Posted by sustain

Landfill Carbon Pricing – Revenue and Risk

Landfill carbon pricing – revenue and risk

1. Examining the current state of pricing of landfills in the market
2. Why are different landfills charging such different rates – the answers revealed
3. Claw backs and reasonable costs
4. Identifying reasonable versus unreasonable price adjustments to carbon
5. Advice for landfill users
6. Advice for landfill owners
7. What does the recent changes to emissions factors mean for pricing
8. Pricing now for an emission in 2038 with both proximity, emission factor and carbon pricing uncertainty all in the mix.

Mike Ritchie will address these issues and more at the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference in conjunction with the Sustainability Conference “SustainableTransformation” bringing a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The 3 day meeting will be held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda… full details here

Sustainable Investment Guidelines – linking sustainability into the investment decision

Green InvestmentThe single largest investor in capital works  is the public sector, but it’s the same sector that struggles with some of the fundamentals of sustainable investment.
Key challenges include:

• the prioritisation of construction over operational spends;

• a lack of focus on long term benefits realisation at the expense of immediate delivery pressures;

• a narrow definition of sustainability, often singularly toward environmental (as opposed to social or economic) issues;

• and a fundamental disjoint between sustainability and the investment decision. Major Projects Victoria and AECOM have tackled the issue by developing guidance that explains why and how to embed sustainability into investment decisions. This guidance will (subject to approvals) form a core part of the Investment Lifecycle Guidance – the suite of documents that provide the ‘rules’ for all public capital projects across Victoria. The document seeks to achieve a paradigm shift – away from a mindset where sustainability is something additional and cost additive ; toward recognition that sustainability is simply a vehicle to create a better project.

The guidance focuses on:

• linking everything back to clearly identifiable benefits (quantified or otherwise);

• putting sustainability on the agenda from concept stage by providing a set of prompts to consider;

• gradually building the robustness of the objectives such that they form an explicit part of the business case and the investment decision. This way of thinking is of relevance to all organisations (public and private) procuring capital works.

Ed Brown – Associate Director- AECOM will present on this topic at the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference in conjunction with the Sustainability Conference “SustainableTransformation” bringing a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The 3 day meeting will be held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda… full details here

Warmer climate boosts northern crops but the bad soon outweighs the good

By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation

Climate change is creating warmer growing conditions in parts of the Earth’s northern regions, a new study has found, but experts warn that drought and heat wil soon cancel out the agricultural benefits.

The international study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, analysed NASA satellite data and 30 years of land surface temperature records for 26 million square kilometres between the Arctic Ocean and 45 degrees north latitude.

“Higher northern latitudes are getting warmer, Arctic sea ice and the duration of snow cover are diminishing, the growing season is getting longer and plants are growing more,” Ranga Myneni of Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment, said in a media release on the NASA website.

“In the north’s Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.”

Of the area studied, up to 41% had experienced increased plant growth since 1982.

While warming climate may boost crop conditions in some regions, it also increases the risk of drought, heatwaves and pest outbreaks, the study found.

Dr Daniel Rodriguez, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Plant Science said the results of the study accord with what climate change scientists have been saying for some time.

“The good news is that this study provides clear evidence on modelled results present in previous reports,” he said adding that the warmer conditions had boosted Denmark’s commercial wine industry and doubled grain yields in Finland.

“The bad news is that this confirms that climate change is happening very quickly, as expected, and that even though some regions are going to have increases in productivity (though nothing is said here about changes in variability), in other places we expect these changes to be highly detrimental to food production,” said Dr Rodriguez.

“In the same issue of Nature Climate Change other authors indicate that for North America’s maize production, strong negative yield responses to the accumulation of temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius could also be expected as a consequence of increased air dryness.”

Dr Andrew Ash, Director of the CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship, said the early stages of climate change could also lead to increased crop productivity in some parts of Australia.

“But then a combination of declining rainfall projected for the mid-latitudes of Australia and increasing temperatures will negatively impact crop growth. You can initially get some good news but ultimately it’s a negative,” he said.

Within a couple of decades, the benefits of warmer growing conditions and increased carbon dioxide concentrations would be quickly outweighed by declining rainfall and heat stress on grain quality, he said.

“The big unknown in all of this is other factors like pests, disease and fire. There are still a great many uncertainties around the effects of climate change but very few of the likely scenarios are positive for agriculture,” he said.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

GBCA calls on WA to strengthen sustainability commitment

20 February 2013 — In the face of Western Australia’s 9 March state election, the Green Building Council of Australia has outlined a three-point green plan for the state’s buildings and communities to create “a clear long-term pathway to resilience and sustainability”.

The Council has called on the political leaders of Western Australia to strengthen their commitment to more efficient, productive, resource-friendly and sustainable buildings and communities.

Executive director Robin Mellon said “despite a slow start” the number of Green Star rated buildings in WA continued to grow, government and industry were working collaboratively, the GBCA’s state industry group was driving sustainability at the local level, and the government has assumed a leadership position on a number of key priorities.

Read the full story here

Climate change linked to declines in labour productivity

By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Charis Palmer, The Conversation

Increases in humidity caused as a result of climate change are reducing labour productivity and it’s only likely to get worse over time, argue researchers from America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In an article published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, the researchers say humidity is already reducing people’s working capacity by 10% during peak months of heat stress around the world, and this is likely to grow to 20% by 2050.

The researchers say even if the global community commits to active mitigation of CO2, there will be increasing environmental limitations on labour capacity in the coming decades.

In the worst case scenario considered by the model, safe labour would be prohibited in large areas during peak months by 2200, including the entire US east of the Rockies.

“So far little has been done to estimate the impact of climate change on labour productivity,” said David Peetz, professor of employment relations at Griffith University.

“The impact on productivity shown here, for people not experiencing the increasingly expensive benefits of air conditioning, is going to be quite stark, especially for people in warmer or mid-latitude climates,” Professor Peetz said.

“It all points to the fact that it’s much cheaper to deal with it now than to wait until some date in the future.”

The researchers combined analysis of humidity and climate change projections with industrial and military guidelines for people’s ability to work under heat stress.

Their projections do not include information about climate sensitivity, climate warming patterns, CO2 emissions, future population distributions and technological and societal change.

Nor did they consider labour productivity increases associated with a reduction in adverse conditions of extreme cold, snow and frozen soil.

Professor John Freebairn, an expert in environmental economics at the University of Melbourne’s Department of Economics, said the paper provided “provides a detailed assessment of just one of the ways in which higher temperatures and humidity across the globe would bring additional costs to society.”

“It is part of an extended exercise to assess the costs of climate change, and builds more details into the rough early estimates reported by Stern (2006), Garnaut (2008) and many others,” he said.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.