146 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. With visionary leadership and ambitious goals, the UAE has positioned itself at the forefront of the sustainability movement, recognizing the intrinsic link between environmental preservation and long-term economic prosperity.

      In recent years, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has emerged as a global leader in sustainable development, embarking on a transformative journey towards environmental stewardship and economic diversification.

      Junk Removal companies also play a pivotal role in the UAE's sustainability equation by providing essential waste management services that promote resource recovery and recycling. By responsibly disposing of unwanted items and recyclable materials, these companies help divert waste from landfills and minimize environmental pollution, contributing to a cleaner, healthier environment.

  2. Jan 2024
  3. Nov 2023
    1. sadly the now global sustainability industry is mostly stuck with the very 00:05:03 mindset that is the root cause of the wickednesses we are in over six decades
      • for key insight - sustainability industry is stuck

      • key insight

        • claim
          • sustainability industry is plagued with the same root cause as the problem that it is trying to solve
    1. Seit dem Pariser Abkommen haben europäische Banken fossile Energieunternehmen durch die Ausgabe vom Anleihen in Wert von ca einer Billion (1000 Milliarden) Euro unterstützt, wie eine Recherche des Guardian ergibt. Anleihen (Bons) sind inzwischen die wichtigste Form der Finanzierung der Fossilindustrie. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/26/europes-banks-helped-fossil-fuel-firms-raise-more-than-1tn-from-global-bond-markets

  4. Oct 2023
  5. Aug 2023
    1. Whole humans and more than human. Sustainability and systems are a window into the spiritual for many because it’s about wholes.So not a pillar. Rather a deeper level of understanding.
    1. The challenge is that we're now nearly thirty years in the future and despite the best efforts of many people, we haven't yet cracked the nut of sustainable business or sustainability more broadly.
      • new trailmark: - new trailmark
        • replace "for" with "adjacency"
      • adjacency
        • between
          • sustainability
          • failure,
          • root causes
      • source: reason why the author started asking the question:
        • what's missing in sustainability that makes it unachievable after decades of trying?
    2. Is spirituality the missing pillar of sustainability?
      • for: spirituality and science, spirituality and sustainability, spirituality - missing link, Isaac Newton
      • title: Is spirituality the missing pillar of sustainability?
      • author: Tom Greenwood
      • date: Aug. 24, 2023
  6. Jun 2023
  7. May 2023
    1. Registration Agencies must comply with the policies and technical standards established by the IDF, but are free to develop their own business model for running their businesses. There is no appropriate “one size fits all” model; RAs may be for-profit or not-for-profit organisations. The costs of providing DOI registration may be included in the services offered by an RA provision and not separately distinguished from these. Examples of possible business models may involve explicit charging based on the number of prefixes allocated or the number of DOI names allocated; volume discounts, usage discounts, stepped charges, or any mix of these; indirect charging through inclusion of the basic registration functions in related value added services; and cross-subsidy from other sources.

      {Fee-for-Service}

    1. Revenue based on services, not data – data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.

      {Sustainable Operational Revenue}

    2. Mission-consistent revenue generation – potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation

      {Mission-Consistent}

    3. Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months – a high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.

      {Contingency}

    4. Goal to generate surplus – organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

      {Surplus}

    5. Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities – day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.

      {Time-Limited}

  8. Apr 2023
    1. Much popularization work remains to put newer evolutionary lessons on par with pop-science selfish-gene logic. But billions of years of harsh testing have taught all living systems to suppress certain sorts of disruptive selfishness. Economists should reflect long and hard on why the systems they study would be any exception.

      Kate Raworth's Donut Economics thesis is a step in the direction of reframing economics towards cooperation and creating a self-sustaining world.

    1. Recommended Source

      Under the "More on Philosophies of Copyright" section, I recommended adding the scholarly article by Chinese scholar Peter K. Yu that explains how Chinese philosophy of Yin-Yang can address the contradictions in effecting or eliminating intellectual property laws. One of the contradictions is in intellectual property laws protecting individual rights while challenging sustainability efforts for future generations (as climate change destroys more natural resources.

      Yu, Peter K., Intellectual Property, Asian Philosophy and the Yin-Yang School (November 19, 2015). WIPO Journal, Vol. 7, pp. 1-15, 2015, Texas A&M University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 16-70, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2693420

      Below is a short excerpt from the article that details Chinese philosophical thought on IP and sustainability:

      "Another area of intellectual property law and policy that has made intergenerational equity questions salient concerns the debates involving intellectual property and sustainable development. Although this mode of development did not garner major international attention until after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the Yin-Yang school of philosophy—which “offers a normative model with balance, harmony, and sustainability as ideals”—provides important insight into sustainable development."

  9. Mar 2023
    1. Sustainability and a continuum of human unsustainability
      • simple diagram showing trend towards collapse

      • spectrum from sustainable to collapse:

        • sustainable
        • unsustainable
        • socio-ecological crisis
        • socio-ecological collapse
  10. Feb 2023
    1. The results told us Felix’s demographic really wanted to shop for climate-friendly food brands, but found the sustainability information too confusing and – perhaps as a result – believed sustainable grocery shopping to be too expensive.Our strategy was clear: Give shoppers better information on the climate impact of Felix products and, in the process, demonstrate how easy it is to make climate-friendly choices when products are clearly labelled. We called it The Climate Store (Klimatbutiken) – the world’s first grocery shop in which the ‘price’ of food would be based on its carbon footprint.
      • Climate Supermarket
      • Climate store
      • Survey showed consumers were confused by sustainability information
      • consumers were left with the belief that shopping sustainably was too expensive
      • One answer to simplify the complexity that was confusing people was uniform labeling of grocery products with their CO2e and a hard limit (18.9Kg CO2e) that consumer must stay under each week to meet Paris agreement
  11. Dec 2022
    1. Sustainability is inadequate as a concept

      !- inadequacy : concept of sustainability - too vague and can be gamed - appropriated and coopted by industry to continue moving in the direction of ecological degradation

    1. Interpersonal competence is the ability to motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative and participatory sustainability research and problem solving.
    2. Strategic competence is the ability to collectively design and implement interventions, transitions, and transformative governance strategies toward sustainability.
    3. Normative competence is the ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets.
    4. Anticipatory competence is the ability to collectively analyze, evaluate, and craft rich “pictures” of the future related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.
  12. Oct 2022
  13. Apr 2022
  14. Mar 2022
  15. Jan 2022
    1. The Gravitricity system uses weight configurations totalling up to 12,000 tonnes in a deep shaft, suspended by a number of cables, each of which is engaged with an electric winch capable of lifting its share of the weight. Electricity is stored in the form of potential energy by raising the weights. Power is then generated by lowering the weights to turn a generator. The technology has been proven to reach full power in less than one second and has a predicted full scale efficiency of between 80% and 90%.

      [[Gravitricity]] is an interesting Scottish energy company of new age. Their idea is using gravity to store energy in a physical from as opposed to lithium-ion batteries which do so chemically. Their gravity storage, unlike pumped hydroelectric energy storage, does not rely on water which makes it more accessible to more arid countries.

    1. “Philanthropy is commendable,” Dr. King wrote, “but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

      We could say a similar thing about sustainability: Sustainability practitioners must not overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make sustainability work necessary.

  16. Dec 2021
    1. Dr Merlina Missimer.[3][4] By providing significant granularity on the root causes of social systemunsustainability

      Divide social and ecological unsustainability in the thesis

  17. Nov 2021
    1. The negative indirect effects of additional land-use change may outweigh the positive direct effects on global climate and biodiversity, so that a large-scale switch to organic farming in the EU could possibly turn out to be a disservice to global sustainability.

      Argument

    2. Combining organic farming and modern biotechnology could unleash important synergies, as both have their specific strengths in contributing to the SDGs. However, such combination would require a change in the EU law

      Conclusion / recommendation: combine organic and biotechnology

    1. Sustainability window analysis is based on the advanced sustainability analysis (ASA) approach. The ASA approach was developed in Finland Futures Research Centre [31,32,33] providing a general framework for analyzing sustainability.

      Include this in a comparative analysis of other methodologies such as Hoornweg, Hachaichi, R3.0 Thresholds and Allocations, etc.

    1. just because ESG is about virtue signalling and risk management, does not mean it is meaningless. On the contrary, the very fact that company executives feel the need to “signal” ESG virtues shows how the interplay of digital transparency and shifting social norms is creating a feedback loop that cannot be ignored. If that encourages companies to change strategy, say by cutting carbon emissions, it is good. If it puts pressure on governments to make crucial reforms, like introducing a carbon price, it is even better, particularly if companies are shamed into demanding such policy actions.

      Also, aren't ESG standards and goals are supposed to ratchet up as time goes on?

    1. Instead, current AI research on sustainability tends to emphasize the quantifiable effects of environmental pollution and climate change, and focus on solutions of continued measurement, monitoring, and optimizing for efficiency.
  18. Oct 2021
  19. Sep 2021
    1. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the best way to start growing more in any domain is to first lose less. We see this first principle everywhere: In a subscription business, you're better off reducing churn before increasing sign-ups. In personal finance, you're better off spending less before earning more. In investing, you're better off stopping losses before seeking gains.

      Perhaps the principle behind this is aiming for longevity. You cannot have a long-term working system if it breaks down at early stages. It is important to undress breakdowns, before seeking to improve.

      Simply put, there is no point in giving your ship a new coat of paint if it has a gaping hole in its keel.

    1. Milestone

      Where are the actual emissions reductions milestones? Why doesn't this page show the total emissions of the signatories at the time of signing, the targets, and the emissions reduced since signing? How is this pledge different from all the other climate pledges?

    1. Yes, signatories are held accountable through their choice of regular, publicly-available reporting, and the public-facing commitments they make when signing The Climate Pledge.

      Who is checking this? Will signatories who fail to meet their climate commitments be removed from the signatory list? Are there any repercussions?

    1. Proof-of-work methods (e.g. blockchains) are harmful for sustainability (s12y).

      First time I've seen s12y as abbreviation for sustainability.

      Also makes me wonder if I should make sesquipedaliantly into s15y? It would be more fun if it were s18y so that the 18 could refer to 12+6 inches which is a foot and a half matching up with sesquipedalian's root definition.

  20. Aug 2021
    1. A material sustainability issue is “an economic, environmental, or social issue on which a company has an impact, or may be impacted by,” according to New York University, and may also affect stakeholders’ decisions with respect to the company.

      Materiality covers issues which the company impacts and is impacted by. The latter is often forgotten by stakeholders outside the company but is equally important to a company's sustainability.

      Materiality needs to be defined together with stakeholders, but who are the (local, regional and global) stakeholders for a company?

  21. Jul 2021
    1. sustainability consultants help organizations reach and maintain their economic, social and environmental sustainability goals in a way that ensures that the benefits outweigh the costs of implementation.

      consultant role mapping

    1. While it is the primary duty of governments to protect, respect, fulfil and progressively realize human rights, businesses can, and should, do their part. At a minimum, we expect businesses to undertake due diligence to avoid harming human rights and to address any adverse impacts on human rights that may be related to their activities. As a complement, not as a substitute for respecting rights, businesses can also take additional steps:Contribute in other ways to improve the lives of the people they affect, such as by creating decent jobs, goods and services that help meet basic needs, and more inclusive value chains. Make strategic social investments and promote public policies that support social sustainability. Partner with other businesses, pooling strengths to make a greater positive impact.

      THE SOLUTION

    2. actions to achieve social sustainability may unlock new markets, help retain and attract business partners, or be the source for innovation for new product or service lines. Internal morale and employee engagement may rise, while productivity, risk management and company-community conflict improve.

      Benefits of transition to sustainability

    3. Businesses’ social license to operate depends greatly on their social sustainability efforts. In addition

      A social license to operate (SLO) refers to the perceptions of local stakeholders that a project, a company, or an industry that operates in a given area or region is socially acceptable or legitimate. ... As such, from the perspective of a company, a social license to operate is often evaluated as an intangible asset.

  22. Jun 2021
    1. The other way to lessen the impact of blockchains is to ensure that the energy used is completely renewable. On April 7, a coalition led by Energy Web announced the Crypto Climate Accord, modeled loosely on the Paris Agreement. The top-level goal of the accord is for all of the world’s blockchains to be powered by 100 percent renewables by 2025.
    1. Though things are improving, the fact remains that no Blockchain model is truly energy efficient, so if you’re in doubt as to whether you need it and are concerned about CO2 emissions, you should proceed with caution. In some ways, the problem of the Blockchain is that it hit the public imagination - and that of app developers and entrepreneurs - long before the technology was fully mature (it definitely still isn’t) and many of these scalability and energy-consumption problems have yet to be ironed out. 
    2. The key to this is in sharing resources on a massive scale, both in terms of how networks and modern servers work.
    1. The goal of the GCC is to facilitate a greener and more sustainable art world. Our aim is to provide information and the necessary tools so that we can collectively reduce our carbon footprint by 50% over the next ten years (in line with the Paris agreement), along with near zero-waste practices.
    1. Gestartet 2020 in London als „Gallery Climate Coalition“, verzeichnet das Bündnis um Heath Lowndes, den Managing Director und Ausstellungskoordinator der Thomas Dane Gallery, nach kurzer Zeit bereits mehr als 150 internationale Galerien.
    1. To celebrate their work, I selected the ten most innovative art initiatives in Berlin (in alphabetical order) that engage with environmental issues through their artistic programming and practice.
    1. It is an important aim of ALB, in the form of a close, long-term collaboration with artists, to follow the creative processes and make this visible in exhibitions, events and conferences. Instead of subordinating the artworks on exhibition to theory, we are interested in an inductive approach – that rather places the individual artistic work at the centre of inquiry.
  23. May 2021
    1. Park, J. J. H., Grais, R. F., Taljaard, M., Nakimuli-Mpungu, E., Jehan, F., Nachega, J. B., Ford, N., Xavier, D., Kengne, A. P., Ashorn, P., Socias, M. E., Bhutta, Z. A., & Mills, E. J. (2021). Urgently seeking efficiency and sustainability of clinical trials in global health. The Lancet Global Health, 9(5), e681–e690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30539-8

  24. Apr 2021
  25. Mar 2021
    1. Importance of inclusion and equity for the future of micro credentials, beyond the traditional job-market and tertiary education environment

  26. Feb 2021
    1. Wiley  

      Similar to CUP and IOP, Sage, and Springer Nature, many UK institutions have signed a contract to fund Wiley's publishing activities for four more years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

      Furthermore, the financial credit cap for the Wiley deal is operationally low, resulting in additional expenditure for institutions at the end of the calendar year when open access support funds are running low. This additional cost is not sustainable for many institutions and unintentionally creates inequitable access to no-additional-cost publishing.

    2. Springer Nature  

      UK institutions have been through several terms of the Springer Compact deal and continue to negotiate amendments and additional terms with added expense. The Springer Compact deal delivers no-additional-cost publishing for an upfront commitment of funds by institutions. Regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories institutions continue to support Springer Nature's publishing activities. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

    3. SAGE Publishing  

      Similar to CUP and IOP, many UK institutions have signed a contract to fund Sage's publishing activities for three years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

    4. IOP Publishing

      Similar to CUP, some UK institutions have signed a contract to fund IOP's publishing activities for four years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

    5. Cambridge University Press

      Many UK institutions have signed a contract to fund CUP's publishing activities for four years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

    6. undermine the integrity of the Version of Record, which is the foundation of the scientific record, and its associated codified mechanisms for corrections, retractions and data disclosure. 

      This misrepresents the situation. Authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) have been shared on institutional and subject repositories for around two decades, with greater prevalence in the last decade. Despite this the version of record (VoR) is still valued and preserves the integrity of the scholarly record. The integrity of the VoR continues to be maintained by the publisher and where well-run repository management are made aware, corrections can be reflected in a repository. The solution to this problem is the publisher taking their responsibility to preserving the integrity of the scholarly record seriously and notifying repositories, not asserting that authors should not exercise their right to apply a prior license to their AAM.

    7. eliminates the ability to charge for the services that publishers provide

      This is an inaccurate statement or at the very least misrepresents the situation. Despite the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), publisher may - and many do - continue to charge page charges, over-run charges, colour charges, submission fees, society fees, etc. to the author. The author may also choose to pay an open access article processing charge (APC), without using their funder's money. Furthermore, the RRS does not eliminate the publisher charging subscription fees, licensing fees for the reproduction of content (e.g. figure resue), access to meta-content, docdel etc. or, indeed, individual access to the version of record (VoR) where a reader has identified a need to see the VoR after seeing the authors accepted manuscript (AAM)

    8. free

      Repository based open access is not free. Institutions and other organisations have invested significant resources into the development, maintenance, management and quality assurance of repositories and their content. This would not be necessary if academic journals publishing was more equitable, transparent and sustainable.

  27. Dec 2020
    1. It seems to also highlight how much our governments, banks and big corporations roles play into the state of our planet, how much we need them to change so that our individual choices can actually make a significant difference. Read more

      Notice the subtle othering: it's not "us" who have been doing this but the "governments, banks and big corporations" ... But who are their shareholders, who are their citizens, staff, customers etc? Us ...

      Note this is a comment on Attenborough's book. I do wonder what his recommendations are...

    1. Proponents of so-called green growth—economic growth that uses natural resources in a sustainable manner—must show that it is possible to effectively eliminate carbon emissions from developed economies in the space of little more than a decade with no impact at all on economic expansion. This challenge cannot be answered solely by an appeal to technology. The question is not whether technological measures such as energy efficiency and solar power are possible (they clearly are); nor whether, in the past, countries have managed to harness these technologies sufficiently (they clearly haven't); but rather, whether countries can now achieve sufficient gains in a short enough time to allow the pursuit of economic growth indefinitely, while still remaining within the safe operating space of the planet.In a sense, this once again raises the question of whether economic value is something completely separate from—or at least separable from—physical and material flows. Certainly, in the past, the two things have gone hand in hand. According to economics, monetary value surely has something to do with activity. According to physics, activity is impossible without the expenditure of energy. There may well be efficiencies to be had, but these will ultimately be constrained by thermodynamic limits, as all activity is. Those who believe that this is not a constraint on expansion typically appeal to the massive quantities of solar energy that flood Earth. But it remains true that these flows are diffuse (rather than concentrated, as fossil fuels are) and must be captured using material devices.

      Confirms point from Ozzie Zehner's excellent Green Illusions + things like "Renewable Energy without the Hot Air": we are going to have to have lifestyle - tech ain't going to cut it.

      Green growth is one of the greatest "green" illusions. Let's have our cake and eat it we are told by the techno-solutionists.

      As the saying goes: The real clean energy is less energy

  28. Oct 2020
    1. el Distrito tiene identificadas 432 huertas urbanas en la ciudad, que en patios, terrazas, jardines, balcones y el espacio público han tenido cabida, tras procesos comunitarios, y se han fortalecido a tal punto que su producción es comercializable.
  29. Sep 2020
  30. Aug 2020
  31. Jul 2020
  32. Jun 2020
  33. May 2020
    1. close off parts of the city to traffic and open them up for exercise
    2. Modern cities weren’t designed to cope with life during a pandemic, and this upside-down way of living has turned them into “a disorganised array of disconnected bedrooms and studios”
  34. Feb 2020
    1. which they estimate to be $230,000 per year.

      There is some good discussion on HN about the realistic nature of this estimated expense and how it is not likely out-of-line with what it should be and may actually be quite reasonable.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22317244

    1. scientific laboratories create an amazing amount of plastic waste, consume large amounts of water, create risks from hazardous chemicals and use significantly more energy
  35. Jan 2020
    1. We must stop building new nuclear power plants, and find a real solution to our existing nuclear waste problem.

      We urgently need a debate to discuss and rethink this idea against nuclear energy. I strongly opine that nuclear power generation will be necessary at-least in the short term during the transition into clean energy, hopefully eventually leading to purely sustainable energy and minimizing nuclear energy.

      This article expresses the same point and points out to the German experience of not being able to contain carbon emmissions despite going green energy sans nuclear - https://theweek.com/articles/862988/what-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-wrong-about-nuclear-power

  36. Dec 2019
    1. Their model also raises the question of scale: unlike Facebook, whose mission has always been to accommodate and connect everyone, everywhere, Low Tech supports the idea that a website can serve a small community connected through common interests. The Internet's global accessibility has lead us to think on a massive scale, but a community that lacks physical proximity can still be “local” in mindset.
    2. Perhaps because it was conceived as a utopia, we tend to think of the internet as a limitless superhighway, a virtual mirror free from the constraints of our physical world. Data, files, our work, our memories, all float up to the cloud and are called down to attention by what seems to be magic. Yet in reality, life online is governed by the same limits to growth affecting the rest of our world. According to Low Tech Magazine the entire World Wide Web is responsible for consuming 10% of all global electricity production, a rate that is exponentially increasing.
  37. Nov 2019
    1. Theexhaustion of forest cover by aboutad1000 obliged iron smelters to usecoal instead of charcoal in coke-burning blast furnaces.

    Tags

    Annotators

  38. Oct 2019
    1. a range of business models

      I think Hypothes.is plays a very important role in democratising these discussions. The real places where these decisions are made are often closed off to faculty and students. We need to have serious discussions about which sustainability models are appropriate for education not just the businesses. What is sustainable for education may not always be sustainable for business!

    1. The Politics of Sustainability and Development

      This reading is to help you better understand the role and importance of literature review. Literature review connects us to a bigger community of scientists who study the same research topic, and helps us build up, illustrate, and develop our theory (what is happening between the IV and the DV?) and research design (how one plans to answer the RQ).

  39. Apr 2019
    1. The first week of class was pretty similar to most first weeks of a programs I have experienced. However, this program was a little more hectic due to the fact that we have so many programs trying to do so many different and connected things. The moment that stood out the most to me was how much work was accomplished in 8 short hours by the MTA changemakers, this was impressive and inspiring to me. I participated in a similar group last quarter. In that program we  had weeks to get the point that they got to in an afternoon.

      You know, upon reading the textbook Networks, Crowds, and Markets, I came to see that when networks are first formed, they tend to be hectic and that there is a scram for connections in order to get a project or anything started. However, as time goes by and the networks began to get familiarized with themselves, I found that they start to form groups that are more stable and cohesive with one another and will start building up momentum in order to build something great. However, this comes with the understanding of trust and mutual bonds and without it, it will not become a teampreneurship but instead it becomes just a regular classroom setting that is just doing a series of movements on various different projects. Thus, through reading your blog and other people's blogs, I came to see that there is a stage in which teampreneurship must go through in order to be called teampreneurship and this goes the same with any enterprises. Guess it is the key towards understanding sustainability.

  40. Feb 2019
    1. So, the UN forecasting model inputs three things: fertility rates, migration rates, and death rates. It doesn’t take into account the expansion of education for females or the speed of urbanization (which are in some ways linked). The UN says they’re already baked into the numbers. But when I went and interviewed [the demographer] Wolfgang Lutz in Vienna, which was one of the first things we did, he walked me through his projections, and I walked out of the room gobsmacked. All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education. And he comes up with a much lower number for global population in 2100, somewhere between 8 billion and 9 billion.

      Makes sense

  41. Jan 2019
  42. Nov 2018
    1. while we like to scoff at all the mucky-muck bureaucracy around training, budgets, policy and messaging, it’s precisely that stuff that prevents your dream initiative of today morphing into rotting infrastructure of tomorrow. It’s all too easy in this business to end up the new interactive whiteboard — bought one year as the must-have accessory and abandoned the next.

      Good reminder of how essential it is to take time from the evangelism of OER to write and enact some policy to ensure sustainability of our OER efforts.

    1. Individuals are most creative when provided space to follow their interests without sanction, when support and guidance are readily available, and when social community is fostered.

      "Support and guidance" is tricky. They're not binaries that are or are not available; they're large matrices of forms and degrees.

    2. My work, rooted in both theory and practice, reveals three things that are essential to bringing individuals into the circle of change: autonomy, guidance, and a sense of social community, or working toward a larger meaningful goal.
  43. Sep 2018
    1. Apple says that they intend to move to all recycled materials. But they won't let recyclers repair their products for reuse.

  44. Aug 2018
  45. Jul 2018
  46. Mar 2018
    1. Most do not contribute anything back to PKP

      Consider working with the 2.5% Commitment group. They are leading a movement to organize libraries to direct some of their funding to support open infrastructure.

  47. Dec 2017
    1. A study from Finland's Leppeenranta University of Technology and Berlin-based Energy Watch Group claims that the entire world could transition to 100% renewable electric power by 2050.

  48. Nov 2017
    1. Average land use area needed to produce one unit of protein by food type, measured in metres squared (m²) per gram of protein over a crop'sannual cycle or the average animal's lifetime. Average values are based on a meta-analysis of studies across 742 agricultural systems andover 90 unique foods.

      Beef is nearly 6 times the impact of Pork.

      This is worth referring to in the background section to provide context, on why you need more than just changes to the web

    1. We invite all scientists to endorse this global environmental article and engage with a new alliance concerned about global climate and environmental trends

  49. Feb 2017
    1. Free open source plans for "The Growroom," a spherical urban garden structure large enough to walk through. Requires plywood, screws, and access to a CNC machine to cut the plywood.

  50. Oct 2016
    1. The International Energy Agency said today that it was significantly increasing its five-year growth forecast for renewables thanks to strong policy support in key countries and sharp cost reductions. Renewables have surpassed coal last year to become the largest source of installed power capacity in the world.

  51. Sep 2016
    1. A local company named AeroFarms has built what it says is the world's largest indoor vertical farm, without the use of soil or sunlight.

      Its ambitious goal is to grow high-yielding crops via economical methods to provide locally sourced food to the community, protect the environment and ultimately even combat hunger worldwide.

      "We use about 95 percent less water to grow the plants, about 50 percent less fertilizer as nutrients and zero pesticides, herbicide, fungicides," said David Rosenberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of AeroFarms.

      http://aerofarms.com/

  52. Jun 2016
    1. But EEI, its member utilities, Koch-backed groups, and their corporate and conservative allies have been lobbying states, sometimes successfully, to eliminate net metering or otherwise reduce the financial incentives for clean home power generation. When they succeed, people with solar leases could end up with less in savings on their electricity bill than the cost of renting their solar array. EEI’s letter feigns concern for these consumers — an impressively cynical maneuver, as it’s the very group leading the push to raise those consumer costs.
  53. Apr 2016
    1. Beavers are great for water conservation: they create ponds by damming creeks, and they also dig to make them deeper.

      We could be collecting the rain water that flows off our roofs (and also elsewhere), but very few people do -- at least not in the US.

  54. Mar 2016
  55. Feb 2016
    1. John Quiggin points out that we have consumption peaks, as well as production peaks. Coal, oil, steel, and paper usage per person have all declined. If I understand him, then the per person rates have declined enough to create a decline in total consumption, in spite of population growth.

  56. Dec 2015
    1. IPCC: Solar & biomass produce 3.5 - 21 times more carbon emissions (eq.) per kilowatt-hour than nuclear & wind.

      Is this right? If so, that's disappointing for solar. But it shows wind as lower CO2 than nuclear. (And the chart doesn't show fossil fuels. Is solar favorable compared to them?)

  57. Nov 2015
    1. Elinor Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on governance of the commons -- finite resources shared by a community. She studied such communities, and derived eight principles, which are summarized on this page and on Wikipedia.

      Elinor Ostrom

    1. Such self-management oftenworks well, but it is also contingent uponthe costs and complexities of spare parts andrepairs, as well as the underlying economiccohesion of the neighborhood—in terms ofits ability to hold on to specific values anduses of land and the demographic stabilityof its inhabitants.

      All pieces of the puzzle must come together in order for infrastructure to remain stable. If someone does not have the right tools or access to information, they are helpless to sustain the power of the infrastructure.

  58. Oct 2015
  59. Sep 2015
    1. Excited to see hypothesis on Appropedia! We have over 300 thousand edits on thousands of pages. So terrible. For instance, this front page is fairly ugly.