For the past 18 years, the NFL has been working to decrease the environmental footprint of the largest annual sporting event in the U.S. — the Super Bowl. Two years ago, we wrote about several initiatives aimed at reducing the events’ impacts. Last year, we covered how Super Bowl XLV was slated to be the greenest NFL championship game in history. This year, the NFL is trying to outdo itself yet again by working with the Green Mountain Energy Company and the Indianapolis community to make Super Bowl XLVI the greenest yet. I talked with Jack Groh, Director of the NFL’s Environmental Program, to get the details on this year’s efforts.

Our 2011 predictions were about 80% right. So we have made 4 predictions for 2012: Sustainability as a profit driver; Focus on the ‘how’ of sustainability; Innovation, and; LED lighting.

To see whether our predictions for 2012 are worth reading, let’s see how 2011’s predictions fared (for the original predictions see http://drgreglavery.wordpress.com/5-low-carbon-predictions-for-2011/).

A possibly ground-breaking idea has been kept on life support after Ecuador revealed its Yasuni-ITT Initiative had raked in $116 million before the end of the year, breaking the $100 million mark that Ecuador said it needed to keep the program alive. Ecuador is proposing to not drill for an estimated 850 million barrels of oil in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputinin (ITT) blocs of Yasuni National Park if the international community pledges $3.6 billion to a United Nations Development Fund (UNDF), or about half of what the oil is currently worth. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative would preserve arguably the most biodiverse region on Earth from oil exploitation, safeguard indigenous populations, and keep an estimated 410 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. However, the initiative is not without its detractors, some arguing the program is little more than blackmail; meanwhile proponents say it could prove an effective way to combat climate change, deforestation, and mass extinction.

Mark Hay
Monday, January 02, 2012

Functioning largely by sight and sound, humans are poorly equipped to understand the importance of chemical signals among organisms.

PANAJI: Against the backdrop of public apprehensions over the Regional Plan (RP) 2021, the archbishop of Goa, Filipe Neri Ferrao, on Thursday reminded Goa government leaders including chief minister Digambar Kamat and cabinet ministers of "the duty to tend the earth and to be responsible stewards of God's creation".

The future of environmentalism in Connecticut just might be economic development.

At the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters' 12th Annual Environmental Summit in Hartford Tuesday afternoon, it was growth, not blocking bulldozers, that got the old hands and activists chattering.

Putting Back What Is Used Through Offsets and Exchanges

Sustainable business requires making changes to the way your business thinks; it means changing business practices through purchasing and providing products and services that have a positive impact on the environment AND the economy.

Why an Environmental Exchange? Sometimes in the course of business, we use material resources, emit pollution into our waterways or send emissions into the atmosphere. As responsible business owners, our job is to:

    prevent these things from happening in the first place
    measure how we do use resources, create pollution, etc
    minimize our impacts and create a strategy to phase out or change our practices
    pay for what we use.

Paying for What Your Business Uses. If our environment (water, energy, materials, waste, emissions, etc) are finite resources, and we use these resources in the context of our business, then it seems fair that they would be paid for with money or a trade in like.
What is an Environmental Exchange?
In the context of doing business, an Environmental Exchange is when the organization pays the environment back to offset consumption used in creating a particular good or service.

When a business puts back 100% or more of the natural resources it uses to create a product or a service, then in theory the business is considered a sustainable business.

These exchanges are typically voluntary, and are not all created equal.
Types of Environmental Exchanges
There are many types of environmental exchanges, and the type you choose are dependent upon the type of organization or business you run, and what types of environmental impacts are created in what you do. Organized in order of most common, here are a number of environmental exhanges to consider:

    Carbon Exchange. A carbon exchange is purchased to mitigate climate change created by your organizations carbon footprint. Carbon Exchange is by far, the most well known of the environmental exchanges, and is often referred to as 'Carbon Offsets' or 'Carbon Credits.' Don't be fooled though, these are not one in the same!

        Carbon Offsets: Carbon offsets are verified tools to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions. Buying a carbon offset allows you or your company to claim a reduction of your net carbon footprint.         Carbon Credits: Carbon credits are purchased when you want to buy 'green power' through a 'renewable energy certificate (REC)'. This certificate provides proof that renewable energy has been supplied, but do not offer verified proof that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. Instead of planting trees to reduce the green house gas emissions created from your last flight from Seattle to Boston, your company can purchase Offsets or Credits from a company that does the work of mitigating your carbon for you.

                Habitat Exchange. A habitat exchange is purchased to consolidate lands that are home to endangered and threatened species. For example, the Living Building Challenge requires that for every square foot of building development, a square foot of habitat is placed under conservation for the next 100 years.
                Nutrient Exchange. Nutrient exchanges aim to improve water quality in impaired watersheds by offsetting the discharges in one source by decreased discharges in another water source.

By Marni Evans, About.com Guide

Visitors to this city’s burial ground learn more from the dead, particularly about the whale shark and other endangered sea creatures.

The 12-year-old “fish cemetery” of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) has become a field school all year round, even to the curious, according to Westly Rosario, chief of the agency’s National Integrated Fisheries Technology Development Center here.

Almost every day of his childhood, He Xin remembers the skies in his hometown of Shenyang being gray. “If I wore a white shirt to school, by the end of the day it would be brown,” recalls He, who was born in 1974, “and there would be a ring of black soot under the collar.”

The idea that human societies, at their best, seek to evolve toward a more perfect embodiment of humankind’s shared aspirations for peace, freedom, justice, prosperity, personal and collective wellbeing. Today, and for the foreseeable future, that list also includes sustainability: living within the natural carrying capacity of our planet, in order to preserve and protect the wellbeing of Earth’s biosphere upon which all living things depend for survival. Over many centuries, human societies have devolved away from sustainability. It is high time to evolve back.