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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Blue Planet Laureates: Environmental and Development Challenges – The Imperative to Act 2 days, 8 hours ago
This paper is a synthesis of the key messages from the individual papers written by the Blue Planet Laureates (Annex I describes the Blue Planet Prize), and discusses the current and projected state of the global […]
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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Why Join the MAHB? 6 days, 15 hours ago
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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Interdisciplinary Sustainability 6 days, 20 hours ago
What do natural and social scientists create for sustainability when they work together?
Rhetorical answers:
1. Innovation: Working together means understanding ourselves from different viewpoints–and […] -
Katy Ashe wrote a new post, The 7 Billion Wager 6 days, 20 hours ago
At an event at Johns Hopkins University on October 14th, 2011 marking the arrival of the 7 billionth human on the planet, Professor David Lam of the University of Michigan and President of the Population […]
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Hilary Boudet wrote a new post, Mission 6 days, 21 hours ago
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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Why the Real Victim of Overpopulation Will Be the Environment 6 days, 21 hours ago
by Bryan Walsh. Time Magazine. October 26, 2011.
This month, the 7 billionth person will be born on a planet already strapped for resources. To mark this extraordinary milestone, TIME explores the most pressing […] -
apesoapeso became a registered member 1 week ago
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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, The Must Haves for a Sustainable 2050 1 week ago
This report describes an 18-month World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) project, Vision 2050. The vision was formed by a technique of backcasting past events, to evaluate the plausibility of […]
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Katy Ashe started the topic Democratic crisis resolution? in the forum MAHB Members Forum 1 week ago
Can the population-resource-environment crisis be resolved in any way that could be considered “democratic”?
Question posed by: Professor Paul R Ehrlich, Stanford University -
Ahmad Ali became a registered member 1 week ago
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Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Climate Change: What it means in terms of energy 1 week, 5 days ago
by Ian T Dunlop International Conferenceon the Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21st Century: Basel. October 17-18, 2011
As population rises from 7 billion today toward 9 billion by 2050, […] -
Katy Ashe wrote a new post, Population Growth Sees Myths Reborn 1 week, 5 days ago
by Paul Ehrlich The Age: Australia. November 1, 2011
The news that the human population now numbers more than 7 billion – and the projection that it may grow to 15 billion – has caused the re-emergence of many […] -
Katy Ashe wrote a new post, State of World Population 2011: People and possibilities in a world of 7 billion 2 weeks ago
United Nations Population Fund. October 2011
This year’s State of World Population report, People and Possibilities in a World of 7 Billion, looks at the the dynamics behind the numbers. It explains the trends […] -
Katy Ashe wrote a new post, NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record 2 weeks ago
NASA Headquarters release No. 12-020. January 29, 2012.
Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures […] - Load More
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Recent Posts
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Blue Planet Laureates: Environmental and Development Challenges – The Imperative to Act
February 20, 2012
This paper is a synthesis of the key messages from the individual papers written by the Blue Planet Laureates (Annex I describes the Blue Planet Prize), and discusses the current and projected state of the global and regional environment, and the implications for environmental, social and economic sustainability. It addresses the drivers for change, the implications for inaction, and what is needed to achieve economic development and growth among the poor, coupled with environmental and social sustainability, and the imperative of action now.
Authors:
Gro Harlem Brundtland, Paul Ehrlich, Jose Goldemberg, James Hansen, Amory Lovins, Gene Likens, James Lovelock, Suki Manabe, Bob May, Hal Mooney, Karl-Henrik Robert, Emil Salim, Gordon Sato, Susan Solomon, Nicholas Stern, MS Swaminathan, Bob Watson, Barefoot College, Conservation International, International institute of Environment and Development, and International Union for the Conservation of Nature
Read the Paper! -
The Must Haves for a Sustainable 2050
February 15, 2012
This report describes an 18-month World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) project, Vision 2050. The vision was formed by a technique of backcasting past events, to evaluate the plausibility of reaching a reasonably sustainable world in 2050. The team comprised of 29 senior strategists representing 29 diverse companies. Its leadership included two of the co-authors of the present report: Idar Kreutzer, CEO of Storebrand, a large Norwegian financial services company. and Mohammad Zaidi, who was until the latter part of 2011, the Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of Alcoa, one of the world’s leading aluminum companies. They were joined by two CEOs from WBCSD member companies, Price Waterhouse Coopers and Syngenta.
The project is causing major strategic re-thinking among the 200 member companies in the World Business Council, and has generated thoughtful discussions in proceedings conducted by the United Nations, OECD, and a variety of academic institutions. That WBCSD has led the way on this project is especially significant given that its member companies have $7 trillion in annual revenues (comparison: China’s GDP at current exchange rate is $5.8 trillion).
An important focus of the Report is to call out the urgency that is being felt by WBCSD member companies, and their concern that we must bring together many elements of global society to accomplish its objectives. The Report emphasizes the challenge of bringing together government, business, and NGOs to accomplish the very difficult 40 “must-haves “ that the Report’s analysis shows to be essential if we hope to be on track to achieve a sustainable 2050.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development completed the Vision 2050 project in February of 2010. It stands as the most comprehensive set of milestones and one of the most plausible visions of the future of human civilization.
The two authors of the Report, Kreutzer and Zaidi, have joined with Stanford University professor of Biological Science, Paul Ehrlich, and Bob Horn, a visiting scholar at Stanford, to go beyond the WBCSD report. Here we try to summarize the strategic implications of the work done by the Vision 2050 project. What’s especially significant about it is the clear indication that the companies in the WBSCD have achieved agreement on a new concept that represents a turning point – a way of thinking about our collective future in which business are prepared to commit themselves to be part of sustainable future. We think the identification of a critical 40 “must haves” to make that destination a real prospect is an extraordinary accomplishment. To fulfill its promise about the future, others will need to explore the clusters that represent key elements in each of those critical objectives – in short, supporting the new directions necessary for us to reach a sustainable 2050. This reminds us that we are now well into the year that marks the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
The other major advance represented in this report is the way in which it brings together representatives of two major institutions in our civilization that often have been at odds with each other. Two of its authors represent the forward-looking business community; another, my colleague Paul Ehrlich, a spokesman for decades on the part of the scholarly community supporting environmental responsibility. These authors, among whom I am proud to count myself, agree that there is a singular need for diverse institutions in our civilization to do the urgent work of confronting climate change, social inertia, and the other challenges that confront the prospect of sustainability.
We are pleased to make this report the first in the series that the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) will be producing. We hope that it will inspire representatives of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and business communities to work together in more fruitful ways to accomplish the 40 must-haves.
Don Kennedy
Read the Full Report
President emeritus , Stanford University -
Interdisciplinary Sustainability
February 15, 2012
What do natural and social scientists create for sustainability when they work together?
Rhetorical answers:
1. Innovation: Working together means understanding ourselves from different viewpoints–and moving forward with collaborative ideas to create change.
2. Wisdom: Collecting lifetimes of varied experience shows what we can do as a global team.
3. Technology conforming to people’s needs rather than forcing people to conform to technology’s needs.
4. Application (Usable Science): We need basic science, but we need to understand how that applies / is used in day-to-day life–and that can be applied/used to change day-to-day life.
5. Using one field’s knowledge to fill in the gaps and to overcome the limitations of another field’s knowledge
Tangible answers:
1. A Smart Car that uses less fossil fuels and smart drivers who know when to take public transport.
2. Local, small-scale energy technologies and a population who can use them.
3. The facts about climate change and how to communicate those facts to convince non-scientists.
4. Urban planning that factors in how both nature (ecology) and society (sociology) develop within cities.
5. Decision making software for sustainable product choices that is designed around how people think, not how computer languages do not think.
Ilan Kelman, CICERO
