that has led to political squabbling over costs and benefits and that demonstrates the limits, even in London, to what a city can do on its own.

In her final book, Dark Age Ahead, the massively influential urban thinker Jane Jacobs talked about a concept she called “subsidiarity.” She defined it as “the principle that government works best – most responsibly and responsively – when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.” The C40 network is a case study in the value of subsidiarity and its limits in the climate change era. The world over, cities have led the conversation on climate change and developed some of the most innovative strategies to tackle it.

Germany’s transformative national energy policy, the feed-in tariff for renewable energy, began as a municipal ordinance. Congestion charges – whether in London or Stockholm or Singapore – have proven to be among the most effective and efficient Pigovian taxes (i.e., taxes on negative externalities) yet created to put a clear and fair price on greenhouse gas emissions. And of course the C40 network is rife with examples of urban innovation, many of them finalists or winners in the first City Climate Leadership Awards.

Copenhagen is well on its way to a municipal target of carbon neutrality by 2025. Munich has concrete plans to become the first city of more than a million people to be powered entirely by renewable energy. San Francisco’s recycling program has as its goal nothing less than the obsolescence of the landfill itself. In Melbourne, 1,200 buildings in the downtown core will receive hyper-efficiency retrofits. In cities around the world, forward-thinking governments, spurred often as not by more immediate crises and exercising their intrinsic subsidiarity, have found their way to sustainable solutions to problems of energy use, transportation, air quality, resilience and waste.

In Bogota – as in so many cities – the traffic was a nightmare. The conventional wisdom said to build on-ramps, overpasses and freeways. Instead, the mayor created space on its streets for everything but cars – TransMilenio buses, yes, but also bicycles and pedestrians – and the city ignited a worldwide boom in a new system of transit.

That system is better positioned than any freeway ever will be to become the world’s first zero-emissions bus network. But it will need partners in industries far away to see the opportunity hidden in the urban chaos.

The post Transit done right appeared first on Corporate Knights.

These jobs are not only growing — they are also increasingly diverse, with multi-faceted roles that encompass everything from corporate strategy development to natural resource management and regulatory compliance.

Ironically, this recent job proliferation has created a unique challenge for job-seekers. New professionals are now faced with a daunting variety of sustainability careers. They know the jobs are out there, but they lack adequate information on in-demand careers or required skills. Without a clear map that links jobs with relevant education and training, these prospective workers have a tough time effectively planning for careers in sustainability.

Responding to this need, a number of new Canadian and American studies have started to bridge the knowledge gap. These reports explore the demand for sustainability careers, while also delving into required skills, typical salaries and common fields of study.

Most of this market research features strong themes of job growth and variety. In their research of the West Coast’s clean economy, GLOBE Advisors and the Center for Climate Strategies arrived at a conservative estimate of at least 508,000 full-time, direct production jobs. Similarly, Environmental Careers Organization (ECO) Canada found that over 50,650 Canadian professionals spend 50 per cent or more of their time on work activities related to environmental or social sustainability.

While sustainability jobs are widespread, they are especially concentrated in the American and Canadian west, with regions like California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alberta accounting for a high proportion.

Among these jobs, ECO Canada’s study identified seven top career paths: chief sustainability officers (CSOs), sustainability specialists, officers, researchers, educators, consultants and trainers. Sustainability specialists are particularly in high demand, with over 34,450 working in this role in Canada.

Many of these careers also pay decent salaries. In GreenBiz Group’s 2013 “State of the Profession” report, a panel of American sustainability managers earned median salaries of around $112,500, with higher salaries in health care and automotive industries, and lower ones for service providers and real estate firms. Their Canadian counterparts earned similar pay, with average starting salaries over $53,000 for four out of the seven top sustainability careers.

Sustainability careers often pay well because they require considerable education and experience. GreenBiz found a strong correlation between compensation and education in its report: only 12 per cent of sustainability managers with a bachelor’s degree earned more than $100,000 in the United States, compared to 39 per cent of managers who had a master’s degree. Similarly, 68 per cent of Canadian sustainability professionals held at least a bachelor’s degree, while 55 per cent also possessed at least eight years of professional experience.

In addition to this education, sustainability professionals also need extensive work experience. Many of the practitioners in ECO Canada’s report supported multiple departments and led vital company activities related to managing risk, increasing returns on capital, and stimulating business growth. These professionals needed skills in interpreting environmental regulations, implementing sustainable development programs and partnering with stakeholders.

American sustainability professionals have a similar work scenario. In the GreenBiz study, sustainability VPs, directors and managers carried essential responsibilities in strategy development, reporting environmental data, leading cross-functional teams and educating employees. These practitioners relied on solid business acumen, a willingness to learn about a wide range of issues, and an exceptional ability to serve as both sustainability “translators” and collaborators.

Sustainability practitioners clearly need diverse, well-developed skills to succeed, but how do they actually build these competencies?

For both American and Canadian practitioners, the most popular field of study is business or public administration, followed by physical or life sciences, engineering and social sciences. Sustainability consultants are one exception to this general rule – only 4 per cent held a business-related degree in ECO Canada’s report, while 41 per cent had studied biology, chemistry or environmental sciences.

Graduate degrees can also make a difference. According to Net Impact, recent MBA graduates felt this program increased both their employment options and the likelihood of finding a job that aligned with their values.

Armed with vital insights on sustainability careers, new professionals can look at the wealth of job options and feel empowered, not intimidated. Sustainability work will continue to expand into new and exciting areas, so there’s no better time to take the leap.

The post Time to find a job appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Although her charm goes a long way, Lee-Brewster also has a compelling pitch. Open an account, she tells them, and have a chance to win a big cash prize. The concept is called prize-linked savings, and it’s capturing the attention of more financial institutions.

With prize-linked savings, a lottery layer is added to a savings product. In the case of Lee-Brewster at Michigan’s Communicating Arts Credit Union, that product is an account with the Save to Win program. The minimum monthly deposit is $25.

Members of the program are awarded the equivalent of a lottery ticket for every $25 deposited, including entry into an annual jackpot of $100,000. Members are free to make one withdrawal every year after the first. “That’s my selling point. You’re not losing anything. You can win just by saving,” says Lee-Brewster, the credit union’s top seller of the unique accounts.

Save to Win is a four-year-old program, unique to North America. Yet it builds on a centuries-long, international line of prize-linked savings products. The combined track record of these products and the research indicate they’re an efficient way to encourage personal savings – especially among those least likely to put money away for a rainy day, but who are most in need of doing so. Despite the historical and academic evidence, and the need in North America for savings innovation, regulatory barriers have prevented testing the concept’s full potential in the U.S. and Canada.

Before taking a closer look at prize-linked savings’ past, it’s important to consider two current financial trends. First, both Americans and Canadians are big into lotteries. In fiscal 2010, according to the Rockefeller Institute, the 43 state lotteries in the U.S. were the main source of state gambling revenue, bringing in about $18 billion. Surveys by the Consumer Federation of America and the Financial Planning Association released in 2006 found nearly 40 per cent of Americans with incomes below $25,000, about a fifth of the general population, thought winning the lottery was the most practical way for them to accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars.

North of the border, the 2010-2011 Gambling Digest published by the Canadian Partnership for Responsible Gambling reported that the four largest provinces – Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta – had all taken in nine-digit net lottery revenues in the previous fiscal year. Ontario led the pack, raking in over $900 million. According to the digest, lotteries were the most popular form of gambling in almost every province.

While money has flowed into lotteries in the U.S. and Canada, savings rates in both countries have dried up. In their Assets & Opportunity Scorecard for 2013, the Corporation for Enterprise Development found nearly a third of American households had no savings account. A survey released in May this year by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) found 40 per cent of respondents would probably or certainly not be able to come up with $2,000 in case of an emergency. Meanwhile, in Canada, at around the time FINRA released its data, Certified General Accountants Association of Canada noted Canadian household savings rates had dropped from a peak of about 20 per cent of disposable income in the early 1980s to less than 4 per cent by the end of 2012.

What more people do have today is ballooning levels of personal debt, and servicing that debt makes it difficult for individuals to save money. Canadian economist Mark Anielski makes the link to sustainability, equating rising debt levels and the “chronic societal stress” it creates to cancer cells that “grow out of control until they finally consume or destroy their host.” Debt can become the antithesis of wellbeing. Personal savings, to stick with Anielski’s analogy, can be viewed as antioxidants that boost household resilience.

Enter prize-linked savings, which turns the consumer’s weakness for lotteries into saving strength. “That’s precisely what appealed to me about these products when I first heard about them, when I studied them in England and South Africa, and ultimately tested them in the U.S.,” says Peter Tufano.

Currently dean of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, Tufano is a prolific researcher and founder of the Doorways to Dreams (D2D) Fund, a non-profit that supports savings innovations for low-income consumers. In 2009, D2D helped the Michigan Credit Union League launch Save to Win. A year later, 87-year-old Billie June Smith won the first $100,000 grand prize thanks to a $75 deposit.

In order for its credit unions to offer customers such as Smith a Save to Win account, Michigan first had to create a legislative loophole. Without one, the product would have been an illegal lottery. Nebraska and North Carolina followed suit, and this spring Washington became the fourth and latest state to join the Save to Win program after passing its own amendment. Initial results are promising. In April, the D2D Fund reported that the number of credit unions offering Save to Win had increased from eight to 62, serving over 40,000 account holders – mostly with low or moderate incomes – who had saved more than $70 million from 2009 to 2012.

Save to Win’s success comes as no surprise to Tufano. “This is a product that goes back to the 1700s and has succeeded in country after country after country since then,” he says. They include England, South Africa, Sweden, Japan, Indonesia and several countries in South America.

With regards to the U.K., Tufano points to Premium Bonds offered by National Savings and Investments (NS&I), the British government’s savings arm. In 2006, NS&I celebrated 50 years of offering the bonds, which at the time were held by over a third of the population. The first national prize-linked savings program in the U.K. – the Million Adventure – was launched more than 250 years before Premium Bonds as a strategy for coping with debt from the Nine Years’ War.

South Africa is another prize-linked savings success story, albeit one that only lasted three years. Starting in January 2005, the private First National Bank of South Africa (FNB) began offering what was called the Million a Month Account (MaMA). The account included a chance at winning monthly lotteries of up to one million rand, or around $100,000 at today’s rate. Nearly three quarters of South Africans were unbanked at the program’s outset. In mid-March 2008, FNB had opened over a million MaMAs and executives estimated the program stood for just over 7 per cent of all banked South Africans. By the end of that March, however, MaMA was no more. The South African lottery board sued to have the program closed as an illegal lottery, and won.

Unlike the active opposition faced in South Africa, the main obstacle for prize-linked savings in the U.S. has been regulation, or as Tufano puts it, “a history of inertia.” Decades-old legislation intended to protect state lottery franchises and to inhibit banks from taking part in gambling stand in the way. As Tufano has pointed out, these laws were never intended to stop banks and credit unions from offering products such as Save to Win accounts.

The Canadian legal waters for prize-linked savings are largely uncharted. As Toronto-based gaming lawyer Michael Lipton explains, a lottery has three defining legal features: prize, risk and consideration. To not be seen as a lottery in the eyes of the law, at least one of these must be eliminated. In terms of prize-linked savings, this would be consideration, according to Lipton. “If you’re losing nothing by participating in the activity, then that would go a long way to establish there is no consideration,” he says. However, court decisions from opposite ends of Canada suggest a legal battle over prize-linked savings could go either way.

Whereas the legality of prize-linked savings in North America is somewhat untested, the concept’s incentive power has recently reached new empirical heights. Results from the first two lab studies of prize-linked savings accounts were both published in the last year. The independent Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany published the first in October 2012, and found the availability of a prize-linked savings account led to a significant savings increase across demographics. The average increase was 12 per cent, with demand coming mainly from reductions in lottery play and general consumption, but also some from traditional saving. The highest rate of increased saving occurred in the low-income bracket. Results from the second lab study, published in the U.S. in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research, were similarly positive.

The high appeal of prize-linked savings to low-income consumers demonstrated by research, as well as Save to Win and other applications of the concept, is an important point. These are the people who stand to benefit the most, dollar for dollar, from saving more and wasting less. Unfortunately, they are also those with the lowest levels of financial literacy and political influence. In other words, they are in no position to demand, say, that the Save to Win program be expanded in the U.S. or an equivalent product be offered in Canada. Rather, this group makes up a disproportionate number of participants in large lotteries, which are informally known as a tax on the poor.

“Savings by low-income families is inherently difficult, receives relatively little government incentives, and is – at best – tolerated by the financial sector,” wrote Tufano and Princeton University professor Daniel Schneider in 2007. They noted that economists often speak of “diminishing marginal returns” and that from the perspective of big banks the poor are beyond the profitable edge of these returns. However, from a wider, societal perspective, Tufano and Schneider wrote, “We may have the margin completely backwards.” Adding $100 or $1,000 in savings to a low-income family, they argued, “will surely have a bigger impact on their lives – and on society – than adding the same amount to a wealthy family’s balance sheet.”

Despite the challenges, prize-linked savings is making headway in the U.S. In June, Connecticut created a legal opening for credit unions to offer Save to Win accounts. Maryland, Rhode Island and Maine had already done the same. “You can’t lose,” Lee-Brewster tells her clients in Michigan. “It’s not as if you’re throwing money away. You will have the money at the end of the day.”

In short, for both consumers and policy makers, giving prize-linked savings a chance is not much of a gamble.

The post The savings jackpot appeared first on Corporate Knights.

At the outset, he made the following points:

• Auto sales have been relatively slow to rebound in the United States, whereas in past economic rebounds we’ve seen car sales lead the way;
• He figures sales of light-duty vehicles peaked in 2005 and those record levels won’t be reached again until about 2020, despite the growth in population between now and then;
• There has been significant growth in bicycle commuting — 47 per cent growth between 2000 and 2011. In more bike-friendly cities, growth has jumped 80 per cent;
• E-bicycle sales are growing strongly, particularly in Europe. While they aren’t necessarily displacing car sales, they are reducing the amount of miles driven in cars;
• Influencing trends being noticed: urban planning with attention to more transit-oriented designs and streets that accommodate multiple modes of transportation; more people telecommuting; a rise in car-sharing as an alternative way to travel in cities; increased political interest in congestion pricing.

But can we say with certainty that we’ve hit “peak cars” yet? “I would argue in western Europe we’re likely there. Right now it looks like North America is going to be next,” said Hurst. “The jury is still out.”

Phineas Baxandall, senior analyst for transportation policy at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, came across as more certain in his comments. Up until 2004, he said, there has been a steady increase in per-capita miles driven since WWII. But nine years ago it suddenly began to fall, and this happened well before the economic downturn. “What we see in 2004 is truly a break with an almost 60-year trend.” Total miles driven also began to fall in 2007, despite ongoing population growth. So what explains this? Baxandall said a big part of it has to do with younger drivers — at least that’s what the data says between 2001 and 2009. “During this period, driving among younger Americans fell much faster than the rest of the country — a breathtaking 23 per cent per person.” Young people are taking fewer vehicle trips and shorter trips. “This trend was seen with young people both with and without jobs,” he added, pointing out that younger people are embracing alternatives modes of transportation much more aggressively than their parents. “This group’s public transportation trips increased (between 2001 and 2009) by 40 per cent. Bicycle trips increased 24 per cent, and walking trips by 16 per cent. A truly big change.”

And let’s not forget driver’s license statistics. In the mid-1980s more than 80 per cent of young people between 16 and 20 years of age had a driver’s license. Today, that number is in the mid-60s. Another interesting point that Baxandall made has to do with the recent decoupling of GDP from driving miles per person. For decades driving miles per person almost shadowed the movement of GDP, but in recent years they have diverged. This likely has much to do with rising gasoline prices following a long period of relatively cheap fuel.

All of this raises the big question: Is it temporary?

Is it a blip? Will the shift we have seen be enduring? Will it grow more intense to the detriment of the auto industry? I got the sense from the call that Baxandall doesn’t think it’s temporary, which isn’t a bad thing depending on where you sit. “It’s going to mean less pollution and oil consumption, less stress on our existing roadways, and less need for new and wider highways,” he said. But there’s bad news for some. There will be more risk for public-private toll ventures, shrinking North American auto sales, and the amount of federal tax revenue collected through gasoline sales is going to fall significantly — a combination of more efficient vehicles, electric vehicles and reduced driving. “We can no longer continue to believe there will be an increase in driving,” he added. “Policy in our country has yet to catch up to these trends and still reflect old driving assumptions.”

There’s much to think about here, for auto manufacturers, urban planners, political leaders and consumers. Of course, some of the market demand issues will be offset by rising demand from Asia and elsewhere, but in North American and Europe these trends beg a much closer, careful look.

The post North America hits peak car? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

 They include:

• A commercial demonstration of a system that manages electric-vehicle charging stations in Quebec;
• Demonstration of a wind-biomass-battery system in the north of Quebec where there’s heavy reliance on diesel;
• Integration of wind energy in diesel-based generation systems to power remote mining operations;
• The study of Very Low Head hydro turbines, a promising technology that opens up hydroelectric generation opportunities across Canada;
• A project to tap low-temperature geothermal energy for power production;
• Advancing efficiency and reducing the cost of in-stream tidal energy;
• Development and testing of prototypes of “plug and play” building-integrated solar PV and thermal systems;
• A project to recover energy from refrigeration waste heat;
• Advancing a process that takes syngas made from the gasification of municipal solid waste and turns it into drop-in jet and diesel fuel;
• Researching and developing a super-efficient air-source heat pump that can provide heating in very cold climates and cooling during summers at low cost;
• An inventory and analysis of recoverable waste heat sources from industrial processes in Alberta;
• Development of a pre-commercial thermoacoustic engine that is super efficient and can be used for co-generation applications.
• In addition to the above-mentioned projects, there is a big emphasis on technologies that help reduce the environmental footprint of the oil sands, as well as coal-fired power production in provinces that are heavy coal users, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia. Indeed, roughly a quarter of the funds has been earmarked for projects aimed at reducing the environmental impacts of fossil-fuel production and use (or perpetuating the production and use of fossil fuels, depending on how you view it). I have mixed feelings about this. One part of me says, “Great, we really need to reduce emissions and water contamination/consumption related to the oil sands and burning coal.” The other part of me says, “Oh great, more window dressing. This will make it look like the federal government is doing something without actually doing something, as these technologies are unlikely to have an impact anytime soon.”

Two projects in Nova Scotia that are being funded will focus on scoping out ideal sites for geological sequestration of CO2 and coming up with a monitoring and verification standard to make sure CO2 injected underground isn’t leaking out – i.e. will stay underground. Money is also being given to a Quebec company called CO2 Solutions, which I’ve written about many times over the years. This company, demonstrating biomimicry in action, has developed an enzyme that can extract CO2 from industrial effluent emissions. It will use the new funding to support a pilot-scale facility that can capture 90 per cent of C02 from an oil sands in situ production and upgrading operation. “This is expected to result in cost savings of at least 25 per cent compared to conventional carbon capture technology,” according to the government funding announcement.

One project will look at whether impurities in CO2 have an impact on the capture, transport and underground storage of CO2, while another will study geological sites in the Athabasca area (i.e. where the oil sands are located) that are ideal for underground storage of CO2. Funding will also be used to investigate the use of non-aqueous solvents to extract bitumen, thereby reducing the energy needed to create steam (i.e. reducing water needs and the proliferation of toxic tailing ponds). Efforts to improve the efficiency of steam-assisted gravity drainage processes and reduce the environmental impacts of tailing ponds are also being funded. On the water front, one project will explore the ability to use non-potable, briny water to create steam for oil sands production, while another will demonstrate a technology that can clean up and recycle the waste water used during oil sands production. In total, about $21 million will go toward all of these projects, designed to help “dirty” energy become – or look – much cleaner.

In a separate announcement, the federal government also disclosed plans to support construction of a $19-million facility in Alberta that will use algae to recycle industrial CO2 emissions, in this case emissions from an oil sands facility operated by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. This is great news for Toronto-based Pond Biofuels, a company I have written about extensively and which currently operates a pilot facility at St. Mary’s Cement, where it grows algae from kiln emissions. The end goal of this three-year oil sands project is to use the algae to create commercial biofuels and other bioproducts. All of this innovation is important, and funding of these projects — as well as the recent re-funding of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, an important supporter of cleantech innovation in my country – is encouraging. Yet, it’s not getting us to where we need to be. Nowhere close.

We’ve been down this capture-and-hide carbon path before. A handful of high-profile projects announced several years ago have still led nowhere, and two have already been cancelled. Yet the federal government, and Alberta, is still putting most of its eggs in the CCS basket. Indeed, they’re still heavily promoting this idea of a new pipeline network that will carry CO2 from the oil sands and other heavy emitters to sequestration sites. Alberta Energy Minister Ken Hughes recently touted this proposed pipeline as a “Trans-Canada highway for Carbon.” Here’s a question: If the industry and federal government can support the ambitious idea of building a cross-Canada network of CO2-carrying pipelines, why does it poo-poo the idea of a Trans-Canada power transmission corridor that could carry clean hydroelectric, wind and solar power from where it’s abundant to where it’s needed? The positioning is proof that moving toward a low-carbon world is not about can’t-do, it’s about won’t-do; it’s about protecting established industries and infrastructure and preventing a cleaner, 21st-century alternative from emerging.

Again, the recent round of innovation funding is good news. But let’s look at the reality: Last week we sadly hit 400 parts per millions (ppm) of CO2 in our fragile atmosphere, a level never before experienced in human history. Many scientists say 350 ppm is where we should be, and certainly we shouldn’t go much past 400 ppm. We’re heading in the wrong direction, and notoriously conservative organizations like the International Energy Agency and the World Bank are now even sounding the alarm. If the federal and Alberta governments really want to prove to the Americans – and Canadians – that they’re serious about climate change, they would complement their innovation spending with a recognition that the oil sands extraction machine can’t continue its current fast pace of growth, and that some day – in 10, 20, 30 years – the oil orgy must come to a complete end.

This is true of all “carbon bombs” being developed around the world, not just the oil sands. And if we are to adequately prepare for that day, we need to carefully transition to a low-carbon economy. That means taxing carbon, a policy approach now being encouraged by both the IEA and World Bank and accepted by most credible economists. That means creating a realistic vision for the country and working toward it — and by “realistic” I mean recognizing that perpetuating the grow (or current rate) of oil sands production and coal use is not an option.

This isn’t about educating people so they are “made” to know better about the oil sands’ alleged strong environmental record. This isn’t about clever public relations campaigns and slick and deceptive advertising meant to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers and voters. This isn’t about targeted funding announcements to make a government appear that it cares. This is about facing facts, and preparing for eventualities. Canada isn’t doing that, and soon enough, Mother Nature is going to spank our sorry asses.

The post Clean energy projects get $82M appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The System of National Accounts and its bellwether indicator, gross domestic product (GDP), have together proved an antiquated compass for steering our economies. This has resulted over the years in policy failures, as the compass does not tell us whether our resources are scarce or sustainable, whether the quality of life has improved along with GDP growth or not, and so on. It does a very poor job of measuring what matters.

There have been persistent efforts over the last two decades to reform our national accounting system through “green accounting” or “inclusive wealth” measures. It is expected that one of these new measures will finally provide a yardstick for sustainable development. These improved measures of national performance will also reflect our institutional and political commitments through the Agenda 21 document “Our Common Future,” an outcome of the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio, and “The Future We Want” document accepted at Rio+20 in 2012.

The effort comes not a moment too soon. The United Nations is now formulating Sustainable Development Goals starting in 2015 with the expectation of being able to compare how the world responds to sustainability targets. Fixing the accounts of society so that they measure what matters becomes even more crucial in this context.

Better indicators for economic welfare have been sought as far back as the 1960s. William Nordhaus and James Tobin proposed alternative indicators in 1973, while Herman Daly and John Cobb proposed an index of sustainable economic welfare in 1989.

Pioneering efforts to compute alternatives have also been made by statistical agencies in the Netherlands and the Philippines. The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) and World Bank developed a framework for a satellite accounting system in the early 1990s, resulting in the publication of a handbook in 1993 that has since gone through a number of revisions.

Some progress is being made. Efforts to green national accounts are now underway in many countries, including Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, India, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and United States.

In 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France at the time, set up a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, headed by economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. Their prime mission is to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress. The commission’s mandate is also to assess the feasibility of alternative measurement tools, and to discuss how to present such statistical information in an appropriate way.

At the same time, there is a significant global effort underway to build a partnership among countries interested in including natural capital in their national accounts. The initiative was announced at the COP-10 meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010 by World Bank president Robert Zoellick. Christened WAVES, which stands for Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services, the goal is to develop guidelines for ecosystem accounting. Several developed and developing countries are part of this initiative, including Australia, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, Madagascar and the Philippines. WAVES partners also include several UN agencies, such as UN Environment Programme (UNEP), UN Development Programme and UNSD, as well as non-governmental organizations and academic institutions.

In May 2012, in the run-up to Rio+20, Botswana President Ian Khama hosted a summit of 11 African nations to discuss the significance of natural capital to their respective countries. No less than five African heads of state attended this meeting in person. The result of this gathering was the Gaborone Declaration, which committed this group of African first-movers to including natural capital in their national accounts. The document sent a powerful political message during Rio+20 negotiations. It told the world that these African nations were not only aware of the importance of natural capital, but also willing to do something about it.

Also at Rio+20, the World Bank and its partners initiated the “50/50” campaign, inviting the public and private sectors to join forces in support of natural capital accounting. The response was overwhelming: 62 countries, 90 corporations and 17 civil society members signed up. UNEP and the United Nations University added momentum to the discussion with the release of their Inclusive Wealth Report, a ground-breaking document that measured the change in man-made capital, natural capital and human capital for a selection of 20 countries over the last 18 years. Although Rio+20 has been criticized as an underwhelming event, it was clearly a success for efforts to boost acceptance of natural capital accounting.

In a related sphere, Rio+20 also saw considerable interest and cohesive action to initiate a parallel process by which corporations could begin to measure and report their own impacts on natural capital. Apart from the obvious dependencies of some business sectors on nature – tourism, agriculture, forestry, fisheries and pharmaceuticals, to name a few – the world of business also has significant impacts on the natural environment.

These are the so-called “externalities” of business, including greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater extraction, pollution and waste. A recent 2011 estimate of the economic size of these externalities was as high as $2.15 trillion (U.S.), or 3.5 per cent of GDP contributed by just the top 3,000 listed companies in the world. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and at present there is very little measuring or reporting on natural capital going on in the corporate world. Guidelines and standards are urgently needed to help corporations integrate natural capital metrics into their statutory reporting process, which is at present limited to just financial accounts. “Mainstreaming” these issues can only be achieved if mainstream analysts and investors discover sustainability information as part of the annual reports they read and respond to with ratings and market actions.

Meanwhile, the UNSD has improved guidelines for reflecting natural capital in national accounts. The latest version of the internationally accepted standard for how one counts natural capital and ecosystem services, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), was updated in 2012. It prescribes ways to reflect the market-priced value of nature’s goods and services in national accounts. But this is not new. What is new is that it also provides experimental accounting guidance to reflect the values of non-market goods and services, such as freshwater and nutrient cycling and pollination. It also sets out monitoring and analytical approaches that countries can follow, and suggests ways for such data to inform policy.

Can the leading nations accomplish much of this accounting advancement by 2015, when the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals will signal a new phase of sustainable development? The jury is out on this question. But if five or 10 leading nations from both developed and developing worlds can focus their collective efforts, there is no doubt that these trailblazers can be ready in time with national accounts that actually reflect development’s biggest asset: natural capital.

If they succeed by 2015, we would all have cause to celebrate the arrival of a brave new world.

The post Natural capital in a nutshell appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s all happening faster than the most extreme predictions. “It’s not just a wake-up call, it’s a wake-up scream,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reportedly said of Hurricane Sandy.

As a consequence, New York City and other at-risk metropolises are preparing a more robust response to the next super storm. But just as important is how to effectively engage all citizens in the kinds of behaviours that will help them reduce and adapt to the certain impacts of climate change. What methods are most likely to work?

The answer may surprise you: rewards and incentives; social contagion, and gamification – bringing gaming concepts of motivation and engagement into daily life.

Individually or in combination, these approaches tap into our human desire to play games, compete, cooperate – and be infected by other people’s pro-social behaviour. From spurring energy conservation to waste reduction and more, these tactics may yield meaningful opportunities to respond to climate change, especially as international negotiations to reduce atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels betray many people’s hopes for a better future.

And best of all, they’re practical. At a cash-strapped time, for relatively low cost, consumers can be motivated to adapt to shifting realities through incremental changes to awareness and behaviour.

This was Andreas Souvaliotis’ goal in 2007, when he started Green Rewards, the loyalty program that later became Air Miles for Social Change (AMSC) after being acquired by LoyaltyOne, operator of the popular Air Miles program in Canada.

AMSC works with utilities, public transit providers and assorted government agencies seeking cost-effective ways to “incentivize” energy conservation, greater use of public transit, and healthier lifestyle choices.

Its secret weapon is a combination of reach and reward. Air Miles, which through an extensive network of partners provides loyalty points for certain retail purchases, has direct access to more than 70 per cent of Canadian households, making it the largest loyalty program of its kind in North America. Its points are redeemable for an array of sustainable products.

By piggybacking on that reach and using much sought after Air Miles points as the carrot, AMSC has educated and engaged a significant portion of the population. One successful energy-conservation campaign attracted 120,000 more participants than a traditional advertising-and-rebate approach, representing an increase of 600 per cent. At the same time, it saved the government agency behind it 66 per cent in taxpayer dollars.

“If we’re looking for solutions with a true and measurable impact on the human species’ overall footprint, then we must realize that all seven billion of us are consumers,” says Souvaliotis. For the beasts of consumption that we are, incentives work – whether the goal is to get people to drive less and use more transit, or recycle more and conserve electricity.

Souvaliotis is now evolving the approach in “a number of other markets beyond Canada” through newly founded Social Change Rewards, which states on its website that it can “consistently demonstrate dramatic improvements in marketing efficiency, effectiveness, and overall program cost.”

Meanwhile, Friendefi, a start-up based in Montreal, Quebec, is on track to bring the rewards-and-incentives concept to the world’s social networks. The idea is to plug existing loyalty programs into social networks such as Facebook, then use the lure of rewards to stimulate online competition and cooperation through customized games. Friendefi’s co-founder Aaron Carr concedes it’s difficult to get people to break old habits and adopt new ones. “People are so busy that taking a few steps off the day-to-day path is really challenging.”

To ease the load, Friendefi aims to break down big problems into a menu of “gamified” day-to-day actions that translate to a larger impact on the whole. “We need immediate, bite-sized programs that prevent people from getting scared and tuning out,” says Carr. “For example, we could put value on specific actions, such as not idling your car. People would measure and track their actions, gain 50 points here and 100 points there, and see a cumulative impact (over time).”

Rewarding healthy and environmentally beneficial behaviours, of course, is just one approach. Some companies, such as Arlington, Virginia-based Opower and Quinzee of Toronto, Ontario, are harnessing our innate desire to compete with and emulate neighbours and friends. Their goal: to make energy conservation contagious. Faizal Karmali, co-founder of Quinzee, wants smart energy use to spread among “people like you or near you” – that is, within social networks and among neighbours.

Opower, which recently integrated social-comparison features into its service, works with 75 utilities on three continents to educate consumers about their energy use. Partnerships with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council have helped expand Opower’s reach to 15 million homes, which so far have reduced electricity consumption by 1.7 terawatt-hours – roughly what a small coal-fired power plant generates in a year.

A key challenge, according to Karmali, is that there’s been no way for individuals and communities to know what’s normal in terms of energy consumption, and whether their personal energy usage would be viewed as excessive or, conversely, super-efficient. “Socializing consumption provides people with points of reference,” he says. As consumers gain insight into their own energy-consumption patterns, “Quinzee alerts customers when they’re beating their peers, or falling behind them, which seems to motivate sustained, better behaviour.”

Using Quinzee, individuals and their peers can influence the social network contagiously – and save money. “People seem to really care how they’re doing compared to others and we use this social dynamic for environmental good,” Karmali says. “One of our friends in the suburbs was using as much energy as a couple in our peer group with two kids. He was really embarrassed when we mentioned it over dinner one night, and has since reduced his energy use by about 25 per cent.”

The social-contagion aspect of Opower and Quinzee may be especially significant. As reported in Science Daily, a joint study by Yale University and New York University found that “people are more likely to install a solar panel on their home if their neighbours have one.” The study found that with just 10 installations in a given zip code, the probability of adoption rises by 7.8 per cent. A solar panel that’s visible to neighbours, combined with a homeowner who expresses enthusiasm about saving money, may lead to additional installations. A social contagion “bump” could apply equally to other low-carbon, energy-saving goods such as electric cars.

But let’s not forget the power of fun. Asi Burak, co-president of not-for-profit Games for Change, based in New York City, is convinced that positive social and environmental impacts can come through digital games. Burak believes there are solid reasons why games and gamification hold long-term promise for helping spur the kinds of progressive behaviours that can help us, for example, adapt to or mitigate climate change.

The digital games industry has heft, and games are a proven way to engage people. “Call of Duty on a console can sell 20 million units. There are 100 million players for some Facebook games,” he says. “Americans spend 407 million hours every month playing online games, which offer continuous daily engagement.

Americans spend the most time on social networks. Number two is online games.”

In his view, it makes no sense to leave such a dominant, interactive medium just for shoot-’em-up, thrill-seeking entertainment. Burak says his daughter spends more hours playing games in her life than many other activities. “But if 100 per cent of her play is going to be entertainment, it won’t teach her how to prepare for this world in a meaningful way.”

Admittedly, online games that do just that are niche offerings. They include ElectroCity, which teaches young players in New Zealand about managing urban energy, sustainability and the environment; and computer-based strategy game Fate of the World: Tipping Point, which challenges players to “solve” the climate crisis. Such games, as designed and available today, seem a long way from holding the attention of the masses.

“There will be a tipping point when a game for social change is a blockbuster game,” says Burak. “It took movies time to develop the independent documentary voice, for example, and games will take longer because they’re more complex, are evolving so fast, and look so different.”

Jesper Juul, a New York University games researcher at the NYU Game Center, weighs in. “I haven’t seen many good climate change-related games. One problem we have in that category is there’s a green button or a red button, something that’s bad or good [which is inherently uninteresting].”

One missing ingredient in the creation of good interactive experiences – the kind that will reach large-enough audiences to effect positive change – may be a lack of widespread, open and accessible data on everything from individuals’ travel patterns and energy consumption to social behaviours.

Norman White, clinical professor of information sciences at the NYU Stern School of Business, says big data clusters are needed to bring together large data sets across silos, so that interesting patterns can emerge about, say, how taxi rides and climate data intersect. “There’s a whole new group called data scientists,” he says. “These are specialized computer scientists who apply statistics to computer data, and we need them to find better ways to put together climate data, social network data, financial data, and so on.”

All this, White muses, may yield interesting, scalable opportunities for game development or gamification on top of open, rich and compelling data. Until then, catch a positive social contagion, seek out rewards for your good behaviour, and look ahead to the 2013 launch of SimCity 5, which promises to feature greenest-city competitions among other climate change-related themes.

The post Game changer appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The challenge is how to be socially responsible while investing in an industry that is not inherently sustainable, will cause at least some degree of contamination – even with the latest environmental technology – and has a track record of human rights violations.

Almost one thousand investment firms representing $25 trillion in assets have signed the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment, pledging to be “active owners and incorporate environmental, social and corporate governance issues into (their) ownership policies and practices.” They use their leverage as shareholders to try to influence company policy, including calls to defend the rights of local communities affected by oil, mining and gas projects.

This growing chorus of investors and traditional SRIs say they are shareowners, actively using their influence to push companies to improve social and environmental policies. Their stance is both moral and economic: evidence shows that poor environmental and social practices can lead to financial woes, like the $40 billion price tag attached to BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But do companies really listen to these do-gooder investors? Analysts, non-profits and even company insiders say that although final decisions rest with the majority shareholders (the owners), minority shareholders – even those with relatively few shares – can have an impact. A company’s annual general meeting (AGM) provides an opportunity for responsible investors to file shareholder resolutions, vote on company policy and garner media coverage for their cause.

“Companies prepare for their AGMs months in advance and they know if a shareholder resolution is in the works,” said one oil and gas insider. To avoid the spotlight, he said, “they’ll do everything they can in advance to resolve problems.”

Private talks, phone calls and letters are more appealing to company executives who are intent on minimizing scandal. Shareholder resolutions, on the other hand, are public. If passed, the company is obliged to execute them and report on progress. Since most SRI firms hold less than 1 per cent of a company’s shares, it’s rare for their resolutions to obtain a majority vote. But a tally of 20 per cent will capture media attention and might put enough pressure on a company to address some of the issues raised.

To gain more votes, SRIs need to win over more mainstream investors. An analysis by Corporate Knights, using data from the environmental-investor group CERES Resolution Tracker, shows that SRIs are making an impact. About three-quarters of environmental and social resolutions tracked by CERES received either 20 per cent of shareholder votes or the matter was resolved in advance. The list included several oil, mining and gas companies. Issues ranged from water pollution and worker safety at Marathon Oil to climate change and emission reductions at Occidental Petroleum and Exxon Mobil.

A new study published last year by U.S. and U.K. academics shows that activism by shareholders (known as ‘engagement’) also makes financial sense. The study, which won a prize from the University of Berkeley, examined 2,152 engagements by shareholders over a 10-year period and found that successful activities led to higher shareholder returns.

But even when a resolution is passed, implementation can be difficult, as illustrated by the famous Newmont gold mining case. In 2007, a group of about 15 Christian investors filed a resolution at the gold giant’s annual meeting in Colorado. The document called for an independent review of Newmont’s poor handling of conflicts with local communities at its mines around the globe. Oddly, the resolution passed with over 95 per cent support, meaning the company itself actually voted in favour. This marked the first time a U.S. mining company had endorsed a social resolution at its own AGM.

Rev. Seamus Finn of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, one of the resolution’s supporters, says Newmont’s support remains a mystery. “It may have been they saw the writing on the wall.”

At the time, Newmont was under fire for its treatment of local communities in Peru, Ghana, Indonesia and the U.S., and had even faced legal action for environmental contamination at a few of its mines. Despite the surrounding controversy, the resolution was heralded as a victory for SRIs.

The resulting independent review, published in 2009, was surprisingly critical of the company and included a hefty list of recommendations. In a move some consider groundbreaking, Newmont created an independent advisory panel to help implement the report that included Christian Brothers Investment Services, the leading proponent of the resolution, and long-time critics of the company like Oxfam and Earthworks.

“We felt the report could have an impact on the industry,” says Julie Tanner, assistant director of SRI at Christian Brothers. “It was one of the first in the mining industry that was so extensive and with the clear goal of trying to develop recommendations for change.”

But three years later, Tanner admits it’s been “difficult” to get information on the company’s implementation of the report. Activists put it more bluntly, saying that recent violence at Newmont’s mine proves the company has failed to follow through on the recommendations.

In 2012, Newmont was forced to suspend a $4.8 billion expansion project at its Yanacocha mine in Peru after massive protests supported by the regional government resulted in five civilian deaths. The Minas Conga gold project would have been Newmont’s largest mine to date, but locals say it would destroy four sacred lakes, the source of water for an entire farming region.

Every day of delay from protests was costing Newmont shareholders an estimated $2 million, illustrating the danger of pushing ahead with a project without first obtaining local consent. But Newmont insists that Conga isn’t completely dead. It has announced plans to build water reservoirs on the site, sparking accusations that the company is creeping ahead with plans to build the mine despite local opposition.

Newmont’s responsible investors now face some tough decisions. If they divest, they lose their opportunity to hold Newmont accountable. But if they stay, they risk being used to prop up the company’s already tarnished image. Having SRI firms on board is like being awarded a certificate of “good conduct” and Newmont’s handling of the Conga crisis hardly deserves a medal.

The case highlights another challenge for responsible investors: the issue of local consent. It’s not hard to ask a company to put more women on the board of directors or to use cleaner technologies. But what if the local community’s wishes go against shareholders’ interests? What if the community quite simply wants the company to go away?

These tough questions were put to the test when a group of responsible investors, including Ethical Funds, part of NEI, filed a shareholder resolution in 2008 asking Vancouver-based Goldcorp to conduct a human rights impact review at its Guatemalan mine. Before the resolution came up for voting, the company agreed to conduct the review and the resolution was withdrawn. A year later, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, one of the resolution’s signatories, withdrew its involvement in the review process because community leaders said they were not consulted about the resolution. They also accused Goldcorp of manipulating the review process.

That the SRIs neglected to obtain support from locals before taking action on their behalf highlights what activists consider a conflict of interest. “SRI firms might be supporting best practices, but at the end of the day they earn money from the company,” said Camilo Leon, who has worked on corporate social responsibility for mining firms, non-profits and the government in Peru. “If there’s no mining project, there’s no money.”

Can investors overcome this conflict of interest? There’s the encouraging case of Vedanta Resources, a British-based natural resources company that tried to develop a bauxite mine in India’s Orissa state despite opposition from the local indigenous group. The 9,000-member Dongria Kondh survive on hunting and gathering and said the project would destroy their water resources and livelihood.

In 2007 Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested its holdings of Vedanta, accusing the company of environmental damage and complicity in human rights violations. Three years later several other high-profile investors divested, including the Church of England, Marlborough Ethical Fund and the Dutch pension giant PGGM. India’s government responded by rejecting Vedanta’s plans, causing the company’s shares to plummet.

The SRIs that divested not only made a strong moral statement, they also spared themselves the resulting losses from Vedanta’s falling share prices.

Examples like Vedanta, where shareholders divest from billion-dollar projects that lack a social license, are few, however. The majority of SRIs have a more subtle impact on oil, gas and mining industries, leveraging their clout to advance social and environmental policy and more efficient use of natural resources. In the process, they must navigate tricky waters to ensure they don’t harm local struggles or become good publicity for companies with damaged reputations.

The challenges are great, but the alternative is to leave investment in this sector to the sharks: those who believe “social” means a good cocktail party and “responsible investing” is about getting the highest return for clients, without caring how that money is earned.

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