Round Up: Interviews with Pakistani executives about CSR and more

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Saad Khan, and was first published in Social Bridges.)

Social Bridges presents a round up of interviews that we conducted with Pakistani executives to know what their companies are doing for the community and what’s their environmental and social footprint. It was really heartening to know that Pakistani corporate sector has started doing good for the society and are also trying to reduce their carbon footprints. These interviews were really very helpful in learning the CSR dynamics of Pakistan. Read more

Doing Simple Things for the Planet

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Irene Rafer, and was first published in The Shape of My Life.)

“Wastes segregation begins at home.”

Practicing proper waste segregation reduced our household waste to 20% – the rest being recycled.

Metro Manila disposes tons of garbage everyday and time will come that its landfills can no longer accommodate all its wastes.

Our household trash is ordinarily composed of old news papers and scrap papers; cartoons and card boards; plastic bottles and plastic scraps; Styrofoam and the inedible parts of fruits and vegetables that we consume. Instead that those trashes end up to the garbage collectors we managed to segregate and recycle. We piled the scrap papers and card boards in a big cartoon then we allocated a separate sack for our plastic bottles and plastic scraps. Our lifestyle here sometimes demands for the consumption of plastic bottled drinks. Nevertheless, we are trying to be responsible consumer by properly disposing our plastic trash. Read more

China to Hold Firm on Climate Change Policy Position

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Julian Wong, and was first published in The Green Leap Forward.)

China releases comprehensive white paper on its climate change policy ahead of key international meetings.

Ahead of the high level technology transfer summit in Beijing next week; next December’s 14th Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznan, Poland, during which a general framework for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012, will be hashed out; and of course, Halloween, the State Council of the central government has released a white paper on climate change policy titled “Comprehensive Plan on Climate Change.” This white paper also comes on the heels of China’s submission of a viewpoint paper to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action of the UNFCCC on September 28.

While the 11,000 word white paper reads like a kitchen-sink of domestic policies that may seem to ring hollow given the institutional limitations that China observers have come to be so familiar with, the document does provide a good summary of the specific policy programs that China has enacted so far and of future policies that we can expect. Above everything else, the timing of the release of this document is highly strategic, ahead of the above mentioned meetings, as the white paper also states in no uncertain terms various policy positions that seem to have the north and the south heading towards climate deadlock. Read more

Beijing Energy and Environment Exhibition 2008 Review

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Julian Wong, and was first published in The Green Leap Forward.)

This is the 50th post for The Green Leap Forward! To celebrate, we visited the 2008 China (Beijing) International Energy Saving and Environmental Protection Exhibition held at the Beijing Exhibition Center this past weekend (Oct 17 through 20).

The first thing that strikes the visitor is the Cathedral-like grandeur of the Beijing Exhibition Center. It was opened in 1954 “with the late Premier Zhou En-Lai cutting the red ribbon and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung contributing poetic thoughts.” It doesn’t look like it is LEED-certified, but being more than half a century old, visitors could take heart in the fact that the building’s carbon debt has probably been paid off a while ago. Read more

Ecotourism – still a distant dream in Pakistan

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Saad Khan, and was first published in Social Bridges.)

Nature-focused tourism or what is now known as Ecotourism is a new catch phrase in the dictionary of sustainability. Ecotourism, as we all know, is based on such type of recreational activities which are nature-centric and sustainable. It’s interesting to note, however, that there is a hot debate on the exact connotations of ecotourism. Some say that any type of tourism which doesn’t harm the environment and can improve the living standards of a society is ecotourism. Critics, on the contrary, have very strict rules on which type of tourism is ecological one and which is not. Aspects of green washing, environmental exploitation and human rights issues, among other things, mars the exact spirit of ecotourism. Read more

Five Things Filipino Should Know About Climate Change

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Irene Rafer, and was first published in The Shape of My Life.)

I received this article as a forwarded e-mail message from a concerned co-earthling. I think I should post it here as one of my simple acts for this planet.

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“Don’t run away from your problem,” 10-year-old Xandrinne admonishes her playmates who hurriedly left their game to seek the intercession of a favorite relative. Eavesdropping, I marvel at the child’s wisdom and maturity. How I wish the same could be said of our political leaders.

Politicians scrambled for the allocation of additional congressional districts (visualize added fat pork barrels) with the news of a galloping population growth. With overpopulation, poverty, pollution, and the fish and agriculture crisis hounding this nation, people expect their leaders to forget politics and instead craft stringent policies to lessen the repercussions on the limited and threatened resources, the economy and human development. Read more

Follow the Money

If China’s Green Leap Forward fails for whatever reason, it won’t be because of the lack of cash. Generally speaking, it has never been better to be a clean tech entrepreneur or project developer. Investment dollars are pouring in globally from hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds, multinational corporations and development banks. Take these recent developments, for example:

• The clean development mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol, for example, provides the much needed financial lifeblood to take IRRs of wind farm projects over the “hurdle rate.” There has been some criticism about the use and abuse of CDM by some camps, such as a front page article by The Guardian, but I thought China Environmental Law’s response was spot on. China is by far the world’s biggest market for CDM projects, accounting for a whopping 73% of transactions in 2007. Hong Kong joins the CDM fray as well.
• Sycamore Ventures and the China Association of Resources Comprehensive Utilization (CARCU), which operates under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, are to launch a US$ 1 billion dollar Greenstar fund to invest largely in China’s environmental sector.
• The World Bank will provide additional $440 million in loans for three energy efficiency projects. This will constitute one-third of the bank’s loan portfolio in 2008 to China. The three projects consist of energy efficiency financing, desulfurization in Shandong and infrastructure in medium-sized cities in Liaoning.

All this is not to say that China is reliant on external sources of funding. In fact, according to a Reuters report, Gao Guangsheng of the National Development and Reform Commission expects China to fund 90% of its renewable energy development by domestic sources of funding. Separately, Don Ye, founding partner of Tsing Capital’s China Environment Fund, for seven years, and still, China’s only fund 100% dedicated to clean tech investments told The Green Leap Forward, “There’s a trend to self sufficiency both in terms of talent as well as investments. By the end of this year, we expect to see quite a few RMB-denominated investment funds come to the market.”

Provincial and municipal governments are also investing big in renewable energy. The northeastern municipality of Tianjin has committed to invest RMB 200 million a year into mergers and pre-IPO deals in solar, wind and energy storage businesses. The southwestern province of Sichuan is pushing solar development in a big way, as evidenced by last weekend’s Western China PV Conference held in the province’s biggest city, Chengdu (成都). The governments of Chengdu and adjacent Shuang Liu (双流) county, together constituting the aviation hub of China, have now have established the Chengdu (Shuang Liu) Photovoltaic Industrial Park with the goal of becoming China’s “solar PV valley.” I’ll write more about the Western PV Conference in my next post.

There will be occasional bottlenecks to capital availability. Last month, the central government raised bank reserve ratios yet again to reduce liquidity in the market so as to combat inflation. The series of bank reserve ratio increases has resulted in a tightening in the availability of bank loans for renewable energy projects (although these have tend to affect foreign project developers, which are typically last in line, more than the major state-owned enterprise developers, which get priority access to capital) . But such a phenomenon does not detract from the favorable patchwork of investment policies enacted by the central, provincial and municipal governments for clean energy. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the red (the color of RMB 100 notes) to continue chasing the green (energy).

(This article is contributed by our guest writer, Julian Wong, and was first published in The Green Leap Forward.)

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