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Sustainability Lessons Learned Hitchhiking the Real Estate Cosmos
By Martin Melaver
Recently, I’ve been reading with my son The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We’re at that point in the story when our travelers arrive on the planet of Magrathea. Magrathea, you may recall, made a name for itself millions of years ago by specializing in building designer planets for the super-wealthy. Then, out of the blue, a severe economic recession hit the galaxy and demand for Magrathea’s high-end product vaporized. The citizens of Magrathea decided to mothball the planet until market demand returned. Fast-forward five million years, and the Magratheans are still waiting. Talk about an allegory for our time.
In a recent webcast, Stephen Blank, Urban Land Institute’s Senior Resident Fellow for Real Estate Finance, expressed what many in real estate already know and fear: that the downturn in residential real estate in 2007-8 was nothing compared to the tsunami coming at us in 2010 in the commercial sector. Values are likely to dip to 40 percent from three years ago, a commercial resurgence is not likely to occur until 2012, and the financial markets will continue to remain frozen except for the vulture plays stepping in with all-cash, low-ball purchases of distressed assets. Of the total $3.5 trillion in commercial debt out there, $900 billion is held in the problematic CMBS market. Thirty-nine billion dollars of that debt will be due in 2010; $150 billion by 2012.
Is There a Generational Failure on Climate Change? Not Yet.
By Eban Goodstein, Director of The Bard Center for Environmental Policy
I have attended a lot of college climate change talks lately by 50+ year old white guy experts. They all feature a curious line directed at the students: “Our generation screwed up; we are sorry to leave you this mess, but it’s going to be your job to fix it”.
There’s a problem with that logic. In fact, it’s our 50+ generation that currently has all the power, and we don’t look to be letting it go for the next couple of decades. The only way to transform the planet will be a generational partnership, with folks our age laying a solid foundation for the revolution in technology and consciousness that will indeed be the life work of today’s college and graduate students.
A tragic generational failure – and lots of success too—is illustrated in a beautiful new film by Robert Stone, called Earth Days. The movie follows the lives of a handful of 70+ environmental warriors, primarily Stewart Udall, Stewart Brand, and Denis Hayes. Stone documents the creation of the environmental movement in the 1960s’, sparked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb; the movement’s symphonic arrival on Earth Day 1970, orchestrated by an intense and charismatic Hayes; and the phenomenal legislative success early in the decade, in which the we see the sunny (but still creepy) side of Nixon—with Tricky Dick signing the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts, NEPA, and creating the EPA, all in the space of a dizzying two years.
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Greenbuild 2009 – The Three P’s in Action
By Amy Berry
I recently returned from the United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC) 2009 Greenbuild Expo in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference boasted more than 28,000 attendees and more than 1800 exhibitors. Former Vice President Al Gore gave the keynote speech as leaders of the green building world converged to discuss the future of building and the impact this community of architects, designers, builders, project managers and corporate sustainability managers can have on mother earth’s future. Attendees snacked on organic appetizers and drank from compostable plastic cups. Student volunteers filled the convention center excited, to be able to participate in the event, and in exchange spent their time sorting attendees’ garbage into the appropriate recycling, composting or trash bins.
As one of those 1800 exhibitors (we had a full Windspire wind turbine up in our booth) I spent the majority of the show on the expo hall floor. The energy on the floor was described as electric, engaging and awesome by those tweeting with the hashtag #Greenbuild and by some of the more than 100 media in attendance. If you believe that smarter buildings that use less energy and water are a real solution to global warming, this was the place to see and be seen. The USGBC must be applauded for educating so many on real solutions to the global climate crisis.
Relationships: The Key Ingredient to a Green Data Center
By Mike Leber, president and founder of Hurricane Electric
Green data centers have been getting more attention in the media in the last six months. Although much of that coverage has been on how green data centers are reducing carbon footprint, they also serve another importance purpose: reducing data center operating costs. Given that energy costs can account for up to 30 percent of a company’s IT budget, there is substantial economic incentive to improve energy efficiency in the data center.
Whether it is an existing data center or a new center in the process of being built, decisions need to be made not only on the type of technologies that will be utilized within a center, but also the facility’s design. Vendor relationships as well as one with the local power company are key to creating an energy efficient data center.
It is critical to have open discussions with vendors to find energy-efficient products. It is not only important to know how the product works, but how it may work in an energy-efficient mode, why it is energy efficient and how much energy may actually be saved. Only through open discussions with vendors, can these answers be found and the right energy-efficient sever, UPS, HVAC system or airflow management solution be deployed.
The Impact of Storytelling on International Development
By Mary Solecki
The entrepreneurs of international development work will have a special place in history. These are entrepreneurial spirits that have risked their careers and livelihoods, not to make exorbitant profits or seek the thrill of the IPO, but instead to make life better for their fellow countrymen. These men and women are rarely recorded in history books, but have devoted all their time and talents toward the thankless job of making the world a better place.
Last summer I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to intern with a non-profit organization in Nicaragua. During my experience, I lived in rural Nicaragua, and spent a lot of time not only watching the hard efforts of a social entrepreneur, but trying to wrap my mind around the differences between my origins and the Nicaraguans. The whole summer, and most days since, I have tried to envision how not only my life, but I might be different if I was born there. After all, I did nothing to earn the opportunities I have in my life. Just as Nicaraguans were simply born there, I was simply born in the United States. A simple act of fate and geographical convenience that permanently alters the paths a life might take. It is the realization of my blind luck that drives me to appreciate and create these opportunities for others.
The Hurdles and Heroes of International Development
By Mary Solecki
I frequently tell people I’m ‘into’ international development. I recently received a raised eyebrow at this statement, reminding me just how vague the term is. Is it sinister international globalization plans? An underground tunnel to China (finally)? When asked to describe what this means to me, I tend to go for the explanation “helping people to meet their basic needs of clean water, food, and education.”
Now, this might sound like pure humanitarian efforts, but I have a very negative impression of humanitarianism. I envision crates of food dropping to people on the ground, canned in English they do not understand nor have the can openers to open without bodily laceration. International development is the sustainable version of humanitarianism, based off the ‘Teach a Man to Fish’ life lesson #218. Rather than a crate of canned food, the international development plane might drop off a fishing pole and a fly-fishing guide that knows a few local jokes and swimming holes.
While the world seems to have growing enthusiasm for international development, the hurdles and risks associated with this work have not gone away. As social entrepreneurs are sprouting up throughout developing countries, governments of these countries are relaxing their own efforts, and becoming more dependent on these organizations to provide services in their place. Social entrepreneurs face a huge obstacle in their very existence. They exist to help improve lifestyles and meet basic needs to some of the world’s poorest. In order for an organization to consider itself ‘social’, they cannot turn too much of a profit off the very people they are trying to help. The amount of creativity required to help meet people’s needs while still fulfilling bottom line needs walks the fine line between exhilarating and exhausting.
Enabling Sustainable Data Centers with Tightly-Integrated, Advanced Component Technologies
By Dr. John Busch, president and co-founder of Schooner Information Technology
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every 100 units of energy piped into a typical data center, only three are used for useful computing. These inefficiencies are the result of very low (~10 percent) utilization of the data center’s computing servers which creates intolerable heat and energy issues as well as sprawling space requirements.
To make matters worse, experts predict the number of servers to double or even triple over the next few years as a result of booming demand for Internet capacity. Fortunately, the emergence of advanced component technologies, such as multi-core processors, low-latency interconnects, and flash memory, hold the promise to transform the data center through radical improvements in performance, scalability and power consumption.
Opening Up Fort Knox: Looking for Transparency to Foster Data Center Innovation
By David Zwerin, Sustainability Marketing Consultant
Photo Courtesy of Inhabitat
While researching the sustainability of data centers, I became frustrated with the lack of corporate transparency around the environmental impacts associated with their data centers. Many companies talk about how efficient their data centers are, but stop short at providing hard facts, data, and relevant numbers to authenticate their story.
Data centers have become the new Fort Knox, housing everything from Facebook photos to medical records, and data driven companies are unwilling, or so it appears, to share any environmental impact information about their data center. There is a belief that disclosing this information, competitors will reverse engineer the environmental impact data to shed light on the capacity of a data center to gain a competitive advantage.
As a result, there is an underestimated perception of the true environmental impact of data centers. To truly create innovation in this sector, more transparency is necessary to stimulate an industry-wide discourse on the true environmental risks of data centers, enabling companies to develop effective strategies and best practices for reducing the impact of their data management.
Enterprise Sustainability and Greening Data Centers
By Dr. Zen Kishimoto, Principal Analyst, Alta Terra Research Network
Some years ago, energy was cheap. Few people in corporations paid attention to how much energy was consumed company wide, much less in data centers. More recently, however, several factors have changed this scene completely. These factors included much higher demands for computing and storage due to the rapid increase in online processing in both business and consumer sectors and, consequently, denser server concentration to maximize the use of space in data centers.
According to a 2007 EPA report, power consumption by U.S. data centers doubled between 2001 and 2006. In 2006, data centers used 1.5 percent of all the power consumed in the United Sates. Without any remedy, consumption will double again by 2011. As a testimony to this study, many operators have recently begun feeling pain at several points in their data centers, which are experiencing power shortages, high costs, and extensive needs for cooling.
Data Centers as Information Factories
By Dave Ohara, Data Center Consultant and Publisher of GreenM3.com
Photo Courtesy of Google
I have been writing on the Green Data Center topic for more than two years. After more than 1,000 blog posts, one of the things that I have found is the name “data center” doesn’t mean what most people who don’t work on them think they are. In the past, there was one corporate building that was the place where data was housed for the corporation. But now, that no longer is the case.
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. New technologies and practices were designed to handle the scale and the operational requirements that came with the dot com boom. The standard for Fortune 500 companies now is to have multiple data centers around the world to provide information availability, disaster recovery, and reliability. What does it mean to have multiple centers of data? If you green the data center, what is actually getting greened? And how?
Hotels: What’s Keeping You From Going Green?
By Jeff Slye, Chief Evolution Officer Business Evolution Consulting
I have two questions I’d like to pose to the hospitality industry, particularly to the hotels, hotel management companies, and investors that do not have a sustainability or green platform for their property or properties:
1) What data or additional information do you need to hear or read to illustrate to you and your stakeholders that investing in ‘green’ is critical to your revenue stream and attracting and retaining customers?
2) If there is consistent information from 3rd party survey data, direct customer feedback, and comments from your competitors that tells you that your customers and prospects are actively searching out and spending money with green hotels, would you make the investment to go ‘green?’
The above two questions are the primary ones hotel company decision-makers should be asking themselves in this economic climate, regardless of the other business benefits that come from ‘green’ programs such as operational efficiencies, cost savings, employee values connection, marketing, and improved public relations. This article will help answer these questions and will use hard data and real case studies to demonstrate the growing influence by today’s green-oriented travelers (which include corporate, individual, and group business). In my work assisting companies in developing their green and sustainability strategies we have seen first hand that there is real money currently being lost or gained in this space and it is directly connected to a hotel’s environmental commitment…or lack thereof.
The Fourth Bottom Line of Sustainability: Perspective
By Steven Kenney
Concern for the triple bottom line — it’s what pushes companies to shrink their environmental footprint and make restitution for past negative impacts. And yet, as progressive as this ideal seems, its time has already passed. It’s time to put a fourth P alongside people, planet, and profit: perspective.
Adopting a truly future-focused perspective is the next step in sustainability. The goal is more than securing present conditions or making amends for missteps — it’s working today to make businesses, communities, and the environment stronger with respect to tomorrow’s conditions. The key to future sustainability is understanding the forces causing change and taking advantage of them to equip our businesses, communities and ecosystems for the future.
The Sustainability Commons: How Corporate Data Sharing Can Advance Sustainability
By David Witzel, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Innovation Exchange
Several people pointed me to Mary Tripsas‘ post in the New York Times called “Everybody in the Pool of Green Innovation” this weekend – it really struck a chord. The article focused on two initiatives involving major corporations to share patents that protect the environment and foster new innovations. Through the Eco-Patent Commons companies like Xerox, IBM, Nokia, and Ricoh, working with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, pledge to make environmentally beneficial patents available in the public domain. The Eco-Patent Commons now includes 100 patents from eleven participating companies.
Meanwhile, Creative Commons, the innovative engine behind CC licensing for content sharing, is helping launch a new initiative to increase patent-reuse called GreenXchange. Partnering with Nike and Best Buy, they have a “vision of creating an open innovation platform that promotes the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide challenges” and are using their expertise in crafting licenses and legal language to both protect patent-holder interests while enabling easy reuse.
NYC Event Helps Women Climb the Green Ladder
By A. Lauren Abele, Strategic Initiatives Manager New York Women Social Entrepreneurs
The best kept secret in the world of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is that CSR is an inside job. Many people who are heading up CSR departments (or are the CSR department) at their companies, were once regular employees who one day decided to start recycling at the office or organize volunteer days. What resulted was a snowball effect. Management saw the benefits of sustainability, clients became interested and engaged, the company re-branded and marketed its efforts, and these employees continued to develop more and more socially responsible initiatives. A new way of doing business had been born and a new social champion had arrived: the social intrapreneur.
How important is the social intrapreneur to business? Ninety-five percent of CEOs report that businesses must address the social and environmental pressures of society (McKinsey & Co., July 2007) and mounting evidence shows that employees will drive companies’ efforts to address sustainability (MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept 2009). Innovative and forward-thinking employees need to be encouraged and trained to bring their social vision to the workplace in a meaningful and compelling way. The success of social intrapreneurs lies not only in their passion for sustainability, but also in their ability to translate that passion into a great pitch, a solid business plan, and positive, measurable results.
Read on to find out about a cool, must-attend event!
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