February Green Drinks invites you to participate in the anticipated talk on The Population White Paper and The Implications on the Environment, featuring a distinguished panel of speakers:
From Guardian: “Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Wellbeing, talks about the challenges of the global economic system. Marks created the Happy Planet Index to measure global wellbeing and environmental impact, which showed that the world’s wealthiest countries weren’t happier. We are servants to the system, rather than its masters, Marks says. Instead of measuring outputs in terms of economic growth, it should be the quality of people’s experience of life.”
Good quote from Guardian:
All industries are wresting with similar challenges as we seek to balance the pursuit of prosperity in our economic world with desire for a healthy and long lasting planet.
The challenges for business are not simply environmental, but also about the need for an overriding commitment to responsible capitalism. It is clear that unless we sustain business as a force for good in society we will lose the glue that binds people with the wealth creating bedrock on which society depends.
All businesses are increasingly judged not just on how much money they make, but how they make money; business behaviours and business performance are increasingly inseparable.
From Green Drinks Singapore:
Fourteen per cent – or 79 out of 562 – of Singapore Exchange (SGX) Mainboard-listed companies engaged in sustainability reporting last year. While this percentage appears low, it represents a 25-per-cent increase over the previous year.This key finding, released by the Singapore Compact, a national corporate social responsibility (CSR) society, at the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Singapore (ICPAS) Singapore Accountancy Convention last November, is a useful snapshot of the non-financial reporting scene in Singapore.Companies with large market capitalisation (of more than S$1 billion) accounted for almost 60 per cent of listed companies engaged in sustainability reporting.
“Sustainability reporting is now more than a buzzword to business and accounting professionals,” noted Mr Thomas Thomas, Executive Director of the Singapore Compact for CSR. “For the past year or so, the growing awareness of sustainability reporting has led to greater proactive interest from companies and organisations.”
From The Big Think: Nature is just a description of things that occur “naturally”. Presumably this means “without interference from humans”, but why remove humans from the natural? We’re as natural as daffodils – with which we share genetic ancestors. What exactly is unnatural? Cars? Plastic? The Internet? I see no difference between an otter’s dam and the Internet: both are made using materials from the Earth. Sure iPods don’t grow on trees, but like otters’ dams, they have origins in raw, “natural” materials. At what magical point from the mining of metals to downloading the latest Linkin Park song does your iPod become “unnatural”?
This is the quote of the month (from Bloomberg):
Humans suffer from a mismatch between our thinking about what we do and the truth of what we do. Our brains make sense of a multifaceted world by ignoring much of its complexity — a trait Van der Leeuw calls “low dimensional” thinking. In engineering a dam, assessing how agricultural runoff influences an estuary or figuring out how automobile emissions might alter the atmosphere, our conceptual models (or those of our scientists and engineers) at best consider only a few of the true pathways of cause and effect. As Van der Leeuw puts it, “every human action upon the environment modifies the latter in many more ways that its human actors perceive, simply because the dimensionality of the environment is much higher than can be captured by the human mind.”
