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Browse: Home   /   about   /   motivation
motivation

motivation

October 8, 2013 · by admin · in about
  • Cities and the natural world
  • Transformational change
  • Economics fit for purpose
  • Communities and Culture
  • Trust and Neutrality
  • Commitment to the UN Global Compact

Urgency

The overwhelming majority of scientists, and all of the world’s leading scientific bodies, agree that anthropogenic emissions are driving climate change. Despite concerted attention of the international community since the 1990s, global emissions have continued to rise. In its most recent assessment of the science, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) examined a range of emissions scenarios. In the worst case scenario where the rise in greenhouse emissions doesn’t level off until the latter part of the century, the best-estimate temperature rise was 4C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. We are already on track to exceed 2C in the second half of this century.

The world’s population grows by 80 million people every year. As a result the area of land available on the planet to support life is reducing annually. Over the last 100 years the average amount of land available for food, energy, water and materials has fallen from 8 ha per person to 2 ha per person. At the same time the bio-capacity of the planet to support life is being reduced. We live as if this has not happened. A factor 4-5 change in reducing pollution and ecosystems destruction and improving renewable resource productivity is required by 2050.

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Cities and the natural world

The urban environment deserves special attention, both in the developing and developed economies. More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Though cities come in many configurations with vastly different densities and are frequently heralded as efficient, the reality is they have ecological footprints that vastly exceed their geographical area and bio-capacity. Today, 50% of the world lives in cities. Urban centres account for 70-80% of global energy consumption, producing 75% of the world’s carbon emissions and consuming 75% of the world’s natural resources. The UN predicts 70-80% of the world’s population will be city-dwellers by 2050.

At present, we design and manage cities in a piecemeal fashion: resources flow in and out of urban areas, with little recognition or concern about where these come from and where wastes are deposited. This approach is unsustainable.

The eco-city and sustainable city movement is undergoing significant growth. Much focus is on providing the city with smart ICT systems and a lower-carbon built environment. This is not enough. For a city to achieve sustainability, it is necessary first to understand where it stands today in meeting its water, food, energy and economic resource needs. This requires understanding the extent to which it relies on its regional hinterland to meet its needs and the extent to which it draws in resources from a wider geography. TEST’s approach is to provide city-regions with this information on the ‘here and now’ and provide them with the means to explore the potential impacts of future scenarios.

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Transformational change

Incremental development in individual fields of expertise will not deliver the necessary step changes in resource use and the required outcomes for health and wellbeing – for individuals, communities, economies, and the natural and built environments. The radical shifts required can only come from systems innovation and active collaboration across multiple disciplines.

Whilst technology improvements will continue to be attractive, our approach is not to focus on new developments alone. Through a thorough understanding of how human systems and ecosystems interact, we believe great progress can be made to achieving transformative change by using what we know now in a smarter way.

To address the systemic challenges of climate change, resource consumption and urbanisation, we need to adopt a systems-centred approach to designing for an ecological age where on average greenhouse gas emissions are 50% of levels in 1990, the global ecological footprint is no more than an average of 1.44 GHA per capita and with parallel focus on increasing human development index rather than solely upon economic growth.

This represents a factor 4-5 improvement in the way most countries in Europe operate today. Our aim is to demonstrate how this can be achieved at scale by 2030.

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Economics fit for purpose

The natural environment is the basis of our socio-economic system. It provides us with basic goods and services and increases our resilience to climate change and resource scarcity shocks. There can be no economic stability without ecological stability. The planet’s ecology is capable of regeneration and our approach is to make this a priority as part of future development.

Progress in economic and social development during the past century has been achieved through the exploitation of planet’s finite resources and destruction of ecology. Whilst there is growing awareness of the earth’s biophysical limits, we continue to run our economics and businesses with little regard to the natural planetary boundaries we face. We need a ‘deeper economics’ – that values the finite resources we consume, takes account of their impact on ecology and the value of regeneration and defines social development beyond GDP growth.

A key objective of our approach is to ensure our analyses include all of the main aspects that form a ‘city-region metabolism’ to enable our city-region partners to have a deeper insight into the economics of their region. We see this as a transformative step in adopting circular economic models critical to developing future products and services and accelerating the pace at which cradle-to-cradle design principles underpin innovation.

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Communities and Culture

Citizens are often un-empowered and placed outside the critical processes shaping and driving change. Our aim is to ensure that the information and insight we develop in partnership with a region draws on input from across cultural communities and is made available to as wide a section of society as possible through innovative visually rich real-time information. Effective engagement with the region’s community and cultural sectors is central to this.

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Trust and Neutrality

We see a clear need for a new type of NGO with deep multi-disciplinary skills, to act as a neutral catalyst to foster new forms of collaboration between the public and private sectors, and champion new and effective means of involving communities and enlisting their capacities for innovation. The Ecological Sequestration Trust was founded in direct response to this need, to pioneer and apply this urgent new approach to capacity development.

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Commitment to the UN Global Compact

The Ecological Sequestration Trust is a participant in the United Nations Global Compact. This is a global network that brings together business and non-business entities in a shared commitment to ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. Its overarching objectives are to mainstream the ten principles in business activities around the world, and to catalyse action in support of broader UN goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.

The Trust embraces the Global Compact as a vehicle for collaboration and dissemination of open-source tools and learning within the public, private and charitable sectors as we work to demonstrate the action required to achieve validated low carbon, ecologically sustainable solutions that are economically effective.

The Global Compact website is found at www.unglobalcompact.org.

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动机

动机

October 8, 2013 · by admin · in 大约

 

  • 城市和自然世界
  • 转型变革
  • 经济学适合用途
  • 社区文化
  • 信任和中立
  • 承诺联合国全球契约

急

绝大多数科学家,以及所有世界领先的科学机构,同意人为排放正在推动气候变化。尽管国际社会自上世纪90年代一致关注,全球温室气体排放继续上升。在其最近的科学评估,联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会(IPCC)研究了一系列的排放情景。在最坏的情况下,其中的上升温室气体排放不平整,直到本世纪后期,最好的估计温升4C高于工业化前水平,到2100年,我们已经有望超过2 C在本世纪下半叶。

世界人口增长以每年8000万人。作为结果的土地可在行星支持生命的面积每年减少。在过去的100年的可用于食品,能源,水和材料的土地的平均金额下降,从每人8公顷每人2公顷。同时行星支持生命的生物量正在减少。我们的生活就好像这并没有发生。一个因素的变化4-5减少污染和生态系统的破坏,提高再生资源的生产力,需要到2050年。

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城市和自然世界

城市环境值得特别关注,无论是在发展中国家和发达国家。一半以上的世界人口生活在城市地区。虽然城市有许多配置,完全不同的密度,经常被誉为高效的,但现实是他们的生态足迹,大大超过他们的地理区域和生物的能力。今天,世界的50%居住在城市。城市中心占全球能源消费的70%-80%,生产世界上碳排放量的75%和消费世界资源的75%。联合国预测世界人口将是城市居民,到2050年的70-80%。

目前,我们设计和管理城市的零敲碎打的方式:资源流入和流出的城市,很少承认或关注的地方,这些都来自哪里废物沉积。这种做法是不可持续的。

生态城市与可持续发展的城市运动正在发生显著的增长。大部分的重点是提供城市智能ICT系统和内置低碳环境。这是不够的。对于一个城市,实现可持续发展,就必须先了解它代表今天在满足它的水,食物,能源和经济资源的需求。这就需要了解在何种程度上是依赖于它的区域腹地,以满足其需求,并在何种程度上它吸引资源从更广泛的地域。测试的方法是提供城市地区,这些信息在“此时此地”,并为他们提供探索未来情景的潜在影响的手段。

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转型变革

在专业领域的个别增量开发不会提供必要的一步变化,资源利用和所需效果的健康和福祉 – 个人,社区,经济,自然和建筑环境。需要激进的变化只能来自系统的创新和跨越多个学科的积极合作。

虽然技术的改进将继续保持吸引力,我们的做法是不要把重点放在新的发展孤单。通过深入了解人类如何系统和生态系统的相互作用,我们相信很大的进步,可以向使用,我们现在知道了更聪明的方式实现转型变革。

为了应对气候变化,资源消耗和城市化的系统性挑战,我们需要采用系统为中心的方法来设计一个生态时代里的平均温室气体排放量在1990年水平的50%,全球生态足迹是没有更多的比对经济增长增加的人类发展指数,而不是仅仅平均人均并行焦点1.44 GHA。

这代表了一个4-5的因素在改善欧洲大多数国家目前的运作方式。我们的目标是展示如何能在规模,到2030年才能实现。

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经济学适合用途

自然环境是我们的社会,经济制度的基础。它为我们提供了基本的商品和服务,并提高我们抵御气候变化和资源稀缺程度的冲击。可有没有生态稳定没有经济的稳定。地球上的生态环境能够再生,我们的做法是使这个优先作为未来发展的一部分。

在过去的一个世纪的经济和社会发展方面的进展,通过了地球有限的资源,生态环境的开发和破坏已经实现。虽然有对地球生物物理极限意识日益增强,我们将继续很少考虑到我们所面临的自然行星界限运行我们的经济和企业。我们需要一个’更深的经济学“ – 珍视我们消耗了有限的资源,利用了其对生态环境的影响和再生的价值账户,并定义超越GDP增长的社会发展。

我们的方法的一个关键目标是确保我们的分析包括所有的,形成了“城市 – 区域的新陈代谢’,使我们的城市区域的合作伙伴有一个更深入地了解自​​己的区域经济学的主要方面。我们认为这是在采用循环经济模式,以开发未来的产品和服务,并加快在该摇篮到摇篮的设计原则,巩固创新步伐的关键一个变革性的一步。

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社区文化

公民往往是未授权的,并放置塑造和推动变革的关键流程之外。我们的目标是确保我们在发展与合作的区域信息和洞察力借鉴的输入来自全国各地的文化社区,并提供给社会尽可能广泛通过创新视觉丰富的实时信息的部分。有效地与该地区的社会,文化等领域的核心是这个。

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信任和中立

我们看到,显然需要一种新型的非政府组织的深多学科的技能,作为一个中立的催化剂,促进公共部门和私营部门之间的合作的新形式,并涉及到冠军的社区和争取自己的能力,新的和有效的手段创新。生态封存信托成立于直接回应这种需求,开创和应用这一新的紧急开展能力建设活动。

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承诺联合国全球契约

生态封存信托基金是在联合国全球契约的参与者。这是一个汇集了商业和非商业实体在人权,劳工,环境和反腐败等领域的十项普遍接受的原则的共同承诺的全球网络。其总体目标是主流,在世界各地经营活动的十项原则,并推动支持更广泛的联合国目标,包括千年发展目标的行动。

信托拥抱全球契约作为协作和传播开源工具和公共,私人和慈善部门内的学习,因为我们的工作证明,以实现有效的低碳,生态的可持续解决方案,经济有效的需要采取的行动的车辆。

全球契约网站,在www.unglobalcompact.org发现  。

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The Ecological Sequestration Trust is a registered charity number 1143397.
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