Green ArchiTEXT

Putting a Dollar Value on Nature

By Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio

Scientists in Minnesota are trying to do something that may be impossible: put a dollar value on nature.

Nature performs many important functions that benefit humans — not just offering beauty but cleaning water, taming floods and pollinating crops. Some researchers think it's time to put a dollar value on those natural processes.

University of Minnesota economic researcher Steve Polasky is building on ideas first presented in the field of applied economics back in the 1960s. The idea is kind of a merger of ecology and economics to identify services that nature provides, and assign a monetary value to those services.

Polasky's approach, which he calls "full-cost accounting," involves tracking all the consequences of a particular activity, not just the intended results.

The way he looks at it, nature has assets — he calls it "natural capital" — like minerals and timber. But Polasky said it's time to focus on something less obvious: the processes inherent in nature that provide benefits for people. READ MORE >>

via minnesota.publicradio.org

Detroit copies Torino’s public markets to support its regeneration

By Andrea Rossi

Who would have thought that the regeneration of a city can start from a market stand that sells fruits and vegetables, or clothes? But it’s true: one of the pillars that Detroit has chosen to structure its very difficult relaunch around, is the development of a network of local public markets, based on the “Torino model”.

Facing an uncertain industrial future, having lost nearly half of its inhabitants in fifty years, and with a fragile urban fabric that needs to be rethought, Detroit is looking in the mirror and discovers it has much in common with the situation facing Torino fifteen years ago. So now, building on the newborn Fiat-Chrysler connection between the cities, Detroit is retracing the steps of Torino’s regeneration. The city’s urban and (particularly its) social fabric needs to be knitted back together, and the Michigan heart has decided where to start from.

It may seem bizarre to us, but for the Americans it isn’t. Yesterday morning a delegation landed in Torino led by Kathryn Lynch Underwood, the City Planner of the City of Detroit. And with her came a group of about ten managers, experts and market operators. The first thing they did was taking a plunge in the heart of the Porta Palazzo market. Then they gathered in an office, to be briefed in detail on Torino’s 45 local markets by the city’s administrators in charge of local commerce and public spaces.

As of today they will visit them one by one, trying to understand how they can export their DNA and adapt them to the Detroit context. “They are interested in understanding the social, economic and cultural functioning of the markets and of the nearby businesses, which in Torino constitute one of the more distinctive aspects of urban life,” explain deputy mayors Ilda Curti and Giuliana Tedesco.

It took the American delegation only one day to understand that the replication – even in a reduced version – of the “Torino model” could be the engine of the urban regeneration process that the Michigan capital will have to undertake if it wants to rise up again. “Ours is a feeble system, made up of only six markets,” explains Pam Weintestein, who is in charge of one. “In Turin, however, everyone does their shopping at the market stands irrespective of their social background or their income level.” Dan Carmody is in charge of the Eastern Market, Detroit’s largest. He is surprised: “What makes the difference here is the sense of community that transpires from your markets. It is obvious that they add value to the urban context.” READ MORE >>

via www.experientia.com

Slate: The Return of Common Sense

How the Great Recession has changed architecture—for the better.

By Witold Rybczynski

Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Slate about Mexican architect Enrique Norten. I characterized Norten, whose work I admire, as belonging to the rationalist tradition of Modernism. I also observed that, judging from some of his recent designs, he was succumbing to pressure to produce increasingly unusual and startling buildings more along the lines of the Expressionist anti-rationalism of architects such as Libeskind, Hadid, and Mayne. "It would be a shame if Norten were pulled in this direction," I wrote. "The theatricality weighs uneasily on his unsentimental and tough brand of minimal modernism." Well, he was pulled. In the following two years he designed a number of gyrating skyscrapers whose fey whimsy rivalled the anti-rationalists. Thankfully, none were built—the Great Recession saw to that.

It is impossible to exaggerate the chilling effect of the economic slowdown on the architectural profession. For a developer or an institutional client faced with a weakening market or a diminished endowment, the easiest thing to do is simply pick up the phone and cancel any project that is not actually under construction. Even if it's under way, there is still time: In Las Vegas, a 49-story Norman Foster-designed hotel stopped at 28 floors. Between 2007 and 2009, the Dodge Index from McGraw-Hill Construction, which measures construction activity in the United States, dropped from 135 to 85. As a result, architectural firms shrank drastically, layoffs of 50 percent or more were common, small firms simply closed up shop, and older architects took early retirement. Since the recession was global, even international practices like Norten's were not insulated from the slowdown.

via www.slate.com

The Competing Black Swans of Sustainability

By Andrew Winston

According the metaphorical story that opens Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, until the discovery of Australia, everyone in the Old World knew that all swans were white. Years of empirical evidence proved it — nobody had ever seen anything but a white swan.

It came as a shock then when the sighting of a single black swan destroyed such a simple theory. All it took was one example to overthrow the status quo.

The world faces some big shocks in the realms of sustainability and climate change, and the ways of thinking about the future described in Taleb's book will come in handy. In Taleb's view, a Black Swan event... 

• Lies way outside the realm of regular expectations — it's an outlier
• Carries extreme impact
• Seems explainable after the fact 

The event that perfectly fits this bill, and the reason Taleb's book is so vital today, is the financial meltdown of 2008. READ MORE >>

via blogs.hbr.org

The Sustainability Imperative

By David A. Lubin and Daniel C. Esty

Most executives know that how they respond to the challenge of sustainability will profoundly affect the competitiveness—and perhaps even the survival—of their organizations. Yet most are flailing around, launching a hodgepodge of initiatives without any overarching vision or plan. That’s not because they don’t see sustainability as a strategic issue. Rather, it’s because they think they’re facing an unprecedented journey for which there is no road map.

But there is a road map. Our research into the forces that have shaped the competitive landscape in recent decades reveals that “business megatrends” have features and trajectories in common. Sustainability is an emerging megatrend, and thus its course is to some extent predictable. Understanding how firms won in prior megatrends can help executives craft the strategies and systems they’ll need to gain advantage in this one. READ MORE >>

via hbr.org

Nature imposes the real bottom line

From the David Suzuki Foundation:

We often describe the triple bottom line - society, economy, and environment - as three intersecting circles of equal size. This is nonsense. The reality is that the largest circle should represent the biosphere. Within that, we have 30 million species, including us, that depend on it. Within the biosphere circle should be a much smaller circle, which is human society, and within that should be an even smaller circle, the economy. Neither of the inner circles should grow large enough to intersect with the bigger ones, but that's what's happening now as human societies and the economy hit their limits.

We also draw lines around property, cities, provinces, and countries. We take these so seriously that we are willing to fight and die to protect those borders. But nature pays no attention to human boundaries. Air, water, soil that blows across continents and oceans, migrating fish, birds and mammals, and windblown seeds cannot be managed within human strictures, yet all the discussions in Copenhagen were centred on countries that, in turn, were divided into rich and poor. In science-fiction movies where an alien from outer space attacks and kills humans, national differences disappear as we join forces to fight a common enemy. That is what we have to tap into to meet the climate crisis.

Nature is our home. Nature provides our most fundamental needs. Nature dictates limits. If we are striving for a truly sustainable future, we have to subordinate our activities to the limits that come from nature. We know how much carbon dioxide can be reabsorbed by all the green things in the oceans and on land, and we know we are exceeding those limits. That's why carbon is building up in the atmosphere. So our goal is clear. All of humanity must find a way to keep emissions below the limits imposed by the biosphere.

via beta.davidsuzuki.org

Putting a Value on Bees, Trees and the Rest of Nature

By Tom McKeag

"Money doesn't grow on trees," our parents told us, and they were right. Trees, however, are essential for making money, and not just because of the paper they provide. More and more, companies are recognizing that the forest, as well as the tree, is essential to everyone's prosperity. After all, we live in a society with a nature-based economy, and the resources that nature provides could not exist without healthy ecosystems.

Resource economists typically depict nature as doing four general favors for us: providing things like food and water; regulating things like floods and droughts; supporting life through basic processes like photosynthesis, soil formation and material cycling; and enhancing cultural things like spiritual refreshment and scientific discovery. Valuing these services is complicated and is done by several methods, like calculating replacement value, or willingness to pay. As resources get scarcer, valuation of these services will become more and more a part of every business.

via www.greenbiz.com

The New Green Economy: What Does a Sustainable Economy Look Like?

From the “New Green Economy” conference, held recently in Washington, D.C. In the session “Growing the Green Economy or Greening the Grown Economy?” Robert Costanza, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, moderated a panel including Mindy Lubber, President, CERES, Van Jones, author of “The Green Collar Economy,” Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner, UK Sustainable Development Commission, and David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College.

What does a sustainable economy look like?

Orr: “It won’t look like what we’ve done in the past. Bill McKibben is coming out with a new book in April called “Eaarth” because he says humans have actually changed the climate to such an extent that it’s literally a different planet. The U.S. is now a debtor nation $10 trillion in debt. We are in a radically changed world. On the positive side, we now have green buildings; solar-powered buildings are proven to be doable. There’s biomimicry, which can lead to innovations in products. We have theoretical basis for a green economy. We’ve had a revolution in design capabilities. There can be growth in more honest ways now.

via dirt.asla.org

Towards a Greener Manufacturing

An interesting post in yesterday’s Environmental Leader on ‘sustainable production’ by David Dornfeld who leads the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS) at the University of California, Berkeley. In “Green Manufacturing: The Next Great Leap Forward”, he reviews the evolution of manufacturing through ‘flexible production’ in the 1980s to ‘lean manufacturing’ and ‘mass personalization’ of the last few decades and asks how can improved processes lead to greener manufacturing. What bigger impact on the built environment could there be than a system of manufacturing that fully addresses the environmental and social costs associated with the lifecycle as well.

Dornfeld writes:

“What is the next big change? I believe it will be a move to account for the “embedded costs” associated with energy, carbon footprint, re-use and re-manufacturing leading closer to sustainable production. But, how will this be accomplished?”

Read his full essay here.

Habitats, Biodiversity & Ecosystems As Valued Assets

What is the true value, a full accounting, of ecosystem services within world markets? Is it possible to actually trade the broad array of systems that are essential for life – soil, water, carbon – while influencing political decisions, even consumer preferences?

Those are the fundamental questions posed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in its latest newsletter. “Natural Assets: Conservation Instruments or Instruments for Change?”, begins:

“Nobody is surprised when their water is cut off if they haven’t paid the bill. We admit that companies have to recoup their investments and maintain infrastructure (water withdrawal, treatment, distribution, etc.), on top of paying staff and suppliers.

Why don’t we apply the same logic to the services offered by nature? The answer is simple: they are perceived to be free. Year after year, plant roots have acted as enormous filter systems and, in spite of not getting compensated, they have not stopped filtering.”

“Natural Assets” cites several emerging examples: the European Union’s Water Framework Directive and the Environmental Liability Directive, which includes complementary measures to compensate for the damage caused at different sites. In addition, the EC Habitats Directive and the Biodiversity Strategy embrace the principle of no net loss, setting the target of zero biodiversity loss by 2010. In Spain, the Ministry of Environment’s WATER program has created water banks. And “Natura 2000”, Europe’s network of protected natural areas, obliges Spanish businesses to act in the fight against biodiversity loss.

The central idea, according to Fundación Entorno - BCSD Spain:

“The introduction of ecosystem services that are essential for life (soil fixation, nutrient cycles, carbon absorption, climate regulation, water supply, along with aesthetic, cultural and spiritual values) into market considerations would help to create a school of thought that is sensitive to conservation interests.

By doing so, new trading opportunities would emerge that build on the experience of carbon markets. Buyers and sellers would exchange environmental services with a net result that does not imply the loss of natural assets.”

Read the full text of “Natural Assets: Conservation Instruments or Instruments for Change?” here.