It’s a classic James Bond scenario. One brilliant, committed evildoer, with a small force of minions, is bent on global domination to get what he wants. He is pitted against one brilliant, committed do-gooder bent on stopping him at all costs. As usual, the clock is ticking.

In our case however, there are vast forces committed to actively opposing any increase in sustainable actions, with an army of minions, all arrayed against a small-but-committed cadre of leaders — business executives, NGOs, government officials, scientists, and members of the public bent on stopping them. And the clock certainly is ticking.

Many top executives who appear to align well with the Black Hats should —and could — be natural allies of sustainable actions. If they truly knew how sustainability could increase bottom-line profits, shareholder value, and value in the community, maybe they would leap into the fray with the White Hats, become leaders in this fight themselves. 

It is up to the rest of us to be effective sustainability leaders and to lead them, and the world, to become leaders too.

How? First, by making sustainability a valuable part of the business, and making sure all involved know it. If you’ve seen our articles on submerged value, breaking through to the C-Suite, etc., you’ll recognize our emphasis on this theme. Second, we need to be rigorous about what works – really works — and what doesn’t. 

Taking a cold, hard, and detailed look to see what works, and tossing the things that don’t, greatly increases our credibility. It also means fewer wasted resources. As we all know, sustainability programs don’t get enough resources to waste them on things that don’t work!

It has long been our approach to inject rigor into what we do and to focus on finding what works through hard evidence – then scaling it for larger impact. 

Before I started Valutus, I conducted research on whether a centralized sustainability / CSR organization had better results, or whether a decentralized one did, one where “sustainability is everyone’s job” and there is no CSO. There were champions of both approaches but, if one worked substantially better, then people using the other one weren’t maximizing their impact. We’re all about impact and we needed to know which was true. (It turns out it’s the centralized organization with a CSO. The intuition that explains the results is simple: Sustainability is like profitability – while it’s everyone’s job to help a company make money, companies still have CFOs.)

Similarly, I led a study about which sustainable supply chain practices actually work. Here again, the results pointed to a way to get more bang for both the buck and the managerial effort. What we found, after reviewing data from almost 1,000 organizations, was astounding. Under half of the 50 sustainable supply chain practices companies use can actually be shown to work. 

In other words, the majority of what companies do to promote sustainability in their value chain doesn’t seem to work at all and is a waste of precious resources. But why is this?

I begin a number of my talks by asking directly, “What if you could do more of what tends to work, and less of what may not?” But maybe the question that matters is, “Why don’t organizations know what actually works before they start?”

The answer seems to be that companies just don’t know how to find out what works. They may be brilliant at making better widgets or developing superior medicines, but when it comes to sustainability, they don’t know the right questions to ask (or simply don’t believe it’s possible to answer them). Even if they’re on the right track, they often don’t apply enough rigor to the answers.

Now, as anyone who follows us has heard (once or twice before!), we’ve spent the better part of two decades quantifying things we were told could not be measured. But if the unmeasurable is out there, we haven’t found it yet. (For one thing, it’s not always necessary to come up with the exact and perfect answer. As the great statistician John Tukey was fond of saying, “An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.”) 

When I was doing the research into making a supply chain more sustainable — helping suppliers improve their environmental and social performance — it took about 40% of the questions we ask just to clarify how well each practice worked. But we had to do it — no way do we want our clients putting their resources into low-value projects, and no way does the world have time for us to be inefficient. 

Today’s sustainability leaders need to be rigorous, to take nothing for granted, and to learn to measure and quantify what matters, even if that initially seems impossible. We need to know our project will work. 

We can’t afford not to: Not succeeding squanders resources, wastes time, and emboldens those opposing us. The forces trying to hold us back need to be shaken, not stirred.

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Each time we drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway, approaching my sister’s home in northern Manhattan, I’d gaze across the vast sheet of the Hudson, sigh and say, “You know, this must have been so pristine and beautiful when the first settlers got here… ”

Glancing at the passenger seat, I’d see my wife desperately trying to stifle her laughter. “You say it every. Single. Time!” she would gasp. “I’ve just been sitting here waiting.”

Okay, very funny. But the truth is, it was still magnificent. The cliffs on the Jersey shore, known as The Palisades. The Great Grey George Washington Bridge, under which – if you look carefully – you can see the Little Red Lighthouse, of children’s-book fame.

A few miles south are the Plains of Weehawken, to which Aaron Burr and Alex Hamilton were separately rowed for pistol practice, and from which Hamilton returned mortally wounded. (By the way, that was no mean feat: the river is well over a mile across at that point.) There have been some changes since then – since the early days, I mean.

When Henry Hudson, for example, sailed up the Hudson in 1609, there were huge creatures swimming alongside him: sperm whales, humpbacks and other species of cetaceans. One sperm whale famously became entangled and died at Cohoes, NY, in 1652, supplying the town with a vast supply of spermaceti for whale oil. 

But the those pesky ‘first settlers’ came, and the history of the river since then has not been a kind one: the European touch was not light, shall we say. Those who alleged, in the mid-20th, that ‘dillution is the solution to pollution’ were clearly not drinking from the Hudson. By the time I came along, the river was a sewer. 

I was born in Tarrytown, which is ranged along the east bank of the Hudson near its widest point, some three miles across. This is the home of Sleepy Hollow and the Tappan Zee bridge. We lived in Ossining then, also on Hudson, and later in Riverdale, close to the wonderfully named Spuyten Duyvel (spitting devil) creek separating Manhattan from the Bronx.

Perhaps that’s why the wreck of the river – and the constant thought of what it must once have been like – was so personal, and so painful. The pollution of our waterways was a concerted attack from all sides and it was only legislation such as the Clean Water Act that stemmed the tide. 

GE, for example, poured PCBs into its waters for 30 years, until their toxic effects were fully understood, and their use was banned. After 50 years of exposure, one species of fish, “evolved a two amino acid change in its AHR2 receptor gene.” Apparently this made it more likely to pass its PCB contaminants up the food chain through striped bass and beyond. Industry up and down the river added various chemicals, sewage and all the other trappings humanity seems to use but not dispose of safely.

There are major point-sources for waterway pollution and there are non-point-sources too. “…Sediments, nutrients, pesticides, fertilizers and animal wastes, account for more than half of the pollution in U.S. waters,” according to Wikipedia.

But hey, I didn’t come here to whine, not this time anyway. The story of the Hudson – and the Charles and the Great Lakes and many other American bodies of water – is a story of success. 

My last post was about air pollution and how the Clean Air Act of 1970, along with the creation of the EPA that same year, had done wonders for America’s lungs. While researching all that, I couldn’t help but think of the impact the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the EPA’s designation of the Hudson as a superfund site, had on that wonderful river.

Fortunately, many other waterways have also been rescued, among them the Charles River in Boston. That’s good, because two of my wife’s siblings and my nephew capsized their canoe just past the Anderson bridge in Cambridge during Boston’s 4th of July celebration en route to the fireworks. They had to be rescued by a yacht heading in the same direction. (I was just about to dive in to save them when that boat pulled up. No, really I was, honest.)

Thirty years ago this would have been horrifying and I would have aborted the trip and taken them to the hospital. By 2011, when this occured, the Charles – while still not absolutely pristine – was swimmable again.

 Some time in the summer of 1974 or ’75, I walked 20 miles along riverside trails beside Pete Seeger, on our way to Croton Point Park for his Hudson River Festival. We were raising money for the sloop Clearwater, Seeger’s co-op sailing vessel that plied the Hudson raising awareness about the plight of the river’s water, flora and fauna. I say ‘we’ but I was just a teenager helping raise a few bucks. Seeger, long-time champion of the Hudson, was walking behind the thousands of others, picking up trash they left behind, and I tagged along.

He was an old man, and I a young one, but he was spry and feisty and tall and had a wonderful resonant speaking voice, as I recall. Up close, he was as impressive as his reputation. The late great Harry Chapin was waiting at the park and entertained us all for a while.

A few years later I sailed on the Clearwater, taking my very young nephew – the same who took an unintentional dip in the Charles some years later – for his first sail. We both got an earful on the various states of the Hudson, dredging up crabs and shrimp along with the occasional piece of trash. He was born a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge, in an apartment my sister has occupied for almost 40 years. I guess the Hudson is pretty deep in my family’s bones.

But here’s the thing: the Hudson is back. The quality of water in the area is now higher than at any point in the last hundred years, according to the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. This in a river where fishing had to be banned in spots, along with eating anything that came out of it.

But there have been recent images of beaver in the Bronx and Hudson rivers, an animal that was hunted wiped out in New York before 1700 for its pelts.

Humpbacks have been spotted coasting upriver in the past few years. This is not a fluke – if you’ll pardon the pun – as some 272 were sighted in 2018. This was unthinkable just a short while ago and even as recently as 2011 only five were seen.

And that’s just the big boys. I, for one, was flabbergasted to learn there are seahorses in the lower river. Seahorses! 

The lined seahorse is flourishing, and that means there are tiny shrimp for them to eat, and sea nymphs, and on and on. There are now bald eagles along the central and upper Hudson, and many more sharks than we’re accustomed to are hunting in the estuary. Move over striped bass, the big boys are atop the food chain here now — meaning the Great Whites. That’s likely a good omen, as sharks only go places to hunt and that means fish, and lots of ‘em. There are well over 200 species in the estuary including glass eels, Atlantic sturgeon, several species of catfish, and many others.

The lower Hudson, of course, is not truly a river anymore. Below Troy, New York, it’s a tidal estuary, and the brackish mix of salt and fresh makes for variety of animals and plants that would not be found if the water was fresh alone.

Now, we’re not out of the woods on this, and last year another estuary, the Chesapeake, was damaged by runoff of chemicals – specifically nitrogen and phosphorus – from heavy rains, along with debris, receiving only a D grade from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF). 

The good news is, the Bay had been steadily improving for years. At the same time, it points up how easily all this work can be turned on its head. “The Bay’s sustained improvement was reversed in 2018, exposing just how fragile the recovery is,” Will Baker, the president of the CBF, told the Associated Press earlier this year, and the same is clearly true for the Hudson and others. This is not a ‘win’ where we can sit on our thumbs going forward. 

But for the moment, let’s enjoy the fact that we’ve made huge strides and more is being done. It may not be just the way the first settlers saw it. But for all practical purposes, the Hudson is back!

From Valutus Sustainability R.O.I. #18 Rigor: Part 1

Consider that the first Econ laureates, in 1969, were recognized for “applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.” In 1970 it was for, “static and dynamic economic theory.”

A year later came, “empirically founded interpretation of economic growth,” followed closely by ‘economic equilibrium theory,’ ‘input-output’ method, the ‘theory of money’ and ‘theory of optimum allocation of resources.” See a pattern here?

This year, in contrast, the Nobel committee said their three Laureates — Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer — had “considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.”

Boom! Theories are critical underpinnings, but sometimes decisions must be made now, perhaps with billions of dollars or people riding on them. If so, then real, concrete information is needed in advance to be as sure as possible that the intended good will result.

An ‘experiment-based approach’ such as these laureates used, leads to measurable, provable results. These economists made field work and experimentation a priority over accepted ideas on poverty reduction.

“Banerjee and his co-workers,” writes Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury, Pro Vice Chancellor of Adamas University, Kolkata, “try to measure the effectiveness of actions… in improving people’s lives. For this, they use randomized controlled trials, similar to clinical trials in medical research. For example, although polio vaccination is freely available in India, many mothers were not bringing their children for the vaccination drives.” 

Duflo and Banerjee found that immunization rates for children in rural Rajasthan, India, jumped dramatically (from 5 percent to 39 percent) when their families were offered modest incentives for immunization, such as lentils. Lentils!

But it wasn’t immunizations alone. As MIT News notes, “Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.” Their work has “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice” while demonstrating a “new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty.” 

Yes! No theory need apply. These guys are looking for hard evidence of what actually works. 

So, if a company had come to them and said, hey, we’d like to fund a million vaccinations in Burkina Faso and Kenya but the folks there don’t seem to be vaccinating their kids… any ideas? these three could say, with a high degree of confidence, Yes. We suggest you stock up on legumes.

My wife just returned from a visit to Xiamen, China. Calling me from a tour bus, she remarked on Xiamen’s clean, fresh waterfront air. This reminded me of my own recent trip to the States, and the enjoyable breezes I inhaled in such places as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston.

That was a far cry from my boyhood, when approaching any of those towns meant peering through a grimy brown smear. On an early foray to Los Angeles, I saw the thick, hazy rim hanging, stationary, above the great bowl between the mountains. And let’s not mention Gary, Indiana or Elizabeth, New Jersey, where rolling the car windows up was mandatory.

I remember when the air was so thick in New York that it was tough to see the Empire State Building from my place on 13^th street, twenty blocks away. The same nasty stuff hung over Chicago’s skyline. So it was notable that I never gave the air a thought during my trip there this past September.

The air in my current town is a lot more like what I saw during my boyhood. It so happens that just as I flew to the U.S., there was a sudden upswing in air pollution, both here in Hồ Chí Minh City, and in Hanoi.

Since my return, the view from our windows here in Hồ Chí Minh includes a grey, dirty haze, limiting visibility and causing us to buy an air purifier just last week. My oldest daughter — the only one of us to spend the majority of our time in the outside air — has had a persistent cough for most of the past year.

It’s hard to explain the schools here, but hers is three floors of open-air classrooms ranged along open-air corridors in a rectangle around a large open-air courtyard, with flagstones and full-sized trees. By ‘open’ I mean that if it rains — which it does every day during the monsoon season — then it’s also raining in the courtyard and corridors. Whatever the outside air contains is what she breathes all day.

So what should we do? Well, it occurs to me that a snapshot of success in this area looks a lot like the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the EPA, in 1970. We’re just shy of 50 years on from those acts and consider that over this period, GDP has risen nearly 300% while emissions have dropped about 80%. Now that is an accomplishment.

It’s also a little alarming that, for the first time since those incredibly powerful pieces of legislation were passed, air quality in the United States is going in the wrong direction since 2016. The New York Times wrote this week that particulate is up ≈5.5%, enough to be responsible for just under 10,000 extra deaths over the past two years. Yikes!

Now, in spite of this, the U.S. death rate is relatively low. As of 2015, it was coming in at 20.7 deaths per 100,000 people. For context, India, at the top end, had a rate of 223/100,000 with Vietnam in the middle at about 87/100K.

Except that U.S. rates are now rising. More particulate is being pumped into the atmosphere from industry, autos, agriculture and, yes, climate-change-driven wildfires in the West. Having just written about the ravages of indoor air pollution (IAP) in R.O.I. last issue, it seemed air pollution particulate was now an issue for the developing world. Perhaps it’s too soon to make that call.

Under these circumstances, it is comforting that, according to the Washington Post, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently disbanded the expert academic panel that reviewed and advised the agency on its standards for small-particle air pollution and replaced it with fossil-fuel-industry consultants. What?!! Double Yikes!

Yet at least up to this point, the EPA, Clean Water act and the various Clean Air acts, have been spectacularly successful.

Still, if I was hoping Vietnam would follow the U.S. model, the news that AirVisual, an app that monitors air quality in cities around the world, took down its Facebook page, was disconcerting. AirVisual was also unavailable on the various App Store sites after Hanoi recently found itself at the top of their list for bad air pollution. The cause, they said, was a ‘coordinated attack,’ though they did not say by whom. If one were indiscreet, one could make a pretty solid guess, given that Hanoi is the capital. (Incidentally, the site is back up and Hanoi is now fourth on the list behind Belgrade, Delhi and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.)

As an American expat, it is gut-wrenching to find that my government is now in the habit of similar attacks on climate information. It is not shocking here to find that politically unwelcome facts are suppressed but when the EPA’s Climate Change Page went dark for more than a year, it became hideously clear the same was happening back home.

Happily, for those who haven’t checked in a while, I just did and the page content has reappeared.
Yet now we find that enforcement at the EPA is down, leading in part, to the uptick in emissions and, sad to say, to more disease and death.

Living here, where just breathing is deadly, is a stern reminder that going back to the days of smog in America’s big cities should be off the table. I can’t cross my fingers — that’s an inappropriate gesture here in Vietnam. But all the toes on my left foot are crossed that soon, Vietnam can replicate what the U.S. did fifty years ago and make its air breathable again. I’ve crossed the toes on my right just as tightly hoping the U.S. does not do the same in reverse.