Media roundup

A few media leftovers for a slow summer’s day...
On the heels of Rachael Jonassen’s recent post on why corporations are addressing climate change, a quick piece by the Weather Channel’s Carl Parker on what some of the private sector’s most prominent members are saying.

     

Here's a great (albeit long) discussion of our recent weather, including a nice explanation of how this fits in with the climate change discussion by comparing the recent weather to Major League Baseball's "Steroid Era."

Finally, while I was doing some housecleaning, I remembered that I hadn’t yet shared the audio of an interview I did with WNEW-FM (99.1), the new CBS NewsRadio station here in the Washington, DC area. Here are the two pieces done by WNEW’s Chas Henry, in which we discuss the national security implications of climate change.

Why Companies Address Climate Change

Arne Mogren spent over two decades at Vattenfall Energy Company in Sweden. He remembered when he began work at Vattenfall there was just one person working there on wind energy. Today there are 500! Wind is just one of the areas where employment in climate-related industries has exploded. Solar, energy finance, carbon trading, biofuels, energy retrofits, automobiles, carbon capture… all are growing opportunities for employment, and profit.

Not too many years ago, it was unusual for companies to hire climate change experts at the senior level. Now, companies looking for growth opportunities look for a senior level picture of the landscape. And all companies need a strategic vision of how they fit in this new landscape, how they can shape it to their needs, and how they can benefit from the new opportunities.

And even as agile companies jump on the new opportunities for growth through new products and services, they must respond to new internal needs and new structural challenges posed by climate change.

Agile businesses now have climate change to consider.

Let me give just three examples that help to illustrate why your company needs to rethink internal process and infrastructure issues.

Absenteeism is always a concern in a company but successful companies have found ways to address it. Employee health is a leading cause of missed workdays and heat stress is one important contributor. This summer a record setting heat wave extended from Washington DC to the middle of the country. The average temperature for the entire US in June was 2°F above the average for the 20^th century. The most recent twelve months was the warmest ever observed (back to 1895). Such great heat, and for such long periods, is the real culprit in heat stress related illness and employee missed work. How will your company, and your employees deal with this?

This heat hurts employees, and it hurts logistical operations for companies. If you rely on railroads to transport your products, or to get raw materials, you probably noticed some issues in delivery as rails buckled in the heat and trains were slowed, redirected the long way around, or simply unable to operate. Even the Metro here in Washington had to adjust to buckled rails. Smart companies understand that this may become the new normal and have planned for it.  Indeed, really smart companies are planning ways to offer new goods or services because they see this as an opportunity. 

The Metro Green Line in Washington, DC, is inspected for ‘heat kinks’ that cause the tracks to buckle dangerously.

But it’s not just your employees and logistics that the heat affects. It also can impact your infrastructure in many ways. Certainly the cost of cooling was a big issue this month. And if you are dealing with perishable goods such unplanned expense impacts your competitive position.  You may have heard of all the restaurants giving away food that was going to spoil. Did they plan for the heat?  Did they plan for lots more months like this?  Did they think about increasing insurance for this? Do the insurance companies have products for the increased risk? Well, it turns out that the big reinsurance companies like Swiss Re and Munich Re have been developing risk models that incorporate climate change for two decades. They might be a winner in this new world. The restaurant owner: he or she might be a loser. Which do you want to be?

Balancing Act: Technology and a Changing Climate

We love our technology.

Consider how we follow it, with blogs and columns devoted to following the top innovators in the same way we follow our favorite sports team. Consider how it permeates all facets of our lives, from home to work, from the car we drive to the way we shop. And when you realize what technology means to us, it’s abundantly clear that we need to protect it, and while keeping its impact on the safe side of harmful.

So that’s the double-edge sword: we can leverage technology, information and emerging processes and platforms to help answer a changing climate’s mitigation and adaptation questions. And at the same time we must be acutely aware of what our technology does to the environment.

In the book, we used Google as a good example of how computing can drive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Granted, there’s some disagreement as to how much CO2 is put into the atmosphere—but no one disputes the fact that it does. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s stick with Google’s assertion that a single web-based search generates about 0.2 grams of CO2. According to the search engine giant,

“...the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.”

So how much data is being used, if we accept that the many, many Google searches that take place each day are just the tip of the usage iceberg? Consider this infographic, which can be mind-blowing.

It probably took you more than a minute to digest this, meaning the numbers are now bigger.

So clearly we have a responsibility to support technology that helps lessen the impact of data usage to atmospheric GHG, and in turn support innovation that further addresses this concern.

Still, our technology must be protected, certainly from the impacts of a changing climate. It’s central to so much that we do. A recent post on the WashingtonPost.com Wonkblog reinforced just how much air conditioning has revolutionized our lives, from our economy to our comfort to our diets. It cites this study by Northwestern University researchers that makes the case that high temperatures left unchecked by the magic of central air can result in severe cuts to economic output, worker productivity, political instability, and in severe cases, fragile states that become threats to our national security. So there’s that to consider. As the recent Super Derecho of 2012 taught us, we need our technology intact to power the electrical grid, to help us maintain contact with critical services and loved ones, and to avert a public health crisis when temperature either drop or skyrocket.

Also, consider that the Google searches that I mentioned earlier could in fact be providing people with the information they need without driving to a library—so it’s not all bad to have this capability in hand.

The balancing act comes to a head when a company makes a decision that seems to fly in the face of sound environmental policy. The world’s most valuable company, Apple, Inc., is itself dealing with that quandary right now.

Until last week, 39 of Apple’s products sat comfortably on the list of devices certified by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool. That is, until Apple requested that the organization remove those 39 products. Why is this significant? The move effectively removes Apple from being part of some public sector procurement efforts—San Francisco, for one, whose Department of Environment sent a letter to their government agencies announcing that Apple laptops and desktops are no longer qualified purchases.

Apple responded by explaining their frustration with the EPEAT standards, which even the governing organization admits are old. And to Apple’s credit, they’ve been at the forefront of positive news for their efforts to develop green data centers to support their various cloud-based services. Apple’s not alone—Google and a host of other tech companies have been very open about their efforts to lessen the GHG impact of their operations. 

 Apple recently won approval to build a 20-megawatt solar farm at their new data center in North Carolina

We can’t run from technology just because it’s a burden of the environment; it’s just too important to what we do, and what we need to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. And we need to ensure that the infrastructure is in place to keep our world running (that’s the adaptation side of this). But much of the mitigation efforts that some think is still a means for slowing climate change impacts can be fueled by technology, just as it can be inhibited. So a conversation needs to happen now. We need stakeholders at the table to figure out what works best—and how we’re going to make it happen.

Lessons Learned from an Epic Storm

At LMI’s annual Family Picnic on Saturday, the hot topic of conversation was the devastating impacts that the region endured beginning with Friday night’s epic storm. On a day where temperatures easily exceeded 100°F, many, if not all the people I spoke with didn’t yet have power at home. Today’s Monday Tuesday and many of them still don’t.

We can’t say this event, labeled an “in-land hurricane” by some, a “super derecho” by others, is related to a changing climate. I’d just as soon rather not dwell the cause, and focus on the facts.

This event:

·         Lasted 12 hours during its 700 mile run from Indiana to the mid-Atlantic coast

·         Featured gusting winds in excess of 70mph, with some places experiencing 91mph gusts

·         Left more than 1 million without power in the Washington, D.C. area alone (and 2.2 million overall, with “catastrophic damage” to the electrical grid).

The ferocity and timing are amazing to consider. That a storm could sweep through (And quickly! At my house it was a violent half hour and then it was over) and coincide with record high temperatures, is something few could have expected.

Consider the broad impact: the storm damage has disrupted infrastructure and the supply chain, along with regional IT and communications capabilities—parts of Northern Virginia were without 911 services for the entire weekend, and major cloud-based services operated by Amazon, Netflix, Instatgram and Pinterest were among the casualties. These were not small fish that were knocked out, reinforcing just how bad things were.

Add to that the public health issues. Already, the region was bracing for high temperatures—with the standard alerts and warnings that come with a forecasted heat wave. But no one envisioned such an event in which people would be forced to deal with the heat without the benefits of power for air conditioning, cell phone service for checking in on loved ones and coordinating activities, or clean water to drink.

A woman and her great-granddaughter at a Red Cross cooling shelter in Lynchburg, Va. Photo credit: Parker Michels-Boyce/AP

Again, whether or not climate change is at the root of this remains inconsequential so much as what organizations are prepared to do to adapt to these types of events.

This is the type of cross-functional impact that we talk about in our new climate change book—events with impacts that cross over to other areas and demand collaborative action from a multitude of agencies and stakeholders on every level. Whether they represent the private or public sectors, organizations have got to begin developing plans of action to account for their people, processes, and assets when debilitating events occur.

Whether it’s a better system for early warnings, using social media for first response, building hardened infrastructure, or adapting your supply routes, these are wise strategies that should be adopted by state, local, and federal governments, and supported and adopted by private sector organizations. It’s the smart thing to do. And if we do have an event that we can definitively chalk up to climate change, then we’re that much better prepared to respond.

Early to Rise

I don’t like talking about the weather. I have plenty of meteorologist friends that can ably do that on my behalf. In fact, our book about climate change isn’t as much about the climate as it is about its impacts and what can and should be done to prepare and respond. (If you’re looking for a great discussion on the weather aspect of climate change, Heidi Cullen’s book is a very accessible, and thought-provoking, text on where we could be headed.)

But the weather is the easiest frame of reference when it comes to climate change—it’s right there in front of us, relatable, and people have a pretty good feel for what it means—and certainly what lessons can be learned from our current environment. And when I see something in June that’s being monitored as a possible tropical depression, I think about what kind of mindset a functional manager needs to adopt in order to do their job.

“And they shall call her ‘Debby.’ Image taken the morning of June 22, 2012, by Accuweather

See, hurricane season in the Atlantic technically runs from June 1 through November 30, so anything is possible during that timeframe when it comes to tropical storms. But anyone who has ever booked a Caribbean cruise knows that your cheapest rates are in August, primarily because that’s when severe storms and hurricanes are most likely to rain on your (tropical) parade. Traditionally, hurricane season isn’t in full swing until the late summer.

But NOAA has already looked at things from a historical perspective, and what they found was that Hurricane Season 2012 jumped the gun, noting that

The Atlantic season has already gotten off to a quick start...with tropical storms Alberto and Beryl forming during the month of May.  This is the first time since 1908 that two tropical cyclones developed before 1 June. 

Consider the other severe weather events 2012 has already delivered to the United States. March was the setting for a rash of powerful storm systems, something that research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory noted was a result of optimal tornado conditions arriving earlier than in previous years.

March 2, 2012, tornado in Henryville, In., part of a system that killed 7 people.

The question becomes this: how can functional managers develop strategic plans when some things (like severe weather) arrive earlier, while others stay later (like longer frost-free periods and longer periods of pest proliferation)? Your calendar is completely out of whack. The impacts to your operations are multiplying and morphing right before your eyes. And that becomes a question of risk assessment and preparedness.

In the book, we pose the question of risk on each of the seven functional chapters. One thing we found over the course of this discussion is that organizations must assess associated risk that come with discrete events, along with vulnerabilities to their assets and processes. These factors will vary from place to place, but risk assessment process remains the same: understanding the event and its impact, looking at potential damage to what you do, and then determine its overall likelihood. This isn’t a novel way of looking at things, but rather a good method to apply to the climate change issue, and the unique set of problems it could bring with it.

Is this a cultural shift? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the same jarring consideration as how a flu pandemic might force people to forgo shaking hands. But if we’re to really adapt to a changing climate, that means shifting the way we think—or at least broadening the things we’re considering in order to help safeguard our way of life.

Climate Change on the Mind

In 1985, David Lee Roth began extracting himself from Van Halen’s shadow by releasing his EP Crazy from the Heat, with cover art of Roth waste deep in the waters off of the Seychelles Islands.

Twenty-seven years later, one has to wonder if Mr. Roth, even then, had climate change on the mind.

Seychelles, of course, is at significant risk to the impacts of a changing climate. Rising temperatures present a number of issues that must be adapted to, certainly from a public health perspective. Less obvious among them, though, is mental health.

The June 20 official start of summer arrived with furnace-like temperatures all along the east coast. This, after several weeks of awful wildfires in the western United States, which have forced evacuations from California to Colorado. And as firefighters valiantly work to stop thousands of acres of wildfires, and cities activate their health systems designed for severe heat events, there’s been no break from a stressful sequence of events—which certainly falls under the area of mental health—and the need to consider how public would deal with these events in extended and rapid succession.

The High Park fire west of Fort Collins, Colo. is being called one of the worst fires in Colorado history. Photo courtesy of PBS.org.

You can call it the mental aftermath.  A 2011 study by Australian researchers found that several years of continued catastrophic weather events on that continent have resulted in Cold War levels of anxiety and insecurity in children.

This extreme anxiety and stress are logical responses to extreme weather events—this on top of well-documented stressors like lack of access to food and water. A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation outlines how the uncertainty caused by unpredictable weather causes people to become depressed, even suicidal. The report, developed from conclusions of a high-level panel of psychiatrists, psychologists, and public-health and climate experts stated two hundred million Americans will be subject to stress because of climate change. 

Think about Hurricane Katrina and the doubling of mental health issues that occurred post-Hurricane Katrina.  A 2005 study of 283 children displaced by Hurricane Katrina revealed that they were nearly five times more likely than a pre-Katrina national comparison sample to have "serious emotional disturbance." This mental health category is similar to PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and accounts for children's distress and social, behavioral and functional impairment.

Hurricane Katrina’s wake left four states with disaster areas, including all of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Public managers have an opportunity to view each of these events as case studies as they move forward in developing a response strategy. There is critical information to be gleaned with regards to how their communities respond to those problems unique to their area.

Stakeholders in the public and private sectors will need to ensure adequate community health services with enough capacity to handle a wide array of mental health challenges, including displacement, death, depression and anxiety.

One community’s heat wave is another community’s wildfire, but the common element is that people will be confronted with stressful situations—and that’s a pretty good baseline to start with.

Making Supply Chain Music for a Better Climate

I have played guitar—albeit not very well—since my teenage years. Until I started studying supply chains and sustainability, I didn’t think much about the environmental implications of making a guitar. As it turns out, guitars and other musical instruments are often made from old growth woods, like mahogany, spruce, and ebony, prized for their acoustic qualities, and harvesting this wood can sometimes do more harm than good. Some guitar makers are finding ways to use the traditional old growth woods by selecting sustainable sources.

A flaxwood guitar, made by breaking down non-endangered European spruce and binding it with a special polymer.

Old growth wood deforestation is a central concern in discussions of climate change (for more on forestry issues, check out our chapter on land use in Climate Change: What You Can Do Now). In 2009, talks at the Copenhagen Summit centered on that very issue, with participants struggling to balance economics, biodiversity, primary forest loss.

“Some environmental groups are pressing for conservation of old-growth forests—the most carbon-dense, and biologically-rich state of forests—to be the centerpiece of [reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation], while industry and other actors are pushing for "sustainable forest management" or logging using reduced-impact techniques to be the primary focus of [reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation].”

I have long believed that many of the issues that we now see with sustainability and risk in the supply chain are due to business spending the past two decades outsourcing processes and globalizing operations. The result is more complex supply chains with less visibility into sources of material. As Gibson Guitar Corporation found out, that lack of transparency can lead to trouble if you don’t get the wood you think you are buying or suppliers mislabel the raw materials. Although Gibson was never charged with any wrongdoing, federal agents disrupted manufacturing operations on the suspicion that Gibson had received illegally harvested and exported wood.


Getting more visibility over the supply chain—understanding who is doing what and how it can be verified—is a first step to making the supply chain more sustainable. That is why a recent story about Taylor Guitars buying an ebony mill in Cameroon stood out to me as a good sustainability and risk management practice. By purchasing the mill, Taylor hopes to gain more control over the sourcing and processing of ebony to ensure the wood is sources sustainably.

Taylor Guitar’s Cameroon-based ebony mill

Given the recent trend of outsourcing, Taylor’s vertical integration may seem like a questionable decision. But purchasing a critical material supplier can pay off in the long run. First, Taylor is ensuring a source of supply for a critical and constrained raw material, which will reduce uncertainty in the future. Second, with a customer base that is fairly sustainability savvy, there is a great risk if unsustainably or illegally harvested wood found its way into a guitar. By taking control of the supply chain, Taylor protects themselves from this risk.

The interesting aspect of this story is the role of customer education in sustainability. Despite its name, ebony is not always a pure black color, but there is a perception that ebony must have that dark color. Taylor realizes that educating customers about sustainable wood choices will lead to more sustainable harvesting, less constraints in the supply of ebony, and no loss in guitar quality. As company founder Bob Taylor notes, “We need to use the ebony that the forest gives us.”

I may not be the next Guitar Hero, but the supply chain needed to make a quality guitar offers lessons for all of us. Gaining visibility and control over your supply chain can help take sustainability actions and reduce risk. Educating customers about the sustainability and performance of the materials in the product can support implementation of sustainability practices without losing the market. Who knew you could learn so much from a guitar?