Sustainable Urbanisation conference presentations

The presentations from the Sustainable Urbanisation conference recently held in Melbourne are now online.

TEDx talks from the Sustainable Urbanisation conference

The TEDx Carlton talks from the Sustainable Urbanisation conference held recently in Melbourne are now online.

Social media and sustainability

Several MASS members attended the Sustainable Urbanisation conference in Melbourne last week. Social media was identified as a potentially important contributor to the transition to a sustainability society for a number of reasons such as allowing direct public communication globally and outside traditional power structures, and empowering youth and facilitating engagement with them.

Greenpeace has just announced a campaign to get Facebook to unfriend coal by increasing its own use of clean energy and also by advocating for the use of clean energy. This provides a really interesting and important test of the role of social media in driving corporate behaviour change, and perhaps also a challenge for Facebook itself which is now firmly embedded in global corporate power structures. If successful, this may also help drive the growing "new" economy (including information technology) towards the use of clean energy independently of the behaviour of the "old" economy.

Further information on the Guardian's Sustainable Business Blog.    

We will provide some more information on the highlights and outcomes of the conference in later posts.

Private enterprises in the developing world are embracing sustainability

Emerging nations are embracing sustainability

The future of global sustainability depends on the actions of companies from emerging markets. So far they have not disappointed, says Simon Zadek

Read the full post at the Guardian's Sustainable Business Blog

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There is certainly a dominant discourse of poor sustainability performance of private enterprise in the developing world, and perhaps a colonial expectation that innovation in western markets will result in the adoption of western technology in the developing world to improve sustainability outcomes. However, maybe private enterprises in the developing world can lead those in the west towards a more sustainable society? It will be interesting to follow Simon Zadek's posts on this topic. 

Wash Less to help the environment

Sustainable fashion is often described as an oxymoron, how can something at the pinnacle of consumer driven growth with deeply entrenched "planned obsolescence" ever be though of as sustainable? Well maybe there is no such thing as sustainable fashion, however as wearing clothes is an integral part of modern culture, some consideration must be given to this aspect of our lifestyles.
There have been some valuable and interesting contributions to sustainable fashion mainly focusing on the supply chain, low impact materials, shortened supply chains and working conditions. Considering a life cycle analysis of a garment shows that the highest impact is accrued at the use phase.
To focus on the use phase, my research is looking at what happens when people wash less, through a social lens. On the 1st of March 2011, 30 participants will be donning a pair of jeans they intend to wear for 3 months straight without washing, while I document their lived experience.
Interestingly there have been similar studies released in the past month, a Canadian Student Josh Le who didn't wash his jeans for 15 months, and found that there were similar levels of bacteria to jeans that were not washed for 13 days, and a new Levi's campaign aiming to save 16 million litres of water during (Australian) Autumn 2011.

Exploring the relationship between wellbeing, environmental stress and income

A recent paper by Michigan State University's Thomas Dietz et al. in Applied Geography explores the relationship between people's wellbeing, income and environmental stress of 58 different countries. They found that wellbeing for a given amount of environmental stress will be high at both and high and low levels of affluence, and lower at intermediate levels of affluence. This pattern is known as a Kuznets curve.    

ABSTRACT
The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) posits an inverted “U” shaped relationship between the affluence of a nation and the stress it places on the biophysical environment, with increases in affluence from low to moderate levels producing increased environmental stress but further increases eventually leading to a tipping point after which further affluence reduces environmental stress. We hypothesized that the same pattern might obtain for the relationship between affluence and the efficiency with which a nation produces human well-being compared to the stress it places on the environment. The environmental intensity of human well-being (EIWB) was represented as the ratio of a nation’s per capita ecological footprint to its average life expectancy at birth. Using panel data on 58 nations, we find that, on average, the relationship between gross domestic product per capita and EIWB is a U shape, the inverse of the Kuznets curve.

Corporate sustainability reporting

A new report by Futerra, SustainAbility, KPMG and GRI (the Global Reporting Initiative) presents the results of a survey of authors and readers of corporate sustainability reports. 


They key findings of the report are:

• Reporting is becoming more global, with more than 70% of the readers surveyed coming from Brazil (obviously not a random sample!)
• Reporting is being used to improve the internal processes of companies 
• The majority of authors of the reports cited stakeholder engagement as a reason for reporting, while fewer than 20% of readers cited engagement as a reason for reading reports
• Few readers believed companies were fully reporting their sustainability progress, although most believed that companies were reporting what they thought was important.
• Reporting was not being used to compare company performance
• The majority of readers believed that the use of standards improved the quality and transparency of reporting.
• A variety of internal and external measures of success were important for both readers and authors
• Sustainability reports are used for a variety of reasons, such as informing product/service choice, investment decisions and sharing information
• Almost half the readers had shared their views of the report with others
• Sustainability reporting leads to changed behaviour within companies and the people reading the reports with actions related specifically to the company, but also relating to broader sustainability issues

See also an article by one of the authors in the Guardian.


via Dr Saffron O'Neill.