When we think of innovations, we often think of the latest airliner, smartphone or flat screen TV. These bring many benefits, jobs and pleasure, but rarely make the world more sustainable.

One of Canada’s top business innovators has said the Canadian government needs to do more to help the country innovate its way to sustainability. Jim Balsillie is co-founder and former co-CEO of Research in Motion (now BlackBerry), and founder and chair of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an international governance think tank.

In a speech to an International Institute for Sustainable Development meeting in Toronto earlier this year, Mr. Balsillie said the government needs to do more to foster the development of sustainable development technologies. He said Canada has strengths in public policy, but they are not harnessed for sustainability. He proposed Canada’s “Own the Podium” strategy that brought Olympic success as a model for organizing resources and energy for sustainable business development.

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Guest blog By David Letteney

As renewable energy is playing a larger role in the world’s energy mix there is a clear trend that sports clubs are starting to use green energy as a way to reduce costs, create positive public relations and show they want to reduce their pollution and carbon footprints.

This is significant because sports events, sports clubs, and individual sportspersons have tremendous power to influence. Billions of people watch the world cup, and the Olympics incorporate almost every nation on the planet. Home teams dominate the local news, and the local news media surround local players, hanging on their every word. As Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council stated, “Thirteen per cent of Americans follow science, Sixty-one per cent follow sports. If you want to change the world, you have to go where the people are.”

This change in the use of renewable energy in sport can be traced from the last World Cup, the Olympics, English football, U.S. college football, the U.S. National Football League, tennis, hockey and even professional motor racing.
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Sustainability is about integrating economic, social and environmental decisions. One of the popular images is of a three-legged stool. For stability you need the three legs to be equal. Dealing with greenhouse gases and climate change is the greatest test of the world’s willingness and ability to find ways to successfully integrate the different needs and interests.

The next attempt comes during annual U.N. climate talks in Warsaw on November 11-22. The aim is for representatives from some 200 nations to hammer out a deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in time to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The betting is that they won’t be able to do it. Economic development interests are likely to once more trump the need for a safe and stable climate system. The economic leg of the stool will take precedence. A recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme said global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, instead of falling back to a safe level. In Canada, for example, rising emissions from oil sands production means this country is headed to miss another of its targets for greenhouse gas reductions. Other nations, such as China and India, are still expanding their use of coal, the most greenhouse gas intensive of the fossil fuels.

Economic growth takes priority in virtually all nations. Developed countries are preoccupied with trying to restart economies hard hit by the financial collapses of 2008. Unemployment is still high in most of these nations. Developing countries are still trying to grow their economies to lift more of their citizens out of poverty, another major goal of sustainable development.

The answer, of course, is to make a rapid transition to energy sources that do not release greenhouse gases, but this is costly, and will take decades even if the money is there. The world needs to agree on a rapid and economically costly project to speed the transition away from energy sources that release greenhouse gases. It would include not only major shifts on spending within countries, but very large financial and technology transfers from richer to poorer nations so they do not build their economies on pillars of pollution.

Can nations make this kind of agreement? We’ll see.

Many of the benefits of moving to sustainability will go to future generations. The title of the seminal Brundtland Report of 1987 is Our Common Future.

An article in Time by Bryan Walsh looks at how planning for the long term often goes against the grain of human nature. He uses a study of investing in climate change as an example.

Stopping or at least slowing climate change means a radical shift away from the relatively cheap fossil fuels that move us around, heat our homes and power much of the global economy. The economic cost of the transition would fall mainly on our shoulders, while much of the benefit would be avoiding costs for future generations.

Walsh says that “…climate policy asks the present to sacrifice for the future,” but humans are not very good at that kind of planning. He notes that many people have not even been able to set aside enough money for a decent retirement.

His bottom line: we better look for climate policies that also bring benefits in the short term, noting that reducing fossil fuel consumption will also bring cleaner air and better health.

The line “What have future generations done for me?” needs to be taken seriously. While people do care about their children’s’ future, their focus is mainly on the short term. Sustainability policies must take this into account or they risk getting shelved.

A global survey of concern about the impact of environmental change on humanity’s future shows ongoing concern, with little change over the past year.

The Asahi Glass Foundation in Japan calculated the responses of more than 1,300 environmental experts selected from governments, academic institutions, NGOs, corporations and mass media. They were asked to measure their sense of crisis “about the continuance of the human race as the global environment continues to deteriorate.” They measured their level of concern in terms of minutes to midnight on the Environmental Doomsday Clock.

Environmental Doomsday Clock

This is the latest survey by the foundation, which started in 1992, when the clock only read 7:49 pm. This year it moved to 9:19 pm.

It is useful to look at the regional differences. The greatest levels of concern were from North America and Oceania. The latter is no surprise given fears that sea level rise from global warming will make some low-lying islands uninhabitable. The lowest concern levels were in Asia and the Middle East.

Some of the most interesting reading is in the comments from people surveyed. Some make very specific recommendations. Others call for a fundamental rethink of how we consume.

The Asahi Foundation’s Environmental Doomsday Clock is modeled on the Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947 to represent the threat of nuclear war to human survival. More recently it has also reflected other risks, such as climate change.

You can see the modern, industrialized and globalized food system every time you walk into a supermarket. There are stacks of fresh foods stuffed into plastic boxes. Meat, vegetables and fruits come from around the world: lamb from New Zealand, grapes from Chile, apple juice from China, strawberries from California and so on.

What most people do not see is the ecological impact of a food system based on ever-larger farms growing single crops and maintained with huge machines. The system uses lots of fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals. It emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, both in production and transportation. It causes from soil erosion and soil compaction from the heavy machinery, and its monoculture crops are vulnerable to pest attacks.

In the short term it delivers lots of cheap food, but this kind of agriculture is not sustainable in the long term. Like so much in “western” society, it is about short-term profits, with little regard for its long-term viability.

At the same time population increase will increase pressures on our food supplies. We are now more than 7 billion and adding nearly 80 million a year. Countries like India and China, each with more than 1 billion people, are starting to move to a meatier, more resource-intensive diet.

The UN projects a global population of more than 9 billion by 2050. Will we be able to feed ourselves? Can we do it with a sustainable food system based on ecological agriculture?

These are central questions in Consumed: Food for a finite planet, the latest book by my friend Sarah Elton.

Elton says the present system of industrial agriculture must be dismantled and replaced with small-scale local and urban organic agriculture. She says we need sustainable food systems that maintain soil health, conserve water, reduce soil erosion and conserve biodiversity by leaving habitat for other species. She calls for a return to pasture-based farming even though this will mean a sharp reduction in meat supply, but adds that we eat too much meat now.

Elton calls for a “…a good, clean and fair food system.” She says farmers must earn a living wage. “We cannot continue to exploit farmers so the rest of us can eat cheap food.”

A well-established writer and broadcaster on food issues, she tackled food in 2010 with her book Locavore, promoting the local food movement in Canada.

With Consumed she goes for the global scale, asking, “How will we feed ourselves in 2050?” She looked for answers in local food systems on four continents, telling stories of small-scale organic farmers, thriving regional food cultures and resurgent grassroots organizations.

In India, she visits an organic bazaar in Aurangabad and talks to a woman who abandoned fossil fuel-based fertilizers to go organic, becoming self-sufficient and financially secure.

In China’s Yunnan province, she shows us 2000-year-old rice paddy terracing that still works.

In the Aubrac region in south central France, we encounter a thriving rural community that produces the prized Laguiole cheese, using traditional techniques.

In the Charlevoix region on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, Elton finds a herd of Canadiennes, descendants of the cattle brought to North America by French settlers four centuries ago. This is a story of preserving genetic diversity at time when industrial agriculture is focussing on just a few breeds.

Elton is a good storyteller, serving up a dish of both science and human interest stories. She shows people trying to farm in a sustainable way, and make a decent living. Consumed opens the door to a badly needed discussion about how we are going to provide healthy food to more people without running down the planet at the same time.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is another signal that we are on a dangerous track away from sustainability.

Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis, says human actions have driven atmospheric concentrations of climate warming carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. Carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by 40 per cent since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions, as well as land use changes, such as deforestation. The ocean has absorbed about 30 per cent of the CO2, causing ocean acidification, which threatens marine life.

This comes from the Fifth Assessment Report on climate change by the IPCC. It is based on millions of observations and 9,200 scientific publications.

Global temperature increase

It says: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent.”

The world’s top climate scientists warned the planet is committed to centuries of a changed climate, even if emissions stop now. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

A changing climate means the world faces a series of risks.

Over the past few decades there have been more heat waves and heavy rainfalls in parts of the world. Thomas Stocker, co-chair of an IPPC Working Group said, “Heat waves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As the Earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall, and dry regions receiving less, although there will be exceptions.”

His remarks came after the worst flooding in Alberta’s history, a flash flood that shut down traffic, including a train, in Toronto, and floods in Colorado that killed a number of people.

Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been shrinking at an increasing rate, glaciers have continued to decline almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease. As the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets shrink, global sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than over the past 40 years. This will lead to more coastal flooding.

Research ship Tara sails around the Arctic, 2013

As if to add an exclamation point to the IPCC report, a large freighter sailed through the Northwest Passage this fall. The Nordic Orion carried a load of coal (which releases greenhouse gases when burned) from Vancouver, bound for Finland. This summer and fall the Tara, a sailing yacht doing scientific research, circumnavigated the Arctic, finishing by the Northwest Passage. It is operated by a French non-profit environmental organization.

Two recent statements from the International Energy Agency (IEA) do not bode well for the critical energy and sustainability file.

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map warns that greenhouse gas emissions are still too high. “The world is not on track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius,” stated the Paris-based source of expertise on global energy.

The IEA estimates there was a 1.4 per cent increase in global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2012, reaching a record high of 31.6 billion tonnes.

In May, CO2 levels in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in several hundred thousand years.

According to the IEA, “The weight of scientific analysis tells us that our climate is already changing and that we should expect extreme weather events (such as storms, floods and heat waves) to become more frequent and intense, as well as increasing global temperatures and rising sea levels. Policies that have been implemented, or are now being pursued, suggest that the long-term average temperature increase is more likely to be between 3.6°C and 5.3°C.”

IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven lamented that “Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite.”

She said the energy-climate report maps out four energy policies that can deliver significant emissions reductions by 2020, using existing technologies that have already been adopted successfully in several countries:

• Greater energy efficiency measures in buildings, industry and transport.
• Limiting the construction and use of the least-efficient coal-fired power plants.
• Halving expected methane (a potent greenhouse gas) releases into the atmosphere from oil and gas industries.
• Reducing fossil fuel consumption subsidies.

In another report, http://iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2013/may/name,38080,en.html, the IEA said a surge in North American oil production is helping to increase the world supply of fossil fuels. This is the result of new technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing, which provide access to large amounts of oil and gas that were previously trapped in rock formations.

In the past, there have been predictions that the world would run short of fuel, but the limit to production may not be one of supply, but of pollution. How much climate change is the world willing to endure?

Inertia, call it laziness, has long been seen as one of the great barriers to a transition to sustainability. People can be slow to change to greener options when the benefits are longer term, and the change may take some effort and introduce some uncertainty.

Cass R. Sunstein, a former U.S. government administrator, says that too often people continue practices that are hard on the environment simply because this is the way they have always done things. Mr. Sunstein says society needs to change the default rules so that the normal option for many decisions is a greener one.

As a simple example, he said a university switched the default setting on its printers to double-sided printing and saved more than seven million sheets of paper in one semester. He recommends applying this type of approach to issues like energy, where people would automatically be signed up for green energy unless they opted out.

He said this is a way to help overcome our normal inertia, procrastination and fear of losing something by making changes.

In an article in The Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/what-if-we-were-green-by-default/article11579431/ he wrote: “Green default rules have the advantage of maintaining freedom of choice, but they also promise to protect the environment, save money, increase energy independence and reduce energy use. They ensure that, if people do nothing at all, they will act in an environmentally friendly fashion.”

He said that green default rules may be a more effective tool for altering outcomes than large economic incentives, but need to be chosen in a way that considers people’s welfare as well as the environment, and does not unfairly impose costs on people who will have a hard time paying.

Mr. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012. He also co-authored a longer paper, Automatically Green: Behavioral Economics and Environmental Protection, with Lucia Reisch of the Copenhagen Business School.

It can be found on the Social Science Research Network at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2245657.

A sustainability professor from Roads University in Victoria, BC has proposed a 10-point agenda for a transition to sustainability. Ann Dale suggests a move to an economy of low or zero growth to deliver prosperity while reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.

Dale writes in Action Agenda: rethinking growth and prosperityhttp://mc3.royalroads.ca/sites/default/files/webfiles/MC3%20Climate%20Action%20Agenda.pdf  that the present economy, based on perpetual growth, rising levels of debt and continuing ecological deficits, cannot continue.

The proposed agenda was developed with input from more than 100 researchers, practitioners, civil society leaders and policy-makers participating in workshops and panels convened by the Canada Research Chair on Sustainability Community Development at Royal Roads. It recommends changing the nature of our development paths, redirecting their trajectories towards a steady state economy of a stable or mildly fluctuating scale.

The agenda calls for measuring well-being, imposing limits on certain practices, moving to a low carbon economy and counting the future value of resources as well as their current value.

We know that more half the world lives in towns and cities, a historic shift marked in 2008.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), about three-quarters of the natural resource consumption takes place in cities, and given current trends, 70 per cent of humanity will live in urban areas by 2050.

The cost of building and renewing urban infrastructure in the world’s cities between 2000 and 2030 is estimated at US$40 trillion.

These are staggering numbers and threaten to drastically increase environmental impacts on an already over-stressed planet.

In a press release, http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=2713&ArticleID=9474&l=en&t=long, UNEP draws from its International Resource Panel http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/ to look at reducing the environmental impact of cities. It says that greening the ways cities operate can provide economic growth and use fewer resources.

UNEP calls for decoupling urban economic growth from the unsustainable consumption of finite natural resources, which has characterized most urban development to date.

It gives a series of examples from industrial and developing countries to show how current innovations can improve services such as transportation, waste and water while reducing greenhouse gase emissions, and reducing some costs.

The report says a transition to greener cities will be essential “…in an increasingly resource-constrained 21st century.”

The Canadian International Council, on the website http://opencanada.org/ has posted a series of articles under the heading “Do we need sustainable development goals?” The project is a partnership with The North-South Institute, with contributions from the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The series looks at different ideas about sustainability, if and how sustainability should be integrated into global development goals, particularly the next generation of Millennium Development Goals to be created by the United Nations.

One of the articles, Brundtland Revisited http://opencanada.org/features/the-think-tank/essays/brundtland-revisited/ is written by Jim MacNeill, secretary-general and lead author of Our Common Future. The article is a wake-up call and provides insights into the roots of sustainability. It’s written by someone who was at the centre of developing the sustainable development movement 25 years ago. MacNeill provides a warning about how the concept has been over simplified as people grappled with this complex set of ideas.

The article is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the roots of sustainable development and how we are doing in achieving the goals.

MacNeill sums up changes since the 1980s this way: “…the journey to a more sustainable world is barely underway, even though we have made a significant amount of progress.”

One of the greatest threats, of course, is the continuing increase in demand for the types of energy that are leading to disastrous climate change.

The bright spots are in a reduction in global population growth, many reductions in poverty, increases in freedom and democracy in many countries, gains in in transparency and the growth of civil society.

He feels that to get the real changes needed for sustainability we need aroused public opinion, an active civil society, progressive people in business and enlightened political leadership.

Following the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in 2012, the United Nations is trying to reach agreement on a new set of long-term sustainable development goals. They are to succeed the eight Millennium Development Goals established by the UN in 2000.

Last month, a group of international scientists has proposed their own goals to try to link poverty eradication to protection of Earth’s life support systems.

The researchers said the millennium goals were successful in some areas: the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has been more than halved. But many goals have not been met, and some remain in conflict with one another. Economic gains, for example, have come at the expense of environmental protection.

They said that people need to see the economy and the broader human society as existing within Earth’s life support system. They suggest six universal sustainable development goals cutting across economic, social and environmental domains:

1. Thriving lives and livelihoods

2. Sustainable food security

3. Secure, sustainable water

4. Universal clean energy

5. Healthy and productive ecosystems

6. Governance for sustainable societies

The goals appear in an article published by the International Geosphere-Biosphere program, a global science program on the changing world.

In 2008, the Canadian government passed the Federal Sustainable Development Act, starting the process of a Federal Sustainable Development Strategy to make environmental decision-making more transparent and accountable.

Environment Canada’s Sustainable Development Office at is looking for input from Canadians, by June 13, on the draft second cycle of the sustainable development strategy, covering the period 2013 to 2016.

The government has also released the 2012 Progress Report on the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy. Although described as a report on federal government strategy, it is in many ways a national report on key environmental sustainability issues. It is a valuable complement to the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators program.

For details see the Environment Canada sustainable development page at http://www.ec.gc.ca/dd-sd/ and the environmental indicators page at http://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/.

The environment is back in the news after being pushed to the sidelines by the economic crises.

We see stories of droughts, floods, deforestation, overfishing, disappearing species and risky chemicals in our food and water.

At the same time a growing global population has increasing demands for food, water, transportation, energy and material goods.

Much of human development is unsustainable for the long term. We are using too many resources too fast, and dumping too much pollution into the environment.

Can we change course? Can our species evolve one that uses up and soils the world to one that lives comfortably within its ecological means? Or will future generations say we changed too little and too late?

Since The Sustainability Report went online in 1998 it has tracked key issues and trends shaping our environment, health and economy. This report focuses on environmental sustainability, showing the connections with our economy and well-being. The stories tell what is happening, why and what can and is being done to bend the curve of human development toward sustainability.

The report is now relaunched in a simpler blog format that still provides background information on key sustainability issues, combined with news and updates. I want to thank John Chenery for creating the original site and advising on the change, and Rob Dooh of Threestone Studios for creating the new site. I also want to thank many advisors who have guided the evolution of the report over the years.

I hope you find the new report informative and useful.

Michael Keating

The average Canadian is now richer and lives longer than ever before, but the lifestyles, health and economic development of people in Canada and all countries depend on a wide range of ecological goods and services. These include climate regulation, food, fish and timber production, provision of clean air and water, flood control, soil formation and fertility, pollination and biodiversity. Our environment also provides for spiritual, recreational and cultural needs.

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Although there are many examples of sustainability in Canada, there is no overall vision or common approach, despite pleas for one from many sources, including various governments, business leaders and the public.

In the mid-1980s, the World Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Brundtland Commission after its leader, popularized the term sustainable development. Their work inspired a group of Canadian environment ministers, along with industrial, environmental and academic leaders, to create the National Task Force on Environment and Economy. It was a bold and pioneering move that put 17 people with widely divergent views on the environment together in one room. Despite these differences, the group rapidly came to consensus on a wide range of difficult topics.

In its 1987 report, http://www.ccme.ca/assets/pdf/pn_1090_e.pdf the task force said its main objective was to promote environmentally sound economic growth and development. It stated: “The economy and its participants exist within the environment, not outside it; we cannot expect to maintain economic prosperity unless we protect the environment and our resource base, the building blocks of development.”

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Climate change is the most important and difficult environmental sustainability issue facing humanity.

More than 81 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply comes from fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

According to the International Energy Agency: “With energy-related carbon dioxide representing the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, the fight against climate change has become a defining factor for energy policy-making – but the implications are daunting. Meeting the emission goals currently pledged by countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would still leave the world some 13.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ – or 60% – above the level needed to remain on track with the 2°C goal in 2035. Much additional investment will need to be directed towards lower- CO₂ technologies, on supply and end-use sides alike. The benefits that society would reap from these measures, beyond avoided climate impacts, would be of an equal if not larger magnitude than the cost to the energy sector.”

Not only is pollution from fossil fuels a major source of climate change, some of the many pollutants also cause tens of thousands of premature deaths plus a great deal of illness around the world.

Can the world make a shift to green energy in time to head off a climate disaster. Canadian writer Stephen Leahy investigates in an article,

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/green-energy-solves-dual-crises-of-poverty-and-climate/ called Green Energy Solves Dual Crises of Poverty and Climate.