Politics is suddenly front and center when it comes to companies’ ESG policies, especially in the US. In several US states, laws have been proposed ­– or passed – that target companies that “discriminate” against fossil fuels, that use or promote ESG ratings when deciding where to invest, or that have diversity initiatives.

Elsewhere, others have threatened political action against companies based on their advertising or content decisions – such as one heavy hitter in the Republican party saying that companies that stopped advertising on Twitter could be called before Congress about participating in “leftist corporate extortion”[1] while another warned AT&T to work things out with the Newsmax cable channel “or else.”[2]

People used to think that questions like investments and advertising spend were outside politics and would be left up to the businesses themselves – but that is far less true than it used to be. Even these decisions are being pulled into the legislative orbit by relentless political gravity.

Image by Casey Horner / Unsplash

Is this new? Yes and no. It’s certainly new, and bad, in a lot of ways. But there have always been places where political and business issues intersect.

In the early 1950s, when IBM was exploring building factories in North Carolina and Kentucky, segregation was still legal in the United States. In 1953, company President Thomas Watson wrote Policy Letter #4 and circulated it to his managers, stating the company’s position plainly: “It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed.”^[3]

IBM, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Photo by IBM

As the official history of IBM continues:

Policy letter #4 conveyed without qualification that IBM would not comply with “separate but equal,” an entrenched euphemism for sanctioned segregation in the U.S.

It took courage for IBM to stand up to state governments in the 1950s, and it will take courage for business leaders to stand up for their beliefs now. But there is no alternative – as politics swallows more issues, businesses will either push back or see many of their decisions made for them.

References:

[1] https://twitter.com/HolmesJosh/status/1588626474327760904?cxt=HHwWkICzsZHX94ssAAAA

[2] https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1629171470881390592

^[3] IBM. “IBM100 – Building an Equal Opportunity Workforce.” CTB14, March 7, 2012. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/equalworkforce/.

^[4]“IBM100 – Building an Equal Opportunity Workforce.” CTB14, March 7, 2012. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/equalworkforce/.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fairy Tale Homes
Goldilocks, as every child knows, was scouting for a new house when she happened upon a two-story cottage in a secluded, wooded neighborhood, and decided to look it over. As with any prospective buyer, she was faced with various lifestyle choices: is it too cozy? Too cavernous? Will it be too hot or too cold? Can I find a mattress that’s neither too hard nor too soft? Finding a home that is ‘just right’ has never been simple but, by today’s standards, Goldilocks had it easy.

This century demands an entirely different set of criteria:

• How frequent and severe will hurricanes be?
• How likely is massive flooding or inundation over the next 50 years?
• What about regular atmospheric rivers, like the Pacific Northwest?
• Is it certain water will be available by 2030 and beyond?
• Are millions of climate migrants going to compete for space?
• And, yes, will rising temps and more-frequent, more-intense thermal periods render it too hot?

This is not an idle exercise. In 2020, the Ecological Threat Register reported a tenfold increase in natural disasters between 1960 – when there were 39 such incidents – and 2019, which endured almost 400. With oceans rising, deserts metastasizing, populations rising, and the number of climate-refugees exploding, locations that are safe from the various ramifications of global warming are becoming as scarce as they will be in high demand.

But where on Earth will it be safe to live? Inquiring minds – especially those used to the Hamptons, Los Cabos, Trancoso, and St. Barths; or who winter on atolls off Tahiti – want to know. For those without riches? Buckle up: it may get rough.

Climate GPS

A modern Goldilocks must triangulate climate-safe landing spots, and to do so she will need, as The Balance suggested, this set of simple criteria:

It Should Be Cool…

Temperatures are rising, and heat waves will intensify and lengthen, so starting with a place that stays cool makes sense       

Settle on a Hill…

A nice meadow, ridge, or timbe stand halfway up will keep you cooler, flood-free, and hey, what a view! Avoid areas prone to mud or rockslides, plant plenty of shade trees, and you’re set

Access to Water is a Must…

Desertification continues spreading worldwide (map above) so potable water for people and agriculture will be major issues, even in parts of the world where such was abundant before. A lake, an aquifer, enough rainfall, or a tame river will be ‘just right’

Avoid the Coasts…

Inundation will dominate headlines in coastal areas around the world throughout the century. Cyclones, rain, storm surge, erosion, and salt damage will increase dramatically, and few coastal areas will escape unscathed. A homestead in rolling hills or landlocked woodlands checks this box

There are a limited number of places that fit all these criteria. Those cited most often lie within a slender band of the temperate zone whose northern boundary runs east from the Canadian prairies to the Nordic peninsula; and to the south, from North America‘s Great Lakes to Latvia and Estonia. Above that zone, though warming is rapid, the growing season is not yet fully reliable, and wildfires are problematic under global warming. South of that zone, the worst manifestations of climate change – cyclones, sea-level rise, unbearable ambient temperatures and heat waves, drought, fire, and more, will be at their height.

Futurist Khanna dubbed this band the New North, “a collection of geographies such as the Great Lakes region and Scandinavia that are making significant investments in renewable energy, food production, and economic diversification.” But of course, they are also cool, hilly, have enormous reserves of fresh water, and are either inland or have long head starts dealing with coastal-protective infrastructure. As their northern range thaws, they will also have vast new agricultural, mineral, and oil reserves even as the southern regions’ resources – agriculture in particular – face harsher growing conditions than before.

Within this northern zone lie several glamorous locations like Copenhagen, Reykjavik, and Toronto. Less exotic spots, like Duluth, Buffalo, and the Estonian city of Narva – current population only 55,000 – have room for expansion.

The aurora borealis dazzles in the skies over Reykjavik, Iceland, January 2015.
Photo by Sergejf. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As noted above, some locations outside this belt have not, up to now, been able to support large populations. Ironically, a potentially useful effect of climate change is that, while it is broiling and stir-frying the middle latitudes, it is likewise opening areas to the north and south that were previously too cold, ice covered, or stormy. Places like Siberia, Greenland, the Norse countries, Iceland and even, perhaps, portions of Tierra del Fuego, are warming quickly, and are soon to become more fecund. If the winds hold true, they will soon also be far more populated.

To be clear, this opening of the cold lands is not to be desired in the normal course of events. Their climate was more appropriate to the mammoth than to man, and so they’ve remained largely pristine. Billions of tons of carbon are sequestered in tundra, forest, and peatlands, and many species fostered there will likely perish if humanity clusters there more thickly. But the reality of our failure to confront carbon emissions sooner means billions more people will have to move… somewhere. The thawing of the formerly frozen north and south is happening and will result in significant human immigration.

Consider Vladivostok, a port city just over 400 miles (680 km) from Pyongyang, but with strong infrastructure and only 600,000 inhabitants. This and many other places in the New North will likely be hotly sought after as milder temperatures move in to stay. Some like Duluth, with a mere 85,000 residents, are actively using this status to court climate refugees in order to boost that number and gain significant economic growth. As the New York Times explained, “they sense an opportunity in climate change,” and they are determined to make the most of it.

The Red Bridge, Novosibirsk, Siberian Federal District, Russia.
Photo by Mikhail Pavstyuk / Unsplash

Indeed, Khanna asserts, both Russia and Canada would “benefit massively from doubling or tripling—or, in Canada’s case, quintupling—their populations. Climate migrants wouldn’t be moving into barren spaces: Russia has more than a dozen cities of under one million people whose death and emigration rates far exceed the birthrate.”

Siberia, for example, the classic frozen ‘waste land,’ is seeing a significant shift towards a livable climate. “It’s a process that is likely to accelerate,” notes the New York Times. And a Russia that has long struggled to grow enough to feed even its own people, “hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.”

The Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada check all the climate boxes above. The area holds a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water; it’s far inland and virtually immune to sea-level rise; it is generally a few degrees cooler than coastal or southern cities[1] with plenty of rainfall; and while areas such as Chicago are postage-stamp flat, most are well above the level of their respective lakes.

Old and new construction in Nuuk, Greenland, August 2019. Photo by amanderson2.

Source: Wikimedia commons.

Finally, Greenland may be the world’s largest island but, with less than 57,000 people clustered along portions of its coast, it may yet become a thriving, highly populated human colony. Tierra del Fuego, too, is losing much of its glacial ice, and warming should permit more people and crops.

Will that be enough space? Will there be enough new or underexploited land to accommodate everyone? It remains to be seen. Billions will be affected. Whole populations are slated to move. Everyone will need a place. As futurist Khanna put it, people in the New North and other safe zones may find relative climate peace; but “they should expect a few hundred million new neighbors, too.”

It is rare for most governments to proactively protect living systems. It’s so infrequent, in fact, that any instance should be cause for celebration. So, when Hawai’i, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Palau, and several island nations banned certain sunblock ingredients believed to harm coral reefs, we put the champagne on ice.

But when these bans got ahead of the issue, did they also get ahead of the science? Some researchers are asking if the banned substances – clearly harmful to coral in high concentrations in the lab – are actually damaging coral in the wild; while others, more importantly, question whether their replacements are, in fact, coral safe.

Corals and other marine dwellers are already crushed by so many pressures – heat, acidity, fishing, invasive species, coastal construction, shipping, and sewage pollution among others – that adding sunblock to the list is simply piling on. But somewhere between 6,000 and 14,000 tons of the stuff is estimated to be released into coral reef waters annually, so understanding the impact of UV screens is critical.

Snorkelers, Blue Lagoon, Indonesia, in 2019. Photo by Taylor Simpson / Unsplash

Indeed, with coral tourism generating around $36B in local revenue and producing some $375 billion in commerce overall, further coral degradation is an enormous threat. Clearly, action must be taken, and the local authorities listed above have taken it by banning several so-called organic – chemical – UV blockers.

The Parks Service, for example, says flatly that “sunscreens that include the ingredients oxybenzone, octinoxate, and avobenzone, which absorb UV rays, can harm coral reefs, leading to coral bleaching and adverse effects of reef reproduction.” There is some strong laboratory evidence for this claim, and tests have found these substances in reef waters and in the tissues of some marine animals.

But the Service and others are going farther, actively steering bathers to ‘inorganic,’ mineral-based sunscreens, notably zinc oxide (Zn0) and titanium dioxide (Ti0₂), nano-sized metal particles that physically block, rather than absorb, harmful light, and that are believed to be benign for coral. Dozens of sunscreens are now being marketed as ‘reef safe’ and ‘coral friendly’ leading one 2020 Marine Policy white paper to urge the creation of “clear and consistent ‘reef safe’ labeling standards,” which, it says, would “enable individuals to make more informed sunscreen purchasing decisions.”

Bleached Acropora coral colony in the Andaman Islands, Indian Ocean. Photo by Vardhanjp.

Source Wikimedia Commons

But are there ‘more informed’ decisions to be made? Is it known if these mineral-based UV blockers truly coral safe? Or that the chemicals listed above actually harm reefs in situ? “The science about the possible threat that sunscreen poses to the environment,” Consumer Reports asserted this August, “is far from settled.”

Apparently, the National Academies agrees and has called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct a thorough risk assessment of all commercial UV-blocking ingredients, encompassing dangers to both human and marine life. In the Academy’s words, “the risk assessment should cover a broad range of species and biological effects and could consider potential interacting effects among UV filters and with other environmental stresses such as climate change.”

The supposedly coral-friendly components, Ti0₂ and Zn0, “are often considered ‘reef safe’ despite limited information on the toxicological effects of these compounds in corals,” according to the author of a recent study.

Man with black (Ultraviolet-A) light. Image by Klaus Hausmann / Pixabay

Ti0₂ appears to more-readily block the UV-A rays associated with aging skin, while zinc oxide Zn0 handles UV-Bs, which burn exposed dermal tissue. Together, they create a formidable screen for human skin and, when applied as indicated, adequately protect the skin from harmful radiation.

But on coral, there is substantial laboratory evidence indicating that high concentrations of these metals are harmful, even fatal to corals, promoting expulsion of critical symbiotic algae, tissue mortality, and more. However, points out Consumer Reports, “the levels of those chemicals in the water, on average, are still quite a bit lower than those reported in the majority of studies to be toxic to marine life.”

In fact, it is difficult to measure mineral UV blocker toxicity in wild aquatic environments “in part because these minerals occur naturally and, in nano form, are currently impossible to distinguish from commercial particles in sunscreen.”

Vietnamese nón lá rice-straw hats in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Photo by Dan Kempner. Source: Wikipedia

In other words, we don’t truly know, as yet, whether any of the commercially available sun-blockers, labeled ‘reef-safe’ or not, actually merit that title.

Yet the whole argument could, with the cooperation of the public, be rendered moot. Since at least the bronze age, humans have employed simple sun-blocking methods requiring neither nano minerals nor chemicals.

Japanese women with parasols. Japanese woodblock print. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Parasols, for one: brilliantly effective and still popular as sunshades in many parts of the world, parasols go back some 3,000 years. Wide-brimmed hats, keffiyeh[1]-style scarves, along with sunglasses, gloves, and other photoprotective gear, offer excellent UV shielding on land. In the water, if the maximum-exposure trend of Speedos and bikinis once gave way to the more sedate styles of the past, bathers could receive maximum UV blocking with no impact on coral. Sleeves, rash guards, and wetsuits[2] keep the sun away and never wash off.

We don’t truly know which, if any, commercial sunscreens are coral safe. Neither, it seems, do the governments banning some, and the companies promoting others as benign.

Surfers wearing ‘rash guards’ or ‘rashies’ on Punta Carnero beach, Ecuador.
Photo author: Mathias Poujol-Rost. Source: Wikimedia Commons

While it’s terrific that, for once at least, actions are being taken to protect the delicate coral before there is a massive public outcry, that is not enough. We need to know such things are safe before we promote them. In the meanwhile, a return to simpler methods that can be worn or held, and that don’t rely on dubious creams and sprays, seems prudent. And the sooner that risk assessment is undertaken and completed, the better. The race has a responsibility to protect human skin, but also the last surviving coral reefs.

References:

[1] There are many language- and location-dependent spellings for this garment

[2] It should be noted that the synthetic microfibers comprising many of these garments, as we explained in Nano Air: The Plastic River is Not Wet, have environmental issues of their own, including coral degradation. There is significant evidence that corals are ingesting them in significant quantities that serious harm is done thereby, from “host–symbiont relationship [bleaching], photosynthetic efficiency, tissue necrosis, calcification rates, energy demand, reproductive success and overall fitness,” and more. However, the majority of micro-and nano plastic (MNP) reaches the ocean from either microplastic degradation, from the washing-and-drying process, or from the air, rather than from actually wearing such garments while swimming.

When the ancient Hebrews (apocryphally) crossed the Red Sea, with 600 chariots at their heels, they likely transited the Gulf of Aqaba or its sister, the Gulf of Suez.[1] However, even if they survived descents to average seabed depths of 2,624 ft (800 m) and 131 feet (40 m) respectively, and evaded the spears of their pursuers, the passage would have presented a challenge more daunting than either: coral.

Most images depict a level, sand-lined seabed under a few fathoms of water but in fact, for refugee and charioteer alike, the most immediate threat would have been the calcified spines of razor-sharp coral on the steep, irregular reefs lining both waterways. For any who made it before the waters crashed back down, triage for lacerations would have come before milk and honey.

Thousands of years later, it is the world’s reefs that require first aid. Half the planet’s coral is estimated to have died since the 1950s. Going forward, up to 90% of the remainder may be doomed over the next 30 years. Coral appears headed for extinction.

Coral spawning, Flower Garden Banks, National Marine Sanctuaries (NMS), Aug. 2005.
Photo by G.P. Schmahl /National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yet corals may be attempting to save themselves. In a modern-day exodus, corals are leaving their tropical ranges and fleeing northwards, into warming basins and coastlines formerly too cold for their sensitive polyps and symbiotic algae. Yet, while a few species have been clocked at a blistering 8.7 miles (14 km) per year, others are not so speedy, and reef building is a tedious business. Reefs of even the fastest-growing corals build out at only about 10 cm per year. Indeed, scientists estimate the Great Barrier reef (GBR) took about half a million years to form.

Besides, new reefs farther north won’t save those left behind. Coral migration is so slow, and global warming now so rapid, that most if not all the world’s reefs are doomed – without human intervention. Fortunately, there is hope at the site of the original Exodus. The same bright and teeming Red Sea reefs that Moses may have cursed as they gouged and sliced his sandals, are thriving almost as well as they did in his day.

Beds of Red Sea coral near Hurghada, Egypt, 2010. Photo by Kallerna. Source: Wikipedia

But how? And how can science leverage the answer to save suffering reefs elsewhere? Researchers and marine engineers are racing to find out, with only a few decades to work with until modern reefs are functionally dead.

Scientists’ options, however, are limited. The primary causes of reef degradation and death – global warming, marine acidification, and pollution – are still escalating. In the near term at least, humans can neither cool, nor alkalize, nor cleanse the oceans.

Happily, the answers provided by Red Sea coral may lie not in shifting their range or rehabilitating their habitat, but in the genes of the corals and their algal symbionts themselves. Noting that many Red Sea corals are managing warmer, more acidic surface water better than those elsewhere, some scientists are testing them for the specific genes that make them hardier than corals of the same species elsewhere. If such varieties could be identified, improved, accelerated, and, in a sort of polyp diaspora, sent far and wide to re-colonize the world’s reefs, then coral may yet have a future.

Symbiodinium symbiotic zooxanthellae microalgae, necessary to coral nutrition,
but expelled by coral under heat stress. Photo by Todd C. LaJeunesse (2018).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

This methodology is being applied successfully to other warming-challenged organisms: as we noted in Vietnam Varietals (Nov. 2021),the genetic properties of critical flora and fauna are being cataloged for favorable genetic traits that allow them to thrive in 21^st-century conditions – warmer, colder, saltier, more acidic, more polluted – conditions better than their cousins. As for corals, of the 2,500 or so known species, about 800 are reef builders and, of these, some twenty climate-resilient species have been identified in the Red Sea so far.

But how did they get there? Why are there corals which can withstand temperatures more than 5˚C over mean temperature in their home waters?

The answer, it appears, is that these were not the original waters of all the corals living there. Some, like the Israelites themselves, made an exodus from far hotter and more inhospitable places, such as the Arabian Sea off the Horn of Africa, reproducing and starting new colonies. Some polyps had adapted well to heat stress, and scions of these colonies moved – over some twenty millennia – into the calm, pellucid, and cooler waters of the Red Sea.

Coral column in the Red Sea, Egypt. Photo by Erwin ‘Tauchteufel’ Cox / Pixabay

Their descendants still retain that inherited resistance to heat stress, making them excellent candidates to repopulate reefs laid waste by warming seas. “One degree above an area’s summertime maximum monthly mean sea surface temperature for a period of a week (generally given as Degree Heating Week, or DHW) can be enough for bleaching to occur,” explains The Independent. “But these [Red Sea] corals have been known to survive a seven-degree rise.”

It should be noted that parallel research is ongoing regarding the symbiotic algae that inhabit – and through photosynthesis both feed and tint – coral polyps. It is the expulsion of these algae under heat stress that causes the ‘bleaching’ effect seen in dying corals. But in fact, it is becoming clear that the corals themselves aren’t so much expelling these algae, but rather, “in the events [sic] of high water temperatures… the algae becomes stressed and may escape into the water column.” In some ways the search for heat-tolerant strains of coral is also an effort to locate or create heat-tolerant varieties of their symbiotic algae.

There are several approaches currently under investigation. Certain researchers are using simple breeding techniques – genetic manipulation done every day with plants – selecting for, or removing, specific traits. Once they find an appropriate candidate, to protect genetic diversity the super corals are crossbred with those already on the target reef. “During breeding, the heat-resistant corals have a small advantage over the others and reproduce more as temperatures are slowly raised, meaning the entire population gradually becomes more heat-resilient,” the Independent explains. This accelerates a process that, without intervention, would require many millennia. With only a few decades before Earth’s reefs are expected to be effectively dead, any hastening of the process is critical.

Photo by Anirudh / Unsplash

Other scientists – less patient, perhaps, or more desperate – aren’t waiting for natural processes: they are reengineering corals to breed varieties with climate resilient characteristics. Either way, it’s a tedious and tricky business. As one coral scientist noted, “the Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy — it would be impossible to repopulate it artificially.”

But human reef-reforming efforts are even trickier than that. Just this year, a team of Israeli scientists found that a particular species of branch coral, a “common symbiotic reef-building coral Stylophora pistillata from the Gulf of Aqaba,” exhibited excellent resistance to heat stress, with high tolerance and resilience up to 34.5˚C, offering “real hope for the preservation of at least one major coral reef ecosystem for future generations.”

With a range that “extends from Madagascar, East Africa… through the Indian Ocean to northern Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Japan and many island groups in the western and central Pacific Ocean,” this species appears perfectly positioned to repopulate many stagnant reefs.

However, there are other forces at work on reefs besides warming and acidification: fishing, dredging, and plain old pollution also take a toll. Subsequent studies of Red Sea stylophora pistillata found that warmer temperatures render that coral more susceptible to degradation from copper (Cu), “a common marine pollutant of coastal environments,” which suppresses coral’s ability to form skeletons.

When Cu pollution is combined with higher water-acidity levels, yet another study found, the damage is immediate and devastating. As a candidate species for reef reconstruction on far-flung reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), the Belize Barrier (BBR), or the Apo Reef in the Philippines, to name a few? Very likely not.

Reef degradation has been moving rapidly and, to this point, the human response has been flaccid. But at least there is now significant research and several possible solutions for rebuilding – or at least re-seeding – global reefs, with specific coral strains that can resist global warming. The work is focused, notably, on the corals that must have lacerated the Israelites in their dash for freedom, the corals most closely associated with migration and diaspora: the super corals of the Red Sea.

[1] There is modern debate as to whether the body of water crossed in Exodus references the ‘Sea of Reeds,’ possibly a now -defunct lake, rather than either of the Red Sea Gulfs.

It is the theory that determines what we see.

– Albert Einstein

In the early 1980s, an area of very low ozone (an ozone ‘hole’) was discovered over Antarctica. What was especially surprising was that it had been growing, and was visible to the right systems for quite a while, without being reported. Why? The monitoring system’s design.

It turned out that the systems for detecting ozone concentration were programmed to reject very low readings (below 180 Dobson units) as a quality control measure, since there had never been a reading below 200.

Unfortunately, the data for October 1983 contained many, many such readings – all of which were automatically discarded. A hole in the data hid the hole in the ozone layer.

Luckily, two things prevented the hole from going undiscovered forever:

• First, the system was set to notify people when a reading was discarded, so that someone could manually look into it and figure out why it had happened. (In this case, people did so)

• Second, a group of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey analyzed the data independently and brought up the hole in a now-famous letter to the journal Nature in 1985

Surveillance balloon over Billings, Montana, Feb 1, 2023. Photo by Chase Doak.

Source: Wikipedia (CC4.0)

Almost 40 years later, a similar situation unfolded when a Chinese spy balloon was spotted over (and later shot down over) the United States. Following the discovery, US air defenses were recalibrated to stop ignoring objects that were flying slowly and emitted little or no heat – and when that was done, they immediately discovered several similar objects.

Systems limitations had made it possible for a large balloon, one was easily visible to radar and tens of thousands of feet up, to metaphorically “fly under the radar.” It hadn’t flown under the radar, but it had been beneath notice.

Sustainability Holes
These examples are replicated many-fold when it comes to environmental and social issues. In business, precious few companies are truly ready when a big environmental or social concern rears its head – for example, in spite of the availability of pandemic insurance before COVID (but after Swine Flu, Bird Flu, SARS, MERS, etc.), only a single company actually purchased it.

When you look…through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
– Bojack Horseman (by Raphael Bob-Waksberg)

It’s not just COVID, either. Consider a different thinking hole: climate risk. For years, I’ve been making three mutually-reinforcing points to financially-oriented audiences:

• Companies are far more vulnerable to climate disruptions than they think (because of submerged risks, such as that their suppliers, the ports they use, their customers, or others are affected)

• Companies purchase very little formal insurance against many of these risks*

• Since they don’t have formal insurance against these risks, they are by definition self-insuring. But they don’t think of it that way, and therefore they’re unintentionally self-insured, meaning that they’re not taking the risk-reducing actions they should

• Companies may have natural disaster insurance, but they’re extremely unlikely to have any sort of coverage for a loss of revenue caused by their customers experiencing a natural disaster, or a war spiking the price of oil, or a pandemic causing the price of container shipping to skyrocket (e.g., from around $2,000 to over ten times that much)

Soyuz rocket launch over Russia. Photo by Statuska

Normally, the reaction from finance professionals and other executives is to say something like, “I see. That makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Like the US air-defense system, these executives had all the tools (risk models, insurance and self-insurance best practices) needed to incorporate climate risk in their thinking in a more complete way, but their systems weren’t set up to focus on it.

Photo by Broesus / Unsplash

Plugging the Hole
When there is a hole in awareness, there is a hole in action. Luckily, the ozone hole was discovered, and international action to address the problem followed. And when US defenses were recalibrated, and found more balloons, they took action.

But companies still allow far too much risk to go unseen – and un-acted-on because their systems are set up wrong. They’re primarily set up to look at the yesterday’s risks, along with those that are right in front of them.

But this is a solvable problem. Of course, you can tactically become more aware of climate disruptions and pandemic risks and do more to prevent and prepare for them. That’s a good start.

Photo by Alev Takil / Unsplash

Going beyond responding to a few specific issues – developing the capability to see more clearly – is even better. One way to do this is to let your values guide what you see, becoming “values lenses.”

There’s more about this* in my book The Value of Values, including what kinds of values and how to turn them into better lenses, but here’s a start:

When you let the desire to make the world a better place guide where you look (including where people are more vulnerable) and what you look at (e.g., social and environmental issues), you help close unintentional holes in your thinking. And you see much more clearly – and much farther.

* There’s more about values lenses, COVID insurance, and unintentional self-insurance in my book The Value of Values (which will be published by MIT Press in February 2024).

The current version of ‘trending’ is the video of the guy asking the dude about the thing. Punch up the media analytics, count the clicks, et voilà! It’s trending.

That’s not a trend. It won’t help your business know what your customers and other companies are doing, how they’re viewing issues, or the solutions industry leaders are putting into place over time.

A trend is the “general direction in which a situation is changing or developing.” Ideas, opinions, and innovations evolve, as do the methods for tracking them. Most are mired in media metrics, or 20^th-century tracking.

But one method – ours – is E3Evolution, a better choice for those who need to know which trends sustainability leaders are seeing, what they are saying about them, and any steps they may be taking to address them.

Using proprietary tech, E3Evolution can analyze and categorize thousands of pages of communications, helping companies stay abreast of which issues are growing, and shrinking. One conclusion from the data is that leaders are talking a lot more about a lot more issues than they used to, even as little as 5 years ago. An analysis of what they are saying helps others keep up with what’s most prominent today.

In the graphic above, for example, E3Evolution measured a wide variety of trends by looking at the top 40 sustainability leaders in North America and examining what they talked about in their external communications. This helps companies understand the change in overall expectations and specific issue expectations. In other words, it helps them keep up with what’s most prominent today.

The trends can be tracked over any period – over four years, as in the above graphics, or in detail over a single year, as below. As you can see, some issues have a lot more momentum behind them than others. These are the top movers.

E3Evolution tracks different regions, and the differences between them can be instructive.In Europe, for example, as in the comparison graphic below, trends show a very different arc than those of North America. Trends seem to build momentum more quickly in Europe, with North America having to catch up; but Europe’s trends also peak sooner than North America’s, where trends have a lot more recent momentum. Any company needing to understand the differential between the expectations of different regional customers and regulators will find value in this data.

E3Evolution is updated every six months, which keeps the trend stream both current without clutter.[1]

[1] A 2-year subscription to Valutus’ Stakeholder Science, which combines stakeholder insight with issue foresight, includes an E3Evolution subscription in addition to

• 4D Materiality
• 30 in ’30 Research
• VIEWS –  Valutus Issues Early Warning System

In his prescient 1907 novel, The Wonders of 2000, Emilio Salgari described “huge floating islands… equipped with huge wheels similar to those of your old mills, and towed up to the Gulf Stream, mooring them firmly.” These turbines – for such they were – would take energy from the steady currents of the Gulf Stream and transmit that electrical power through “submarine cables, similar to those that you used for transatlantic telegraphy.”

While the prototype Gulf Stream turbines of today are not moored, like Salgari’s ‘mill wheels,’ but instead drift like kites some 80 feet down in the water column, his concept of using ocean currents to make electricity were spot on. Several projects beta-testing feasibility, turbine design, and cost effectiveness are underway to bring blue energy from the Gulf Stream to the mainland via cables – just as Salgari envisioned.

Of course, modern oceanography has revealed that the Gulf Stream is but one of many such currents in a vast global system. These oceanic rivers – some warm, some cold – transit every ocean and coastline on the planet. The Labrador Current. The North Atlantic Drift. The Kuroshio. The South Equatorial. The Mozambique and the Alaska; the warm Agulhas current flowing down the East Coast of Africa, and the cool Benguela running up the West.

Such currents are perpetuated by Coriolis winds, by variance in ocean depths, by salt gradients, and by temperature. They have been exploited over the years – for shipping routes, fishing, and comprehending global climate patterns – but never, up until now, for harvesting electrical energy.

Photo by Norman Kuring, NASA Earth Observatory.

Just as humanity harvests only a miniscule fraction of the 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continually falling on Earth, we have as yet to make use of the incredible kinetic energy produced by the world’s waters. The Florida-to-North Carolina section of the Gulf Stream alone offers an estimated 163 Terawatt hours per year (TWh/y) in renewable, carbonless power.[1] For context, the United States uses 4,146.2 TWh/y, meaning just this stretch of the Gulf Stream, if fully exploited, could provide almost 4% of the nation’s energy needs.[2]

That may sound small, but the Gulf Stream and others flow north along the southeast U.S. coast, while the California, North Pacific, and Alaska currents also cradle America’s shores. The Greenland current could potentially supply a significant chunk of that island’s needs, the Labrador borders all eastern Canada, while every other continent on Earth is touched at some point by these energy-rich oceanic rivers.

Unlike riverine hydropower though, oceanic turbines must be laid in salty, marine offshore environments, and the electricity harvested must be cabled to shore, a significant technical challenge. As the fastest-flowing ocean current – hence the one with the greatest electrical potential – the Gulf Stream is the logical place to start.

Artwork depicting a cable-tethered undersea turbine design.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center (SNMREC) at Florida Atlantic University has been studying problem and engineering equipment with an eye to accelerating commercial implementation of ocean current power generation.

There have been concerns that, as with fishing, dams, and other human activities, marine wildlife and even the Gulf Stream itself might be adversely affected by floating turbines. However, an exhaustive 2020 study by Ocean Energy Systems (OES), a subgroup of the International Energy Agency (IEA), studied this question and found that, as the Washington Post put it, such structures were “unlikely to harm marine life, change their habitats or affect the natural flow of ocean waters.”

There are threats to the Gulf Stream, however, and to its global family of currents, that could have impacts far beyond the viability of marine power generation. Some models have shown that climate change itself is destabilizing ocean current patterns planet wide. That would substantially impact climate, weather, marine migration, marine salinity, and a host of other critical systems across the globe.

In the meanwhile, Salgari, that champion of fictional swashbucklers everywhere, nailed both the need for more power, an accessible source just off the American coast, and a means for exploiting it. Bravo, signore, bravo!

[1] Eight billion gallons-per-minute flowing at a maximum speed of 4.8 knots per hour (5.6 mph / 9 kph).

[2] The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that all forms of marine energy  – “wave, tidal, ocean current, ocean thermal, and riverine in all 50 states” – would render 2,300 terawatts annually, equivalent to “57 percent of all U.S. electricity generated in 2019,” enough energy to power 220 million households.

With sea levels beginning to submerge coastal communities and crops around the globe, drastic action is needed to protect coastlines from brine, storm surge, and inundation. Enter: the lowly mangrove.

Uniquely adapted to low-oxygen, high-saline environments, mangroves have historically populated exclusively equatorial and sub-tropical shorelines. From tropical South America, Africa, coastal India, the Pacific isles, Asia proper, to the U.S. Gulf coast, mangroves have played a critical role in ecosystem health.

They vacuum the salts from local freshwater sources, foster an incredible diversity of living organisms, keep coastal erosion at bay and – underappreciated until recently – capture and store about four times the CO₂ of their glycophytic (salt-averse) cousins in the arboreal forests. Under climate change as we know it, all those qualities are important. But their most critical task as the century progresses will likely be protecting communities from the swelling, surging, brine-encrusted seas.

Partial image of the Sundarbans mangrove forests of India and Bangladesh.
Photo by SPOT satellite. Source: Wikipedia

But wait: the vast majority of mangroves cluster between 25˚ N and 25˚ S latitude, though some venture into subtropical zones such as Florida (where Valutus founder Daniel Aronson canoed among them) and the northern coasts of Australia. But could mangroves help elsewhere? Even the hardiest of the species cannot stand protracted cold and are limited to areas where frost, if not unknown, is both rare and brief. Could their range be expanded to help communities north and south of their usual habitat?

The answer, tentatively, is yes, and here’s a case where the solution is partially supported by the problem: mangroves can’t handle much freezing and, accommodatingly, the planet is warming. As it does, the more robust mangrove varieties are creeping up once-temperate coasts where they can infiltrate, and in some cases supplant, more traditional wetlands.

Florida mangroves as seen from a canoe. Photo by Daniel Aronson

But the balance is delicate: just as a little warming may help northerly mangrove migration, excessive warming is potentially destructive to mangrove habitat.  “Emergent communities such as mangroves and salt marshes,” notes the IPCC, in its AR6 Special Report SR1.5˚C, “[are] most susceptible to sea level variability and temperature extremes,” whether hot or cold. Of the five potential carbon emissions / warming scenarios the report outlines for the future, even at the very low end (SSP1-1.9) some mangroves would suffer from excess heat and higher sea levels than even mangroves can handle. In the worst-case scenarios, with warming of +2˚C or +3˚C to the catastrophic RCP8.5 (+8.5˚C/+15˚F), though northern coastal mangroves might thrive, many current mangrove forests would be inundated or overwhelmed by heat.

Mangroves on Whiskey Island, Louisiana. Photo by William SooHoo
Source: US Geological Survey

Meanwhile, the migration process is actually underway. In Louisiana, where previously only a few stunted and lonely mangroves had taken root, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that, as temperatures rose between 2000 and 2009, the number of mangrove stands in their study area saw a five-fold increase.

Florida, too, has seen mangroves sneaking north. Currently they range the eastern shores as far north as the Canaveral barrier seashore. But what if they could be coaxed up as high as Jacksonville, to protect another 120 miles of coast, or 150 miles up the Gulf coast from their current terminus at Clearwater to Cedar Key? That one tract is almost 400 miles (644 km) of coast that would have at least some protections from higher seas.

Mangroves in the Florida Everglades. Photo by Fabian FF16 / Pixabay

But could they go even higher up the southeast coast of the United States? A recent climate report from the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS), indicates that, after rising a measly 0.55˚C  over the past 120 years, local temperatures are expected to increase dramatically over the next 8 decades.

Such heat will cause severe problems in the area. Without protection, over the next 80 years “increased flooding, due largely to sea level rise, will disrupt coastal and low-lying communities. By the end of the century, these areas will experience high tide flooding nearly every day and a substantial increase in the chance of flooding from coastal storms… heavy rains from hurricanes and other weather systems will become more frequent and more intense.” But such heat might also help mangroves come to the rescue. Right?

Frozen Mangrove roots in February 2018. Photo by Rolf Dietrich Brecher.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Possibly. Even a few hours at freezing can kill even the hardier species. The key is not higher high temperatures but higher low temperatures: fewer and shorter frosts. In one Florida survey, “the expansion of mangroves did not match patterns of increased average temperatures. Instead, the largest increases in mangrove area occurred in regions that experienced fewer extremely cold nights (when the temperature dipped below 25 degrees F [-3.9˚C].” So, it is possible that warmer overall temperatures will allow mangroves to creep up the coast.

Take Elizabeth City, at the northeastern tip of South Carolina. It currently averages January lows of 0.55˚C (33˚F) – just above freezing – and highs around 10.5˚C (51˚F). The lows aren’t good enough to support mangroves and save the coasts. But the rise in average low temps need not be dramatic. Indeed, as the researchers explained, “these temperature changes were small, just one fewer freeze event per year on average, but they appear to have helped cause these large increases in mangrove area.”

Say temperatures were to rise as expected for the Elizabeth City area? Using the IPCC’s ‘low-emissions scenario’ for the coming decades, Elizabeth City’s winter lows would now be about 4.15˚C (39.5˚F) – well above freezing. For the high-emissions forecast – which is certainly looking likely at the moment – winter lows would top 18.75˚C (65.8˚F), well into the hardy mangrove comfort zone. Suddenly, those bulwarks against coastal erosion, storm surge, higher daily tides, crop salinization, and atmospheric carbon, could potentially weather North Carolina’s winters.

Elizabeth City, South Carolina. Source: Wikipedia

Frost, ice, and snow may wipe them out, true… though on the Gulf side, the last frost in coastal Louisiana occurred in 1989. Though the same cannot be said yet for Georgia and the Carolinas, it may be so in time. We’ll have to wait to see exactly how far north mangroves will take hold over the next 80 years or so.

The importance of maintaining carbon-sequestering, salt-tolerant, coast-protective mangroves is obvious. But regardless of mangrove migration, it’s important to know that extant mangrove forests have already been under stress: logging, clear cutting for crops, aquaculture, and more are hurting them even in their traditional ranges. Supporting and repopulating razed mangrove forests will be a critical part of coastal defenses throughout this century and beyond.

Many projects to rebuild native mangrove forest are currently in the works. In the Indian-Bangladeshi Sundarbans –“a network of muddy islands and waterways that extends roughly 3,860 square miles (10,000 square km), two times the size of  the state of Delaware,” making it “the “largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world”  – plantings are underway. Kenya is hosting a project wherein the growth of carbon-sequestering mangroves pays the community to plant – rather than harvest – the trees, garnering income through carbon credits. Papua, New Guinea is attempting to save communities vulnerable to encroaching seas with mangrove plantings as well, and even the U.S. state of Florida – where the critically vulnerable manatee population eats, lives, and finds protection in the area’s shrinking mangrove wetlands – has natural restoration and  replanting efforts underway.

There are other issues and concerns, like the potential long-term effects of mangroves displacing more traditional temperate wetland ecosystems, such as salt marshes. Much is still to be learned, but this, at least, is clear: given the folly of mankind, having warmed the globe so quickly humanity can at least develop a symbiotic pact with mangroves wherein we help them thrive and they protect us from the very furies we have unleashed.

Every winter, meteorologists chatter hyperbolically before vast arrays of charts, maps, and satellite images. They’re particularly fond of explaining not only how cold it is outside – any thermometer can do that – but also how cold it feels. For this they use a grid known as the ‘windchill’ index, and anyone who ventures out in the cold – from Antarctica to the northern temperate zone – knows how critical that windchill factor can be, both for comfort and for survival.

Modern science having been reared where cold temps were common, the analogous indices for heat are less well known. But as the world warms, heat waves are becoming more widespread, frequent, unseasonal, and severe, and we’d all do well to become savvier about the Heat Index (HI).

The Heat Index – the tool meteorologists use to measure how hot it feels, and the danger heat represents – is increasing in importance even as the windchill factor lessens. Indeed, to every EMT, physician, athlete, event planner, and lifeguard, an awareness of the heat index must now be considered a standard safety precaution.

Heat Index Chart. Source: National Weather Service /
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

There are actually two indices used to express the impact of heat: the Heat Index and the WetBulb Globe Temperature (WBGT). The first uses a complex formula factoring temperature in the shade with relative humidity to express how hot it will feel in given conditions.

The second, more comprehensive formula, WBGT, combines temps in direct sunlight with humidity, wind speed, sun angle, and cloud cover, to render a single value for heat stress. It gives a more localized and detailed reading of the actual physical impacts of heat in a specific place and time. And, like windchill, both these metrics are more than academic exercises: they can represent the difference between life and death.

Under normal conditions, the human body’s thermoregulatory strategies keep us comfortable and safe. For cold, we radiate insulating heat from within. When wind whisks that insulation away – the windchill factor – we feel colder and are more easily subject to frostbite and hypothermia than when the air is still.

Heat, on the other hand, promotes sweat, through which evaporation – an inherently cooling process – keeps us comfortable. But higher temps and humidity can stifle that evaporative process and the cooling it provides. Fatigue, cramping, heat exhaustion, even life-threatening organ damage and heat stroke, can result.

Source: U.S. National Weather Service

Now, all this should have remained standard meteorological fare, trotted out only on rare occasions when the thermometer broke 90˚F for a few days. But there has been a decades-long, unambiguous upward trend with respect to heat waves, and that trend is accelerating as the world’s ambient temperature rises.

Indeed, according to the IPCC, “with every additional increment of global warming, changes in extremes continue to become larger… every additional 0.5°C of global warming causes clearly discernible increases in the intensity and frequency of hot extremes, including heat waves (very likely), and heavy precipitation (high confidence).”

Hmm. More intense and frequent heat extremes, coupled with higher humidity: what could go wrong? As the HI and WBGT make clear, plenty.

Heat Wave Characteristics in the United States by Decade, 1961–2019.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves, Feb. 2022

Lest anyone think said trend is some garden-variety geological shift, scientists say the months-long spring heat wave that hit south Asia in early 2022, and caused “an estimated 10-35 percent reduction in crop yields in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab,” was about 30 times more likely and 1˚C (1.8˚F) hotter than it would have been before the industrial era. Of the massive heat wave that struck the West Coast of North America in 2021, scientists predict that, “looking into the future, in a world with 2°C of global warming” (which is expected as early as the 2040s), “an event like this – estimated to occur only once every 1,000 years, would occur roughly every 5 to 10 years.”

And, while climate researchers have long talked in the abstract of the need to hold warming to <1.5˚C, there’s nothing hypothetical about the human-health consequences of failure. As the IPCC asserted in their most recent report, “limiting global warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heat waves…” That’s approximately the population of the United States and France combined. And keep in mind that +2˚C is looking ever-more like warming’s floor rather than ceiling. People, hundreds of thousands more than in the past, are going to be exposed to, and die from, heat.

Photo by Logga Wiggler / Pixabay

The future estimates are sobering. Currently, in the U.S. alone, there are some 12,000 heat-related deaths annually. Under the IPCC’s moderate Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP4.5 scenario), between 2080 and 2100, that number will quadruple, meaning an additional 36,000 people will succumb. The high-warming scenario (RCP 8.5) is truly frightening. Under it, during the same period, the U.S. would see a truly staggering additional 97,000 annual heat-related deaths. Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, the pacific islands, the Mediterranean region, Australia… millions would die of heat on virtually every continent save Antarctica.

It should be noted that this discussion focuses on the impacts of heat on the human animal directly. However, there are more far-reaching secondary and tertiary impacts of the heat waves to come: lost productivity, health-care challenges, drought, famine, thirst, and of course the wildfires that appear in the wake of intense heat. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), “an increase in heat stress resulting from global warming is projected to lead to a global productivity loss equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs in the year 2030.” Eighty million jobs! Only 8 years hence?!

Meanwhile, in late June of 2021, a heat wave struck the Pacific Northwest, peaking at 49.6˚C (121.3˚F), a new Canadian record, in the small town of Lytton, British Columbia. A day after the record was set, “Lytton was largely destroyed in a wildfire,” according to World Weather Attribution. And for those with very short memories, the brutal and record-breaking heat that descended on almost the entire United States, the U.K., and most of Western Europe this very July, is a prime example. Many of the highs were more than 20˚F (11.1˚C) above average local temperatures for that date.[1] The record-setting heat in Siberia in 2020, also found to be 600 times more likely than in the pre-industrial period – and virtually impossible without human intervention – suggests these heat waves are already upon us.

A wildfire burns in Lytton, British Columbia. Sentinel 2-A Satellite, 1 July 2021.
Photo by Antti Lipponen. Source: Wikipedia

The heat indices noted above are no less than survival equipment, to be consulted before venturing out on land, sea, forest, or plain, all around the world. The 21st century will be – and will feel like – a crucible for the race.

We don’t know with certainty exactly how hot the heat waves will be; just how often they will arise; precisely how much longer they will last, or for how long their seasons will be extended. But we do know this: the heat index should be in every pocket, wallet, backpack, vehicle, and event plan, and on every athletic director’s desk. It should be referenced as casually, and as naturally, as checking to see if it’s raining. Winter still has its chill, but heat – coming in waves – will prove the more important factor.

[1] The International Meteorological Association’s definition of a heat wave requires sustained temperatures at least 9˚F (5˚C) above average for a given location.

“A thousand times have I sought to find the element that makes the
charm complete… That I may bid them enter the toys and mannikins.”
– The Master Toymaker, Babes in Toyland, by Victor Herbert

In Victor Herbert’s Toyland, the Master Toymaker must finish Santa’s toys in time for Christmas and, since each one must be made by hand, it’s an arduous task. Fortunately, Grumio, his apprentice, has created a marvelous new machine:

Grumio:           You’ll never ever need these hand tools again, sir.
                          This is the latest concept in automation!

Toymaker:      Simply astonishing! A real doll! This is amazing!
                          Can this machine make a toy boat, too?

Grumio:           Toy boat coming up, sir.

Toymaker:      This is overwhelming! A doll! A boat!

Grumio:           Oh, my machine can make anything, sir!

Toymaker:      And now, to work… we have a deadline to meet,
                           I will start the machine at full production.

Uh oh. Of course the scene ends in disaster and, unfortunately, the real-life version isn’t far behind. Earlier generations’ toys were crafted by hand from materials found in the natural world: wood, clay, cloth, glass, ivory, horn, and metals both precious and base. As with the Toymaker, the work was skilled and painstaking. But when thermoplastics began their rise around 1960, the population was exploding. Hence, many more children than the century before. Demand was high. Any machine that could make an infinite variety of toys at incredible speed was bound to be appealing and, like the Toymaker, the consequences of this new material were not the uppermost consideration.

William Morris as a Toy Soldier in a 1904 stage production of
Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland. Source: Wikipedia.

Upwards of 90% of all toys are now made that way, as plastics have taken over.
Kids have loved stuffed toys for thousands of years, but back then they were constructed of “cotton or wool cloth, or sometimes from leather, and they were stuffed with horsehair, sawdust, or even old rags.” Simple, easy, and imminently compostable. Today’s bears, bunnies, giraffes, and huskies are filled with, covered in, and stitched together by, high-tech, petroleum-based, fully synthetic polyester fibers. Soft, sure; life-like, and squeezable, yes; but still plastic.

Photo by Robert Zunikoff / Unsplash

Cars, bicycle seats, board games, even the poor Toymaker’s ‘wooden’ soldiers, toys that were formerly of rubber, wood, or cardboard, are now fully synthetic. Most Chanukah dreidels, too. Annual gifts for millions, dreidels originally formed of ivory, silver, brass, animal horn or most commonly lead, wood, or clay, are now made by the millions of cheap, abundant, colorful plastics.

To belabor the obvious, this has gone too far. Toys are a major chunk of the plastic found on almost every square meter of land, water, air, even animal tissue, on the planet.

Ronald McDonald at Special Olympics’ opening day, Okinawa, Japan, 2011. Photo by A1C Brooke Beers.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

But the toymakers weren’t in this alone. Distributors had a role, and therefore a role in potential solutions. Despite the Big Box stores, the McDonald’s restaurant chain distributes more toys under its golden arches than any other outlet in the world, and by a wide margin. The chain’s kid-friendly Happy Meals come with swag, and that swag is almost always plastic. But already, their outlets in France have switched from plastic toys to paper knick-knacks, and a chain-wide migration to “corn and other materials” for their trinkets is slated within the next 3 years. At 1.5 billion Happy Meals sold annually, and therefore 1.5 billion plastic toys, it’s time to put on a clown nose and dance.  

Toymakers themselves are aware of the problem and some are going all-out to reduce plastic packaging. But for greatest impact, a change to the products themselves is needed, and there is progress happening on that front. It may not be necessary, for example, to return to antediluvian materials, or even to eschew plastic altogether, because the very nature of plastic may be changing. Bio-plastics are under development from several promising materials.

The largest toymaker in the world, Lego, is committed to banning their standard acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic and replacing it with a sustainable bio-plastic polymer. They have about 150 (non-biodegradable) components from sustainably grown sugar cane already on the market. Yet that material is too soft and pliable for their basic blocks, and their attempted foray into hemp hasn’t yet borne fruit. They have 7 years to meet their goal. That’s hundreds, perhaps a thousand, fewer years than the actual lifespan of their current material.

Photo by Hidde Schalm / Unsplash

A review of world #2 toymaker, Bandai, shrills, “40 years, 500 million robot figures: The secrets of [Bandai toy models] success.” Actually, the secrets of their success reside in billions of pellets of proprietary synthetic polymers including polystyrene, acrylic and ABS. But they have now had some success with eggshell plastic, and even a unique material they are partnering with an outside firm to develop, known as Limex, a limestone-polypropylene resin combination with up to 50% less petro-derivatives and almost all the characteristics of moldable plastics. The process is new but, if it pans out as Bandai and others hope, it could revolutionize the toy industry.

Mattel, another of the Big Four global toy manufacturers, has reportedly “pledged to use 100 percent recycled, recyclable, or bio-based plastic materials across the entire offering and packaging by 2030,” among other initiatives.

Photo by Ed Dy / Unsplash

So much is being done, but a lot more can be done. This year, the average that will be spent on Holiday gifts was $932.[2] That represents an incredible amount of plastic. Is there any realistic chance of reversion to natural or biodegradable materials for toys in our future?

Grumio:           Just a minute, sir. Please, wake up. This is my new invention

Toymaker:      What?

Grumio:           My new invention

Toymaker:      Shoot me.

Grumio:           Oh, please, sir. This is a scientific triumph. Sir, please, my new formula for toy-making is even better than automation!                                It’s a biochemical breakthrough.

Toymaker:     It’s better?

Let’s hope so, for all our sakes.