Alex Steffen (Worldchanging’s co-founder and editor, for those just joining us) is well known as a writer, editor and blogger, but he also is a popular public speaker, giving many talks a year at leading companies (including Nike, IDEO and Amazon), universities (including Harvard, Stanford and Yale), cultural institutions (from Barcelona’s CCCB to the Danish Architecture Centre) and major conferences (including TED, Copenhagen’s Bright Green, Design Indaba, Pop!Tech, Picnic and South by Southwest, as well as numerous professional associations).

Alex speaks about a variety of subjects, ranging from sustainable business to urban innovation, design solutions to planetary futurism (you can follow Alex on Twitter at @AlexSteffen).

If you’d like to book Alex for your own event, the good people at the Lavin Agency (which represents Alex) can help arrange that for you: a good place to start is with Alex’s speaker page.

In addition, Alex is available as a consultant for appropriate projects, and can be contacted through his soon-to-launch new website AlexSteffen.com.

You can also watch a number of Alex’s talks over the years on our website:

• at TED | 2007
  
• at Pop!Tech | 2006
  
• at Yale University | 2009
  
• at Danish Architecture Centre | 2008
  
• at Town Hall Seattle | 2009
  
• at Future City | 2010

“2050″ slide from Worldchanging’s “Future City” event. (The slideshow text was written by Alex Steffen; the slides were designed by Oscar Murillo with assistance from Amanda Reed)

Image of Alex Steffen at the top of the post by photographer Chase Jarvis as part of his “Seattle 100″ book project.

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 1:45 PM)

by Warren Karlenzig

China Pavilion, 2010 Shanghai World Expo (Copyright Flickr photographer: penphoto)

The Shanghai Expo officially closed yesterday with pomp, circumstance, and a confirmation of the city as the planet’s primary hope for a low-carbon future.

“Eco-friendly development and dissemination of renewable energy sources and new materials will influence the way we live and will lead the course of industrial development in the future,” said China’s Premier Wen Jiabao to the closing Expo Summit contingent of domestic and foreign dignitaries (eight heads of state), Nobel Prize winners and business leaders.

The World Expo, the world’s largest in history with 73 million attending, for the first time in 159 years focused on cities, sustainable ones that is. China’s plans for 350-600 million more urban residents by 2050 threatens to tip the earth’s scales in terms of climate change and the economy so much that China is now focused on a fifth global industrial wave: the low-carbon or green economy.

“The low-carbon economy is a new industrial revolution,” said Sir Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “Low-carbon growth is cleaner, safer, far more attractive while high-carbon growth will kill itself. China is well placed for this industrial revolution.”

Stern, author of the groundbreaking 2006 “Stern Review: the Economics of Climate Change“, was referring to China’s new national pilot program announced this summer by its all-powerful National Development Reform Commission for five low-carbon provinces and eight low-carbon cities.

One of the low-carbon cities, Baoding, for instance, within the last three years added 20,000 new jobs in wind, PV solar ( the city of one million is home to Yingli Solar, among other renewable start-ups), and other renewable energy technologies. It’s also the site of large-scale energy efficiency and renewable energy installations in everything from building-integrated solar to streetlights. The new national pilot programs are expected to pick up the pace and provide a template for the rest of the nation’s provincial and city low-carbon transformations.

Throughout its six-month run, the Shanghai Expo featured numerous forums on urban sustainability. Meanwhile, its pavilions employed many new green technologies in design and architecture. More than 500 new technologies in solar, heat pumps, energy efficiency, transportation and advanced material were developed as part of the Expo, according to ShiFang Tang, Technical Office Vice Director for the Shanghai Expo Bureau.

The massive China Pavilion and the country’s “theme” pavilions on sustainable cities and urban best practices repeatedly and effectively emphasized how the challenges of climate change, pollution and growing consumer consumption can be met with more advanced urban planning, green technology innovation and citizen education.

The displays and creativity were the best I’ve experienced, anywhere, in terms of sustainability information, education and multi-media. For instance, one entire building was devoted to four real families living in the cities of four different contenents, Australia, North America, Africa and China. The exhibit demonstrated through video, waxed figures (the mostly Chinese crowds especially loved these) and other physical displays how each family lived and what they did for work, fun, and school. At the same time it taught people experiencing the multi-level walk-through how much each family consumed in terms of resources, even land, and how that impacted climate change; carbon or ecological footprinting education for the masses.

The takeaway is that China is serious about climate change as a threat to the world and itself, and it intends to capitalize on this inevitability with all its might. China’s National Development Reform Commsision’s low carbon pilot projects comprise 27 percent of the nation’s population, and about one-third of its total economic output. The new low-carbon pilot projects span not only provincial and city planning and operations, but also industrial, economic and social planning, including education. In short, the whole ball of wax: “China will accelerate the model of sustainable development where nature, the planet and people can survive and thrive,” said China’s Premier Wen Jiabao at the Expo Summit’s closing ceremonies.

It will be a tough path, indeed. Only one day after industrial controls were lifted that were in place for six months during the Expo in order to reduce regional air pollution, the air quality in Shanghai has already gone from crystal clear to disturbingly smoggy. As Stern pointed out to a rapt audience at the Shanghai Expo Summit, China will need to reduce its projected total greenhouse gas emissions from 35 billion tons in 2030 to 20 billion tons by 2050 if the world will have any chance of realizing the 2 degree Celsius maximum global temperature increase agreed to with the 2009 Copenhagen Accord.

China, if it continues on its current trajectory of yearly greenhouse gas emission increases, will by 2030, according to Stern, account for 50 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas “budget” under Copenhagen while being home to only 17-18 percent of the world’s population.

“New green investments will help China continue its lead in the green race that has already begun,” Stern predicted. “Green policies are at the heart of the 12th Five-year Plan (the nation’s economic master plan for the near future, a new version which was recently drafted), showing the world what is possible.”

Meanwhile, Shanghai, China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, is deconstructing many of its Expo buildings for reuse in other parts of the nation, and also for other bidders outside China so that its Expo theme of “Better City, Better Life” gets a second and maybe even more lives.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active consultancy based in San Anselmo, California. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and co-author of a forthcoming United Nations manual on global sustainable city planning and management.

This post originally appeared on Common Current.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 11:40 AM)

by Jonathan Watts

After the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, a successful agreement to protect biodiversity has provided a timely morale booster and restores faith in the United Nations.

Delegates in Nagoya, Japan, have reached an agreement to protect biodiversity. Photograph: Nozomu Endo/AP

In the long run, the biodiversity deal scratched out in Nagoya in the early hours of this morning is intended to benefit habitats and species such as tigers, pandas and whales. But in the short-term, the biggest beast to get a reprieve may well prove to be the UN itself.

After the misery, disappointment and anger of last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen, the body was fiercely criticized and the entire multilateral negotiating process called into question. It seemed time-consuming, prone to grandstanding and dominated by selfish national interests rather than pressing global concerns.

At the start of this week, the talks in Nagoya looked likely to become another chapter in the same sorry story. But since then, there has been an impressive – and ultimately successful – willingness to work.

Square brackets (which denote areas of disagreement) have been steadily whittled away from the negotiating texts. Pragmatism has been more evident than ideology. Delegates actually seemed willing to listen to the advice of scientists warning of the perils of inaction.

Some key goals have been set, including a plan to expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land and 10% of the planet’s waters. For a scarred veteran of the Copenhagen or Tianjin climate talks, the extent of the progress, goodwill and readiness to compromise during these past few days has been pleasantly shocking. Right up to the final hour, there have been moments when the talks appeared on the verge of collapse. But negotiators have been flexible enough to skirt around the danger zone.

This is no accident. Ahead of this event – and not wanting to repeat the breakdown of last year’s talks – the EU negotiating team was given a wider mandate. The same may be true of other nations.

That alone cannot explain why the results of Nagoya and Copenhagen were so different. Other factors include the smaller scale of this event and the expectations for it. There was less superpower pride and influence at stake: the United States is not a signatory and China has been relatively low-key. Brazil and the EU have bent over backwards to secure a deal. China and India have shown a willingness to compromise. Even Bolivia and Cuba complained but did not block.

The Japanese hosts also deserve a great deal of credit for the smooth organization, though at times they have been almost comically hospitable in breaking up finely poised negotiating sessions for food, drink and music receptions.

But the most important difference may be in implementation. One of the reasons why climate negotiations are so tetchy is because rival nations want stringent checks in place to make sure everyone complies and on course to realize their goals to reduce carbon emissions.

That is sadly not true for biodiversity targets, which tend to be vaguely worded and voluntary. Nature cannot complain if it gets cheated. This is a major reason why the last set of UN biodiversity goals were nowhere near being realized.

The drafters of the new Nagoya protocol say such lessons have been learned so a tighter road-map will be put in place that ties funds to progress, mobilizes private finance as well as public funds and sees nature in terms of benefits to be shared.

One of the great achievements of this conference has been to highlight the fact that biodiversity is not just about saving a few cute animals, but about preventing risks to entire ecosystems, economies and ultimately human life. As a result, bird-lovers and tree-huggers have started to find common cause with insurers and investors.

In the conference center last night, the mood was one of relief more than euphoria. But many expressed hope that this deal may provide momentum for the climate talks at Cancún next month. That seems optimistic.

It is too early too say whether Nagoya marks a turning point for UN multilateralism, let alone life on Earth. But for both, it is at least a much-needed morale booster.

This post originally appeared on The Guardian.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 1:45 PM)

The Living Planet Report, produced by WWF and its partners, shows that humanity’s demands still outstrip the world’s natural resources – a trend likely to worsen, unless leading countries begin to provide the highest quality of life with the lowest ecological demand. chinadialogue looks inside the 2010 edition.

Populations of tropical species are plummeting and humanity’s demands on natural resources are sky-rocketing to 50% more than the earth can sustain, according to the 2010 edition of WWF’s Living Planet Report – the leading survey of the health of the earth.

The WWF study — produced in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network — uses what it terms “a series of indicators to monitor biodiversity, human demand on renewable resources and ecosystem services”.

This “Living Planet Index” reflects changes in ecosystems by tracking trends in nearly 8,000 populations of vertebrate species — more than 2,500 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. The global index, says the report, shows a 30% decrease from 1970 to 2007; the tropics have been hardest hit, with a 60% decline in less than 40 years.

“There is an alarming rate of biodiversity loss in low-income, often tropical, countries while the developed world is living in a false paradise, fueled by excessive consumption and high carbon emissions,” according to Jim Leape, director general of WWF International. Tracked populations of freshwater tropical species have fallen by nearly 70%, the report says – “greater than any species’ decline measured on land or in our oceans”.

On a more positive note, some “promising recovery” by species’ populations in temperate areas was found, partly due to greater conservation efforts and improvements in pollution and waste control.

“Species are the foundation of ecosystems,” noted Jonathan Baillie, conservation program director with the Zoological Society of London. “Healthy ecosystems form the basis of all we have – lose them and we destroy our life-support system.”

A second indicator of the planet’s health, the ecological footprint, tracks human demand on ecosystems by measuring the area of biologically productive land and water required to provide the renewable resources people use and to absorb the carbon dioxide waste that human activities generate. Latest measurements show that human demand on natural resources has doubled since 1966 and that humans are using the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support their activities. By 2030, if we continue to live beyond the earth’s limits, the equivalent of two planets’ productive capacity will be needed annually.

Leape sees a continuation of current consumption trends as leading the world “to the point of no return”. If the whole world lived like the average resident of the United States, he said, “4.5 Earths would be required”. An alarming 11-fold increase in humanity’s carbon footprint over the last five decades means carbon now accounts for more than half the global ecological footprint.

The 10 biggest culprit-nations – those with the largest ecological footprints – are: the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, Estonia, Canada, Australia, Kuwait and Ireland.

Accounting for nearly 40% of the global footprint, the report says, are the 31 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the world’s richest countries. There are twice as many people living in the so-called BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – and the current rate of per-person footprint in those countries puts them on a trajectory to overtake the OECD if they follow the same development path.

Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, argues that countries put their own economies at risk by maintaining high levels of resource dependence. “Those countries that are able to provide the highest quality of life on the lowest amount of ecological demand will not only serve the global interest,” he said, “they will be the leaders in a resource-constrained world.”

A high footprint and high level of consumption, which often comes at the cost of others, is not reflected in a higher level of development, the WWF report shows. (Countries with moderate footprints can rank well according to the UN Human Development Index, reflecting life expectancy, income and educational attainment.)

Outlining solutions needed to ensure the earth can sustain a global population projected to exceed nine billion in 2050, the report points to choices in diet and energy consumption as critical to reducing footprint, as well as improved efforts to value and invest in natural capital.

“The challenge posed by the Living Planet Report is clear,” said Leape. “Somehow we need to find a way to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly prosperous population within the resources of this one planet. All of us have to find a way to make better choices in what we consume and how we produce and use energy.”

This article is adapted from information provided by WWF.

Image of world puzzle at top via WWF. Copyright: istockphoto.com / WWF-Canada.

This post originally appeared on chinadialogue.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 3:45 PM)

by Warren Karlenzig

UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010 by Heatherwick Studio.

This weekend I’m attending the Shanghai Expo Summit Forum as part of a United Nations delegation. The Oct. 31 event, which will be on “Urban Innovation and Sustainable Development,” will mark the close of the largest World’s Fair in history: more than 70 million have visited the Expo (the Osaka, Japan, World Fair of 1964 attracted 64 million) where a record two hundred countries are exhibiting through Sunday.

The Shanghai Expo has been targeting sustainable cities throughout its six-month run. Developing nations such as China and India will be the focus of not only emerging strategic sustainability frameworks, but also of large-scale financial, technology system and cultural innovation, all of which will constantly intersect with new ways of managing resources and mitigating and adapting to climate change.

About 2,000 are invited to the fair’s closing ceremonies, including heads of state, governors, mayors, Nobel Prize recipients and CEOs: China will be represented by Premier Wen Jiabao, while Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will appear for the UN. The Obama Administration is sending Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council for Environmental Quality, to present on “Green Development and Ecological Cities.” Former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, author of the pivotal 2006, “Economics of Climate Change,” (The Stern Review) will also speak.

Stern has asserted that with one-percent investment worldwide in climate change mitigating technologies and development, estimated climate change-related damage to the global economy in the 5 to 14 percent range can be avoided.

Other sessions at the Shanghai Expo Summit Forum will include:

• Knowledge Innovation and Cultural Cities
  
• Science and Technology Innovation and Creative Cities
  
• Economic Transformation and Sustainable Cities
  
• Community Management and Livable Cities
  
• Youth Creativity and Future Cities

This year I’ve been collaborating with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which has been preparing for the Summit Forum with Premier Wen Jiabao and the National Organizing Committee of Expo 2010 Shanghai China. Together, with the input of other UN agencies and the World Bank, we have been writing the Shanghai Training Manual on Sustainable Urban Development. The publication will come out in May 2011 as one of two “legacies of thematic substance” from the Shanghai Expo, the other being “The Shanghai Declaration,” which will be released at the Summit.

The Shanghai Manual will be an instrument for knowledge sharing and capacity building for cities around the globe as they struggle to tackle the economic, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century. The largest challenge will be the result of China’s expected increase in urban population from nearly 50 percent of its 1.3 billion citizens to about 75 percent of its total population by 2050: that means 350-500 million people will settle into China’s cities in the next four decades, mostly from rural areas of China.

Such unprecedented growth in developing-nation cities prompted the Shanghai Manual to analyze the intersection of sustainability management and urban planning with the emerging green economy, science and technology innovation, management and governance approaches, as well as traditional environmental management sectors, such as transportation and land use planning, solid waste management and wastewater management.

The Shanghai Manual will address topics covered by previous Shanghai Expo urban sustainability forums that have been held in and around Shanghai since its opening in May (which has an overarching theme of “Better City, Better Life,”):

• Information and communication technologies and urban development
  
• Cultural heritage, creative cities and urban regeneration
  
• Science and technology innovation and urban futures
  
• Low carbon cities: environmental protection and urban responsibilities
  
• Low carbon economic transformation
  
• Better campus; better living: learning for a sustainable future
  
• Economic transformations and urban-rural relationships
  
• Environmental change and city responsibility
  
• Good urban governance and sustainable lifestyles

Mayors from North America to appear will include Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, who, a year ago, announced a goal of attempting to make the Canadian city “the greenest in the world.”

By 2015, according to the UN, Shanghai will be the seventh largest city in the world, after (in order): Tokyo, Japan; Mumbai, India; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Mexico City, Mexico; New York, New York; and Delhi, India. The Shanghai Energy and Environment Exchange, based in the city’s Pudong District, has 300 companies involved in a market-based trading system for pollution credits that may become the basis for a city-based and even national carbon trading platform.

How fitting that China focuses an international expo on sustainable urban planning in a city that is its largest, most dynamic example of how climate change, financial markets and urban planning are merging into an entirely new global socio-economic model.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active consultancy based in San Anselmo, California. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and co-author of a forthcoming United Nations manual on global sustainable city planning and management.

This post originally appeared on Common Current.

Other articles by Karlenzig in the Worldchanging archives:

• Measuring and Marketing in Japan’s Eco-Model Cities
  
• Making the Cities of India More Sustainable
  
• Urban Form, Behavior Energy Modeling in China: Sim City for Real?
  
• The Next Decade’s Top Sustainability Trends

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource – Cities at 2:00 PM)