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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
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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
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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
