Social Good Summit

            The Social Good Summit kicked off a week of presentations on the SDG’s for civil society while world leaders open the 72^nd General Assembly. How can advances in technology be combined with issues to accelerate achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals? The Summit had over 100 young people in their Digital Media Lounge tweeting, blogging, and posting on Facebook while great speakers gave success stories, big picture dimensions, and many personal examples to make the issues real. Some nuggets follow:

            David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, sees a vacuum of leadership while half of elementary school age refugee children are not in school and three quarters of high school age are not in school. Caryl Stern of UNICEF noted that there are about 50 million refugee children. Uganda, for example, has 1.3 million refugees, 240,000 in one refugee camp alone. David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program, which feeds 80 million people each day, noted that there are 155 million children whose growth is stunted.

            Lawrence O’Donnell told of going to Malawi and learning that desks and chairs are most needed. He worked with UNICEF and raised funds through lastworddesks.msnbc.com. Desks and chairs are produced locally  and allow students to no longer try to write on a mud floor. When Lawrence’s daughter visited Malawi and learned that girls do not attend high school as a rule because families struggle just to provide the fee of about $80 for sons, she urged her dad to raise funds for girls school fees. So far about $3 million has been raised empowering Malawi’s girls. Lawrence choked up reading a poem of struggle and perseverance from one of those students. 

Bob Weir, founder of Grateful Dead, told of raising money for rain forests 25 years ago. His work on the Sustainable Development Goals is uplifting and fulfilling. Whoopi Goldberg told of the early days in fighting off one more ism in the AIDS crisis and her work with Elizabeth Taylor. She notes that if they can do it to “them”—fill in the blank for race, gender, sexual preference, or religion—they can do it to me.   She points out that AIDs education is still important today and she wishes people well with a lot of sex, often.

            Zia Khan of the Rockefeller Foundation told of their work to provide light and power, especially in India. While light is important, electric power opens the door for much more efficient small businesses and provision of services. There are about 1 billion on the plane without electricity. Rachel Kyte of Sustainable Energy4All  noted the important role of electric power is assuring cold chain for keeping medicine effective as well as preserving food as it moves to the market. Kate Hampton of the Children Investment Fund Foundation urged ratification of the 2015 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. The Montreal Protocol addressed ozone while the Kigali amendment addresses hydrofluorocarbons (HFC’s) used in air conditioning. Implementation of this measure can reduce global warming by half a degree centigrade.

Implementing efficiency measures to save electric power and reducing hfc’s together would reduce global warming by one degree centigrade.

            John Young of Pfizer Essential Health told of reducing both maternal and child mortality through better child spacing with 6.5 million doses of a long lasting contraceptive through a partnership that included the Gates Foundation. Ronald De Jong of the Phillips Foundation told of their partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Telisa Yancy of American Family Insurance told of events in Seattle, Minneapolis-St Paul, and Milwaukee to support the Susainable /development Goals through Doing Good/#Dream Fearlessly. Rina Kupferschmidt-Rojas of UBS spoke about impact investing.

            The Social Good Summit was an object lesson in using the power of social media and positivity to create a better world!

           

  

Sustainability Resource Update

Sustainability Resource Update

Sustainability Energy for All seforall.org announces Sustainable Energy Week September 18-24 in New York City climateweeknyc.org

SDG Academy announces the free on-line course Macroeconomics for a Sustainable Planet starting September 20 for 12 weeks. Jeff Sachs and Felipe Larrain are lecturers. unsdsn.org

Jeff Sachs et al have a discussion paper in Economics, A multi-religious consensus on the ethics of sustainable development: reflections on the Ethics in Action initiative.

Resilience 2017 Conference: reflections is posted on the Stockholm Resilience Institute’s site stockholmresilience.su.se

Johan Rockstrom has an article in The Anthropocene Review, Closing the Loop: Reconstructing human dynamics to Earth System Science.

Saving the Earth

Saving the Earth

At the Social Good Summit, a day after the climate march in Manhttan, the Greenpeace Executive Director noted the planet will be fine without people—oceans won’t acidify, forests will flourish, groundwater will recharge—it’s the people who are at risk.

The vast majority of the global community supports the Paris Accord. Bill Mc Gibben, 350.org, cited agreement that a 1.5 degrees centigrade increase would keep the global community safe. Yet agreed actions lead to a 3 degrees centigrade increase. The Clean Power Plan, a key US action, now not supported by US leadership.

Forecasts from complicated mathematical models aside, the Great Acceleration shows why global action is needed. Major increases in both environmental and socio-economic indicators from 1950 to present bring us out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years with temperature variations limited to about one degree centigrade. This favorable climate for human development now gives way to the to the Anthropocene. Now human activity can take us into uncharted territory including the ability of acidifying oceans to supply fish, deforestation changing rainfall patterns, and water scarcity.

The Great Acceleration continues in the Age of Sustainability. The Earth Institute’s Jeff Sachs points out that global product will triple by 2050 while carbon load must be cut in half—change by a factor if 6 in carbon intensity to keep us safe. We will add many more mega-cities and global increases in purchasing power will put pressure on supplies of food, energy, and water.

Our global challenge is well summarized in Doughnut Economics. Raworth combines the Planetary Boundaries of Johan Rockstrom’s Stockholm Resilience Institutes Planetary Boundaries with the aspirations of the Sustainable Development Goals to demonstrate a safe space for humanity.

Moon Shot Mentality Vandana Shiva argues for a massive effort to restore the functionality of soils versus geo-engineering schemes such as filling the atmosphere with pieces of aluminum. Partnership with the microbial universe is indeed the way forward with energy from biomass, food and energy savings from green roofs, vertical farms which need much less water, and composting of animal manures to restore the carbon capture and ground water recharge capabilities of soils as the goals of a sensible latter day Moon Shot.

SDG's at the Social Good Summit #2030NOW

Standing room only on the Digital Media Lounge supporting social media blogs, tweets, and shares.
Chelsea Handler of Netflix in 190 countries in 22 languages. Coming: Climate Change with DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz on Chelsea's Netflix show.

Social Good Summit 2016

Global conversation on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) and plans for the future.
2030 is the target year for achieving these 17 goals. Helen Clark led off. 92nd Street Y hosting.
193 countries have signed on to the SDG's. Globalgoals.org.

Sustainable Cities

Paradigms for the Anthropocene: An Example

            The Social Good Summit included concern that silos of traditional institutional mechanisms might hinder needed progress toward sustainability. Sustainable cities will pose new puzzles to solve for the water-energy-food nexus. Are solutions resilient, moving toward zero waste, renewable?

            A wastewater treatment plant produces residuals from primary treatment of suspended solids and secondary treatment of dissolved solids. Suspended solids settle out and dissolved solids become food for microorganisms aided by oxygen pumped into the secondary treatment basins. Clumps of such well-fed microorganisms then settle out as residuals. In the old days, residuals might be loaded onto a barge at the riverside where the plant was located and hauled out into the ocean for disposal. Now residuals may be fed into a digester which produces biogas. This biogas can then become electricity  or compressed natural gas as fuel for truck fleets.

            For the United States nationally, our over 3,000 wastewater treatment plants use about 3% of electricity generated in the US, mostly for the motors that pump oxygen into secondary treatment basins. Food waste is the largest segment of the solid waste stream still going to landfill where it generates fugitive emissions of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Adding food waste to the digesters increases biogas generation which could then generate about 6% of the electricity needed in the US. This would be an increase of 50% in electricity generation from renewable fuels which is now at 12%. Huge.

            Existing institutional arrangements include solid waste management, wastewater treatment, and electric power generation. This example combines these well established activities into one operation which produces renewable, off-grid, resilient energy while reducing methane emissions from landfills. If the grid goes down, the microorganisms keep on eating! Resilient, sustainable solutions!             Sustainable Cities

Social Good Summit

Social Good Summit 2015

            The Social Good Summit was part of a 109 nation Social Good Community which engaged social networks to tell the story of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly to guide global efforts through 2030. Progress under the 8 Millennium Development Goals from 2000 to 2015 was celebrated and a broadened agenda to include governance, economic and social justice, and action to harmonize human impact with planetary boundaries was acknowledged to need full participation from all levels of government, the private sector, and civil society. Goal 16 to promote peaceful and inclusive societies was named a key to success by several speakers.

            The Doughnut Economics concept of Kate Raworth has been made more specific by adoption by the global community of 169 indicators to clarify the 17 sustainable development goals. Population increase of 2 billion and greater economic justice will greatly increase human activity which will be carried out with a greatly reduced carbon intensity. By 2050, carbon intensity may be reduced by a factor of six in a global economy three times bigger than today.

            Technological innovation promises much. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales noted that a phone with capabilities similar to the first I-phone which cost $600 can now be had for about $40. He foresaw that a billion more would have access to the internet over the next several years as a result. Progress such as widespread availability mobile phones in the absence of traditional landlines may be in store. The billion people currently using open defecation may get direct deposit inexpensive toilets that produce fuel for meeting cooking needs from anaerobic digestion and fertilizer for agriculture through composting. Sustainable cities may benefit from a breakdown of silos for treating wastewater, managing solid waste, and generating electrical power as anaerobic digestion is fully used. Examples of this latter phenomenon are already emerging in metropolitan Washington DC and New York City.