PhilanTopic

Foundations and Climate Change: 5 Questions for…Robert Searle, Partner, Bridgespan Group

In recent years, the debate over climate change has centered on greenhouse gas emissions, which have been linked by scientists to rising global temperatures. But after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on coastal areas of New York and New Jersey, underscoring the importance -- and vulnerability -- of critical infrastructure systems, many policy makers and environmentalists began to shift their attention to climate change adaptation strategies.

To help advance the debate, the Bridgespan Group has released a report, How Philanthropy Can Help Communities Advance Climate Change Adaptation (12 pages, PDF), that examines the funding environment for these strategies and offers a number of suggestions for foundations looking to support adaptation efforts in a post-Sandy context. Recently, PND spoke with Bob Searle, a partner in Bridgespan's Boston office and co-author of the report, about the impact of Sandy on the climate change debate, the tradeoffs between mitigation and adaptation, and some of the things foundations can do to advance the debate.

Philanthropy News Digest: The climate effects of a warming planet had been predicted long before An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. Why has it taken so long for the discussion about climate change to get serious?

Robert Searle: I think there are two primary reasons, and they are interconnected. The first is that all science involves an element of uncertainty, and climate science is no exception. There are elements of the climate situation that are quite certain. For example, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, and that increase has led to a general warming of the planet. There are other aspects that are less certain and open to interpretation and judgment; for example, whether human activity is the major cause of these changes, and what the environmental and social impact of climate change will be.

And this is where the second reason comes in: The biggest source of greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuel, and the global economy is based on fossil fuels. In other words, there are incredibly strong vested interests in not making the explicit connection between man-made greenhouse gases and the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Those vested interests will naturally seize on any element of uncertainty to argue against change that will threaten economic development, especially when the economy is already shaky.

One mistake that the environmental community has made is to allow itself to be painted as anti-people and anti-economic development on the climate issue. There was a great article in the Fall 2012 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled "Climate Science as Culture War," by Andrew Hoffman, that speaks to some of these points.

PND: Has Hurricane Sandy changed the way shore communities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut plan for and invest in infrastructure projects?

RS: It seems like it's starting to. Just this week, Mayor Bloomberg announced a $19.5 billion plan to invest in infrastructure to protect New York City from future storms and sea-level rise. However, he didn't identify any funding streams for the initiatives, and infrastructure investments happen over a long period of time, so it's unclear how much things will really change, especially in the short term. So while the mindset of people seems to have changed, it's not clear how much action that will translate into.

PND: In terms of their response to climate change, should foundations be pushing an agenda of adaptation, an agenda of mitigation, or both?

RS: The answer for an individual foundation probably depends on its particular strategy, but there's clearly a need to work on both mitigation and adaptation. If you believe the majority of climate scientists, increased concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere could lead to devastating consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable populations on the planet, human and otherwise. So it doesn't make sense to abandon efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

However, there is plenty of evidence that the effects of climate change are already being felt. And a lot of these effects are happening faster than climate models predicted a decade ago, so ignoring those impacts doesn't make much sense. As we mention in our paper, low-income and other disadvantaged populations are less able to cope with the consequences of climate change, so foundations that care about these populations certainly have a role to play in adaptation.

We also think there are a couple of aspects to the adaptation issue relative to mitigation that make it attractive for foundations. The first is the opportunity to leverage public dollars. If foundations can help influence how public money that is already budgeted gets spent so that the investments take into account the effects of climate change, that's a lot of leverage for the foundation and a big win for society.

The second aspect is the nature of adaptation investments relative to mitigation. In general, adaptation is incremental and doesn't require massive changes to things like the global economy. So it's likely to be an easier lift than making headway on mitigation, at least in the near term.

PND: In the report, a number of foundations leaders were quoted as saying that pursuing an adaptation agenda felt like giving up on mitigation. Is it too late for mitigation?

RS: We hope not. But just in case, we aren't investing in any beachfront property.

PND: What can small, grassroots environmental organizations and foundations that traditionally don't fund public policy or advocacy do to make a difference?

RS: Based on our research, we think there are important roles for grassroots organizations to play, and they don't necessarily require hard-core advocacy or public policy work. One example in our paper is UPROSE, which is a community-based organization in Brooklyn. UPROSE has been engaged with climate change adaptation with local officials and nonprofit and business leaders. It has participated in several local planning processes, such as working with the New York City Department of Transportation on adaptation measures such as permeable pavement and bio swales -- landscape elements designed to remove silt and pollution from surface runoff water.

Similarly, there are important roles for foundations at the local and national levels that don't come close to the public policy or advocacy arena. Advocacy, at least in the form of public pressure, is important, but there are many other levers that need pulling. Our paper outlines five agenda items for philanthropy: One, support local science by local scientists; two, invest in neutral conveners; three, support community advocacy for change; four, build the field to share adaptation strategies; and five, reframe the dialogue around people and social benefits.

The first three strategies lend themselves to local or place-based funders, while the last two are more appropriate for national funders. So on the topic of climate adaptation, there are opportunities for all kinds of foundations to make a difference.

-- Matt Sinclair

Rising Risk and Rising Tides: Can We Catch the Wave?

(Rachel Leon is executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association.)

Since its creation in 1970, Earth Day has helped bridge the gap between people and the planet, connecting us to the ground we stand on. For Extreme Weather Earth Day 2013, it is vital we reaffirm that connection as we confront global challenges and increasingly common extreme weather events in our own backyards.

At a recent conference, Gina McCarthy, the Obama administration's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, articulated two priorities for us as a nation and community: finding solutions to problems of climate change, and getting kids outside. These macro and micro pieces fit together and can help show the way to a more sustainable future.

My mother likes to tell the story of my first speech, which I gave when I was three and which included a plea for more parks in our community. I grew up in Schenectady, New York, in an inner-city neighborhood; our playground was a vacant lot full of metal pipes and glass, and that speech was the beginning of my personal activism and connection to the outdoors.

Ultimately, the community, with a huge contribution from my mom, succeeded in getting a new park built. And, thanks in part to that experience, I was drawn to issues of poverty and inequality as I got older. I really didn't reconnect with environmental issues, however, until I found myself working at a statewide anti-hunger organization. Our agenda included getting food stamps accepted at farmers markets so as to encourage fresh food choices for all families, regardless of income. At the time, I didn't identify as an environmentalist, and yet my work was absolutely connected to the environment. That perception, that people working for a better planet are somehow different from those working to address poverty, inequality, or other social issues, is all too common -- and one we absolutely need to address if we hope to build an engaged community that spans all interests and sectors.

Getting kids outside is crucial to that movement because children today are far less likely to be connected to the living environment than their parents or grandparents were at the same age. And if kids don't feel a connection to the environment, the critical work to create a sustainable future won't have a constituency. My activist mom and my anti-poverty work connected me to "place and planet," even though my access to green spaces as a kid was limited. But not everyone has that experience. So while we work on the very big issue of climate change, we also need to remember the smaller, concrete goal of getting kids off the couch and outside, where they can begin to appreciate the connection between the environment and all the challenges, social and environmental, confronting our communities.

After several years at the anti-hunger organization, I went to work for Common Cause, where I experienced firsthand how money in politics was blocking progress on environmental issues -- whether it was the failure to hold landlords in New York City accountable for lead poisoning, the long struggle to pass a bottle bill in the face of the soda industry's opposition to such legislation, or Big Oil blocking progress on renewable energy alternatives that would help reduce our carbon emissions and slow global warming.

Today, in my role as executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, I‘ve come full circle. Recently, for example, I traveled to Chicago for the Council on Foundations' annual conference, where I had the good fortune to meet and network with funders, community activists, and reformers who see the connections between and among their different areas of interest. I organized and participated in sessions that applied a global lens to issues of climate justice, food insecurity and efforts to create a more sustainable agriculture, and media reform (or lack thereof). These sessions crystallized for me how the solutions to many of the challenges we face lie in our ability to connect individual experience to different sectors and broader global goals.

As Earth Day 2013 approaches, the part of the United States I call home is still trying to recover from Superstorm Sandy, while Louisiana and post-Katrina New Orleans, where EGA will hold its fall retreat later this year, is rebuilding at a heartbreakingly slow place and losing the equivalent of a football field to rising sea levels and erosion every forty-five minutes. Other parts of the country are locked tight in the grip of drought, while a recent spate of natural disasters worldwide, from forest fires in Australia to massive flooding in Argentina, remind us that the "new normal" isn't just economic reality; it's something environmental funders, NGOs, and people in communities everywhere need to come to grips with. If there's a silver lining in all this, it's the growing awareness of climate change as a serious problem that will cost millions of people their homes, their livelihoods, and the certainty that extreme weather events are something that happen to other people.

Still, even this moment of urgency will fade unless we succeed in connecting individuals with the issue of climate change and a vision for a better future. And doing that can be as simple as getting kids outside, letting them stick their toes in real mud, and reminding them that they are part of the environment. It is us, and we are it.

So this Earth Day, let's think about where we are and where we need to go. Here are some resources to get you started:

• the Earth Day Network has created a Faces of Climate Change tumblr to personalize the challenge that climate change presents while uniting people around the globe behind a powerful call to action;
• on Monday, the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle will celebrate the grand opening of the Bullitt Center, the "greenest commercial building in the world," and will offer educational tours of the building to the public;
• college-age youth across the country are joining the grassroots online community at PowerShift and showcasing their efforts to get university endowments to disinvest from coal;
• the insurance industry is beginning to "get it";
• the Pulitzer Prize committee has recognized Inside Climate News with a Pulitzer; and, of course,
• EGA members are funding efforts to get kids outside.

Indeed, our Tracking the Field (executive summary, 8 pages, PDF) research shows that a growing number of environmental grantmakers are making these connections. Among EGA members, grants that were strategically focused on communication nearly doubled between 2009 and 2010. The EGA funding community also sees the connection between sustainable communities and agriculture, with more than $13 million funding this intersection of issues in 2010. Between 2009 and 2010, we also saw a 63 percent increase in funding, to $76 million, for environmental education and youth organizing (or roughly 7 percent of EGA members' grantmaking). But gaps remain. We continue to see too few dollars going to environmental justice, which saw one of the largest drops in funding during the Great Recession and in 2010 received less than 2 percent of EGA member grant dollars.

We are also reaching out to new constituencies. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan recently helped EGA members begin to rethink community resilience at the city level. And our board has committed to engaging us globally -- a direction that is both selfish and selfless. As former President Bill Clinton once said: in helping others and the planet, we truly are helping ourselves.

So this Earth Day, let's think back to when we were kids and making our first connection to the outdoors -- a connection that most of us cherish deeply. And let's commit to matching the vigor of our outreach and advocacy efforts to the intensity of the extreme weather events that seem to have become the "new normal."

-- Rachel Leon

Weekend Link Roundup (December 8-9, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Arts and Culture

On its Web site, the James Irvine Foundation unveils a snazzy new infographic format to share what it has learned about arts and arts organizations in California through the work of its Arts Innovation Fund.

Climate Change

In an impassioned post on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Keeping A Close Eye blog, Lisa Ranghelli urges foundation leaders to get involved in the fight against a warming planet.

Fundraising

On his Future Fundraising Now blog, Jeff Brooks, author of the Fundraiser's Guide to Irresistible Communications, provides a timely reminder to fundraisers to "keep calm."

Impact/Effectiveness

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, Minnesota Council on Foundations research manager Anne Bauers shares findings from NTEN's The State of Nonprofit Data report, which found that a lack of expertise, issues of time and prioritization, and challenges with technology, among other things, are holding many organizations back from tracking and using data more effectively.

To help organizations looking to close their data skills gap, Beth Kanter, co-author (with KD Paine) of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, shares some data visualization resources that she's come across recently.

Journalism/Media

On the Knight Foundation blog, Benoit Wirz shares some takeaways -- and questions -- from the recent NewsFoo conference, which brought together leaders in the digital news space to discuss problems and potential solutions for news organizations struggling to make the transition to digital:

1) Building credibility (and engagement) in digital news. Most news publications are not as transparent about their reporters' biases and sources as they could be, and many don't report retroactively on whether pundits/sources got things right or wrong. How can news organizations move toward embedding more credibility into their operations?

2) Improving content recommendations. Today, news consumers learn about content largely through algorithms based on relevance, social recommendations, or as a result of editorial selection. What other ways can news organizations enable the discovery of content?

3) Freeing news content from news sites. News sites capture just 1.1 percent of the total page views on the Web (and even less on mobile). Thus, if content continues to be restricted to news sites, digital ad revenue will remain modest. Can news gathering and reporting operations develop a standard to allow news to be distributed as easily across the Web and mobile platforms as ads are while preserving some benefit for content creators?

4) Scaling media-focused social enterprises (while safeguarding mission). Media companies have traditionally had a source of revenue (advertising) that is not directly tied to content or customers. New socially focused media companies likePolicyMic, Upworthy, and Zeega are trying to build business models that, in addition to ad revenue, include other sources of revenue (e.g., lead generation, content creation). How best to balance these and other potential revenue streams against the needs of the people whose lives they are trying to change?

5) Making data visualization work on mobile. Data visualizations are thirty times as likely to be shared as traditional text articles. Can the industry develop standards to maximize the impact of data visualizations on mobile devices?

Philanthropy

On the New York Times' Opinionator blog, journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg (The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism) looks at some of the reasons why people give to charity and concludes that, regardless of motivation, "perhaps the most relevant point for most people is that whatever cause moves us, we should be looking for effectiveness."

Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz taps "MOOC" -- Massive, Open, Online Course -- as the ninth philanthropy buzzword of 2012 and says that if any reader of the blog can guess the tenth and final buzzword of 2012, she’ll send him/her a free copy of Blueprint 2013, Lucy's annual look at the trends shaping the philanthropic and social change landscape.

In a guest post on the Forbes.com site, Bridgespan chair and co-founder Tom Tierney discusses the implications of the recent embrace of charitable giving by the mega-wealthy. "While politics contrives to divide us, our fundamental generosity -- our willingness to lend a hand -- offers extraordinary opportunities for all of us to help improve our society," writes Tierney. "Taken together, we have the potential to shape America's golden age of philanthropy. We must leave divisiveness behind, respond to our country's true needs, and strive to collaborate -- to give generously and give smart."

In a letter posted to the Council on Foundations Web site, the organization's new CEO, Vikki Spruill, offers a first look at the council's new direction, which includes an ambition to "operate as the hub of the largest, most connected philanthropic network in the
world...."

Technology

Getting into the holiday spirit, the Sunlight Foundation, which works to leverage the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, has come up with the perfect gift for the open data developer: a Sunlight API key and twelve ways to take advantage of the API offerings on the Sunlight Web site.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

--The Editors

Off the Shelf: 'The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change'

(Emily Keller is an editorial associate in the Corporate Philanthropy department at the Foundation Center. In October, she reviewed Changing Business From the Inside Out: A Treehugger's Guide to Working in Corporations, by Timothy J. Mohin.)

Leonida Wanyama sat at her living room table in her mud-and-sticks house at the base of the Lugulu Hills in western Kenya contemplating her assets. Her fifteen-year-old son Gideon had been sent home from boarding school because she couldn't pay the latest tuition bill. Her four-year-old daughter Dorcas was begging for more food, even though the cupboard was bare. Her husband Peter, weak from malaria, a condition worsened by malnutrition, did what he could to feed his family, but the planting season was just beginning and the maize crop wouldn't be ready to harvest for months. Leonida decided to sell her last goat for a thousand shillings -- enough to convince Gideon's principal to take him back as she struggled to come up with the remaining tuition. Food would have to wait.

Welcome to the wanjala, the word for famine in Leonida's Lutacho Valley farming community and one of the most common surnames for boys in a culture where parents name their children for the season in which they were born. Girls who are born during the long months between the last of the prior harvest's food has been consumed and the new harvest is brought in are named Nanjala. Leonida's village is called Malaria; so is the stream that provides the family with water for drinking and washing -- and serves as a breeding ground for the mosquito-borne illness that always grows worse in the wafula, or rainy season.

As he makes clear in his new book, The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, Roger Thurow believes the one to eight months each year that the people of western Kenya live with "chronic, gnawing emptiness in their bellies" is both morally unacceptable and avoidable. And to make the point, he focuses much of his book on the One Acre Fund, a young nongovernmental organization that works with smallholder farmers -- those with less than two acres of arable land -- in East Africa to double and triple their yields. For a forty-five hundred shilling credit (about $50) that is paid back over the course of the year, the organization, which operates out of Bungoma, a town in Kenya's Western Province, provides fertilizer, modern seeds, and weekly trainings to smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi.

The demand for One Acre's services is clearly evident in Thurow's narrative, which depicts the relentless cycle of relative feast and famine in the region and how it dramatically affects the quality of life for the smallholder farmers who comprise the bulk of the food-producing population in Kenya's agriculture-dependent economy. Indeed, the country's Public Health and Sanitation ministry reported that during the wanjala which is the subject of Thurow's book, malnutrition was the underlying cause of more than half the deaths of children under the age of five. In the community of Malaria, unconnected electrical wires hang from the church ceiling because the congregation cannot afford to pay for electricity. Children study at home by the light of kerosene lamps that emit noxious fumes and are a constant fire hazard, and the fee-based high school Gideon attends lacks basic chemistry supplies, audio-visual equipment, even blackboards. The local health practitioner, Janet, has no blood pressure gauge or microscope to help confirm her diagnoses. Villagers get around by foot and bicycle, and families often live for a decade or more in homes that were intended to be temporary structures.

One Acre works to lift these farm families, which are often headed by women, out of the grinding poverty that is their lot and into lives in which they have enough to eat year-round, children are able to attend the area's top schools, and excess profits from agricultural work are reinvested back into the farm or livestock.

As Thurow tells it, Andrew Youn, One Acre's co-founder and executive director, believes East Africa's food insecurity problem is primarily economic rather than agricultural, and he has come up with an innovative business model to address the high rates of malnutrition, depleted soils, lack of access to information, and crop price fluctuations that are characteristic of the region. To start, One Acre arranges the bulk purchase of items for distribution at churches near its clients' modest homes, saving them the effort of having to navigate treacherous roads and lack of quality control at local shops. The organization's field directors then teach local farmers how to rotate and diversify their crops to improve the nutrition and health of the soil, and to measure the distance between seeds while planting, ensuring that each one has access to adequate light and air (methods in use in the United States since the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s). One Acre recently added crop insurance and de-worming medication for children to its portfolio of services. Establishing better storage systems that reduce crop mold and losses caused by weevil depredation, thus enabling farmers to keep their crops off the market until prices are high, is another primary goal.

One beneficiary of the program is Zipporah Biketi, who lives with her husband, Sanet, and four children in a hut with a leaky thatched roof. Her youngest child, David, has a protruding belly and a persistent cough — both symptoms of malnutrition. The older children sleep on unpadded wooden couches. Sanet is a livestock trader who also makes and sells clay bricks. The family's only other source of income is milk sales from two skinny cows.

Rasoa Wasike, a mother of three, leads One Acre's Kabuchai Women Self-Help group. She tells Thurow that farming is like gambling, the difference being that the smallholder Kenyan farmer rolls the dice on whether it will rain or not. Her husband, Cyrus, works at a cell phone store collecting payments from farmers who, ironically, have acquired modern communication devices but don't have access to modern seed technology. Cyrus hopes to one day save enough money to purchase a pair of bulls and start a ploughing business.

Life on a small farm, or shamba, in Kenya is, as Thurow shows, labor intensive throughout the year. The annual cycle begins with the soil being ploughed by oxen or with small hand shovels known as jembes; use of the latter forces farmers to remain stooped for hours on end. Once the ploughing is completed, villagers gather and pray for rain. If it comes, they dig and fertilize hundreds of holes for seed. This is followed by strenuous daily weeding of the plot, even as last year's food supply runs low, reducing their strength. Once the crops have matured, farmers gather with machetes and jembes to chop them down. During harvest season, or wekesa, the farmers face the additional daily task of spreading maize in the sun to dry, keeping an eye out for rain and thieves, and returning the crops to storage at night. This is followed by shelling, which takes over living room floors and involves the whole family. Many farm families also raise goats, hens, chickens, or cows, primarily for milk sales or for trading rather than for food; incomes are too erratic to sacrifice their most valuable asset for a meal or two.

As the harvest nears, the market price of maize per single-serving bag, or goro-goro, increases to five or six times the previous year's post-harvest price. Many farmers, out of desperation, sell their surplus when the price is low and struggle to purchase maize when the price is high. Family finances are further compromised by the academic calendar, which starts in January, meaning tuition fees are due before the harvest.

Thurow, who worked for thirty years as a Wall Street Journal reporter before joining the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as a senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy, vividly portrays the farmers' plight while drawing attention to the region's natural beauty -- the caves, mountains, and lush greenery of the wafala -- and showing the community's generosity and joy as well as suffering. One student earns a government scholarship. The farmers reap more than ever before and celebrate with a Christmas feast. Janet gives malaria medication to Leonida's family on credit, even during the wanjala. There is something to hope for throughout the year.

Yet climbing out of such deep poverty is dependent on several years of good harvests, Youn says. And the gradual nature of that transition is the most difficult part of the story to convey. Thurow, who is also the co-author (with Scott Kilman) of Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, uses the One Acre story to argue that international food aid is fleeting, expensive, and disruptive to market prices, and that increasing crop production through education and agricultural development is the only long-term solution to hunger in developing countries like Kenya. But as Leonida goes without food and Zipporah sells a cow to re-pay the family's loan, the less positive realities of the One Acre approach surface as well.

Nonprofits and Disaster Response: 5 Questions for Gary Bagley, Executive Director, New York Cares

(Laura Cronin is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. Recently, she asked Gary Bagley, executive director of New York Cares, the city's largest volunteer organization, about the organization's work with local nonprofit partners in response to Superstorm Sandy.)

Laura Cronin: City workers -- first responders, firefighters, transit workers, sanitation workers -- labored around the clock to restore critical systems in New York City that were overwhelmed by the storm surge created by Sandy. Alongside them were thousands of residents who provided volunteer support to victims of the storm and chipped in to clean up affected areas. Creative responses such as Occupy Sandy's  online registry and local groups like the Red Hook Initiative were part of a rapid, largely decentralized nonprofit response to the storm. Your organization has a long history of rallying volunteers and partnering with the leading nonprofits in the city, in ordinary times as well as in times of crisis. What did your Sandy response look like?

Gary Bagley: New York Cares has a Memorandum of Understanding with the New York City Office of Emergency Management through which we are responsible for mobilizing volunteers in response to disasters. So beyond the eight thousand volunteers who signed up to help, we had three full-time staff members stationed at the OEM as well as other staff fielding calls and e-mails from organizations and individuals that needed assistance. But because many nonprofits, schools, and faith-based organizations were as hard hit as residents of low-lying areas, we had to go beyond our traditional collaborative program delivery model. In the hardest-hit locations in Staten Island and Queens, we had teams of New York Cares staffers assessing -- on foot and by car -- local needs. At the same time, our volunteers canvassed neighborhoods, distributed food, and started on the debris cleanup. Now, a few weeks into the recovery, we see that much of the work will be about providing social services, from reading programs at libraries to adult education programs, in the most heavily impacted areas. Helping neighborhoods thrive again will be about much more than cleanup efforts.

LC: Many nonprofits in the city moved downtown in recent years in pursuit of lower rents and/or to take advantage of various incentives and rebates put in place by the city after 9-11. Indeed, New York Cares has an office near Wall Street. What was the effect of the power, heat, and Internet outages that hit lower Manhattan following the storm on your operations and on the operations of your partners?

GB: We never wanted to test our disaster-response plan, but we sure were glad we had one! The Thursday and Friday before Sandy came ashore, we reviewed our disaster-response procedures, from backup e-mail systems to phone trees to remote meeting locations. So, luckily, we were able to work remotely while we waited for power to be restored to our offices at 65 Broadway. But even after the electricity came back on, we were without phones for another two weeks. Our on-call phone service -- a cell number that our main line was forwarded to -- received a hundred and fifty calls a day in the immediate aftermath of the storm. We also have three staff members responding to e-mails submitted to our general information address (info@newyorkcares.org), and on any given day in the last few weeks they've had a queue of more than two hundred e-mails waiting to be answered.

LC: What do you think New York City nonprofits will need as we move past the immediate relief effort and really get into the hard work of recovery and rebuilding? And what role can volunteers play?

GB: The hard truth is that, post-Sandy, nonprofits will need what they've always needed: resources, both financial and human. And they'll need more of them. The recovery effort will extend far beyond physical rebuilding; the need for social services in the hardest-hit areas is already apparent, and volunteers will be key to helping organizations that were severely compromised by the storm ramp up their efforts. It's also important to note that nonprofits that were fortunate to escape the storm's wrath are feeling the impact. I've heard, to give you an example, that a lot of food banks in Manhattan are running short of supplies because so much food has been redirected to neighborhoods in Queens and on Staten Island.

LC: The storm made landfall early Monday evening. Two days later, I found myself in a church basement responding to a New York Cares/City Meals on Wheels tweet for volunteers. I don't regularly volunteer with either group, but through Twitter I found one of your projects. What role did social media play in mobilizing volunteers?

GB: As a tool for filling projects, social media was a pleasant surprise to me. We had some of our tweets mentioned in real time on a local newscast, filled projects like yours in record time, and even helped get four hundred blankets to a housing development that had lost heat and electricity within four hours of the initial tweet. Social media worked in a situation where there wasn't the type of lead time that day-to-day programming requires, and I'm already asking myself how we might use that kind of rapid response capability in our non-disaster programming.

LC: Governor Cuomo made headlines when, in one of his many press conferences in the days after the storm, he quipped, "We have a hundred-year flood every two years now." What kind of resilience planning are your nonprofit partners doing? And how can funders and volunteers help?

GB: At a recent meeting of nonprofits convened by the Staten Island Foundation, the number-one concern mentioned was "planning for the next disaster." As you know, it's tremendously difficult to raise money for infrastructure improvements and the development of disaster-preparedness plans and backup systems. During this disaster we've seen how critical it is that frontline nonprofits get back on their feet as quickly as possible in order to serve the additional clients created by the disaster as well as those who needed assistance before the event. Beyond the capital needed to develop these plans as well as repair damage to buildings, nonprofits may require skills and expertise that don't exist in-house. In both instances, volunteers can help fill the gap. Our volunteers have provided everything from translation services to IT consulting. Volunteers are not a substitute for full-time staff members, but they are a wonderful means of extending the reach of an organization. And a dedicated volunteer with skills, for example in the HR or IT area, can help build the systems for managing the additional and rapidly changing workload after a disaster.

-- Laura Cronin

Investing in the Environment: A PubHub Reading List

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she highlighted reports that address some of the issues and legal questions raised by the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.)

Protecting the environment has long been a priority for many philanthropic organizations; the Goldman Environmental Prize, for example, is now in its twenty-third year. But what about public and private investments in the environment? With global climate change threatening to halt and even reverse the social and economic gains we've seen in the developing world since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one would think that policy makers, multilateral agencies, institutional investors, and private philanthropy would be eager to collaborate to help mitigate the worst of its effects. In honor of Earth Day, today we're highlighting two reports that look at aspects of the clean energy landscape.

According to Impact at Scale: Policy Innovation for Institutional Investment With Social and Environmental Benefit (64 pages, PDF), a report from InSight at Pacific Community Ventures and the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard University, the emerging field of impact investing -- investing with the intention of generating measurable social or environmental benefit in addition to financial returns -- will only gain traction when it succeeds in attracting large institutional investors. Indeed, with total assets of more than $20 trillion worldwide, institutional investors (e.g., pension funds, insurance companies, and private endowments) are key players in global capital markets and could do much to legitimize impact investing as a viable alternative to more traditional investment approaches. To unlock the potential of the field, however, public policy must be adjusted to incentivize institutional impact investment by offering, among other things, co-investment opportunities, tax credits, and subsidies for industries and sectors that meet specific impact goals.

For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created incentives for solar energy development that, according to the report's authors, helped boost U.S. solar manufacturing capacity:

The legislation created a federal investment tax credit (ITC) incentive for solar energy equal to 30% of expenditures on commercial and residential solar energy systems. Initially applicable for only two years, the tax credit was extended for an additional year with the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, and again for eight years in 2008 with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. This last version also allowed utilities to qualify for the tax credit. Between the creation of the ITC in 2006 and year-end 2010, U.S. solar manufacturing capacity quadrupled, with the vast majority of growth in 2009 and 2010. While not solely responsible for the market expansion, the ITC was a substantive driver and policy certainty provided by the eight-year extension has helped to catalyze private investment in the field....

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the report notes that institutional investors' fiduciary duty to fund beneficiaries can be a constraint:

Institutional asset owners have the potential, through their investments, for delivering social and environmental impacts at scale. But for public policy to help achieve this goal, it must take into account the nature of asset owners as investors and, in the near term, overcome perceptions of impact investing as a new, idiosyncratic, or niche market....

According to the report, targeted engagement of institutional asset owners should include: 1) an "enabling" strategy directed at investors to provide flexibility and "investability" in target markets; 2) an "integrative" strategy directed at intermediaries; and 3) a "developmental" infrastructure-building strategy to support nascent markets.

Where do we stand, then, in terms of investments in clean energy? Global investment in solar, wind, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources, as well as energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies, reached a record $263 billion in 2011, according to Who's Winning the Clean Energy Race? 2011 Edition (56 pages, PDF), a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and Pew Environment Group, with the G-20 countries contributing 95 percent of the total and more than half of that, some $128 million, going into solar. The report also found that the U.S. reclaimed its global leadership position in 2011 -- after falling to second place in 2009 and third place in 2010 -- with $48.1 billion in clean energy investments, an increase of 42 percent, followed by China ($45.5 billion) and Germany ($30.6 billion). "At the end of 2011, more than 565 GW of clean energy generating capacity was in place globally, 50 percent more than installed nuclear generating capacity," the report notes.

And what role did public investment play in supporting the sector? "In response to the global economic crisis...,

government stimulus plans allocated more than $194 billion for clean energy efforts. By the end of 2011, almost three-fourths of those funds ($142 billion) had reached the sector. More than $46 billion in stimulus funding for clean energy was spent in 2011, more than half of that by the United States and China together. Of the $53 million that remains, 67 percent ($35.7 billion) is expected to be spent in 2012....

But even though the U.S. led in total clean energy investment, as well as investments in solar, energy efficiency technologies, and biofuels, its leadership "is likely to be short-lived"  because of policy uncertainty. Indeed, nothing "appears likely to stem the long-term shift in the clean energy sector's center of gravity as investment swings from the West (Europe and the United States) to the East (Asia) and from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern."

Both reports suggest there is an urgent need for long-term public policies which incentivize institutional and other private investment in businesses that deliver environmental and social benefit. Without a policy framework to guide those investments and a market infrastructure to support them, however, the U.S. could end up losing the clean energy race and suffer the environmental, social, and economic consequences.

Eager to learn more about investments in clean energy, clean energy technology, and the economic impact of global climate change? Check out these reports, all of which can be found in PubHub:

• The Business of Innovating: Bringing Low-Carbon Solutions to Market
  Pew Center on Global Climate Change
• Clean & Green: Best Practices in Photovoltaics
  As You Sow
• United States Building Energy Efficiency Retrofits: Market Sizing and Financing Models
  Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors; Rockefeller Foundation
• Guidelines for Identifying Business Risks and Opportunities Arising From Ecosystem Change
  World Resources Institute; Meridian Institute; World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• Financing Stormwater Retrofits in Philadelphia and Beyond
  Natural Resources Defense Council
• The Economic Impacts of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on Ten Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States
  Analysis Group
• From Barracks to the Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America's Armed Forces
  Pew Charitable Trusts

Have a report or comment you'd like to share? Use the comment section below...

-- Kyoko Uchida

This Week in PubHub: Environment: Water/Marine Resources

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she highlighted several reports that examine how women's roles, both inside and outside the family, are changing and shaping the definition of family itself.)

While discussions of water-related issues in the philanthropic sector tend to focus on the urgent need to improve access to clean water and mitigate the consequences of global climate change in the developing world, the management of water and marine resources in developed countries also has an impact on climate change effects, biodiversity, and the economic vitality of local communities. Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, for instance, has been forced to dump water contaminated with low-level radiation into the sea-- an emergency measure with potentially harmful long-term consequences. This week in PubHub, we look at reports that examine the need to protect and invest in the environmental, economic, and cultural benefits of the planet's vital water and marine resources.

Concern about damage to coral reefs is hardly new; indeed, the World Resources Institute has published a series of reports on reef degradation in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and other regions. In its latest report, Reefs at Risk Revisited (130 pages, PDF), WRI uses updated data and satellite imagery to map and analyze threats to coral reefs from global climate change effects as well as human activities and notes that threat levels rose dramatically between 1997 and 2007. The damage from overfishing, coastal development, tourism, agricultural runoff, and shipping are compounded by rising ocean temperatures and acidification from carbon dioxide emissions, the report warns, resulting in reduced areas of living coral, increased algal cover, and lower species diversity and fish abundance. Funded by the Roy Disney Family Foundation, the report calls for more effective conservation efforts and steps to mitigate threats at the local, national, regional, and international levels.

The lakes, rivers, wetlands, and peatlands that comprise Canada's vast boreal forest not only help maintain global biodiversity and provide food and cultural benefits to indigenous rural communities in Canada, they also mitigate global climate change effects, a new report from the Pew Environment Group argues. A Forest of Blue -- Canada's Boreal Forest, the World's Waterkeeper (76 pages, PDF) explains how the expanse of forest and bodies of water produce a significant cooling effect while also increasing regional humidity and precipitation, which helps stabilize global temperatures. But Canada's boreal forests are also vulnerable to the effects of mining, oil and gas extraction, forestry, hydropower, and other industrial activities. Indeed, while 12 percent of the boreal forest in Canada is protected, the report recommends additional measures, including the conservation of the entire Mackenzie River watershed.

Valuing the Puget Sound Basin: Revealing Our Best Investments 2010 (102 pages, PDF), a report from Earth Economics, argues for shifting investments from activities that damage the Puget Sound ecosystem to activities that enhance and sustain that ecosystem, including such things as environmental restoration, stormwater retention, green building programs, and improved industrial processes. Funded by the Russell Family Foundation and Social Venture Kids, the report estimates the economic value of ecosystem goods and services provided by the Puget Sound Basin, including drinking water, abundant wildlife, climate regulation, flood protection, and recreation, and calls for further analysis and research to inform public and private investment in the region.

The Public Policy Institute of California report Managing California's Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation (503 pages, PDF) outlines the urgent need to reform the state's management policies with respect to fish and aquatic ecosystems, flood risk management, source quality protection, water supply management, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the hub of the state's water supply network. Inaction on any of these fronts, the report argues, could result in the disappearance of native species, an increased likelihood of catastrophic floods, water shortages and degraded water quality, and the decline of the Delta region as a productive ecosystem, with potentially severe economic losses. Funded by the David and Lucile Packard, Pisces, and S. D. Bechtel, Jr. foundations; the Resources Legacy Fund; and the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, the report calls for federal and state leadership in reconciling environmental and economic objectives, implementing new approaches to those objectives, and managing water as a public commodity.

What are your thoughts about protecting water and marine resources as a way to secure not only environmental sustainability but economic prosperity? Has your state or region developed creative or innovative approaches to the issue? And what are some of the obstacles preventing us from changing our relationship to these vital resources? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

And don't forget to visit PubHub, where you can browse nearly 350 reports related to the environment and environmental issues.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Year in Review: Gulf Coast Oil Spill Tops List of Environmental Concerns

Climate change, deforestation, species loss
-- all took a back seat, for a few months at least, to the biggest environmental story of the year, the disastrous explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20 and subsequent discharge of oil. Before it was capped in mid-July, the deep-sea gusher pumped more than two hundred million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico -- the worst oil spill in U.S. history -- wreaking havoc on the region's fishing and tourism industries and threatening long-term damage to the region's fragile ecosystems.

Not that the news on the environmental front was all that bright before the Deepwater blowout. In February, a report from the Pew Environment Group suggested that rapid melting of Arctic snow and sea ice could cost the world a minimum of $2.4 trillion by 2050. The urgency of the global warming problem was underscored later in the month when the Boston-based Barr Foundation, New England's largest private foundation, pledged $50 million over five years to help make the metro Boston region a national leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And in July, the New York City-based Ford Foundation made an even larger climate change commitment, pledging $85 million over five years to help rural and indigenous people play a more active role in the stewardship of the natural resources around them and ensure that future global climate change initiatives addressed their needs.

Still, the BP spill dominated headlines for the better part of the year -- which made the lackluster charitable response that followed in its aftermath all the more surprising. Community foundations in the region were among the first to respond, with the Greater New Orleans Foundation establishing a Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund in early May to support those in the fishing and tourism industries affected by the disaster, while the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice made an early grant to support a Florida marine laboratory monitoring the Gulf's marine life. But six weeks after the explosion, only $4 million had been donated to relief and recovery efforts (compared with the more than $580 million contributed within eight days of Hurricane Katrina's landfall).

A number of corporations eventually did step up with significant donations of cash and/or in-kind goods. They included Pepsi, which contributed $1.3 million through its Pepsi Refresh Project to nonprofits proving support and assistance to people in the Gulf Coast region; Chevron, which gave $750,000 to the National Audubon Society; and BP, which gave $25 million to three research institutions working in the Gulf. In addition, the nonprofit X Prize Foundation launched a $1.4 million competition, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, to encourage the development of solutions to cleaning up oil spills.

If the BP spill overshadowed most other environmental efforts in 2010, it also served, as William Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, said in June after his organization received a three-year grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, as "a tragic reminder of why the transition to renewable energy is so essential."

Meadows was hardly alone in holding that view. In October, David and Patricia Atkinson pledged $80 million to Cornell University to endow the Center for a Sustainable Future they had created on campus in 2007. "The environment, energy, and economic development are heavily interrelated; problems of sustainability can only be addressed with a multidisciplinary approach," said Atkinson, a retired general partner of Philadelphia-based Miller, Anderson, & Sherrerd LLP. "As the pressures of rapid population growth take hold, to avoid a crisis it's important to address issues of sustainability preemptively."

Related:

• Arctic Melting Could Cost $2.4 Trillion by 2050, Report Suggests (2/9/10)
• Barr Foundation Commits $50 Million to Fight Climate Change (2/17/10)
• Pew Environment Group Calls on Congress to Reform Laws Following Gulf Oil Spill (6/16/10)
• BP Awards $25 Million to Gulf Research Institutions Studying Effects of Oil and Dispersant (6/18/10)
• Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Awards $3.1 Million to Facilitate 'Wildlife-Friendly' Renewable Energy Development (6/30/10)
• Ford Foundation Commits $85 Million to Advance Rural Land Rights, Reduce Climate Change (7/29/10)
• X Prize Foundation Launches $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge (7/30/10)
• Oil Spill Aid Remains Small, But Some Corporate Donations Trickle In (8/4/10)
• Pepsi Refresh Project Doubles Its Monthly Grant Commitment (9/6/10)
• Cornell University Center for a Sustainable Future Receives $5 Million Gift (10/14/10)
• Cornell University Receives $80 Million for Research (10/29/10)
• Chevrolet Commits $40 Million to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions (11/22/10)
• Princeton Receives $11 Million for Carbon Mitigation Initiative (11/24/10)
• Swiss Billionaire Donates $35 Million to Conserve a Million Acres in Montana (12/14/10)

A Conversation With Brett Jenks, President/CEO, Rare Conservation

Our planet has become very crowded, very quickly. According to economist and Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs, the world's population has grown by 4 billion, from 2.6 billion to 6.6 billion, in just sixty years. Over that same period, the population of sub-Saharan Africa has increased from 180 million to 820 million, while the population of Asia Minor has quadrupled, from 51 million to 220 million. Global economic activity has increased even faster, with gross world product having risen a staggering eight times since 1950 and a hundred times since the start of the industrial era.

All those people and all that economic activity have greatly stressed the planet's natural systems. In almost every region of the world, freshwater supplies, forests, arable land, and fish stocks are being depleted at an alarming rate. Deserts are expanding, endangered habitats are shrinking, and the oceans are becoming more acidic. And with world population predicted to hit 9.2 billion by 2050 — a nearly 40 percent increase — and world per capita income expected to rise 450 percent, the global competition for critical resources is predicted to have dire consequences. Unless, as Sachs writes in Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, we "break some bad and long-standing habits" and learn to manage our resources sustainably.

Recently, Philanthropy News Digest talked with Brett Jenks, president and CEO of Rare Conservation, a U.S.-based conservation group, about the organization's work, the dynamics of behavior change, and the significance of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

For the past decade, Jenks has overseen Rare's global effort to equip people in the world's most biodiverse areas with the tools and motivation they need to protect their natural resource base. Under his leadership, the organization has grown over 1,000 percent; expanded its work to five continents; formed worldwide partnerships with leading environmental NGOs; and received four straight Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards.

Philanthropy News Digest: I'd like to start by asking you about the situation in the Gulf of Mexico. After three months and the release of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf, BP was able to cap its damaged Macondo well in July and [last month] finally managed to plug the well for good. Beyond the economic toll on the residents of the Gulf region and the toll on turtles, sea mammals, sea birds, and other species, what concerns you most about what happened in the Gulf this summer?

Brett Jenks: It's clear to me the oil spill was a tragedy whose ultimate consequences we won't be able to assess for months, if not years, to come. But a spill like that, as devastating as it was, pales in comparison to the much less perceptible loss of habitat and species we are going to have to contend with once we realize what we've allowed to happen, in our lifetimes, to the planet's climate. For me, the oil spill is a symbol of our arrogance as a species, as well as the fact that we don't have a Plan B in the event something goes wrong when we drill that deep for oil. And my biggest concern is that people simply don't recognize or are unwilling to admit what is happening all over the world with respect to the loss of habitat, the loss of species, the loss of the natural resource base on which so many people's lives and the well-being of future generations depends. Sadly, I don't think we've learned very much from the spill, and I don't think it will lead to comprehensive climate legislation — or to a recognition of what's happening in terms of the global extinction crisis, the future scarcity of water, or climate change in general.

PND: Is Rare doing anything to address the after-effects of the spill

BJ: We aren't involved in any way with the spill. We're not a domestic conservation organization, we have no offshore drilling expertise, and we don't lobby. Instead, we spend every waking moment thinking about the small gains we can make with local communities in the world's richest habitats in the developing tropics. We work entirely abroad, in countries like China, Indonesia, Mexico, and Malaysia. Other groups are far better equipped to take on the government and the oil companies and industry lobbyists who spend all their time on the Hill. We want to work where we can make a difference, and that's what makes us an effective organization.

PND: Many of our readers may be surprised to learn that Rare has been around in some form for almost forty years. How did the organization get started? And how has its mission evolved over the decades?

BJ: Rare was founded in 1973 by David Hill, an avid ornithologist and former Flying Tigers pilot, in part because he felt people weren't as aware as they should be about what was happening in the developing world with respect to habitat and species loss. One of the first things he did was to hook up with Friends of the Earth and the Animal Welfare Institute to launch the "Save the Whales" campaign. As that campaign caught on and revenue from the sale of bumper stickers and buttons began to add up, Hill and his colleagues realized they were making enough to finance a number of other conservation projects. The focus back then — the organization's focus for the first fifteen years, in fact — was really promotion and marketing, basically fostering the kinds of conversations that today are so commonplace when we talk about the plight of certain habitats or species, whether it's whales, tigers in India, snow leopards in Pakistan, or smaller creatures in far-off places that few people have heard of.

What's changed at Rare, especially over the last fifteen years, has been a growing focus on the recognition that the environmental movement has succeeded in creating a desire for change. Where the environmental movement has fallen short, however, is in providing the means to make change happen. What we've focused on over the last ten years is to identify situations in which charismatic local leaders have been able to not only inspire a desire to protect the environment within their communities, but have also created the political, technological, and economic means to actually bring about that change. In short, our focus today is to identify what works at the local level and to replicate it in other places where species and critical habitat are endangered.

PND: Rare takes what I would call a tools-based approach to conservation work. Tell us about some of the tools in the Rare toolkit?

BJ: First let me say that, in providing a conservation toolkit, Rare works from a couple of assumptions. One is that any good approach to conservation needs to be based in local culture, local economies, local ways of dealing with the world; you can't just parachute in like Wile E. Coyote from the outside with a conservation-in-a-box approach and, presto!, expect change to happen. Everything we do is customized by and for our local partners, whom we train to be agents of change in their communities.

That said, the basic toolkit is pretty simple. First, we identify local leaders and provide them with a two-year-long masters program. They study for seventeen weeks at a university, in their language, and then spend the greater part of two years designing and implementing a campaign for behavior change in their communities.

The second is an apprenticeship, during which our local partners are taught how to develop a grassroots marketing campaign that reaches every member of a community with the message that they live in a unique environment, that there's no other place quite like it on earth, and that the species that live there — many of which are not found anywhere else on earth — are part of their cultural legacy and something to be cherished and protected. The goal is to create a desire among local residents to conserve something that is valuable and uniquely theirs. If you can link their pride in place to an area's natural resources, you begin to create the desire to conserve those resources.

The other tools we use revolve around creating the means to bring about change. So, for example, in Indonesia, which boasts seventeen thousand islands and where fishing is a way of life for millions of people, the coral reefs that support and sustain the natural resource base are of utmost importance to people's way of life and economic livelihood. It's their asset base, their insurance policy, and yet people there generally recognize that the reefs are being overfished. That recognition has to come first. That's the knowledge component.

The attitude component, as we call it — getting people to not only want to make a change but to develop the confidence that they can change — usually comes in the form of providing examples of other success stories. So, in the case of Indonesia, we try to identify other communities, in Indonesia itself or elsewhere in Asia, that have not only recognized they have a problem with resource depletion but have actually implemented concrete changes to better govern their resources. It might be that they have decided to create what's called "no-take" zones, which serve to allow young fish to grow to a mature size and spawn more, which creates a positive feedback loop and ensures that that a fishery can be fished on a productive, sustainable basis. If you can provide models like that to local fishermen, local cooperatives, municipal leadership, pretty soon everyone is thinking about what they might do to replicate that success.

So, again, it's sparking a desire for change, which involves marketing and outreach and getting everyone on the same page with a clear, compelling message and call to action, followed by a technical assistance phase involving skills building. It may sound simple, but it's actually quite complicated.

CGI 2010 Highlights [Video]

It was a busy week here in New York, and I'm still trying to process the dozens of sessions that were webcast from (or in conjunction with) the UN Millennium Development Summit and the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

For many, CGI and the MDG campaign epitomize everything that's wrong with international development as practiced by rich donor governments and their NGO partners: an addiction to grand schemes; an over-reliance on technocrats; and an unwillingness or inability to address some of the most important contributing factors (agricultural subsidies, resource exploitation, corruption) to global poverty.

I'm not an aid expert. But I found myself (as I have in the past) inspired by much of what I saw and heard this week in New York. Yes, the UN, which was established by charter in 1945, is showing its age. At the same time, one has to be impressed by a new generation of activist-geeks who want to open-up and energize the MDG campaign with social media. And sure, there are all sorts of agendas in play at a CGI meeting. But as Bill Clinton reminded those in attendance (and all of us watching on the Web), the folks making commitments, taking time out from busy schedules, and/or flying halfway around the globe to be part of a panel don't have to be there; they want to be there.

So without further adieu, here are three of my favorite sessions from this year's CGI meeting:

In the first clip, NPR's Adam Davidson moderates an "historic" conversation featuring three of the leading voices in the world of microfinance: Vikram Akula, founder and chairperson of SKS Microfinance Ltd., India's largest and the world's fastest-growing microfinance institution; Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president and chief executive offficer of Women’s World Banking; and Noble Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of the prototypical microfinance institution, Grameen Bank.

 

 

In the second clip, Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica, talks with Virgin Group founder Richard Branson (who at the 2006 CGI meeting committed all profits from Virgin's transportation divisions to the develoment of alternative fuel sources) and the dynamic Christiana Figueres (no relation), recently appointed head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, about energy, climate change, and the post-Copenhagen prospects for addressing "the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced."

 

 

And in the third clip, former President Clinton moderates a special session on recovery efforts in Haiti after first doing a brilliant job of framing the daunting task at hand. (Be sure to catch hip hop star and Haitian presidential hopeful Wyclef Jean's brief turn on stage with René Préval, the man he hoped to unseat, at the beginning of the clip.)

 

 

You can access webcasts of all of this year's CGI sessions here. And if you've got a favorite of your own -- from CGI or the Millennium Summit -- let us know in the comments section below.

-- Mitch Nauffts

The BP Oil Spill and Us

The loud sound you heard yesterday afternoon was the collective sigh escaping from millions of people on hearing that BP had sucessfully capped -- for the time being, at any rate -- the undersea well that has been blasting crude into the Gulf of Mexico for the last three months.

Earlier today, I spoke with Brett Jenks, president and CEO of Rare Conservation, an Arlington, Virginia-based conservation group that uses social marketing methods to change attitudes and behaviors at the local level, about the spill and its long-term impact on Gulf ecosystems. Jenks was understandably happy that the flow of oil had been stopped but bemoaned the damage that has already been done.

His biggest concern, however, is that we learned nothing from the spill. It was horrible as long as we could see the oil billowing into the freezing depths of the Gulf or washing up on pristine beaches. But even while it was happening, very few of us did anything to cut our consumption of oil or reduce our carbon footprint, and that's the real problem. The biggest environmental threat confronting us, climate change, isn't a phenomenon made for undersea webcams or the nightly news, said Jenks. It's a slowly unfolding catastrophe -- and as we pour ever-greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, it's growing worse by the day, week, year. But if something as terrible the BP oil spill can't get us to change our behavior, what will?

It's a good question. I live in a small Manhattan apartment, don't own a car, and am mindful of my carbon footprint. But I took a cab instead of the subway to work this morning because I was running late and, well, because I could. I'll go home to an air-conditioned apartment. And I'll spend the first half of August touring New England colleges in a car with my kids. Can't really say I've put myself on a carbon diet since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank at the end of April.

That's a problem. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that June's combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record (going back to 1880) and helped make the April-June and January-June periods the warmest on record as well. Now, I can sign a petition calling on the U.S. Senate to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation, and so can you. But if we really want to slow the progress of global warming -- and spare our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids the worst of the consequences it will bring if left unchecked -- then each of us needs to change his or her behavior. Starting today.

So what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint? And should foundations be doing more to address the climate change threat? Leave your comments below....

-- Mitch Nauffts

This Week in PubHub: The Environment and the Clean Energy Economy

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center’s online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her last post, she wrote about global public health initiatives.)

Today's the 40th anniversary of Earth Day -- what better time to look at a handful of reports that deal with aspects of the emerging clean energy economy?

Investment in the clean energy industry worldwide has grown 230 percent since 2005 and is forecast to reach $200 billion in 2010, according to Who's Winning the Clean Energy Race? Growth, Competition and Opportunity in the World's Largest Economies: G-20 Clean Energy Factbook (Pew Charitable Trusts). Among the G-20, China, Brazil, the UK, Germany, and Spain all have strong domestic policies aimed at reducing global warming and all offer healthy incentives for renewable energy production and clean energy job creation. Without a similar policy framework to stimulate investment in solar, wind, bioenergy, and energy efficiency, the report warns, the United States risks falling behind in the race to lead the global clean energy economy.

What actions should the U.S. be taking? The Clean Energy Economy: Repowering Jobs, Businesses and Investments Across America (Pew Charitable Trusts) offers a state-by-state analysis of clean energy jobs, businesses, and public and private investments across five categories — clean energy, energy efficiency, environmentally friendly production, conservation and pollution mitigation, and training and support — as well as policies to promote clean energy. According to the report, financial incentives, renewable portfolio standards for electricity providers, energy efficiency standards, regional initiatives, and vehicle emissions standards, combined with federal stimulus spending, are all needed to spur further growth.

What barriers do policy makers face in adopting such policies? One concern is that the adoption of cap-and-trade or a carbon tax would make carbon-intensive U.S. industries less competitive with China and other emerging economic powers. China, the U.S., and the Climate Change Challenge (World Resources Institute) suggests that such concerns can be addressed by including a domestic allowance in U.S. cap-and-trade legislation as well as through coordinated bilateral and multilateral action. The report also examines China's energy policies and argues that a comprehensive U.S. climate policy could strengthen recent environmental advances in that country by making clean technologies cheaper and easier to adopt.

Meanwhile, it seems that many industrialized nations are working at cross-purposes when it comes to climate change. World Bank Energy Sector Lending: Encouraging the World's Addiction to Fossil Fuels (Bank Information Center) looks at how the World Bank's approach to energy-sector lending encourages a reliance on fossil fuels in developing countries at the expense of a rational, measured transition to a low-carbon economy. According to the report, lending for fossil fuel projects increased by 102 percent in fiscal year 2008, compared with only 11 percent for renewable energy projects. What's more, the carbon emissions over time from projects funded by the bank in 2008 will amount to more than twice the annual emissions from Africa's entire energy sector, further impeding the bank's efforts to help the very people it is trying to lift out of poverty.

So what do you think our environmental and climate change priorities should be as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day? Next week's roundup of reports will focus more on what U.S. cities and corporations are doing. Until then, feel free to share your thoughts and comments below. And don't forget to check out PubHub, where you'll find annotated link to almost two hundred and seventy reports related to the environment.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Webcast: 2010 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference

For the second year in a row, the Foundation Center is providing the information platform for the Global Philanthropy Forum's annual conference. Using its research database and knowledge resources, the center has made targeted materials and a set of visual presentations organized around four central themes -- food security, global health, access to water, and climate change -- available to conference participants through a customized Web portal.

Many of the conference sessions are being streamed live. You can follow the proceedings on this page through the conclusion of the conference on Wednesday.

Watch live streaming video from gpf2010 at livestream.com

-- Mitch Nauffts

3rd Annual Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting

The third annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) has descended on the University of Miami campus, where more than a thousand college students, dozens of university presidents, and various nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs will spend all or part of the weekend participating in workshops and meetings focused on five topics of importance to college students: education, the environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health. This year's meeting also will focus on reconstruction efforts in Haiti.

As at all CGI events, participants are expected to make "commitments to action" -- a comprehensive, formal commitment to address a specific problem on their campus, in their community, or somewhere in the world. This year, participating students volunteered a thousand new commitments, while various universities and national youth organizations offered an additional sixty. When fully funded, the value of those commitments is expected to total roughly $42 million and will improve the lives of more than 290,000 people around the globe.

The following commitments (among others) were announced today:

• Maren Gelle, Kayla Johnson, Sarah Carlson, and Daniel Novas will offer bike rentals for students on the St. Olaf College campus. The goal of the project is to encourage a bicycle culture on campus while reducing traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. Gelle, Johnson, Carlson, and Novas also will work with the local community to donate bikes to Haiti to be used as bicycle ambulances.

• Syracuse University undergraduates Tim Biba, Gregory Klotz, Kate Callahan, and Allison Stuckless will launch a literacy and nutrition program -- Books and Cooks -- for children in low-income housing in Syracuse, New York. In addition to improving students' reading skills, the students will teach workshops devoted to cooking and nutrition.

• New York University student Michelle Pomeroy, in partnership with the Tibetan Women's Association, will lead a two-week leadership skills course in India for exiled Tibetan women. The course will train women in leadership, settlement officer responsibilities, conflict resolution, and gender sensitization, with the goal of preparing the women to be elected or appointed as settlement officers.

• University of Miami undergrads Kaitlin Birgenthal, Safia Alajlan, Kelley Winship, and Sara Johnson will work to expand Ocean Kids to Boston, Washington, D.C., the Bahamas, and Kuwait. Ocean Kids currently brings underserved elementary school students to the University of Miami campus, where they learn about marine life and science.

• Rockland Community College undergrads Mark Svensson and Tarik Abdelqader will work to combat the modern human slave trade in the U.S. by lobbying state officials in New York and urging them pass a resolution that aims to stem the flow of enslaved people into the country. Each year an estimated 14,000 to 17,000 people are brought to the U.S. to be traded as human slaves, with New York state functioning as one of the largest trafficking hubs. In 2009, the legislature of Rockland County passed a memorializing resolution co-authored by Svensson and Abdelqader, and the two plan to target other county legislatures as well.

• Bates College student Razin Mustafiz will create financial literacy workshops for the Somali and Somali-Bantu community in Lewiston, Maine. The workshops will cover the basics of financial planning, from opening a bank account to saving money for education. Mustafiz' commitment is supported by the Bates College Harward Center for Community Partnerships and Adroscoggin Bank.

• MIT student Christopher Moses will develop a course called "Sana Lab" to teach medical personnel and students in the Philippines how to adapt a mobile medicine system developed at MIT to poor, remote locations. His commitment ultimately aims to extend medical care to the conflict-ridden area of Mindanao.

• St. Lawrence University student Grace Ochieng will work to expand the Pads for the People Project that she started in her village of Lwala, Kenya, with the help of the Lwala Community Alliance and thirteen local women. Women who participate in the project are trained to sew menstrual pads and encouraged to sell them for a profit. Over the next six months, Grace will form partnerships and work to make the program more financially sustainable.

• John Trimmer and Scott Teagarden, undergraduate engineering students at Bucknell University, will construct a rainwater harvesting system that will provide the three hundred residents of Tumaipa, Suriname, with reliable, clean running water year-round. Local labor and materials will be used in the construction of the rainwater catchment system, and a water committee will be established to take ongoing ownership for the project.

• Cynthia Koenig, founder of Hippo Water International and a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in association with Hippo Water International, will work to expand Hippo Water Rollers to India, providing Rollers to women and families. The Hippo, an innovative water transport tool designed to alleviate the problems associated with lack of access to water, makes it possible to collect twenty-four gallons of water, five times the amount possible using traditional methods, in much less time and much more easily.

• Makerere University graduate student Divinity Barkley will build an energy-efficient recording studio for the Amagezi Gemaanyi Youth Association (AGYA) Learning Center, a community center she founded in Kampala, Uganda. Her commitment will provide digital technology training to the Ugandan youth at AGYA, empower them to produce and market their own music, and serve as a source of revenue for AGYA's arts and educational programs. In addition, the recording studio will utilize solar power for 35 percent of its energy.

• Wesleyan student Kennedy Odede, in conjunction with Shining Hope for Communities and American Friends of Kenya, will work to empower and educate women in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. His commitment has two parts: a Home Birth Network, through which women will be trained as home birth attendants; and the Women’s Microfinance Empowerment Project, which will use sustainable gardening techniques to grow vitamin-rich vegetables that provide desperately needed sources of nutrition at affordable prices.

• Purdue University student Keith Hansen will create the iRead Foundation to deliver childrens books to community health centers in Indiana. As vice president of the Purdue Engineering Student Council, Hansen oversees a group that puts on the largest student-run job fair in the nation, bringing over 350 of the nation’s biggest engineering companies to campus and raising nearly $500,000 dollars annually. A portion of those funds will be used to set up the foundation.

• Miami Dade College student Ximena Prugue will distribute 10,000 solar-powered lamps in India's rural communities, with the goal of reducing and/or eliminating kerosene lamp use. The D.Light Design Company lamps will be provided by Bogo Light at wholesale price, and Ximena will work with PTK Honor Society at Miami Dade to raise the money neccessary to purchase the lamps.

• MIT student Sreeja Nag will work to bring renewable, sustainable, and affordable energy to rural regions of India. After consulting local citizens, NGO representatives, and staff at Selco Solar India, Nag has created a report outlining how to bring energy to these areas. One of her ideas, for example, is to create detachable table lighting systems for students to carry home from a solar-powered charger at school.

• University of Miami students Kristina Rosales, Arielle Duperval, Austin Webbert, and Lissette Miller will establish two new community centers in Cite Soleil, a slum located in Port-au-Prince. The community centers will provide educational progams, cultural activities, mentoring, and opportunities for intercultural exchanges between the south Florida community and Haiti.

• Khushbu Mishra, an undergraduate student at Mount Holyoke College, will open an art institute in Mithila, Nepal, to display and sell the cultural folk art of local women, empowering and improving the lives of their families. After it's completed, the center will be run by local women who will then train other women in the arts, thereby expanding the reach of the program.

• Jessica Yamane, an undergraduate student at the University of California-Riverside, will design an experimental course on how communities can promote healing for domestic violence victims. Partnering with Alternatives to Domestic Violence, Path of Life Ministry's King's Hall Transitional Housing Program, and With Her Strength, Yamane hopes to modify this curriculum for integration in K-12 health and wellness programs throughout the Riverside School District.

• Christine Meling, an undergraduate student at Luther College, will purchase the materials and sewing machines for women in Yari, Sudan, to make school uniforms for families that cannot afford them. The women also will receive training on how to sew and use the profits from uniform sales to sustain the program.

• An Thi Minh Vo, in association with the Office of Genetic Counseling and Disabled Children in Hue City, Vietnam, will provide microloans of $212 to thirty-five families with children disabled by Agent Orange. The project aims to increase borrowers' income and ease the hardship of families struggling to afford health care and other basic needs.

• University of the Pacific graduate student Harnoor Singh will work with local physicians to provide free blood sugar and basic cardiovascular health screenings for California's migrant worker and supply low-cost prescription drugs to those in need. The tests, which can be completed for less than $15 per person, are of vital importance to California's migrant laborers, the majority of whom lack access to basic healthcare services.

• Nathan O'Hara, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, in association with Makerere University and Vancouver General Hospital, will work to supply Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda, with three hundred half-pins annually. Each year, there are unnecessary fatalities in Uganda due to a lack of vital medical supplies; half-pins, which are used to treat traumatic injuries involving fractured bones, are among those. A collection system in Vancouver-area hospitals will reprocesses the reusable pins, which will be delivered to Mulago Hospital twice a year.

• Christina Newman, Sherley Codio, and Fabrice Marcelin, students at Virginia Tech, in partnership with Caritas and the Religious of Jesus and Mary in Gros-Morne, Haiti, will raise $60,000 and oversee the construction of a facility that can house more than 1,500 hens capable of producing 1,250 eggs per day -- 15 percent of the local egg supply. The three have already raised $23,000 and developed a business plan for the project. Their commitment will strengthen the local economy by reducing reliance on imports, and will empower local communities by providing much-needed employment opportunities.

Wow. As Margaret Mead famously said, "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." Hats off to those who have stepped up with commitments. You're an inspiration to us all.

To learn more about and/or view webcasts from the event, which ends tomorrow, click here.

-- Mitch Nauffts

This Week in PubHub: Advancing Global Health

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center’s online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her last post, she wrote about climate change mitigation and adaptation.)

As mentioned in my last post, the Foundation Center is providing grants data, research, and relevant news items for four plenary sessions ("Providing Food Security," "Advancing Global Health," "Improving Access to Water," "Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation") at the upcoming ninth annual Global Philanthropy Forum conference, April 18-21, in Redwood City, California. In the weeks leading up to the conference, PubHub is featuring reports on each of these issue areas. This week's focus is on "Advancing Global Health."

Global health challenges, caused or exacerbated by climate change, growing pressure on freshwater supplies, and/or food insecurity, are predicted to consume an ever-larger share of global GDP. So what is being done to address these closely linked issues?

The U.S. Global Health Initiative: Overview & Budget Analysis (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) examines the Obama administration’s six-year, $63 billion global health initiative, which advocates a shift in U.S. policy from a vertical, disease-specific approach to global health problems to a more horizontal, integrated approach that addresses multiple health issues in the same populations while strengthening underlying health systems. The initiative also includes continued commitments to the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis and a broader focus on maternal and child health, family planning, and neglected tropical diseases. The report points out the need to consider implications of ongoing reviews of U.S. diplomacy and development policy, reforms of foreign aid structure, and the U.S. Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative.

Building Healthcare Leadership in Africa: A Call to Action (Accordia Global Health Foundation) highlights the need to bolster public health systems in Africa — not only by hiring more workers, improving infrastructure, and introducing new technologies, but also through building leadership capacity. Based on discussions from an April 2009 conference, the report lays out a framework for building capacity and sustainability through leadership development at the individual, institutional, and network levels.

Proven HIV Prevention Strategies (Global HIV Prevention Working Group) describes effective strategies for preventing sexual, blood-borne, and mother-to-child transmission of HIV such as antiretroviral drugs, breast-feeding alternatives, and caesarean delivery. The issue brief emphasizes the need to complement prevention technologies with structural interventions that reduce the vulnerability of those at risk, including legal and policy reforms that empower women.

Empowering women is what Investing in Women for a Better World (BSR) is all about. The report offers case studies of HERproject, a six-country initiative that aims to improve women factory workers' health awareness, leadership skills, and employer relations though peer education and intervention networks. Given that women are more likely to invest their income in the education, nutrition, and health of their children, the authors argue that workplace health programs further empower them to break the cycle of poverty.

Clearly, the global health challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be tackled in isolation, and the above reports only begin to touch on the cross-cutting strategies that will be needed to bring about lasting change. What other strategies are being tried and/or are working? Use the comments section to share your thoughts. And be sure to check out some of the 1,400 other health-related reports in PubHub.

-- Kyoko Uchida