April, 2014 | Environmental Debt

Climate change survival: companies need courage… and new metrics

First published in the Guardian on April 24th, 2014.

Today, tremendous work is being done to develop the metrics of natural capital. All kinds of very smart people and organizations are making the “business case” for sustainability, making tortuous calculations as they analyze the life cycles, carbon production and water footprints of a variety of products, all in an attempt to make the best possible business and marketing choices.

This arduous work is being done – finally – by gifted and smart accountants, economists and supply chain and manufacturing experts, from the Global Reporting Initiative to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board to the Carbon Disclosure Project to the World Bank’sNatural Capital Accounting. I appreciate all of this work. We need it.

But, impressive as this work is, it is no replacement for having the courage to actually contemplate the state of the world around us. Right now, we are looking on with a mix of disbelief and ennui as extreme weather engulfs us. In some cases, we are trying to take what appear to be reasonable steps, mostly in order to protect our precarious perch in the world’s economy. The trouble is, the time for reasonable has passed. We have somehow forgotten that if there is no nature, there is no business.

We are in a global environmental emergency, but we are behaving as if incremental improvements to “business as usual” will do. Talk to a scientist, a fisherman, a native of a low-lying island or a farmer stymied by drought, heat or floods. Or for that matter, talk to anyone who has been flooded in southern England or Pakistan; or who is making flood

A simple accounting change can make green infrastructure more attractive

First published in the Guardian, April 8th 2014

Many businesses struggle with the question of how to invest in large fixed assets. These are painstaking decisions, because they always demand long-term thinking and guessing about markets, future technologies and risk factors. How much revenue will a new factory generate? How much savings will a new technology produce? What unintended consequences might occur because of a purchase?

As companies attempt to answer these questions, they also have to deal with long-term trends that further complicate the question of fixed-asset purchases. Issues as diverse as globalization, environmental degradation and climate change can affect commodity prices, cause fires or floods, drive up the cost of living, and undermine political stability and security. And even positive developments, like the growing use of renewable energy, can lead to instability as coal producing areas will need new economic lifeblood. For governments hoping to deal with these trends by incentivizing green investment, one simple accounting change – accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure – could make a considerable difference.

Companies attempting to adjust to these changes with large fixed assets often find themselves trying to balance a financially viable long-term solution with a steep up-front cost. At the same time, companies also have to deal with several long-term issues that further complicate their purchasing decisions. I recounted one such story in my book,Environmental Debt: the Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy. Several years ago, PepsiCo built a state-of-the-art facility for its Frito-Lay division in Arizona. The installation had near net-zero waste, water, and energy systems. It isn’t hard to see how these advanced systems not only helped PepsiCo, but also the surrounding community: approaching net-zero water use would seem pretty valuable, actually imperative,