Sustainability experts have called on global regulators to ask companies to report on their sustainable policy and performance, disclosing results in a similar way to financial reporting.
“A ‘report or explain’ approach could persuade more companies to report rather than explain why they don’t,” said Teresa Fogelberg, deputy chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
. . . . . .
About 4,000 global companies report their sustainability performance, using reporting guidelines recently updated by the GRI.
These focus on 79 issues including consulting stakeholders on important topics, human rights, the impact on local communities and gender matters.
whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.
Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it is horrible. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well. Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.
Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process: 1) Emergent Thematic Maps 2) Revealing Hidden Connections 3) Drilling Down
The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren. This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.
Utah State University. Professor in the Department of Environment & Society, (Social conflict in environmental issues, human responses to climate change and environmental degradation, human uses of energy and resources).
“We Need An Adult Conversation–Our Political System is Dysfunctional”
Phi Beta Iota: There are no challenges that cannot be addressed with a combination of collective intelligence and individual integrity. Infinite free energy, and the eradication of waste across all industries, are immediately achievable if (big if) the public will reengage in its own governance.
Using a new “crowdfunding” program called Solar Mosaic, the city is selling solar tiles to locals for $100 a pop and installing them on public buildings
By Maria Gallucci, SolveClimate News
Apr 22, 2011
The city of Oakland, Calif., is getting its residents to help build out a clean energy economy, one solar tile at a time.
By selling 5,000 tiles at $100 each to locals, the city is aiming to piece together entire rooftop solar arrays at seven budget-strapped schools, youth centers and houses of worship. A team of Oaklanders will be trained and hired to install the panels by as early as July.
The city's efforts are part of a pilot program called Solar Mosaic, a web-based marketplace for community solar initiatives that launched on April 15.
Using the “crowdfunding” model, residents can help generate energy savings and scale back greenhouse gas emissions without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar installation at home.
Phi Beta Iota: The existing tax system in the USA is so corrupt it must be abolished. The public is now ready for line-item crowd-sourcing and the fully-transparent Automated Payments/Transaction Tax.
A very interesting article by Chuck. Earlier I was thinking along similar lines about how the Military Intelligence System has devolved in the same manner as our air strategy.
When I first signed up, the Army had a number of sites in far flung places with strange sounding names. The advantage was the people working their were somewhat in tune with the psychological mindset of the people who lived in proximity to the “threat”. When they were concerned it raised our awareness of activities by the “other side”. The local population always had better intelligence than we did, but it was an indicator that we picked up on and used to focus our efforts.
Enter technology (re: US Air Force) resulting in the consolidation of intelligence activities to major fixed bases (somewhat like our overall military strategy – hunker down). We no longer have that view of the population, hell, we don't have any concept of the human terrain in those areas or anywhere else (with the exception of Korea where we have not run away).
Have you ever thought about how completely irrelevant structured learning is? Indeed. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot unlearn and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler. The video below advocates a change in how we learn – network-centric, personal, based on your context, not based on some institution’s agenda. (Thanks to Judi Clark for sending me the link to this video.)
Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker profiles David Eagleman, a brilliant researcher who’s studying the brain, consciousness, and the perception of time. At a personal level I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years studying and trying to comprehend my own degrees and levels of consciousness and perception. We think of our “conscious experience” as a constant, and our unconscious as inaccessible… but through attention we learn that there are gradations in the range of conscious to “un-” or “sub-” conscious experience; that perceptions can vary with context; that memory is selective and undependable; that our perception of the world is generally incomplete though we do a good job of filling the gaps. When David Eagleman was a child he fell from a roof and realized that his perception of time had changed as he was falling. Now he’s doing evidence-based research to determine how people experience the world, what are the variations, how does the brain work and how does the mind work? Read about it here. If you know about similar studies and writings, please post in comments.
