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

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
President emeritus , Stanford University

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

http://www.ilankelman.org

As population rises from 7 billion today toward 9 billion by 2050, the inevitable logic of exponential growth in both population and consumption is now hitting the limits of global ecosystems and resource availability. The immediate pressure points are climate change, energy security, biodiversity loss, water and food availability, issues which are converging rapidly in an unprecedented manner, in the process contributing substantially to current financial instability… Climate change is arguably the most intractable of these issues, due to its complexity, inherent uncertainties and the inertia of the climatic system. However, there is now unprecedented evidence that human carbon emissions from fossil-fuel consumption and land degradation are, on the balance of probabilities, warming the planet at an accelerating rate… The implications for energy are diabolical. Changes to the energy system take decades to implement, but fossil-fuel emissions must be cut rapidly and there is no sign that sequestration methods, such as carbon capture and storage, will contribute to a solution either at the scale, or in the time, now required.

Read more: http://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2011_Dunlop-Climate-energy.pdf

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 population issues of the day, from the quest for sustainable energy sources to a look at what our biggest cities could look like in the decades to come

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 ancient population fallacies.

Australia is a centre of one of the most dangerous myths to infect civilisation: that population and economic growth have no limits. The “big Australia” fallacy is pushed by unscrupulous developers, politicians, media moguls and their buddies, who will personally profit from growth.

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 that are defining our world of 7 billion and documents actions that people in vastly different countries and circumstances are taking in their own communities to make the most of their–and our–world.

The report makes the case for sound planning and investing in people.

Read the report: http://www.unfpa.org/swp/index.html

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 on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

Read more & watch the video: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2011-temps.html

One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive.

Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scrubbing-carbon-dioxide-air-too-expensive