“Against a backdrop of dark or gloom-filled outlooks regarding climate change,
a rising movement seeks to emphasize hope without sugarcoating the crisis.”
– Christian Science Monitor

Paradoxes are just that. Unstoppable force confronting immovable object. A single hand clapping. Or the well-known conundrum, ‘this statement is false.’ They are useful to contemplate but have no practical value. But paradoxically, there is one paradox with important, even critical real-life applications that could come in handy for all of us just now. It requires that people in circumstances where success is virtually impossible, and who are aware of same, nonetheless maintain belief in eventual success.

Said paradox was tested and proven by its namesake, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was rotting in a North Vietnamese prison camp, hungry, physically damaged, and in solitary, with no knowledge of how things stood outside when he developed it. We only know about Stockdale’s paradox because it was eminently practical – for him: he lived it, and it saved him. However brutal, that prison proved the perfect laboratory. And so, as we’ve written before, is the current fluxuant state of Earth’s climate.

Photo by Ajith S. / Unsplash

“‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas
would come, and Christmas would go…then Christmas again,
and eventually they died of a broken heart”
–  Vice Admiral James Stockdale

It wasn’t some form of optimism: Stockdale made clear that the optimists among his imprisoned comrades were the least equipped to make it, crumbling further each time their hopeful expectations failed. But the pessimists fared little better, and journalist David Wallace-Wells must take care for, with his 2019 tome The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (Penguin Random House), he’s clearly in the pessimist camp.

Or is he? In a New York Times Magazine piece this October called Beyond Catastrophe, he laid out an almost Stockdalian approach to future climate scenarios, navigating between “Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and… millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days.”

In this he was assisted by new data he interprets as more moderate than the numbers he’s seen before. And indeed, Wallace-Wells is not the only one studying them and sounding a more hopeful note. The Christian Science Monitor is clearly in the Stockdale camp, as an upbeat climate article’s insert last September read:

“Why we wrote this: Hope.
Against a backdrop of dark or gloom-filled outlooks
regarding climate change, a rising movement
seeks to emphasize hope without
sugarcoating the crisis.”

The Monitor headline calls this the Rise of the Climate Optimists, but in fact, ‘emphasizing hope without sugarcoating’ is the very model of a modern major Admiral – Admiral Stockdale. A middle path, a single hand clapping. The dark and gloom isn’t a chimera, but a measurable and appreciable rise in temperatures, sea levels, human migration, monetary losses, heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and more. This thing is real. ‘Emphasizing hope’ is what you do when there isn’t much.

Yet the optimistic tide does appear to be rising, as the Institute for Policy Studies’ OtherWords.org noted in Three Hopeful Stories of Environmental Activism, back in February. And just a few days ago, Vox’s environment reporter, Benji Jones, posted, “7 Reasons Why Our Planet Might Not be Doomed After All.”

Most of these focus on good trends and small victories – the number of species in recovery; land being reclaimed; focus placed on indigenous communities as environmental stewards; and so on. All the above and more were poured over at Montreal’s COP15 this December.

‘Architect of the Capitol’ shot at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1^st Inaugural. By U.S. Capitol
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Monitor’s piece was essentially an encomium to positivity, a sort of FDR meets TR theme: namely that fear itself crushes the spirit, leading to apathy; while optimism fuels action and innovation. It quotes a professor of sustainable enterprise explaining, “the thinking is that if I can show you a future you want to aspire to, I will unleash your creative energies, and you will strive towards the best.”

But the true surprise was Wallace-Wells’ back-from-the-brink assessment of the IPCC’s climate predictions. He has now seen, he writes, not the promised land, but the probable land. It is indeed the middle path between catastrophic damage to both human-and-eco systems, and the abundant, verdant planet we knew.

“The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay,” he wrote. “The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.”

If he is right, it’s the path that we, for better or worse, are doomed to walk.

“Oh! When will Christmas be here?” wailed Hans Christian Andersen’s Fir Tree. “I am now as tall and well grown as those which were taken away last year. Oh! That I were now laid on the wagon, or standing in the warm room, with all that brightness and splendor around me!” Various forest birds and animals were giving advice when a ray of sunlight piped up. “Rejoice in thy youth,” said the sunbeam; “rejoice in thy fresh growth, and the young life that is in thee.”

But the sunlight of yore was kinder than that of today. With higher temperatures in pine-growing regions, Christmas trees are being damaged and killed by those very beams.

Photo by Pexels / Pixabay

But Christmas trees are creatures of the forest no more. Saplings and trees by the millions are carefully tended on dedicated Christmas-tree farms, the first of which was established in the U.S. in 1901. It’s become a huge industry with hundreds of millions of live trees under cultivation, about 350 million in the U.S. alone. Between North America and Europe, around 100-million trees are cut and sold annually. These days, an incredible 98% are farm-grown.

Despite annual industry growth, “Christmas tree farms shrunk by almost 20,000 acres from 2011 to 2021, notes Green Matters, with older farmers retiring and global mean surface temperature (GMST) rising. Heatwaves, such as last year’s ‘heat dome’ in the Pacific Northwest and the blistering drought in Europe and the U.K., are more frequent, more sustained, and more searing. The result is singed and discolored trees and dead seedlings, driving prices up and tree farmers to distraction.

The Douglas Fir, a popular species according to the National Christmas Tree Association, begins to lose function at 110ºF (43.3ºC). So, when portions of Oregon hit a scorching 117ºF (47.2ºC) last year, the trees began to suffer. Heat stress “impacts plant function… increases respiration, reduces photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, growth and reproduction, and leads to leaf abscission, visible foliar damage and mortality,” notes a 2016 scholarly study in Oxford’s Tree Physiology. In plain words, it turns the needles a very un-Christmas-like brown.

Photo by Iuliia Burmistrova.

Such trees go begging in the marketplace while the seedlings and saplings often die outright. If this continues the farms may die as well. The U.S. cut-tree industry stood at $2.56 billion in 2018, nearly double its 215 revenue, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7%. But with farmers taking a beating, and heat waves becoming even more frequent and intense, the situation is likely to worsen.

Farmers have a few tricks up their sleeves though, finding and importing varieties to suit their farms’ conditions, even if those species aren’t as close to the famed Christmas aesthetic. They shear and trim until the shape is right, and all is well.

Science is on the case, too. For trees, as well as most plants and animals in the latter Anthropocene, salvation may lie in genetics. As we reported previously, species under climate pressures may benefit from the DNA of varieties with better heat, flooding, salt, or drought-resistance properties and other useful traits. The “Collaborative Fir Germplasm Evaluation Project,” for example, is “a 12-year partnership with scientists in Connecticut, Oregon, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan,” one of several groups scouring the globe for conifer DNA to make Christmas trees fit for climes that are hotter, wetter, drier, or whatever is needed.

Farmers may be a resilient bunch, and those who hawk Christmas trees on frozen parking lots and frigid farmers’ markets even hardier. But they need some help.

Christmas tree farm in December 2019. Photo by Julianna Arjes / Unsplash

The trees themselves are doing their part: a tree farm sinks about a tonne of carbon per acre, according to Carbon Credits. With about 350,000 acres under Christmas tree cultivation in the U.S. alone, that’s 350K metric tonnes of carbon stored. That number only increases once trees are cut, so long as others are planted behind them, and the tree is mulched, rather than burned, after use.  

It used to be the fir tree crying for help in the forest. Now, it’s the farmers. They deserve Merry Christmases along with their customers. Here’s hoping they get them.

A very quick nibble (of chocolate) to get things rolling. In our innocence, we all ate Cadbury Eggs for Easter, Hanukkah Gelt by the bagful, Hershey bars and hot chocolate by the campfire, and basically as much chocolate as possible for every occasion, without a pang of guilt. Oh sure, we might have put on a pound or two, but we never dreamt we might be contributing to serious climate concerns.

Alas, cacao, the base material for chocolate, is incredibly problematic. Millions of children are working the farms, often as virtual slaves. A kiloliter (264 gallons) of water is required to produce a single fragrant bar. And that bar also renders 200 gm of carbon emissions. But perhaps chocolate’s gravest planetary issue is the dramatic loss of forest in cacao-growing areas, specifically coastal West Africa, Indonesia, and parts of South America. In the first 20 years of this century, Côte d’Ivoire alone, according to new estimates, has lost 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) to cacao.

Fortunately, progress, though frustratingly slow, is being made on all fronts.

As The New York Times recently reported, the European Union, the largest buyer of cacao and producer of chocolate, has finally taken a stand on deforestation. New EU legislation requires commodities such as cacao, and palm oil too – a major ingredient in chocolate production – to be purchased from non-forest-destructive sources. It sounds a little sketchy, but the plan is for importers to be able to trace every cacao bean from source to candy wrapper. The program begins in 2024, with extensions for some smaller producers.

Photo by cgdsro / Pixabay

The child-labor issue has proven intractable because cacao farmers, mostly family smallholders who need labor, are already working at subsistence levels. Farmers in Ghana, for example, earn “an average income of about $1 a day, while their counterparts in Ivory Coast make an estimated $0.78 a day — well below the extreme poverty line of $1.90 a day established by the World Bank,” according to the World Economic Forum. 

Some good news here is that Fair Trade producers, a small but growing segment, tend to earn more. Beyond this, Swiss food giant Nestlé has, under pressure to act, begun direct payments to farmers who achieve certain targets, such as “enrolling children in school; enabling sustainable forestry; improving cultivation techniques… and finding other income sources.”

As for emissions, there is a good deal of science being done on mitigating cacao’s footprint without adding additional pressures on farmers. 

So, there are issues to be sure, but there’s progress on all of them, and that’s worth celebrating. Maybe over a nice mug of organic, Fair Trade, piping-hot chocolate!

By Daniel Aronson

Adapted from my forthcoming book The Value of Values.
Available fall 2023 from MIT Press.

All was quiet at Twitter until new owner Elon Musk made it so anyone with eight bucks and a grudge could receive Twitter’s “blue check” verified account status without the benefit of actual vetting. This left thousands of organizations vulnerable to any impersonator, prankster, provocateur, or government actor with an agenda or a score to settle. And troll they did.

A verified account appearing to be that of basketball star LeBron James said he’d been traded. Another, appearing to be Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, included a concession speech the election-denying candidate had not made (and perhaps will never make). And fake posts by accounts nearly identical to those of Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin caused tens of billions in market cap losses for the companies and their investors.

This type of vulnerability, and a sheaf of other modern dangers, only add to the portfolio of standard business threats companies must cope with and plan for. Yet, most firms have no comprehensive framework for vulnerability. But Valutus does: the V Model of vulnerability, so named because it encompasses Variability, Volume, Velocity, Variety, Visibility, Vitality and, as Mr. Musk just reminded us, Validity.

For an in-depth look at the V Model, click here for our article in Sustainable Brands.

Back in 2020 we wrote that around 7,000 large companies had begun voluntarily reporting greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and other environmental data to the non-profit Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The problem? More than 230,000 other companies had not. As the process was purely voluntary, there was little to be done.

But soon, with a tap of the SEC Chairman’s gavel, all public companies may be compelled to do so, and more. The SEC’s new proposed rule will mandate scope 1, 2, and (with exceptions) scope 3 GHG reporting. It will also require a full accounting of other climate-based investor risks and “how climate risk will affect their strategy, outlook, financial statements and business from the near-term to the long-term.” The rule would take effect quickly, in fiscal 2024 or 2025, though there are some built-in extensions for smaller reporting companies (SRC).[1]

“We believe,” the SEC explains, “that the current disclosure system is not eliciting consistent, comparable, and reliable information that enables investors both to assess accurately the potential impacts of climate-related risks on the nature of a registrant’s business and to gauge how a registrant’s board and management are assessing and addressing those impacts.”

Drum sextant and compass, at the Sjøfart Museum, Oslo, Norway.
Photo by Fanny Schertzer. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As a result – if enacted – public companies must, for the first time, measure and report their specific GHG outputs and climate-related business risks. In another first, they will do so using a consistent reporting framework, a concern that has dogged voluntary reporting since its inception.

“The SEC has been calling companies out for saying in their ESG or sustainability reports, ‘climate is a big risk, it’s a massive impact on our business,’ but not saying that in their [IRS form] 10-K,” said Phil Clawson, Director, Sustainability & Social Impact at AMN Healthcare in Dallas. Indeed, the commission has complained of such discrepancies and this action is, in part, intended to align them.

But aside from better informing investors, this will make it easier for companies to do things the sustainability community has long been screaming for: quickly formulating and working towards meaningful science-based targets (SBT); planning effective sustainability strategies; and bringing sustainability into C-suites and boardrooms for keeps.

Photo by Rido81

Meanwhile, it will translate into long nights for those responsible for compliance, especially for thousands of firms who haven’t voluntarily done such analyses before. And as proposed, there’s little time to prepare. The SEC’s “reasonable amount of time to comply,” begins in about a year and a half.

As such, there’s likely to be a scramble to gather and collate appropriate data. While there are several companies and platforms specializing in such measurements, the brunt will fall on Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) and equivalent positions. Therein lies another challenge: last year, the Weinreb Group listed only 95 CSOs in the United States. The 4,000 public [2] companies that will fall under the SEC’s new rule, currently ill equipped, will be hungry for talent at that position.

Capacity will be strained and, historically, budget requests for sustainability projects have been tough to get approved. However, sustainability director Clawson chuckled, “though additional resources will be necessary to comply with the rule as currently envisioned. – technology, auditing, help with data capture and quality – it’s easier to make a business case for it if it’s mandated by SEC.”

Photo by Immo Wegmann / Unsplash

Indeed, the detailed measurement and analysis needed may be what finally causes business to, as we wrote in 2019, bring sustainability onto the top floor. As TechTarget points out, without trained professionals in these positions, “the reporting task will fall to a business’s legal counsel or the chief financial officer.” Such people are competent in their lanes, but measuring various global warming potentials (GWP) of GHGs across company operations, and surfacing the risks posed to global supply chain by climate change, are not the stuff of financial statements or legal briefs.

In part for this reason, the rule would also hold directors responsible for compliance. It would even require that companies identify, by name, the specific “board members or board committees responsible for the oversight of climate-related risk.” To this point, climate expertise has not been common in the boardroom and most companies will need some creativity to meet that rule.

“In our case there are no actual experts on the board,” said Clawson. “We’re growing board expertise, training board expertise.” His company isn’t alone: a 2018 survey found that “of the 1,188 Fortune 100 board members, only 6% had environmental credentials,” while the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) calculates the majority of directors fall short, with just 24 percent of public company and 13 percent of private company directors participating in educational activities related to ESG in the last 12 months.”

Photo by Vaughn Smith / Pixabay

Between C-suites and boardrooms, it should be a lively couple of years for execs with sustainability chops.

The rule drew its approach primarily from two extant sources: the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), “a leading accounting and reporting standard for greenhouse gas emissions;” and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), “a climate-related reporting framework that has become widely accepted by both registrants and investors.”

For many firms, scope 1 and 2 emissions are relatively straightforward affairs, which is handy with disclosure dates as close as 2023. Scope 3, however, is considerably tangled. The proposed rule acknowledges this with 2024 disclosure for scope 3, and SRCs – non-investment, non-subsidiary companies with small public floats or revenues under $700 million[3] – have more time for 1 and 2 and are, currently, exempted altogether from scope 3.

Scope 3 emissions and climate risk are closely related in that both are dependent on factors a firm cannot directly control. The Port of Vancouver, as we reported last spring, was heavily affected by a climate-change exacerbated atmospheric river: the port Los Angeles was overwhelmed in 2021 by post-pandemic resupply; and this year, political chicanery caused massive trucking delays – hence extra emissions – at the Texas-Mexico border. Teasing out such risks – like potential damage to facilities, supply chain disruption, and sea-level rise – and reporting coherently on them within short time constraints, can be daunting. It could cripple the capacity of ESG staff while work is ongoing, and annually thereafter.

Photo by Twenty20 Images

According to the proposed rule, companies will be required to report on scope 3 emissions only when they are found to be material to the company. ‘Material to’ is a tad fuzzy but both the rule and Supreme Court precedent define it as representing issues with a “substantial likelihood that a reasonable investor would consider them important when making an investment or voting decision.”

Calculating such emissions, as they ripple through an entire value chain, is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the proposed rule, an enormous undertaking. It is particularly so for huge multinationals. Coca Cola, for instance, lists more than 16,000 suppliers, manufacturing in 23 nations, and 225 global bottling partners (as of 2020). Proctor and Gamble tops 75,000 individual suppliers while Walmart boasts over 100,000. The complexity only increases when considering relationships of large banking and financial firms. Here, downstream emissions may include all investment activities not to mention insured emissions such as insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios: anything that represents material risk to investors.

Not surprisingly, the SEC’s proposal has received intense scrutiny from all sides. Indeed, the Commission was compelled to extend their public comment period while everyone from investor groups, congress, the sustainability community, the energy industry, and corporate interests weighted in.

Executive by Monkeybusiness / Smokestack by Ian Montgomery

The Wall Street Journal reported that “companies are tearing into the proposed rule” because, “it poses heightened legal liability, hefty costs and reporting burdens.”

Some argue that the rule is unneeded because climate risk disclosures are already required or that there is a “climate-industrial complex” that is being supported by the proposed requirements. In fact, one of the five commissioners, Trump Appointee and Federalist Society member Hester Peirce, made both of those arguments in her statement of opposition.

However, it is far from certain that these arguments will prevail. When it comes to the idea that climate risk disclosures are already sufficient, the world’s largest investor, Blackrock, has stated that climate-related risks have been “notoriously hard for investors to grasp,” while companies lag in grappling with the idea of “stranded assets,” such as 80% of Exxon’s business-as-usual petroleum investments.

(Since the “climate-industrial complex” argument is primarily a political one, its success depends more on the political fortunes of climate deniers and those who oppose action on it. While it’s always possible they will regain influence, to halt the new rule, that would have to happen before it takes effect.)

Several business-lobbying firms also commented in opposition to the rule, including the largest of them all, Akin Gump. Though they echoed many of Peirce’s arguments, it was the dollars required to meet the SEC’s potential rule that they seemed to emphasize. “The tremendous compliance costs of the proposed rule,” Akin Gump wrote, “would compound the significant challenges that businesses are already facing from historic inflationary pressures, significant reductions in government reimbursement for services, and labor shortages.”

Will this financial argument win the day? A little math suggests it might not:

• The SEC has estimated costs will be around a half million dollars per year (from $490,000 – $530,000 in the first year and $300,000-$420,000 in subsequent years, depending on company size and SRC Applicant status)
  
• As noted earlier, the rule applies only to companies with over $700m in revenues
  
• Given that the average operating margin (EBIT) for the S&P is about 15%, a company with $700m in revenue would have just under $600m in expenses – $595m if margin were exactly 15%. Will increasing that by $0.5m to $595.5m be seen as a large enough cost to prevent finalization of the rule? It doesn’t seem likely

Corn trading pit, Chicago Board of Trade. Photo by Jeremy Kemp (1993). Source: Wikipedia

In a sense, objections to the rule serve to underline the SEC’s concerns about risk. Healthy corporations who are unwilling to pay for reporting on Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions are potentially actually driving environmental risk for investors, by running gigantic operations without clarity on the extent or derivations of their emissions. As noted above, voluntary reporting and hounding by risk-averse investors have not motivated most companies to report.

Public advocacy group PIRG has recommended the proposed rule be strengthened, making the excellent point in their comments to the SEC that, “the climate disclosure rule is particularly important because Americans’ retirement accounts and other savings could be endangered if we don’t acknowledge potential threats caused by climate change and work diligently to address them.”

If enacted, this rule may set off the greatest data swap-meet in corporate history. Requests for scope 3 data alone will likely choke the switchboards and calculating these emissions will certainly strain data collection and analysis efforts.

Bell systems switchboard. Photo source: U.S. National Archives.

In a recent Deloitte survey (of 300 public corporations taking in at least $500 million in revenue) more than half (57%) indicated that data availability and quality remain their greatest challenges with respect to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data for disclosure.

Indeed, there is a corporate concern with actual merit, even if it didn’t figure in most arguments to the SEC: if enacted, compliance for the first year may seriously stretch some companies’ already brimful capacity. Standard functions that eat up hours and strain sustainability staff – such as materiality assessments, project cost analyses, ESG policy management, and much more – could grind to a standstill while the SEC’s initial asks are met. (There are, however, as we wrote last spring, potential ways to alleviate this strain.)

Photo by SeventyFour Images / Envato

Whether this proposed rule goes into effect in its current form or not, public companies must begin to undertake such activities. And private companies, though not required to, would benefit from doing so as well.

For one thing, increased regulatory measures such as a carbon tax and cap-and-trade pose significant financial risks, even to companies not yet required to report on scope 3 emissions. Then again, public companies may hound private ones in order to meet their scope 3 reporting obligations.

These requirements, in one form or another, are coming. Valutus tools VIEWS^TM and E3Evolution^TM measure what’s approaching over the horizon, and how fast. The need for full-scope emissions assessments is clearly gaining momentum, and failure to begin now could prove financially devastating to any who remain ignorant of the extent of their exposure.

Meeting photo by Matthew Osborn / Unsplash. Elephant photo by Kaffeebart / Unsplash

Beyond measurement and disclosure comes an even greater need: to actually reduce emissions, which the SEC’s proposal doesn’t mandate. “Businesses will have to disclose how climate risk will affect their strategy, outlook, financial statements and business from the near-term to the long-term,” explained Michelle Hanlon, MIT Sloan professor of accounting, in MIT Management. They’ll also have to act on those insights.

That is where the real risk – and the real value – to both planet and ROI is generated. Actions to reduce climate risk bristle with potential value, and failure to perform them is destabilizing the planet. As my forthcoming book, The Value of Values, makes clear, incredible ROI – much of it submerged, invisible below the surface – is available from such actions. Now, with or without the SEC, is the time to begin.

References
[1] see SEC proposed rule
[2] see SEC proposed rule, footnote #14
[3] see SEC proposed rule, footnote #14

“Hi mom, hi dad. It’s us, the kids born in 2022, writing to you from 2095 when we are 73 – the global life expectancy when we arrived. Back then, you wondered which of the IPCC AR6’s long-term (2080-2100) climate scenarios had come to pass. Well, we can tell you now: it wasn’t the ‘very low’ emissions scenario – our generation had a good laugh over that one! Nor was it the ‘low,’ ‘medium,’ or ‘high emissions’ version. No, it turned out to be the IPCC’s worst-case: the hellish ‘very-high emissions, scenario’ for 2080-2100 (SSP5-8.5 in AR6 parlance, 1135 ppm CO₂).[1] It’s not the zombie apocalypse, mom, but it’s bad.

“Why hellish? Well, that’s a long story, and we want you to know we don’t really blame you and our grandparents for… for… well, anyway, here’s what it’s like.

Sunblock, Anyone?
“Let’s begin with the obvious: it’s hot. We’ve hit the report’s best estimate of +3.5˚C (+6.39˚F)[2] over the period ending in 2014. Warm places like southern Florida, where you retired, your comfy 28°C (82°F) summers are now a balmy 31.5˚C (≈88˚F). Not so bad, you say?”

Photo by Modic / Unsplash

“Well, a global review from your era showed the “risk of mortality increased by between 1% and 3%” every time the thermometer rose by one degree C (in about half the locations studied). At +4.4˚C… well, you do the math. And we get nine or ten annual heat waves for every one you had[3], ramping temps as high as 6.6 °C on top of the baseline temps, lasting far longer, and more widespread than before. Arctic temps were already topping 38˚C (100˚F) when that report was written: just imagine where they are now. (Marine heat waves also rose, mom and dad.

“A 2008 study predicted that “days over 90 degrees in Chicago could reach as many as 80 in one year and the number of days over 100 degrees could be close to 30.” Chicago last had a 100˚ day back before we were born in 2012 (4x) and one projection suggested 2100 Chicago summers would most resemble those of Mesquite, Texas back when we were young. Mom, dad, they do.

Sorry to say our old house in Miami Beach flooded many times before it washed away. Back in 2021 the city demanded that all seawalls, public and private, be raised to a minimum 5’7” (1.73 m) above mean sea level. Under ‘very-high emissions though,’ that level rose between 0.98–3.88 m,[4] an astronomical 3.21 ft–6.17 ft. With or without a smidgeon of storm surge, that is well over mean and still rising. Buh-bye family beach house.”

Photo by Paul Sequeira. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Gimme a Polar Cocktail, Hold the Ice… Hold the Bears
“One cool thing: we cruised to the North Pole! With no late-summer ice in the Arctic Ocean anymore – no albedo effect need apply – we can sail right over it. True, the polar bears are all gone, but I guess you had to power your F150s somehow.

“Those who could have built homes in Greenland’s forests – yes, there are forests growing there now. The glaciers and permafrost are nearly gone. Even in your day, Greenland was melting fast and, to prepare, they were building green hydro-power plants and facilities to accommodate major population growth. Thank goodness someone was thinking ahead!”

“As we passed, the last remaining walruses in Baffin Bay were hauled up on shore. It’s likely they’ll be gone soon too, with no sea ice to rest and mate on. “Coming home, we sailed south but, I’m sorry to say, the coral reefs you used to snorkel in are gone, bleached, dead. I hate to tell you, but all the coral reefs have died: heated, acidified, and bleached by excessive CO₂.”

Geirangerfjord, Norway. Photo by Maia Habegger / Unsplash

The Land “Of course, Greenland couldn’t take everyone – and wouldn’t if they could. Your progeny has spent their adult lives fleeing from one type of climate pressure or another, searching for a safe, stable home. Rising seas alone turned more than 2 billion of us into refugees but that’s not all. Remember when New York Magazine predicted that, though 1% of the world was just barely habitable due to high temps, that number would probably rise to about 17% when we grew up? Nailed it. We’ve been squeezed.

“Right around our first birthday, the U.N. reported that wildfires numbers were expected to increase by about 50% from the already prolific burns of the 2020s. Any walk in the northern summer woods is an invitation to get singed.”

Seeking: Higher, Firmer, Cooler, Safer, Calmer, Fertile, Fire-Free, Cyclone- and Drought-Proof Ground
“As you recall, the years up to 2016 saw the forcible displacement of some 6.5 million people for a variety of reasons but, “by 2060, about 1.4 billion people could be climate change refugees,” a 2017 paper predicted. Finding a new home wasn’t and just a matter of higher ground. As that same paper noted, Homes that weren’t either too hot, too wet, or too dry, subject to frequent powerful hurricanes, or in the paths of regular F4 tornadoes, have been hard to find. Dodging mudslides, heatwaves, and competition from multitudes also seeking a safe place, is tough.

Elders in China. Image by 志涛 张 (Zhi Tao Zhang). Source: Wikimedia Commons

“Where did all those people come from? Well, everywhere – no place was entirely free of climate change’s impacts. But an awful lot of them came from Africa. The population of that continent has ballooned from the 1.13 billion of your time to a seething mass of 3.07 billion (The Lancet) to 4.2 billion (Johns Hopkins). Where did we all go? Well, when 48 Pacific island nations were submerged toward the end of the century, Pacific nations didn’t want to take us in. We have to laugh when we remember that, in your day,, countries like New Zealand began issuing 100 climate-refugee visas annually. A hundred! With two billion of us climate migrants… again, do the math.

A Whole New World

“There have been some political realignments too, guys, some changes to the old atlas. As the U.N. predicted in the 2020s, “in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.” We mentioned, did we not, that the worst case has come to pass? Topple they did.

Three Squares? Not Like They Used to Be
“Your progeny is hungry too. We don’t have meals like the ones you served when we were little, in 2030 or so, when there were only about 8 billion mouths to feed. Today, there are 11.2 billion and about 80% more food is needed to sustain them and, as the researchers at Cornell pointed out, “Feeding that population will require more arable land even as swelling oceans consume fertile coastal zones and river deltas, driving people to seek new places to dwell.”

Woman selling food in Hội An, Vietnam. Photo by Nam Hoang / Unsplash

“As you, mom, read in Sustainability R.O.I.’s November ’21 issue, many plant species were not adapted to higher temperatures, saltier soils, drier decades, and higher yields. The past 70 years were spent trying to save all we could, and to breed varieties that can withstand conditions as they are here in 2095.”  

Bigger is Not Always Better
“This is largely due to population certainly. But humans have also continued enlarging, and that means more calories. Studies in your day showed that “between 1975 and 2014, the average adult grew 1.3 percent taller and 14 percent heavier, triggering a 6.1 percent uptick in energy consumption… daily calorie counts rose” accordingly, from 2,465 to 2,615. This trend continued[1] apace and yet, as the oceans rose, and brining, drought, fire, and metropolitan encroachment combined to shrink the fields. We lost around 13.4 million km² (5.2 million miles²) of prime, multiple-crop farmland (Africa and Brazil[2] were particularly hard hit) and we’ve been compelled to completely alter the food supply.

If it Won’t Moo… Is It Still Stew?
“Meats are all syntho now, lab grown from cells. Grazing requires too much time, feed, water, and land. The old National Institutes of Health (NIH) noted in 2022, “shortage of protein sources such as meat, dairy, and plant protein would be limited not only to developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, but can also become a problem in more advanced countries in the future.” That put some unusual things on the menu: bugs, for one; microorganisms for another. As it turned out in very high, “the answer to humankind’s challenge to meet the need of protein,” turned out to be “various microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast, algae, and fungi.”

“Vegetable acreage, too, was untenable. These days plant foods are farmed vertically. Between the forest of windmills, solar panels, and water condensers, every rooftop is covered with box farms, while wherever front-and-back yards remain, lawns have been replaced with food gardens and fruit trees.

Galoshes, No / Waders, Yes.

“By the way, the report said that for every 1˚C of warming, ‘extreme daily precipitation events’ will increase 7%under SSP5-8.5. Sure enough, a jump of >21% has made wading boots standard equipment where loafers were normal before. Cities have had to completely revamp their drainage systems. Only the molds are truly happy.”

Woman in Uganda. Photo by Colby Ray / Unsplash

The Metropolis
“As we’re sure you were aware mom, when you, and papa were raising us, cities were growing quickly. As farmlands began either drying up or being submerged, there was massive migration to the cities. Urban populations swelled beyond anything previously seen. Kinshasa, Kenya, has more than 84 million people. New York has more than 30 million inhabitants. Khartoum has over 56 million, Manila almost 40. And, with 67 million in Mumbai, India, and a staggering 88 million in Lagos, Nigeria, cities are strained like never before.[1] Life in places so crowded has been a real challenge for us. We miss that backyard, mom.”

“Look, mom, dad, it is what it is. We’ve been adapting, innovating, and learning to manage with less. But it is pretty bleak compared with what we remember from the 2020s, folks. Lawns. Picket fences. Oceans of grain in the heartlands. Miles of waterfront which knew its place and rarely encroached. Fresh meats and food aplenty. Billions fewer people and most living in the lands of their ancestors, just as we all used to live with you… back in the day.”

“We wish this note could have gone back in time, far enough for you to change the course of climate change before the worst came to pass. (Sigh).”

Lovingly,

Your kids in 2095

References:

[1] Note: this article is written ‘as if’ the very-high-emissions scenario SSP5-8.5 had happened.
All predictions are based on cited sources, however which of the IPCC’s scenarios will obtain is yet to be determined
[2] Relative to period 1995–2014, IPCC AR6 Summary for Policy Makers, p25
[3] IPCC AR6 Summary for Policy Makers, p22
[4] IPCC AR6 Summary for Policy Makers, p25
[5] Estimates, for purposes of this story
[6] Estimates, for purposes of this story
[7] All population numbers are 2022 estimates by Sustainability Today, Ontario Tech University

The first true synthetic plastic, dubbed Bakelite®, was invented by a Belgian chemist in New York 115 years ago. It sure seemed like a good idea at the time.

The problem is, almost every scrap of plastic made since is still on the planet. Estimates vary but at the high end, some 9-billion tons of it is now waste – the weight of 18,000 St. Peter’s Basilicas, 24,600 Empire State Buildings, or more than a ton for every human being currently on Earth. For all our first-world efforts over the last 20 years, less than 10% has been recycled. The rest has either been landfilled, dumped, or found its way to the sea. It is already in the food supply and, now documented for the first time, nano plastics are in the human bloodstream.[1]

Despite its incredible versatility, plastic’s ubiquity is generally acknowledged as a major environmental issue. However, although individual nations have been grappling with plastic management, to date there’d been no concerted, focused, and unified international effort to deal with the stuff.

Macaque with a plastic bag. Photo by Intergalactic Rada

That just changed, as the U.N.’s Environment Assembly (UNEA), gathered in Nairobi, Kenya this February, finally took it on. So… what happened? Well, delegates from every U.N. nation resolved “to end plastic pollution.” That means, they agreed to have a working, signable, legally binding treaty prepared by 2024.

The (advance) new agreement “speaks to full life cycle; it speaks to legally binding; it speaks to a financing mechanism; it speaks to understanding some countries can do it more easily than others,” said the head of the U.N. Environment Program, Inger Andersen.

Participants pointed to several other single-issue agreements as models that hold out hope for this treaty’s success, the Minamata Convention on Mercury for one, and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone for another. These have been highly successful, with the hole in the ozone for example, expected to be fully healed by the 2060s.

Photo by Dean Moriarty / Pixabay

Like carbon emissions, however, which have proven incredibly difficult to mitigate by treaty, the manufacture and use of plastics continues to grow. Production between 2025 and 2050 is expected to increase by about 130 million metric tonnes to well over a half-billion metric tonnes annually. Whether this treaty will alter those (2020) projections is unknown, but even substantial reductions still leave the world awash in stubborn, hard-to-manage materials.

Yet, while the draft agreement language aims to reduce plastic waste, it makes only oblique mention of reducing virgin plastic production. This eggshell walking was likely brought to you by the oil industry, which is relying heavily on plastics for growth and which was, pre-conference, “devising strategies to persuade conference participants to reject any deal that would limit plastic manufacturing,” according to industry emails reviewed by Reuters. The recent COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where plastics were on the agenda, also did little to advance the concept of reduction. One participant noted that “the future is not plastic. The future is plastic substitutes…”

That may well be the case, and the Nairobi agreement does repeatedly nod to ‘sustainable production,’ which implies the use of renewable and degradable feedstock for polymers. However, such sustainable polymers are still very much in their infancy, and, in the meanwhile, non-sustainable production is ramping up. This plastic-pervasive approach does not speak well of our species’ husbandry of the plants and animals around us.

Photo by Danette Christine

It is particularly ironic that this conclave was held in Nairobi: Big Oil is also lobbying hard for the U.S. administration to pressure Kenya to allow more plastic – both virgin and waste – into that country and, indeed, into the rest of Africa.

Nonetheless, this agreement must be celebrated as, once again, the world has come together to help solve a problem of its own collective making. Humanity is very much a problem-solving species. As the steps that were taken – and those not yet taken – at Nairobi suggest, it will have to be.

[1] Seventeen of 22 anonymous donors (80%) in an Amsterdam University study were found to have PET, polystyrene, or polyethylene in their blood.

All modern businesses face the difficult challenge of capacity. Puzzling out how to accomplish much more with much less ain’t easy and there’s rarely a genius around when you need one. These days, there’s so much more to sustainability work – reporting, goal setting, project management, benchmarking, valuation, to name a few – that brilliant solutions for increasing capacity are badly needed.

Edison, a genius at increasing human capacity, invented incandescent bulbs, improved telephony, made better batteries, the phonograph, and many more such solutions. Yet, if the great inventor is to be believed, genius is mainly a function of hard work and sweat.[1]

We hope so because Valutus has been sweating to increase sustainability’s capacity for almost 30 years: gathering data, ciphering ‘impossible’ metrics, and inventing tools and processes. In short, we’ve been stockpiling data, metrics, and tools (DMT) to help companies and ESG professionals Do More Today. Compared to other ways of raising performance – internal resources, consultants, etc. – using DMT will accelerate progress with less investment, so you can Do More Today with the same resources.

Castlepoint Lighthouse, North Island, New Zealand. Photo by Tanya Halliday

To give you a taste, we’ve previously described our souped-up materiality process, one which – though far more comprehensive and useful than the standard, can take as little as two months instead of six. But that was just for starters.

VIEWS and E3Evolution
More recently, we’ve sweated over what we call the Valutus Issues Early Warning System (VIEWS). Without knowing which issues are rapidly gaining importance, and how expectations of your company’s priorities are evolving in the public sphere, your goals and plans might be built on shaky ground. Our VIEWS and E3Evolution data products address both needs. VIEWS gives you foresight into what issues are headed your way so you can be prepared, while E3Evolution tells you how expectations are evolving so you don’t fall behind. ESG professionals need time to scour news, even hire consultants, to glean which issues are rising in importance and which are falling. E3Evolution cuts that time dramatically.

As one cautionary example, last year a client of ours set a carbon target that was – then – in the top quartile for their industry. A year later, that same target is near the bottom, and their commitment is behind the times and no longer credible. They needed to know then where the targets were going but, unfortunately, they didn’t have E3 Evolution. Approving such targets takes a long time, a lot of effort, and a good deal of money: having to reset so soon is a disaster.

E3Evolution Visualization

Incidentally, Valutus also has the fast-and-easy CT Viz tool that takes the nail-biting – and the majority of the required time – out of setting such targets.

SPEED System
Another perspiration-worthy tool slashes the time-devouring work of selecting, crafting, and updating policies. ESG professionals burn critical hours on these tasks both because they’re important reflections of purpose, and because requirements, regulations, and expectations are changing constantly. And let’s face it, if policies are a rabbit hole for major corporations, and a huge bother for mid-sized firms, for startups and small companies they represent a nightmare. Small companies require the same suite of policies as multinationals but lack their vast regulatory, research, and legal capacity.

Photo by Sear Greyson / Unsplash

That problem got Valutus sweating over the Sustainability Policy Engine Editor and Document System (SPEED System), which solves all those problems. By surveying the policy portfolios of numerous major sustainability leaders, we collected those most critical, and most common to the majority, into an adaptable, ready-to-implement policy suite. Of course, policies need to periodically be nipped, tucked, and updated, or even scrapped and replaced. SPEED does all of that too, so you don’t have to. Whether animal welfare, sustainable real estate requirements, privacy, carbon footprint, or DEI policies, a 21^st-century company must keep up with rapid expectations and regulations. Though policies will need to be adapted and approved, SPEED cuts the time and effort needed dramatically, adding capacity for other critical tasks.

Valutus 5P Heatmap

5P Heatmap
Finally, there’s a critical data set that sustainability professionals need to gather and update annually: the necessity of measuring your efforts and results against those of competitors and sustainability leaders. Accomplishing this in useful form every single year is grueling and – wait for it – there’s this little issue of capacity. To save you all that time, and often, a good deal of consulting, we’ve created the 5P Heatmap, which renders – in a simple visual display – benchmarking for:

• Purpose
• Policies & Procedures
• Performance (e.g., CO₂ intensity)
• Progress (e.g., reduced CO₂ intensity over last year)
• Perception

________

In Part 2 of D.M.T. we’ll bring you more from our inventor’s bench. We’ll focus on two specific programs:

• Our Total Carbon Ownership Optimization tool (TCO₂), which models various approaches to carbon management quickly and at-a-glance. TCO₂ can enhance client offerings by providing complete carbon decision-making options, quickly and at-a-glance
  
  
• The InVEST tool which quantifies, in the dollars-and-cents language of business, the value a sustainable initiative – or overall corporate sustainability leadership – will reap, including submerged value. There’s enormous power in demonstrating to decision makers not only that there is extant value in sustainability, but just how much value is waiting to be harvested

Customized InVEST Output

We may not be Edison, but we’ve followed his formula and put in the hard work inventing a broad portfolio of Data, Metrics, and Tools that sustainability professionals can use to increase capacity for their companies and clients. In short, we’ve given them the means to Do More Today.

________

[1] Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. Quote attributed to Thomas Alva Edison

In A River Runs Through It, two brothers put on their waders and fish the gorgeous Blackfoot River. The Blackfoot rolls west to merge with the Clark Fork at Missoula, later draining into the vast Columbia River system. The Columbia is known as the largest system in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), but that is incorrect. At least one river system is even larger: the atmospheric river.

Atmospheric rivers (AR), elongated tendrils of highly concentrated moisture in the atmosphere, are often thousands of kilometers long and a few hundred wide. They tend to move moist air from the tropics or subtropics northward toward the pole. They play a critical role in the water cycle and, though some are severe, the majority over time have been helpful rather than the reverse.

The total moisture load of these rivers makes them, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the largest fresh-water rivers on Earth – though hairsplitters might ask whether ‘on earth’ is proper nomenclature for rivers that flow in the troposphere.

Boise River fly fishing. Photo by Henry Fraczek / Unsplash

When ARs reach land, especially in a mountainous region, the moisture “is pushed upwards, causing much of the water vapor to condense and fall to the ground as rain or snow, creating an atmospheric-river driven storm,” and dumping many times the daily discharge of the Mississippi River on whatever lies below. Often what lies below are California and the Pacific Northwest.

Such phenomena aren’t new: there are usually several moving around the planet all the time, occurring regularly in North America, Australia, and Europe. Recently (2019) one was reported in the Middle East, “potentially resulting from the [sic] climate change.”

ARs are responsible for much of the precipitation in the PNW and numerous other regions, and when they are absent, droughts often result. They are normal, even necessary to the hydrology, climatology, and ecology of many regions.

Category rating chart for atmospheric rivers.

Their impacts are a matter of severity and, starting in 2019, ARs have been ranked on a scale like hurricanes and tornadoes, from Category 1, the mildest, to the nightmarish Cat 5. Up to now, the trick has been to dodge the most destructive while benefiting from Cat 1 and Cat 2s, but here’s the rub: “the warmer the air is, the more water vapour it can carry.” Spoiler alert: the atmosphere has been warming, and… well, you get the idea.

Per a 2018 study by NASA’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, given the global warming trend, ARs “will become about 10% less frequent by the end of this century, but about 25% longer and wider… That will lead to nearly double the frequency of the most intense atmospheric river storms.” Some areas are expected to be hurt worse than others, researchers at Yale wrote last October. “Europe, for instance, is expected to experience atmospheric river-driven, extreme rain more than 100% more often than over the last century. That means much more frequent strong storms with the potential to harm life and property.”

Keeping the Category Chart in mind, while there may be slightly fewer ARs overall – including fewer ‘primarily beneficial’ Cat 1 and Cat 2 storms – there will likely be a doubling of the Cat 3 – 5 ARs, which tilt way over into the ‘hazardous’ category.

Snowpack on Mt. Deception, Olympic range, Pacific Northwest. Photo by Eggbones, 2019.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

However, though all assessments appear to agree that ARs will become more destructive, not all models agree there will be fewer. “We expect North Atlantic ARs to become stronger and more numerous by the end of this century,” asserts Carbon Brief, especially under the current high-emissions trend scenario that currently obtains. There may be an increase in the number of days under an AR of between 200%-300% by century’s end.

As we pointed out in our Sustainable Brands article Fool Me Twice: Accepting the ‘Now Normal,’ other impacts of climate change can make ARs even more destructive. It happened last year in the PNW, when a massive AR followed hard on the heels of droughts and wildfires. Events in a ‘heat, fire, drought, flood’ sequence generally lead to unpleasant compound effects, such as landslides, and climate change makes this cascade more and more likely.

Photo by Ryan Arnst / Unsplash

Speaking of which, an ‘extreme’ Atmospheric River drenched the PNW last year, derailing trains, melting snowpack, drowning Vancouver, and closing its critical port. Another hit Washington State just a few weeks ago. The world has a warming atmosphere, and rivers run through it. So long as global warming continues, we may all need to put on our waders, but they may not be enough.

John Adams (as portrayed in the Broadway musical 1776) harangued his colleagues in the Continental Congress to “vote yes! Vote yes! Vote for independency!” His fellows soon tired of the diatribe and begged, “It’s ninety degrees! Have mercy, John, please. It’s hot as hell in Philadelphia!”

The high temperature in Philadelphia that summer was – according to diaries kept by Adams’ protégé Thomas Jefferson and others at the time – a comfortable 76-degrees Fahrenheit, some nine degrees cooler than the current summer normal for that city. Given that rise, dare we ask: if it seemed hot in Philadelphia then, and gets hot in Philadelphia now… what will the city be like in 2076 if we don’t address the climate?

Page from Thomas Jefferson’s July 1-Jan 10, 1776, temperature Records.
Source: Library of Congress

Of course, the U.S. Constitution – hammered out some 13 years later to broadly define principles the framers considered most important to building and safeguarding the nation – did not mention the environment.

Those framers were concerned with structural foundational pillars, such as strengthening the union, keeping peace internally, defending against attacks from abroad, and ensuring liberty for all. With the Constitutional Convention also held in Philadelphia’s mild 18^th-century summer, it never occurred to Hamilton, Madison, et al, that the global environment could ever require protection.

The notion of environmental husbandry didn’t strike the original Roman senate either, or their heirs, the framers of Italy’s modern constitution. But now, after a landmark shift, the Romans’ descendants in the current Chamber of Deputies have rectified that.

Section of an 1888 fresco depicting an attack on Catiline by the emperor Cicero in the Palazzo Madama,
home of the Italian Senate in Rome. Artist: Cesare Maccari. Image source: Wikipedia

Article 9 of the Italian constitution, entitled ‘Research and Culture,’ initially fit Italy’s special historical status as snugly as an emperor’s toga. The whole country is part museum, part archeological site, and library of Western history and culture rolled into one. But while the constitutional court has traditionally ‘broadly interpreted’ article 9 to include environmental issues, such was never explicit.

Now, it is. As of this February, for the first time since Romulus ruled the land, two additions to the costituzione have made environmental husbandry a pillar of Italy’s values as a nation. Article 9 now includes “protection of the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, even in the interest of future generations,” as a fundamental principle – what the Italians call a ‘protected primary value.’ No longer is sustainability relegated to an afterthought, a patchwork of laws, some regulatory language, and broad interpolations of previous constitutional passages.

Nor is it a matter left to the conscience of corporate officers, for a second new line was added to Article 41 – “Freedom of Enterprise” – that reads, “private economic initiatives shall not be carried out “in such a way as to damage health and the environment.”