[Graeme]

Understanding the Sustainable Development Goals and Looking Forward

On September 11, 2014, I stepped into the United Nations for the first time. Attending the High-Level Stocktaking Event on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, I had the opportunity to see the President of the General Assembly, the Secretary-General, heads of nearly every department, and even, oddly enough, the director of Love Actually.

That was the first time I saw the post-2015 development agenda discussion in action, and I was amazed at the capacity of its potential impact. For those that don’t know, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, are universal goals set by the countries of the United Nations to begin when the current Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. They grew out of the outcome document from Rio +20 entitled The Future We Want. In the report, the member states agreed that the "SDGs should be action-oriented, concise and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities" (Paragraph 247).

The process of creating the post-2015 development agenda, of which the SDGs are one component, is led by UN member states with participation from a variety of groups and civil society stakeholders. The most notable inputs into the agenda thus far are the proposals by an open working group on the content of the goals, the report of an intergovernmental committee of experts on sustainable development financing, and discussions on technology facilitation, among others.

The Open Working Group (OWG) is the primary basis for integrating the SDGs into the future development agenda. The OWG held 13 sessions over the course of a year and in July 2014 agreed on a set of 17 goals and 169 targets to submit to the UN General Assembly for consideration. .
17 Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the Open Working Group

Goal 1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2 End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3 Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4 Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8 Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9 Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
Goal 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

theenergycollective

[dohboi]

#8 "Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth" makes the rest kind of a joke.

[Graeme]

The goals are lofty but the pathway is not:

Is corporate sustainability reporting a great waste of time?

What could be less sustainable than reams of reporting that no one reads? That’s the concern voiced in a recent report by strategic thinktank and consultancy SustainAbility, which warns that companies are wasting time and money creating sustainability reports that aren’t effective.

“We’ve seen things plateau, and while the reports are doing many good things, they could be doing so much more, adding much more value,” says report author and SustainAbility manager Margo Mosher.

After analysing over 50 interviews with its own professional stakeholder network, and a survey of nearly 500 sustainability experts and thought leaders, SustainAbility concludes that sustainability reporting has stalled.

Others throughout the sustainability reporting industry have come to similar conclusions. “Of the companies that are already reporting, I do believe sustainability reporting is stalled, but there’s a ton of room for growth. The reason it’s plateaued is basically a marketing problem. People write these giant reports, plagued by special language and catch-all-categories, and don’t think about the audience,” says Kevin Wilhelm, CEO of Sustainability Business Consulting.


To reinvigorate corporate sustainability reporting, and add more value to the process, companies need to “zero in on what’s important to the key stakeholders”, Mosher says. That can be done by integrating the most important materiality issues into the corporate transparency strategy, valuing the business’ externalities and looking at the unintended consequences of not taking issues such as resource scarcity more seriously.

“Resource scarcity is a huge driver, not only for valuing externalities and managing risk, but because many companies may not realize they even have a resource dependency,” Mosher says. “It’s the underlying driver of why we are all worried, and why sustainability is so important.”

theguardian

[careinke]

#8 "Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth" makes the rest kind of a joke.

Any time I see "sustainable growth", I know I'm being lied to, especially if the word "economic" is in the same sentence. You wonder who believes this, then you remember half the world has a below average IQ.

[Graeme]

Four multinationals shifting their business models for sustainability

Last year, the CEO of Fortune 250 energy provider NRG wrote a letter to shareholders about the lack of innovation in the energy industry. “There is no Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google in the American energy industry today,” David Crane wrote. “NRG is not that energy company either, but we are doing everything in our power to head in that direction – as fast as we can. But we need to pick up the pace further, and that is what we intend to do.”

Although NRG’s portfolio still includes 30% coal-generated power, it is repositioning itself and its business model to guide energy users from a grid-based power system to a distributed generation system. It’s also developing products and services related to electric vehicles, rooftop solar and home energy efficiency.

As business leaders begin to see themselves as part of a larger system that is grappling with challenging business conditions – in NRG’s case, climate change risks, the possibility of a price on carbon, and disruptive innovations in renewable and distributed energy – many recognize the need for dramatic shifts in the way they do business. They also see new opportunities to help their customers adapt to and thrive in a more sustainable future.

In a forthcoming report on business model innovation, Model Behavior II: Strategies to Rewire Business, SustainAbility tells the stories of four multinational companies that have shifted their business models to become more sustainable.

For Novelis, rather than continuing to source virgin, primary aluminum, it moved to recycled aluminum because it made more financial sense and would position the company to be resilient to climate change.

To differentiate itself from competitors at the high and low end of the market, Starbucks realized that green building provided more value to numerous stakeholders.

Fibria acknowledged that while demand for its traditional paper products would remain strong for years, it was risky to depend on historic patterns of demand and began to shift its mindset about how to use its forest and land assets differently.

And as part of a larger effort to retain its core customers – farmers – Syngenta changed its sales approach to focus more on what farmers needed to capture extra value from their yields.

theguardian

[dohboi]

India Just Upped Its Solar Target Five-Fold, Will Install More Solar This Year Than Germany

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/0 ... gigawatts/

[Newfie]

That article is NOT about reducing energy use, or sustainability in any way. It is about producing MORE power so that th 400,000,000 Indians without electricity can have some.

That wll likely ramp up their consumption.

NOT good environmental news.

[Graeme]

No it's about giving millions of Indians access to electricity which they haven't had before. This will improve their lives and prevent them from burning kerosene for lighting and wood for cooking. It is also about displacing coal.

[dohboi]

Yeah, Newf, I'm always looking for a feel good story or two so people don't think I'm totally and entirely a downer.

But you pinpointed the confusion dominant in most minds (even mine sometimes! ).

More alternative energy is certainly not necessarily the same as less ff energy.

And what that energy gets used for can be just as damaging whatever the source.

G, it might do those things. And we certainly want alternatives available so that as we (hopefully) turn away from ffs we'll have something for folks to fall back on.

But right now there's no guarantee that this won't add to the problem. Without high carbon costs and preferably direct regulation capping how much carbon can be used, there is just no guarantee that alternatives will replace ff sources rather than just augmenting them.

[ralfy]

The thread title should be changed to "corporate sustainability".

[Newfie]

Doh,

It's in my character to be the eternal skeptic, always looking for the failure mode. I tell ya, I'm a real blast at a cocktail party.

[careinke]

No it's about giving millions of Indians access to electricity which they haven't had before. This will improve their lives and prevent them from burning kerosene for lighting and wood for cooking. It is also about displacing coal.

Electric ovens will take a LOT of solar panels to replace wood. Rocket stoves may be a better option for cooking.

I'm not saying don't do solar it's a great idea. Just saying that precious electricity will probably be used for things other than cooking for a while.

[onlooker]

http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/a-th ... -distress/
Something that is getting worse and worse as groundwater is being quickly used up which in some cases cannot be replenished or which eliminates a source of fresh water. This is one of the biggies in terms of sustaining or not sustaining a large human population. I do not know how you can create water from nothing. As for ocean water in desalination plants well perhaps but it would be expensive so probably only for the relatively rich countries.

[Lore]

Desalination is not going to put cheap food on the table or very much of it. So, we have agricultural places like California, and cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas with people standing around surrounded by desertification. Not the poster I'd want to promote. It's just a matter of several years, or sooner before people start peeling off in mass looking for literally greener pastures.

[onlooker]

Desalination is not going to put cheap food on the table or very much of it. So, we have agricultural places like California, and cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas with people standing around surrounded by desertification. Not the poster I'd want to promote. It's just a matter of several years, or sooner before people start peeling off in mass looking for literally greener pastures.

True, Lore things are heating up pardon the pun in short time. Expensive desalination for whom and when?

[Graeme]

No it's about giving millions of Indians access to electricity which they haven't had before. This will improve their lives and prevent them from burning kerosene for lighting and wood for cooking. It is also about displacing coal.

Electric ovens will take a LOT of solar panels to replace wood. Rocket stoves may be a better option for cooking.

I'm not saying don't do solar it's a great idea. Just saying that precious electricity will probably be used for things other than cooking for a while.

True but cheap light is important to millions around the world.

How to Light the Off-Grid World With Solar in a Decade

The combination of solar, lithium batteries, and LEDs can produce light that's drastically less costly than kerosene. But we're still limiting our potential in financing the businesses behind these technologies.

In the past few years, entrepreneurial solar companies around the world have demonstrated that the prepaid business model of the mobile phone industry can be applied to energy. They have demonstrated that their technology works, that customers will pay for it, and that their business models are profitable at scale.

Their success mirrors the early days of the mobile phone revolution in Africa. While extending the electric grid costs $2,800 per household and therefore needs to be paid for through aid, small-scale solar can be deployed for less than 5 percent of this cost, on a commercial basis.


To unlock the potential of distributed solar energy and solve humanity's energy crisis, we need a Global Solar Bank that can replicate the successes of SNV in Tanzania and IDCOL in Bangladesh.

The bank would provide a program to any country interested in financing large-scale off-grid development. The program would have two components. First, it would offer results-based financing to companies willing to enter underserved markets, catalyzing new investment. Second, it would offer low-interest debt that could be passed on to those companies in order to provide financing to their customers.

The total capital required to create a Global Solar Bank would be only a small fraction of the cost of extending the grid. It would mean connecting off-grid customers to modern energy decades earlier than anticipated. Most important, it could fundamentally change the lives of more than 1 billion people.

greentechmedia

[Graeme]

What is SCP?

Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) is about promoting resource and energy efficiency, sustainable infrastructure, and providing access to basic services, green and decent jobs and a better quality of life for all. The implementation of SCP as an integrated approach helps to achieve overall development plans, reduce future economic, environmental and social costs, strengthen economic competitiveness and reduce poverty.

Sustainable consumption and production is defined as “the use of services and related products, which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimising the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as the emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle of the service or product so as not to jeopardise the needs of future generations.” Norwegian Ministry of Environment, Oslo Symposium, 1994.

SCP aims at “doing more and better with less,” increasing net welfare gains from economic activities by reducing resource use, degradation and pollution along the whole lifecycle, while increasing quality of life. This change towards SCP involves different stakeholders, including business, consumers, policy makers, researchers, scientists, retailers, media, and development cooperation agencies, among others. It requires a systemic approach and cooperation among actors operating in the supply chain, from producer to final consumer. It involves engaging consumers through awareness-raising and education on sustainable consumption and lifestyles, providing consumers with adequate information through standards and labels and engaging in sustainable public procurement, among others.

unep

[Graeme]

FirstCarbon & Carbon Clear Announce Partnership To Serve Global Sustainability Needs

Transparency is big business, and getting bigger. The push for transparency in corporate environmental practices and impacts is growing fast and, globally, driven by sustainability-minded investors, by consumers, by new purchasing priorities, and by legislation.

As a result, companies around the world are dedicating more resources to measuring and mitigating their environmental impacts — from the carbon footprints of their supply chains to water consumption at their facilities and everything in between. Supporting these trends are indexing and reporting entities such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and, perhaps most important, CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project). All of these initiatives require participating organizations to meaningfully measure, document, and reduce carbon emissions – providing a standard for assessment by stakeholders.

A partnership for the future

The move toward transparency is also contributing to rising demand in the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) sector, leading ESG providers like FirstCarbon Solutions, Carbon Clear, and others to think innovatively about how we operate. The recent partnership we announced with Carbon Clear is a case in point. We announced this new collaboration to expand our aggregate reach and develop joint services to help companies measure, report, and reduce their carbon and other environmental impacts. Simply put, industry needs are growing fast – and we can better meet them by working together.

cleantechnica

[Newfie]

Graham,

You can't eat light.