Category: Nature Watch

Corporate Social Responsibility

Suppose that you are an owner or manager of a large company, and you have a choice to make. Your company has the option of working on one of two projects. One would make a lot of money for your company but could harm the environment or destroy a community. The other one would make much less money for you but would protect the local people. Which one should you choose?

If you chose the second of the two options, you would be part of a movement called Corporate Social Responsibility, which says that businesses are responsible for how their actions affect others. For many years, people around the world have believed that businesses are not just about making money. They believe that it is the duty of business owners to try to improve life for everyone their company affects, not just themselves.

Although the idea has been around for a long time, the term “corporate social responsibility” started to become popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea is that every business, large or small, affects many more people than just the owners, employees, and people who have invested money in the company.

The people who are affected directly or indirectly by a business are known as “stakeholders.” They might be people in the community whose small business failed because a big business moved in or who become sick because of the pollution from a factory. They might also be people who have better hospitals and schools because of the wealth a business has brought to the region. Whether the effect on the community is good or bad, every business affects more than just the people who work there.

The idea behind corporate social responsibility is to increase the good effects a business has on the community and to decrease the bad ones. Some companies help the environment by reducing their energy use. Others give their employees good benefits such as free university education and a generous retirement income. Some companies also raise money to help with special projects like protecting a rainforest or buying Fair Trade products that ensure employees producing the products are paid a fair wage for their work.

Not everyone agrees with the principle of corporate social responsibility. Many people think that the main purpose of business is to make money, not to work at community development.  Often, the amount of time and money needed to be socially responsible deters employers from investing in socially responsible programs.

For corporate social responsibility to work, businesses often need the government or social agencies to advise them. Industry Canada is one government agency that works with corporations and the public to try to ensure social responsibility, while the media, the public, and non-profit organizations like Greenpeace can also hold corporations responsible for their actions. Together, the different groups can help companies to benefit as many people as possible and to protect the environment.

(how can people get involved, how can a student make a change to a company they think should be more responsible, or how can they nominate a company they think is doing a good job…give me more info and contact information, be as specific as possible)

The David Suzuki Foundation and Google Earth Outreach are launching an online map that will allow residents and decision-makers to zoom in to their community and calculate the economic value of natural capital assets.

Imagine a sleek contraption for your backyard so powerful it has the cooling effect of 10 air conditioners, quietly filters dust, allergens, and pollutants, runs for free on solar power, and its only byproduct is oxygen.

Dream no longer. This elegant machine is a healthy, mature tree.

Using energy from sunlight, a tree can soak up almost 400 litres of water from the ground each day, and cool the surrounding air through transpiration. Trees absorb airborne contaminants and breathe out clean oxygen. They’re such efficient air filters that Columbia University researchers estimate that for every 343 trees added to a square kilometre asthma rates in young people drop by about 25 per cent.

What else can these handy natural contraptions do for us? The U.S. Forest Service says trees near buildings reduce air-conditioning needs by a third and, because they break the wind, save up to half the energy used for heating. According to the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture, mature tree canopies reduce the air temperature of urban areas between five and 10 degrees Celsius.

Imagine replacing these ecological services with human-built substitutes. While we can handle cooling a building, creating city-sized air conditioning that could reduce the temperature of an urban area by 10 degrees is an engineering feat that would require massive amounts of energy.

The sophisticated services that nature provides are not only misunderstood and underappreciated; they tend to be ignored in modern economics and urban planning. When a forest or wetland is converted to another use, municipal decision-makers focus on infrastructure costs, property values, and future contributions to the tax roll.

We continue to deplete natural resources and degrade nature in and around urban areas, failing to recognize the contribution of ecosystem services — like clean air, fresh water, and cooling — to the economy and health of communities. As The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity initiative notes, this ecological damage is the “perfect crime”, a theft barely noticed. We wouldn’t let a bank get away with losing our life savings. We shouldn’t let decision-makers off the hook when they allow our natural wealth to be squandered.

Encouragingly, a growing chorus of economists and policy-makers has begun advocating for a smarter way of accounting for the true value of nature — something called natural capital economics.

Most people understand the concept of financial capital. We pay for things we find valuable. Natural capital extends that perspective to ecological goods and services. It would be expensive to develop and build facilities to replace the things nature does. So we calculate the dollar value we would have to pay if we had to provide them ourselves.

How much is our natural capital worth? According to the David Suzuki Foundation’s research, the 7,000-square-kilometre Ontario Greenbelt provides at least $2.6 billion in non-market benefits each year. British Columbia’s Lower Mainland region is estimated to be worth at least $5.4 billion annually. Global studies have estimated the total value of the world’s ecosystem goods and services to be on par with the value of the entire global economy. In short, our natural capital is a source of staggering wealth.

Why do we continue to fritter away these amazing assets, despite their immense value? Unfortunately most people don’t have a clear picture of what stocks of natural capital exist in their communities, let alone the true cost of converting natural areas for industrial, commercial, or residential development.

That’s why the David Suzuki Foundation and Google Earth Outreach are launching an online map that will allow residents and decision-makers to zoom in to their community and calculate the economic value of natural capital assets. The interactive Putting Natural Capital on the Map application allows users to select a parcel of land and find out what types of natural ecosystems it contains and what economic benefits it provides.

While economists, ecologists, and decision-makers grapple with how to estimate an appropriate economic value for nature’s benefits, I am hopeful that the field will spur communities to consider the true value of their natural riches. In the meantime, I encourage you to beat the heat and keep your community cool by investing in your own bit of natural capital — a tree for your yard or park.

Another day, another pipeline spill

A recent pipeline leak sent 475,000 litres of oil into Alberta’s Red Deer River. It could have been worse; nothing was being pumped at the time. The company, Plains Midstream, claims the light sour crude may smell bad but poses no risk to humans!

It happened as crews were cleaning a larger spill from last year at another of the company’s pipelines. That one dumped 4.5 million litres of oil into the surrounding forest and wetlands. The recent Red Deer River spill was also the site of a leak in 2008. Industry figures show that more than 3.4 million litres of fossil fuels have been accidentally released from pipelines every year in Alberta since 2006. One litre of spilled oil can contaminate a million litres of groundwater.

Enbridge, the company that wants to build a dual pipeline from the tar sands to the B.C. coast, has had more than 800 leaks and spills on its pipelines since 1999, sending close to 27 million litres of oil into the environment. That included a 2010 spill in Michigan that dumped 3.8 million litres of diluted tar sands bitumen into the Kalamazoo River. Cleanup costs for that are already $765 million, and the river is still contaminated.

Of course, the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which will carry heavy bitumen 1,200 kilometres one way and Middle Eastern condensate the other way across close to 1,000 streams and rivers, will be different, we are assured: world-class safety standards, safety control valves, 24/7 monitoring, emergency responders… Where have these world-class standards been hiding until now?

Enbridge only carries enough insurance to cover $575 million in damages, far less than incurred by the Kalamazoo spill. Who pays the rest if a spill happens after the company and its Chinese state-owned backers get their way in Northern B.C.?

Bitumen is riskier than regular oil or gas. It’s heavier and sinks in water, making cleanup difficult with longer-lasting negative environmental impacts. But, thanks to changes brought in under the federal government’s Bill C-38, we’ll no longer have to think about potential damage to the waterways and land along the pipeline route, unless they’re home to “fish that are part of a commercial, recreational, or Aboriginal fisheries.”

These are just issues with spills. Even the other possible catastrophic environmental impacts of Northern Gateway — such as accidents involving more than 200 supertankers a year carrying the bitumen through the narrow and hazardous Douglas Channel and across the Pacific and down the coast to China and California for refining — pale in comparison to the larger issue: rapid exploitation of fossil fuel deposits and the associated impacts of climate change, pollution, and economic short-sightedness.

The goal of our government and industry leaders appears to be to dig up as much oil as possible, as quickly as possible, and sell it overseas, and damn the economic and environmental consequences. If that means selling entire tar sands operations and the bitumen to companies owned by a government known for human rights abuses and environmental destruction; if it means polluting water and putting people’s health at risk; if it means killing birds, caribou, and wolves; if it means putting our manufacturing industry at risk and not joining the green-energy economy, all for the sake of a few short-term and even fewer long-term jobs, who cares? There’s a quick buck to be made. And the economy will appear to chug along until the next election and maybe the one after that. And that’s surely enough time to dismantle many of the laws, policies, and institutions that have made Canada the great country it is!

Whether or not we smarten up and start switching to cleaner energy, we’re going to need oil for some time. Rather than rushing headlong into this and putting our environment, health, and economy at risk, it would make more sense to step back, develop a national energy plan, and figure out how we can use this valuable and diminishing resource efficiently and in a way that provides long-term benefits for all Canadians rather than a few industrialists and China’s totalitarian government. We also need to start monitoring the long-term impacts of the never-ending spills from leaky pipelines.