Introduction

One four-word question packs the house

The question posed by The Earth Institute's fourth biennial State of the Planet conference, "Is sustainable development feasible?," evidently resonated forcefully among the burgeoning communities concerned with sustainable development issues: it drew more than 1300 people to Columbia University in March 2006 for a two-day, international, marathon event that featured twenty-four speakers, four of them keynoters, and five panel discussions. The speakers, experts at the top of their fields, came not only to contribute to but to learn from the proceedings. No one person could command the breadth of knowledge that was pooled.

Although the conference, which was cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, was held at a university, this was no academic gathering. Together, the speakers' stature, the searching agenda, and the sustained seriousness of purpose located the proceedings squarely in the public forum, the realm in which actions, and inactions, have grave real-world consequences—in this case, for present and future generations and other forms of life around the globe. If planet Earth had a Board of Directors, this might have been its biennial meeting.

The bad news announced by Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute, at the outset of the conference came as no surprise: the world is "on an unsustainable trajectory," he said. Given this, could sustainable development be feasible?

What is the question?

The question that drove State of the Planet 2006 can be stated as it was classically defined in a 1987 report produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development:

Can we pursue development "that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?

But this simple-seeming question conceals exceedingly complicated issues. The fuller question is whether the following goals can be met together, as a set, over time:

• that conditions improve for the five-sixths of humanity that lacks the developed world's material advantages—and particularly for the roughly one billion people living in extreme poverty
• that people in developed nations continue to enjoy material progress
• that development be achieved without damaging the natural systems that sustain all life
• that these goals be met as the world's population—now 6.5 billion and projected to reach 9 billion by 2050—grows

These goals converge with another set of goals that were cited by a number of conference speakers: the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Adopted in 2000, they constitute the international community's historic commitment to addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions by establishing quantifiable goals and a timetable for meeting them. The UN Millennium Project was commissioned in 2002 to develop a concrete action plan for achieving them. The difficulty of achieving the interim targets for the year 2015 is an index of how stubborn and complex are the interrelated problems the project is tackling.

Jeffrey Sachs directs the Millennium Project, and Earth Institute staff contribute to its work. The institute's own research programs directly address issues related to sustainable development. Thus, in designing the State of the Planet 06 conference, institute staff were keenly aware of the complexities their ambitious conference would encompass. To provide handles on them, they anchored the agenda in these four sessions:

• Research and Ingenuity
• Developing Effective Institutional Structures
• Tapping into Market Forces and the Economy
• Challenging Behavioral Patterns and Perspectives

Collectively, participants were asked to think about the world as a system. What forces are now in play? What will happen if current trends continue unchecked? How might destructive trends be altered, and positive trends accelerated? What developments show promise? What changes are achievable?

Over the course of two long days, a wealth of information, knowledge, and insight accrued.

Jeff Sachs opens with straight talk

As director of both The Earth Institute and the UN Millennium Project, Sachs is well positioned to survey the globe, and he's an incisive analyst and lucid communicator, to boot. In a riveting keynote address, he pulled no punches. At present, he stated flatly, "We're not on a course of sustainable development; we're not even close ... Every major ecosystem on the planet is under profound stress." This should be the issue most talked about in our public life, because "it is right at the core of ... our survival and our future prospects." As developing nations consume ever more resources and Earth's population grows, these problems grow more acute.

Aid to the poorest of the poor "is pure win-win."

While economic development is benefiting countries such as China and India, he explained, we're failing miserably to help the poorest of the poor, particularly in Africa, where living conditions are worsening. Yet, aid to them "is pure win-win":

• It will ease stresses on the environment. To try to meet basic needs, the poorest people are driven to deplete ecosystems.
• It will diminish the likelihood of violence and civil wars rooted in competition for scarce resources.

Not to mention the humanitarian goal of alleviating suffering. For Sachs, this is a personal crusade; his 2005 book, The End of Poverty, is a clarion call to end poverty worldwide by 2025.

The many faces of environmental destruction: A river chokes with rubbish, particularly discarded plastic bags. Nearby residents pollute the air with dark plumes of smoke as they burn wires and circuit boards from imported obsolete computers to extract copper. © 2005 Mike Anane, Courtesy of Photoshare.

What must we do to achieve the goal of sustainable development? Modify our technologies, our institutions, and our values, Sachs insisted. Regarding technology, the major challenges are these:

• "decarbonizing" energy, to create a sustainable energy system
• finding ways to grow food that avoid deforestation, destruction of the world's fisheries, and the harmful impacts of nitrogen fertilizer and aquaculture
• developing a global health surveillance and management system
• managing ecosystems, such as watersheds, holistically

"Politics is central" to achieving this, Sachs said, but today "we have almost no politics on this issue. We're fighting all the wrong wars." We haven't even started to fight the wars on poverty, disease, and environmental degradation.

The gap between science and society "is profound and extraordinarily dangerous."

Moreover, he observed, the gap between science and society "is profound and extraordinarily dangerous ... These [issues of sustainability] are scientific problems first and foremost. We will require massive improvements in science and technology" and their applications, if nine billion people are to live better lives. Without improvements, "we'll have war and violence and benighted global disarray."

That the current U.S. government is "scientifically antagonistic" is a temporary problem; far more seriously, "we don't have a government that can absorb the science." Working at the interface of science and policy demands expertise that political leaders and senior civil servants lack.

Nations must collaborate; no one country can solve what are global-scale problems. Indeed, governments alone can't solve them, Sachs cautioned. A new kind of politics is needed, one that's "much more networked, more multisector; not just elected officials."

In addition, he urged, institutions must "look after ... future generations more systematically." At present, "our capacity to diminish future possibilities is really astounding." What's at stake is the global commons—"the atmosphere, biodiversity ... the heritage of the whole world." We must learn how to manage it. A population of 7.5 billion, not 9 billion, will make this easier.

Issues of sustainability "will be at the very core of our geopolitics," Sachs predicted, and will intensify dramatically. Issues like the war against terror and Islamic fundamentalism are "a distraction and misunderstanding" that have "almost nothing to do with basic challenges we face on this planet."

The conference takes off

With Sachs's keynote ringing in all ears, the speakers proceeded to illuminate the nature, scale, and severity of the problems besetting the planet, the intimate interdependencies that make them so difficult to untangle and solve, and some approaches that hold promise. The tenor was, by turns, earnest, frustrated, urgent, and sometimes optimistic.

The world's "business as usual" scenario holds grave dangers.

Recounted later, some points urged by speakers might seem familiar and obvious—even tired; for example, that leadership is needed, extreme poverty must be ended, education vastly extended. But cumulatively the speakers' talks and panel discussions drove home the fact that the world's "business as usual" scenario holds grave dangers for the human race and other forms of life. The full force of those old, familiar points resounded, and new ones rang true, too.

As the conference progressed, the question "Is sustainable development feasible?" came increasingly to seem an excessively polite way to phrase a constellation of raw, urgent questions. And at times it seemed that multiple conferences were under way at once, so vast was the range of subjects. Surely each attendee came away with a different set of messages. As Sachs said in his closing remarks, "There is no single, simple summing up."

Among important points made at the conference were these:

Crosscutting issues

• Economics must take into account the natural capital we consume. People everywhere need to learn how their consumption affects our life-support systems.
• Habitat is being lost to deforestation and desertification; massive species extinction is under way; soil is being degraded; chemical fluxes are being altered. Climate change is affecting ecosystems, with consequences for zoonotic diseases.
• As webs of intricate interdependencies, ecosystems must be managed holistically.
• The MDGs should be revisited in light of concerns about energy and ecological impacts.
• While science and technology are needed to solve problems, we can't wait for them to bail us out. Problems are too grave and urgent.
• The U.S. government is a laggard on sustainability issues and in foreign aid.

Poverty

• One billion people lack access to clean drinking water; 2.4 billion, to safe sanitation.
• Tens of thousands of people, many of them children, die each day from preventable, poverty-related causes. Africa's problems are most acute. To not act to prevent these deaths is morally wrong. Period.
• How to rapidly scale up successful approaches to alleviating poverty is one of the great challenges.
• Population growth will increase demand for food and for the freshwater needed to grow it. Climate change will aggravate water scarcity in some areas where poverty is already acute. Exploiting rainfall with water storage and simple irrigation techniques can yield "more crop per drop."
• Aid must be tailored to local conditions. To help poor people adopt better farming practices and technologies at hand, their behavior must be understood.
• Corporations can collaborate with people "at the base of the pyramid" to create new enterprises that meet local needs and generate income.
• The IMF and World Bank haven't achieved important development goals. Trade liberalization hasn't benefited the poorest nations. But economic development alone is inadequate; income redistribution must be addressed.

Climate, energy, government, and market forces

• Climate change is accelerating, with alarming consequences. Voracious demand for energy driven by development and population growth—notably, in China and India—will increase consumption of fossil fuels, especially coal.
• Technology will be central to meeting clean energy goals, but governments must act to stabilize climate, now.
• Governments must sharply cut CO₂ emissions from power plants and set stringent vehicle fuel-economy standards. Business increasingly seeks the certainty of carbon caps.
• Market-based emissions trading schemes require strict verification and enforcement to succeed. For business, climate change presents large risks and opportunities.

Climate change is accelerating, with alarming consequences.

Overall, consensus seemed universal that the planet is in serious trouble: the status quo isn't sustainable; fundamental change is needed; the hour is late. A heartening theme was that some market forces—which are, as Sachs observed, "powerful tools for mass scalability of solutions"—are emerging as a force for good. Businesses, investors, and consumers are increasingly responding to and pursuing environmentally and socially responsible goals.

And the conference itself was a manifestation of the positive forces at work in the world and of the tremendous recent advances in knowledge across the sustainability agenda—underscoring Sachs's point that successfully meeting challenges depends in large measure on the capacity of institutions to absorb this knowledge and act—swiftly, decisively, effectively.

As many conference speakers stressed, success also depends on the willingness of individuals, in both the developing and developed worlds, to change their own behavior. Will people limit the size of their families? Will poor farmers adopt practices that can greatly boost crop yields to meet growing demand for food? As people transcend poverty, will they eschew the destructive patterns of consumption that developed nations practice? Will affluent consumers moderate their ravenous consumption? Will they, as citizens and moral agents, extend more help to the poor?

A young boy carries a bucket through piles of trash in Kibera, Africa's largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: © 2006 Felix Masi/Voiceless Children, Courtesy of Photoshare.

And, a question not posed by the conference, as more and more of the world's poorest people migrate to, and are born in, "megacities," how will those cities—many already overwhelmed— meet basic human needs and manage environmental impacts?

Revisiting the question

State of the Planet 06 threw into high relief the fact that achieving sustainable development will test the human race's celebrated ability to adapt and innovate—and test it on a scale so vast and a timetable so compressed, and with a set of challenges so fiendishly complex, as to aggravate the difficulty by orders of magnitude.

Change may not be linear; uncertainties are huge.

Moreover, the world we must both adapt to and try to shape is risky and changing fast—and perhaps not in a linear fashion. Climate change may not be linear; ecosystems may collapse abruptly. Some changes, like the loss of species and the melting of polar ice caps, are irreversible.

And as always, a wildly distracting set of wild cards is sure to be in play, such as violence in the Middle East and concerns about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear capabilities. Terrorists may strike, with consequences that cannot be foreseen. (A mortal blow to the electric grid would change everything.) Major natural disasters will certainly occur. (The long-dreaded buckle in the San Andreas fault?) A pandemic could sweep the globe.

Uncertainties are huge.

But this is not uncertain: human life will change. One reading of the conference's content suggests that the polite question of whether sustainable development is feasible could be restated this way:

Will our current way of life be radically disrupted by its inevitable consequences? Or will we radically reshape it, to achieve a more equitable global society that lives in balance with nature?

Sachs put it more bluntly in his closing remarks:

Can we have a transformation that achieves sustainability without a wrenching sense of decline or discord in societies, resulting from massive retrenchment of material activity?

That, he said, remains an open question, and it is "perhaps the central research question of The Earth Institute."

Editor's note: About this eBriefing

This eBriefing is designed to both summarize and supplement the State of the Planet 06 conference.

Summaries of conference keynote addresses, talks, and panel discussions link to corresponding transcripts and video posted on The Earth Institute's web site.

Information about speakers includes biographies and links to web sites and, in some cases, their publications.

The eBriefing also offers a rich set of open questions prompted by the conference and an extensive, annotated list of information resources.

Each section of the eBriefing is organized around categories that best reflect its specific content. Thus, Meeting Report session topics and categories within Report Highlights, Open Questions, and Resources differ.

The eBriefing tracks the conference agenda, with these exceptions: Jeffrey Sachs's keynote address is summarized in the Overview above; Mark Malloch Brown's keynote is summarized in Developing Institutions; John Coomber's keynote, in Market Forces; Peter Singer's keynote, in Challenging Behavior. Jeffrey Sachs's closing remarks on Days 1 and 2 are summarized in Summing Up, along with the Summation panel.

Christine Van Lenten is a freelance writer who has written about public policy issues and technical and scientific subjects—many of them in the environmental field—for federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private sector firms.

Developing Effective Institutional Structures

In a keynote address, Mark Malloch Brown, Deputy Secretary-General of the UN at the time of the conference, reported on the "dramatic transformation" within the UN's administration. He also discussed for further fundamental reforms that are essential if the UN is to work effectively toward the MDGs.

Five speakers then addressed the agenda question posed for Session Two:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of global governance in tackling issues of sustainable development?

Carol Bellamy, a former Executive Director of UNICEF, observed that the UN will not be truly effective until its political dysfunction is addressed, and she suggested some ways to take issues "above the political line."

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, asserted that lack of accountability on the part of World Bank and IMF has seriously harmed development, and that trade liberalization, which has failed to benefit the poorest countries, must be rethought.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, Director-General of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, offered a comprehensive assessment of factors from the international to the local level that are retarding development, including conceptual weaknesses in the MDGs. He described some successful initiatives to build capacity in India.

Eric V. Schaeffer, Director of the Environmental Integrity Project, contended that sound data and monitoring must underlie market-based trading schemes designed to reduce pollution, if that goal is to actually be achieved.

Georg Kell, Executive Head of the UN Global Compact, reported on the successes of the world's largest voluntary corporate-citizenship initiative, which is working to strengthen the environmental and social pillars of the global economy.

After making individual presentations, the speakers assembled for a panel discussion.

Keynote address: The UN sets its house in order

Speaker: Mark Malloch Brown
Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations

"Reforming the UN System to Help Meet the MDGs"

(When Brown spoke, he was Chef de Cabinet to the Secretary-General.)

At the intersection of concerns about sustainability and poverty sit the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). How capable is the UN of driving progress toward them?

Mark Malloch Brown drew on his experience as former head of the UN Development Programme and his recent work on reform of UN administration to report on "where UN reform is going in the context of those issues we all care about."

Over time, "the fundamental social compact between the UN and the peoples of the world ... had gotten terribly frayed," he reflected. "We had to reconnect with our base ... not just governments, but peoples." To "revive and refocus a UN that made a difference in the lives of people everywhere," three core concerns were defined: development, security, and human rights.

Regarding development, "We've made significant progress," Brown reported. The MDGs "created a platform for an astonishing increase in commitments to development finance": $100 billion by 2010, double the amount in 2000, with dramatic increases for poor countries, particularly Africa. Those commitments—a beginning, not an end—could never have been achieved if the UN had not established the MDGs and then worked with a large network of organizations to advance them.

The UN "has undergone a dramatic transformation," he continued. Two-thirds of the Secretariat staff now work in the field, in peacekeeping, peace building, humanitarian response, and development work. "That operational work ... is the real heart and soul of the modern organization." Freeing the Secretariat from the "straitjacket" of a complex committee system is the task at hand.

What will make the most difference is ending the "extraordinary fragmentation" of UN agencies.

What will make the most difference, Brown speculated, is ending the "extraordinary fragmentation" among the eighteen or so UN development agencies. "We've established the MDGs, we've got the world to express the political will to achieve them by 2015, we've laid out a broad blueprint ... we've put at least the promise of the financing largely in place. But unless we can put our own house in order ... we're going to let down our part of the show."

Fragmentation, duplication, high overhead, and uncertainties about funding must be replaced by a demand-driven system that's "unified around a country's own development strategy" and provides resources on a predictable, multi-year basis. More cents in the development dollar must reach the poor; roles must be clarified.

With MDGs now at the center of the development equation, Brown observed, the next challenge is to put them at the center of political life in developing nations, so that governments must respond to citizens' demands for steady, measurable, benchmarked progress. The UN can make a vital contribution to capacity building through technical assistance, too, while recognizing where other parties should lead.

The "vital process of renewal and refocus" can make the UN an institution in which "people everywhere hear their aspirations, and that responds to and supports them—truly "a UN of 'we the peoples.'"

Augmenting the UN's effectiveness

Speaker: Carol Bellamy
President and Chief Executive Officer, World Learning; Former Executive Director, UNICEF

"The Serious Business of Children"

Carol Bellamy's career has equipped her with a pragmatic approach to advocacy, and she used it to reflect on how the UN can further strengthen its effectiveness.

The 2005 World Summit reaffirmed the centrality of development to the UN's work "and the need to view peace, development, and human rights and the rule of law as interlinked and interdependent," Bellamy recalled. It made clear that the development agenda is one of the UN's most critical contributions in the economic and social field.

To play a global role in sustainable development, she suggested, the UN must strengthen its effectiveness. Important changes have been made, and a high-level "coherence panel" is now exploring how the UN system can work more effectively in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance, and the environment.

Bellamy said she envisions a UN that "operates as a single, coherent, worldwide system," delivering its products and services efficiently and effectively, and playing a leadership role in development, as described in the 2005 Summit declaration. "When appropriate, the UN would speak with a single voice globally and nationally," while retaining its capacity to address specialized issues.

Such a UN "would derive strength from its unity" without losing "the advantages of its diversity, its specialized skills, and the brands of its constituent parts." For example, the World Health Organization, World Food Program, and UNICEF have recognizable identities and trademarks that benefit the UN. A partnership is needed to involve the entire UN system—the funds and programs, the World Bank and IMF, the specialized agencies. "This is the elephant in the room that people don't talk about."

"UN reform has about as many meanings as globalization, Bellamy reflected. But certainly the UN's effectiveness can't be separated from "the political side," which is still dysfunctional. The UN "has extraordinary capacity to be a real player in sustainable development," but in the long run, no matter how coherent, how effective, how many working groups, how many executive committees, political dysfunction jeopardizes it.

What do you do about that?

The UN can learn from, and build on, small successes, to take some issues "above the political line."

The UN can learn from, and build on, its small successes and those of the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, UNDP, and UNICEF. UNICEF—a "serious business," with about 9000 staff members in 157 countries and a budget of more than $2 billion—tries to "move children above the political line ... to create an environment where people can transcend political interests, where a UNICEF can point out violations of children's rights without jeopardizing ... the total [UN] system."

To be a serious player in sustainable development, the UN must identify "those small victories, small possibilities, real possibilities, that can take it above the political line." In the long run, it should "engage the entire politic." Until the political dimension of the UN is confronted realistically, "the UN will continue to be only one of many, and not really the player in sustainable development that it should be."

Holding international financial institutions to account

Speaker: Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations

"Needed Reforms to International Economic Governance for Development"

Jomo Kwame Sundaram's talk led to a blunt conclusion: powerful institutions that dominate and govern international economic relations aren't held accountable in any serious way for failures to promote economic growth, improve economic welfare, and achieve meaningful economic development. This is partly due to the kind of governance that characterizes them. To make serious progress in sustainable development, we must transform these governance structures.

Jomo began with these observations:

• Economic growth and improvement in the human condition have slowed. Less than 5% of economic growth has trickled down to people who live on less than $2 a day—nearly half the world's population.
• Research shows "little systematic evidence of a relationship between the usual indicators of governance and economic growth." (See Sachs et al, 2004.)
• Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and IMF) are characterized by corporate, not democratic, governance: one dollar, one vote, rather than one country, one vote, or one person, one vote.

Lack of accountability "has serious, profound, lasting implications for economic development" and has generally adversely affected developing countries, Jomo contended. Bretton Woods institutions and others have been promoting international financial liberalization. Developing countries were told funds would flow from the rich to the poor, the cost of funds would decline, and greater stability would follow. The opposite has happened: generally, net capital has flowed from the South to the North, the cost of funds has not declined, and major financial institutions have enjoyed excess profits.

While volatility in exchange and interest rates has declined, "new systemic elements" have caused greater instability and more currency and financial crises. Financial interests have demanded that developing countries adopt conservative, deflationary, economic policies. Macroeconomic policy has tended to be pro-cyclical, exacerbating the ups and downs of the international financial system. Growth has often translated into market bubbles; downturns have been more severe than need be. Development bank resources have declined significantly.

Middle-income developing countries have chosen to opt out of an international monetary and financial system they see as inimical; the major players who remain are the rich countries and the poorest countries, with the latter subjected to policies not of their making or choice. This has exacerbated a growing divide. And as middle-income countries have been opting out, the "self-insurance" practiced in much of east Asia—using foreign exchange reserves to insure countries against possible currency speculation—reduces funds available for more productive purposes.

Trade liberalization hasn't contributed to growth or reduced poverty.

The trading system requires rethinking, too, Jomo observed. Trade liberalization has increased significantly, but many recent studies, including several late 2005 reports from the World Bank, find that it hasn't contributed and is not going to contribute much to growth or poverty reduction. Historically, trade liberalization tends to follow development; premature liberalization undermines economic capacity building. Gains "tend to be one-shot," and much more modest than previously claimed.

Along with a long-term decline in "the terms of trade" (the ratio of the price of a country's exports to the price of its imports) for primary commodities, recent decades have seen significant declines in the terms of trade for developing countries' manufactured goods compared to those from wealthier countries. This trend has been worsened by the monopoly pricing power of big corporations derived from strengthened intellectual property rights in the last two decades.

Only five developing countries are likely to benefit from trade liberalization. The poorest countries, especially those in Africa, can't benefit: they lack requisite productive and export capacities. Jomo remarked that "if we look at what is being negotiated very seriously in the Doha Round," very little "is developmental."

Connecting macro policy with grassroots action

Speaker: Rajendra K. Pachauri
Director-General, The Energy and Resources Institute; Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

"Evolving Institutional Structures for Sustainable Development: Connecting Macro Policy with Grassroots Action"

Rajendra Pachauri's prominence as chair of the IPCC may obscure his many other accomplishments. He drew from them to examine, top to bottom, what it will take to achieve sustainable development.

The gap between rich and poor nations has widened dramatically, he pointed out. Our expanding ecological footprint is intermingled with the problems of poverty, which climate change and other ecological disasters will exacerbate. The regional distribution of the footprint reveals marked differences among societies. If Asia follows the path taken by more developed societies, "the planet is in serious trouble."

Plans for meeting the MDGs suffer from conceptual weaknesses.

"There are conceptual weaknesses" in plans for meeting the MDGs," Pachauri stated. Energy inputs, so important to meeting the goals, aren't explicitly addressed. Natural resource implications haven't been taken into account. We haven't clearly examined ecological implications. "The vitally important element of technology development and innovation ... is not receiving attention at all." The challenge of human resource development isn't receiving the attention required.

Perhaps most important, "there's no upward flow of knowledge and experience." The fact that the MDGs were adopted through a successful international process seems to have left the world with the impression that all that's needed is a top-down approach. That's not going to work. And there's "the usual problem of relying on business as usual, and therefore a total lack of innovation in what we are doing." This is where institutional changes are vitally important, Pachauri advised.

What's missing internationally? Regarding the MDGs, assessment of progress and innovation: effectively monitoring progress can promote action. How resources are generated and deployed is critical to meeting the MDGs. Better coordination among international agencies is needed. "Ultimately, meeting the MDGs is going to depend on how effectively we're able to mobilize relevant knowledge in this entire field."

At the national level, too, stovepiping hampers ministries and departments. Bottom-up initiatives are lacking. "There's a total lack of technological innovation. If you look at water and sanitation, most programs are driven purely by a business-as-usual approach."

At the grassroots level, a generalized strengthening of capabilities can create the conditions for addressing specific MDGs. Toward this end, Pachauri argued, we must modernize traditional industry, because this is how incomes will grow, capabilities will be enhanced, and communities can address the MDGs.

Problems (left) and solutions (right).

Pachauri described how this has been done with brick production in India, where more than 100,000 rural enterprises together employ eight million people, under poor working conditions, to produce 140 billion bricks per year. The industry consumes primarily coal, generates air pollution and lots of carbon emissions, causes loss of topsoil, and is energy inefficient, to boot. The introduction of efficient brick kilns has reduced coal consumption and air pollution substantially. Partially mechanizing the brick-making process has reduced drudgery. Technical advances in brick design have saved clay and fuel.

Applications of photovoltaics and innovative building construction offer other examples of modernization. The building sector in developing countries, particularly in India and China, is booming, Pachauri noted, but new structures are locking high energy intensity in place. We need to create capacity and knowledge, and innovate, so development doesn't burden Earth's resources.

"We need to listen to local voices, highlight local solutions, design programs and projects for local conditions, and create local capacity," he urged. Democracy "is not merely holding elections at the national level. It really has to be much deeper and requires a much firmer commitment to improving the lot of people at the grassroots level."

Theory vs. reality in market-based environmental regulation

Speaker: Eric V. Schaeffer
Director, Environmental Integrity Project

"Environmental Enforcement in Market-based Economies"

Eric Schaeffer brought "an enforcement perspective" to the conference. Working in enforcement tends to make you suspicious, he confided. The U.S. diesel truck-engine industry illustrates his point. Its comical manipulations of emissions tests for catalytic converters and evasions of emissions standards resulted in penalties of $80 million. The deep question is, what happens when that mentality meets the market-based approach to environmental regulation? "You have to worry about that," Schaeffer advised.

In a typical market trading system, a total emissions ceiling for a sector is divvied up among emitters. If you emit less than you're allowed, you can sell your unused allowances to someone who's exceeded theirs. Such systems seem to offer an appealing "logical elegance," he said, promising less work for government, greater efficiency for industry. But, two rude facts intrude:

• The idea that market-based approaches mean less work for government is largely false. Often it means lots more work. Government must not only track emission allowances for individual plants; it must try to track transactions: Who sold what to whom? Does that party own the allowances? Was the purchase complete?
• Accurate emissions monitoring and reliable data are essential, but we're far from meeting that standard.

If market-based approaches are to succeed, we must address these problems, he insisted.

EPA home page for clean air markets data and maps.

Researchers at the World Bank examined the design and operation of market-based emissions trading programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. They found that the programs can cost more than traditional command and control programs. Data and monitoring were so poor that, essentially, many permitting programs on which market-based approaches were built didn't exist. Design was flawed, practice was wanting, and in many cases, enforcement was non-existent. "Law abiding companies were being shafted" because they were paying for pollution controls while their competitors weren't, Schaeffer noted. As the bank's researchers wrote, "This lack of enforcement creates uncertainty ... and tends to perpetuate noncompliance."

The United States, too, "is still struggling with fundamental problems," he continued. He discussed some EPA programs:

• The Toxics Release Inventory, or "Community Right to Know Program," requires companies to report toxic chemicals released to air and water and generated in waste. Users' ability to manipulate this database is "pretty advanced," but the data aren't very good; no rules govern their quality. For example, an emitter can report an industry-wide average rather than actual emissions.
• The Acid Rain Program database is better. "We actually use this information to monitor compliance," Schaeffer said.
• Regulations limit the particulate matter that power plants can emit each hour. Emissions are monitored once every five years, at a time chosen by the plant.
• EPA's web tool ECHO (Enforcement and Compliance History Online, covering 800,000 regulated facilities) puts EPA enforcement information online for public use. While a lot of the data "aren't terribly accurate, the system is evolving, and the information is getting sharper."

Much discussion and debate about market-based approaches "is very theoretical," Schaeffer concluded, perhaps because economists are trained to think that way. "We need a lot more attention to the fundamentals of how you implement these programs and how well they can be enforced." Absent this, "we'll have a theory that's basically at war with the facts."

The UN enlists the private sector

Speaker: Georg Kell
Executive Head, United Nations Global Compact

"The UN Global Compact: A Voluntary Approach to Connecting Global Policy with Local Business Action"

In 2000, the UN launched what has become the world's largest voluntary corporate-citizenship initiative. With almost 3000 participants from almost 90 countries—more than half of them developing nations—the UN Global Compact brings together companies, UN agencies, labor, and civil society in pursuit of "a more sustainable and inclusive global economy."

Georg Kell, who heads the Compact, observed that, as a voluntary initiative, the Compact "has its limits, it has its strengths." It's a complement to governments. "Understanding how these complementarities play out is important" for everyone who believes in hybrid, public-private initiatives.

The Compact resulted from a challenge leveled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the 1999 World Economic Forum: as business has benefited from globalization, it should assume some of its responsibilities. Within their spheres of influence, corporations can make the global market more stable by giving it environmental and social pillars. And, acting in support of UN goals makes good business sense.

The concept of engagement has taken off like wildfire.

The past several years have seen "phenomenal growth" in the Compact, and the concept of engagement through learning, examples, and project partnerships, "has taken off like wildfire," Kell said. What's been learned and achieved?

• The moral case for corporate responsibility is now understood; it's the business case that's being made. Initially, CEOs acted defensively, to protect reputation: they'd learned they could avoid costs by acting responsibly. Now, they see opportunities to create long-term value. And long-term investors increasingly recognize that environmental, social, and governance issues are material to long-term corporate performance.
• Corporate governance and corporate responsibilities are converging; transparency and accountability are more highly valued. Compact participants are asked to report their progress publicly at least annually.
• Voluntary initiatives do work, especially at the grassroots level. The Compact has motivated 700 to 800 diverse partnership projects, from workplace health to community engagement on a sustainable level. (Examples are corporations providing HIV/AIDS treatment for their employees, undertaking community projects such as proving housing and access to clean water, and supporting small-scale business development, and large banks supporting microcredit. The initiative "Growing Sustainable Business" now operates in 10 countries.) It's too early to know how scaling up will evolve, but the trend is global.
• Voluntary initiatives can't substitute for government. To bring about large-scale change, private initiatives must be coupled with better public policies. Exciting experiments are under way to combine a private advocacy platform with public policy dialogues. For example, in one country where systemic corruption dominates, business leaders told public officials, "We can't become competitive if public institutions don't become more effective. Let's work together. It will benefit society and us as corporations."
• For the UN, "learning how to work with non-state actors at the global level" can lend momentum to achieving UN goals and reinforce what governments do. In failing states or conflict situations, "the private sector can, under certain circumstances, become a positive force for change."
• Differentiating public and private interests can be difficult. "Combining a global advocacy campaign with local infrastructure that enables scalable solutions is a daunting challenge."

In five years or so, Kell predicted, most corporations will recognize that the global market must be embedded "in broader legitimacy" to be sustainable and robust, and that this requires sound social, environmental, and governance frameworks that support market transactions. Progress on these fronts is imperative, not only to sustain markets, but to spread their benefits.

Panel Discussion

Highlights

The panel discussion that concluded Session Two was moderated by Albert Fishlow, Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, and Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies, Columbia University.

Points below are presented in the order in which speakers made them and are compressed.

Carol Bellamy

• "We're talking about technology ... systems ... processes, and yet so much of this ultimately depends on leadership." Without it, "you're not going to achieve."

Rajendra Pachauri

• Fully internalizing social costs in the pricing of goods and services would require leadership and political courage. If cutting down Brazilian forests carried a cost, there'd be far less incentive to cut. Will national or international leadership devise a system that provides that market signal? There's a huge leadership vacuum. The need for change is urgent. "We need political will at the international level" and recognition that local, national, and goals are the same, or damage will get much worse.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

We must address redistributive questions. Just relying on growth won't do it.

• What Gandhi said is true: there's enough in the world for everybody's needs, but not for everybody's greed. We must address redistributive questions. If we just rely on growth, and only 4% of it reaches the bottom half of the world's population, we're not going to get very far.

Eric Schaeffer

• Power plants are 38% of U.S. carbon emissions and a huge and growing share in places like China and India. If big polluters have disproportionate impacts and are relatively easy to monitor, an international emissions trading system might work. But data must be accurate, and a common system of weights and measures is essential.

Rajendra Pachauri

• If China and India lock into high-intensity energy consumption appliances and structures, we'll pay a high price for years to come. If they set high standards, the rest of the world will fall in line, because that's where the largest markets will be.
• Cars are proliferating. Owning them is one thing; driving is another. We must rely far more on public transport.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

• In the United States, four manufacturers may produce Tamiflu to meet national needs, under national licensing provisions. No other country has been permitted to exercise this principle. They should be. India has limited exports of generic pharmaceuticals. This has serious implications, particularly for Africa. We're not prepared for a severe pandemic.

Citizens everywhere must examine their behavior as consumers.

Georg Kell

• Corporations can bring about enormous improvements. Many non-state actors are far more global than many governments in orientation, sourcing, thinking, and exposure. Some global NGOs have experienced enormous growth. For example, human rights is now a global movement. "At the end of the day, it's about a battle of ideas."
• Citizens everywhere must examine their behavior as consumers. Global business and civil society can bring issues home to citizens and policymakers.

Eric Schaeffer

• In the United States, voluntary programs make very little difference. Regarding carbon dioxide, 99.99% of American industry is waiting for regulation. We're not going to see any real movement without it.
• Environmental groups "die without information. More and more information is available online. The ability to manipulate it is growing more sophisticated. But quality is lagging. We need to deal with that."

Rajendra Pachauri

• NGOs must undergo a transformation. If they focus only on environmental sustainability and neglect development, they'll lose their relevance. They need to be innovative, to come up with solutions. This is the critical need of the future.

Carol Bellamy

• In the long run, sustainable depends greatly on human capacity. Third-party actors are critical to that. NGOs should be held to standards, too.

Challenging Behavioral Patterns and Perspectives

In his keynote address, Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University examined the moral dimensions of issues posed by climate change and poverty and the need for the exercise of personal and institutional responsibility. His discussion of the persistent gap between Americans' beliefs about how much their government contributes in foreign aid and actual levels of spending illuminated a stark and troubling reality.

Five speakers then addressed the agenda question posed for Session Four:

Will societies, with all of their complex social, cultural and religious components, need to modify their behaviors to achieve sustainable development?

Joel E. Cohen, Professor of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities, sketched projected changes in population and key interrelationships among population size, the economy, the environment, and cultural factors. He then addressed a bold question: what would it take and what would it mean to educate all the world's children well for 10–12 years?

Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge, explained that economists conventionally evaluate the worth of investments by applying a positive discount rate that assumes future economic growth. Investing in measures to slow climate change, he suggested, presents a different case: economic growth may not occur, and because a global commons is at stake, a conventional economic paradigm is not appropriate.

Johan Rockström, Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, urged that poor farmers in developing nations be helped to achieve "more crop per drop," by exploiting rainfall now lost to evaporation and runoff. But, he cautioned, competition between farmers' and ecosystems' needs for water must be balanced.

Parker Mitchell, co-CEO and co-Founder, Engineers Without Borders Canada, applied an engineer's pragmatism to the problem of why technical assistance to poor people in developing nations doesn't always succeed. It's essential to closely examine the behavioral reasons why people don't embrace assistance, he contended, and to custom-tailor assistance to specific local conditions.

Andrew Dobson, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, urged a rapid expansion of research to better understand the intricate webs of interrelationships that constitute ecosystems, including the relationship between habitat conversion and levels of ecosystem services and the dynamics of how ecosystems fail.

After making individual presentations, the speakers assembled for a panel discussion.

Keynote Address: Telling right from wrong

Speaker: Peter Singer
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University

"Changing Values for a Sustainable World"

Peter Singer cast two conference subjects that he identified as "fundamental"—climate change and the obligations of affluent nations regarding world poverty—in an ethical framework. In discussions of them, he reflected, such a framework is sometimes lacking.

He framed climate change as "one of the most basic kinds of ethical questions," by defining the atmosphere as a global commons. Its limited capacity to absorb carbon emissions without adverse effects poses the question of how an agreed-upon level of emissions can be equitably allocated—particularly given developing nations' desires. From the standpoint of any of three basic ethical principles, he concluded, the United States should greatly reduce its emissions. At present, it's "simply doing the wrong thing."

Singer favors allocating equal per capita emissions allowances to nations, adjusting for projected population growth, and providing for an emissions trading scheme. This could induce nations with low per capita emissions to enter the scheme and keep their emissions low, he speculated. Countries that don't join should perhaps be sanctioned, because they're passing along an externality to the rest of the world that reduces their own production costs and gives them an unfair advantage.

The average American can save more carbon by switching to a vegan diet than to a Prius.

But responsibility for reducing emissions doesn't rest with governments alone. Individuals can act. Fuel-efficient cars are important, but "the average American can save more carbon by switching from a typical American diet to a vegan diet than from switching ... to the Prius," Singer contended. That's because the way we rear animals is extremely energy intensive, particularly for beef.

Turning from the subject of climate change to our obligations to the poor, Singer observed that "we're all shocked by sudden tragedies like Hurricane Katrina." But 27,000 children are dying each day because of extreme poverty—more than 9 million deaths a year that are preventable. He recounted a parable of "the drowning child" to contend that "it is wrong for us to allow children to die from poverty-related causes" that we can prevent without great sacrifice to ourselves.

As an example of how individuals can act, he told of a friend who'd used $7300 from an inheritance to pay for a sanitary water supply for an Ethiopian village. It will provide safe drinking water for years, reducing disease and the time women spend hauling water. By reducing the amount of fuel that must be gathered and burned to boil dirty water, it protects the environment. Another example: consumers can buy products that support fair trade.

On the level of government action, current U.S. foreign aid is minuscule and spent largely to serve strategic goals; the poorest countries receive less than one-quarter of it, Singer said. Polls reveal that "Americans are badly confused about this": the amount they'd like the government to give is ten times what it actually gives, although many people think it gives too much. "That clearly is a failure ... of political leadership."

"The basic needs of others should be a pressing call ... on our governments and on us personally to change our values and to do what we can to help them," he concluded.

Educating all the world's children

Speaker: Joel E. Cohen
Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations, Rockefeller University; Professor of Populations, Columbia University; Head of the Laboratory of Populations, The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Rockefeller University

"Education in Developing Countries"

Joel E. Cohen sketched projected population demographics out to 2050, and he explained why they make education for the developing world even more important.

As reported in his September 2005 Scientific American article, "Human Population Grows Up", out of every six people in the world, four or five now live in poverty; their numbers are growing 15 times faster than the number of rich people. Their rates of HIV/AIDS and infant mortality are far higher; their lives, shorter. By 2050, total population could rise to 9.1 billion; the Middle East could have three times the population of Europe, "a colossal change in one century."

Age structures will shift dramatically: for example, by 2050, Europe's population will be shrinking; the Middle East will have "an enormous youth bulge." Worldwide, population will be older, more urban, and growing more slowly. Major uncertainties concern the extent of international migration and family size. Population size, the economy, the environment, and culture are interrelated, Cohen stressed. Huge expansion in wealth has been driven largely by energy consumption. The resultant increase in carbon and nitrogen emissions, due more to economic than to population growth, has affected the environment. Similarly, increases in water withdrawals have been driven more by economic than population growth.

What if all children had 10 to 12 years of high-quality education? What would it take to achieve this?

"The major cultural event of the 20th century was the spread of primary education." It's "an amazing achievement," Cohen stated. His book How Many People Can the Earth Support? identifies panaceas proposed for global problems. Those goals could be achieved by educating all children well for 10 to 12 years, he contended. A Universal Basic and Secondary Education project he co-directs is examining two questions: What would the world be like if all children had 10 to 12 years of high-quality education? What would it take to achieve this by 2050?

At present, perhaps 115 million children of primary school age aren't enrolled in school, about 20%; perhaps 300 million children of secondary school age aren't, roughly 50%. Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and South and West Asia were the three regions with the largest numbers of children out of school in 2001, and in that year they accounted for 85% of children out of school. And, most children in school "are getting a lousy education," Cohen added.

Crucially, education affects and is affected by population. More-educated people live longer, marry later, migrate more, have fewer children, want more education for their children. "Ten years of education gets you between two and five fewer children per woman." Conversely, population size and age structure affects the size of the school-age population. "Rapid population growth makes schooling all children more difficult."

Education about family life, sex, and the environment warrants far more effort, Cohen stressed. Reducing population growth is probably a cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions.

What it would cost to educate all the world's children through secondary school? One estimate, highly speculative, is $34 billion to $69 billion more a year. One obstacle is simple lack of information: "The statistics are totally inadequate for us to know about the quality and distribution of education," he observed.

Cohen closed by posing "big questions about education in the 21st century":

• Will today's elderly invest more resources in the young or in themselves?
• Will the developing world adopt models of education that exploit new information technologies and opportunities?
• Should developing countries spend a marginal dollar on education, health, physical infrastructure, or applied research? On primary, secondary, or tertiary education?
• Will education instill values that divide people, or bring them together? Will it give children the skills to cope with diversity?

We must talk about what we want from education, he urged. And because the 21st century is about "mastery of information through biology and computing," we must prepare our children to master information if they're to participate "in the leading edge."

How economists think about value

Speaker: Sir Partha Dasgupta
Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge; Fellow of St. John's College

"Discounting Global Warming"

Sir Partha Dasgupta led his listeners through an exercise in reasoning. We've been told about the magnitude of global warming and the difficulties humanity is likely to face, he observed. Yet the economics literature pays little attention to these problems. "If anything, the suggestion has been that ... it's tomorrow's problem."

About two years ago, he recalled, eight eminent economists were invited to Copenhagen to discuss this question: Given $50 billion to spend over five years on 10 global problems, what would you spend it on, in what order? The "Copenhagen consensus" ranked global warming last. "Is," Dasgupta asked wryly, "economics beyond repair?"

The problem is not with economics per se, he explained, but with economists' "reluctance to engage with environmental scientists and work through this extraordinary problem." The reason economists in Copenhagen concluded that money spent to slow global warming should be spent not now but in the future is that economists tend to use a positive rate to discount future benefits resulting from current expenditures.

For example, for public projects in the United States, it's customary to use a 4% or 5% discount rate, the opportunity cost of the investment: safe government bonds earn approximately that, so a competing project should yield that return to be worth it. At 4% a year, a dollar's worth of additional consumption benefits 100 years from now would be worth less than $.03 today. Thus, projects that pay off 50 or 60 years from now must be very productive.

For a "global commons issue," what humanity should do collectively differs from what an individual investor should do.

But global warming is a "global commons issue," and what humanity should do, collectively, differs from what an individual should expect for a dollar's investment. Why, collectively, should we discount at all?

Dasgupta cited two reasons. First, we may simply be impatient: we want the benefit now. For global warming, that argument is inappropriate: an individual may not be here at some future date; society will be. Second, if you think you're going to be better off 20 years from now, an extra dollar will be less valuable in the future. You need it more now. Rising consumption argues for discounting at a positive rate. But declining consumption argues for discounting at a negative rate.

Americans don't think about declining consumption, because they've experienced nothing but growth, Dasgupta pointed out. But over the past 30 years or so, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced declining per capita consumption. A government advisor in sub-Saharan Africa in 1970 with a reasonable forecast of what was in store "would be absolutely insane to use a positive discount rate to evaluate public projects."

Similarly, if you believe global consumption may eventually decline because of climate change, you reach a conclusion that's the opposite of the Copenhagen consensus. Note, Dasgupta added, that the rate of return to private investors could be positive while the community discount rate is negative. Indeed, we're accustomed to accepting differences. What's new is that the difference can be so great that one can be positive and the other negative.

Exploiting available water and boosting Its productivity for agriculture

Speaker: Johan Rockström
Executive Director, Stockholm Environment Institute

"A New Perspective on Water Poverty and Sustainability: Green and Blue Water Options to Attain the MDGs"

Johann Rockström introduced "a new freshwater paradigm" that, he contends, can help secure sustainable freshwater to eradicate hunger and poverty: Expand management of water to encompass all available moisture that falls as rain, and boost its productivity.

Food production now constitutes 90% of human water requirements, he explained, and demand for food is growing. Water withdrawals from rivers and aquifers, particularly for agriculture, are growing fast, too—six-fold over the past 100 years. Water-scarce regions where current climate variability is high correlate with areas of malnourishment. "Dry region" savannahs, in particular, are global hotspots in terms of poverty, hunger, and water-related challenges: more than two billion people live there, 90% of them in developing countries. Population growth is fastest there. Africa is an urgent case. It's most subject to climate variability, in the form of frequent drought, and climate change could aggravate this.

The challenge of hunger is essentially one of water management.

Thus, Rockström observed, "the challenge of hunger is essentially a challenge of water management," a "massive challenge" not addressed by the MDGs.

Conceptualize the hydrological cycle by partitioning rainfall into two fluxes, Rockström suggested:

• Green water flows through evaporation and plant transpiration via photosynthesis back to the atmosphere. Globally, it constitutes 60% of all water; it sustains all terrestrial ecosystems.
• Blue water is the liquid water that flows from catchment areas to oceans through large river systems. It's 40% of all water.

Classic water resource maps portray 30% of world population facing water scarcity by 2025. But those maps rely on "blue water" data. Water policy today is focused on direct economic use of blue water for domestic uses, irrigation, and industry. But while blue water diverted from rivers for irrigation is important, it's a small contribution to total food production, and increasing its use comes at the cost of damaging aquatic habitats. Most food production relies heavily on vapor fluxes from rain. "We have no clue whatsoever of how much water is actually used to produce food," Rockström said. Water vapor is a major water resource, but it's never taken into account in water resource planning. "Here lies an opportunity."

A book Rockström coauthored, Balancing Water for Humans and Nature, calls for "a triply green revolution": he would like to double food production in one generation, in a way that's environmentally sustainable and upgrades rain-fed agriculture for small holder farmers. How?

In poor countries, only 10%–15% of rainfall is productive green water flow; most of the rest leaves the farmer's field as evaporation; some, as runoff, degrading the land. We can increase "crop per drop," Rockström explained, by getting water down into the soil and available for uptake, so it can return productively to the atmosphere. "We can double and triple [water] yields." We regard savannas as dry lands; "actually there's ample water but at the wrong time." Water management techniques like conservation tillage, which enables the soil to absorb water, and supplemental irrigation can bridge dry spells. Other synergies are possible. Soil fertility is essential.

To reduce hunger by half, "you'll have to eat into other ecosystems consuming green water. There will be tradeoffs; that's the crisis of how to balance water for food and nature." But small low-yield farmers can boost crop productivity while decreasing the amount of water they use, if green water resources are exploited.

We can achieve a sustainable green revolution, Rockstrom concluded, if this knowledge informs integrated land-water resource management, if freshwater policy expands to encompass agricultural and environmental policy, and if farmers are helped to learn how to exploit rainfall's bounty.

A fine-grained analysis of resistance to change

Speaker: Parker Mitchell
Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Engineers Without Borders Canada

"Exploring the Practical Challenges of Creating Positive Change in Development"

Parker Mitchell's organization, Engineers Without Borders, pursues sustainable development by developing human capacity. Partnering with organizations ranging from the World Bank to tiny community groups, it helps build knowledge and capacity among local entrepreneurs and organizations so they can spread innovative and appropriate solutions to poverty. "To me the central problem ... is why poverty reduction isn't happening more quickly," Mitchell stated.

Along with the need for more money, more ideas, a different perspective, new technical solutions, Mitchell argued, we need "a better understanding of what happens on the ground ... Basically, implementation is the difficulty of translating ideas and money into impact." It's "not necessarily sexy. It's about ... nitty-gritty details." It's not easy. It's usually location-specific: a project successful in one place might not be just a few kilometers away. It's usually dynamic, requiring change as circumstances change.

No one formula applies. Success requires "understanding each community's particularities" and incorporating them into project design and implementation.

What drives development is people changing their behaviors, Mitchell said. Deep understanding of local situations, and of how behavior can change, can improve outcomes for projects designed in distant capitals. He offered "three big ideas."

The spread of existing, useful, low-capital technologies and techniques could be accelerated if behavior change were better understood. Over one billion people don't have access to clean water. Solutions such as solar pasteurization and a household chlorine treatment are easily affordable; adopting them requires behavior change.

Factors that drive behavior must be understood. In project planning, factors that seem not rational, economically tend to be underestimated. Conservation farming, a simple-seeming technique that can yield massive crop increases, offers one example. Why weren't African farmers adopting it? A fine-grained analysis identified five distinct, deeply rooted, reasons that could be addressed. Similarly, why did poor farmers resist growing sorghum, although in terms of labor required, yield, nutrition, and susceptibility to drought, "sorghum is probably the best crop out there"? Careful analysis revealed reasons that could be addressed. For innovations to be widely adopted, field implementers must address sources of resistance and adapt innovations to local realities.

Behavior change leads development. If an outsider provides free inputs, like education, water, seeds, and fertilizer, will behavior change follow? If not, another strategy is needed. Mitchell believes the closer one is to physical production—like growing a crop, as opposed to delivering healthcare —"the more careful one needs to be about providing free inputs."

These considerations bear on implementation, he said:

• When a project is scaled up, usually it's very difficult to ensure that free inputs trickle down to the poorest farmers.
• It's easy to overlook the education component needed to improve crop yields—"the true extension work," which can take some years.
• Women tend to invest increased income in more education for their children and healthcare; men tend to spend it on consumables such as alcohol and tobacco.
• An open question is whether outside intervention creates a culture of dependency.

More honest discussion is needed about projects that aren't working.

Everyone who plans a development project should spend a week fully immersed in a community, asking questions, Mitchell urged. And more honest discussion is needed about projects that aren't working. Looking ahead, "We need a new generation of practitioners, both Western and local, who are going to be sensitive to and comfortable with the realistic pace of development work, and who are going to bring a powerful intellectual pragmatism to trying to solve some of the challenges of implementation."

Quantifying ecosystem roulette

Speaker: Andrew Dobson
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University

"Ecosystem Collapse and Sustainable Development"

The need for fundamental research in the field of ecology is "urgent," Andrew Dobson contended.

Natural ecosystems provide crucial services all human beings rely on, he stated, but we may neglect to quantify their input to the human economy, or we may underestimate their value. And we don't do enough research to quantify their value. The lives of poor people are even more intimately linked to the environment than are the lives of other people, but in fact we're all intimately linked: humans wouldn't survive the extinction of all other species. With destruction of ecosystems accelerating, we need to better understand interdependencies among species and ecosystem services.

Along with global climate change, global habitat change "is destroying the world," Dobson said—principally, as habitats are converted to agriculture; 90% of the threat to biodiversity is habitat change in the tropics. Climate change is a much smaller threat, and it mainly threatens species in cooler climates. Loss of biodiversity due to climate change will proceed from the poles to the equator; that due to habitat loss, from the equator to the poles.

To better understand ecosystem services, we need to quantify them, he explained; classification helps. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment listed ecosystems services and classified them on a spectrum from resilient to brittle. How do ecosystem services map to species diversity? How do services collapse as species go extinct? "Coarse mapping" of species to services generally finds more resilience at the bottom of the food web: species at the top tend to be lost at a faster rate; the "decomposers" are the last to go, he said.

At what point does the entire ecosystem start to collapse? "That's the big, hard question for ecology."

A big question, relatively unstudied, is this: As we lose species, at what point does the entire ecosystem start to collapse because the interplay of services has been lost? How do you quantify and model that, to examine how habitat is converted, so you know whether and when ecosystem services are going to break down? "That's the big, hard question for ecology."

Conversion of land to agriculture is a major change, worldwide, Dobson stressed. While the green revolution significantly slowed the rate of land conversion, and "the genetic revolution" slowed it too, the green revolution is heavily dependent on water, which may depend on pristine habitat. If you're concerned about poverty and human population, you want to know much land is devoted to agriculture and how many people it can support.

What happens if agricultural productivity depends on how much land is forested? Dobson borrowed one of biology's best-understood models, the dynamics of infectious disease, to examine what happens when the productivity of agriculture and the number of humans it can support is a function of the ratio of the amount of land under forest to the amount of land under agriculture. That dependence argues for conserving forest in order to sustain agriculture and populations dependent upon it, he said. At a point of equilibrium, people are living at a better standard, possibly because they're benefiting from both ecosystem and agriculture services, but at a much lower population density.

Dobson urged more interactions among ecologists, economists, sociologists, and other researchers to promote better understanding, quantitatively, of the relationship between habitat conversion and ecosystem services; how trophic-level diversity (an organism's position in a food chain) maps onto the diversity of services; whether ecosystems collapse randomly or with a predictable, sequential loss of services; and how services change as ecosystems collapse and are restored.

"But most of all," he cautioned, "we need to realize that the time ... is really short."

Panel Discussion

Highlights

The panel discussion that concluded Session Four was moderated by Roberta G. Balstad, Director, Center for International Earth Science Information Network, The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Points below are presented in the order in which speakers made them and are compressed.

Sir Partha Dasgupta

"The numbers don't add up."

• The numbers don't add up for the huge inequality between wealth and poverty to persist. And you want growth across the board. The past 40 to 50 years have seen growing polarization. It's hard to think of a scenario in which you can maintain this and claim you're on a sustainable path.

Johann Rockström

• To lift the one billion people who are living on less than $1 a day today out of poverty, demands on energy, land, water, and other resources are insignificant at the scale of the global challenge. We could do this sustainably. But once poor people cross that threshold, aspiring to Western lifestyles would be the wrong trajectory. The key is to "reduce and change lifestyles at the top, so you guide the bottom."

Joel Cohen

• Certainly, "poverty" means material shortages, not having enough calories to protect yourself against disease, not having a secure place to live. But beyond that level, wealth may not entail a lot of material throughput. "The definition of wealth ... once we get rid of poverty, will probably evolve a lot."

Andrew Dobson

• For many people, so much of their quality of life is tied up with other species with which they coexist. If you lose those species, you destroy that lifestyle and replace it with one that might not be so healthy. "I don't know many Masai who [consult] a psychologist." That might be tied in with their interactions with other species.

Joel Cohen

Education depends on food, water, health, shelter, getting to school. These things must be integrated.

• You can't learn on an empty stomach, or if you're full of worms and feverish. Education depends on non-educational infrastructure—food, water, health, shelter, and getting to school. These things must be integrated. That's what makes it complicated. There's not a magic bullet.

Parker Mitchell

• Why aren't people being educated? We have to understand and address root factors, which differ from place to place. For example, building latrines in schools increases girls' enrollment by 5%–10%, because sending your girls to a school without a latrine carries a stigma.
• In development two approaches prevail: (1) try to improve service delivery; (2) put money and power into the hands of poor people, so they can make their own decisions. An external delivery mechanism can break down, because the ultimate beneficiaries don't have the power to ensure that delivery actually happens.

Sir Partha Dasgupta

• It's not only the poorest people who need education. It's remarkable how ill-educated we are in understanding the feedbacks and perturbations our lifestyle creates. We need to consume less. We mustn't think exclusively about what's happening in Africa and South Asia. So many of our ills are due to us.

Andrew Dobson

• We must change the thinking at the top of the pyramid—particularly the United States's massive focus on terrorism as the biggest threat to the world. "If you want a world that's going to breed terrorism, have a world that's environmentally degraded ... [W]e should be thinking much more about producing an environmentally sustainable world, one in which education has reduced the potential for terrorism to breed in the first place."

Johann Rockström

• We should respect local cultures but remember that some practices were grafted onto them not so long ago. Farmers and other poor people can be much more receptive to innovation that you might suppose.

Open Questions

On the State of the Planet 06 agenda, the subjects of the four main sessions were elaborated as questions. Speakers' talks and the panel discussions raised many more questions and pointed toward still others. The questions presented here are a small sampling of those the conference prompted. They sketch only partially the breadth, depth, and complexity of the subjects that sustainable development encompasses.

We've sorted open questions under the following categories:

• Aligning policy with reality
• Capacity building
• Alleviating poverty, facilitating development
• Ecosystems and human health
• Climate change
• Fossil fuels and clean energy
• Market forces

Because so many issues are interrelated, many categories overlap, some heavily. For example, climate change, government action, energy, and market forces are inseparable. Questions could be sorted in many ways, no one of them satisfactory. If a question that seems obvious is missing from one category, it may show up in another. Or, it may not. We simply hope readers will find interest and value in the range of questions posed.

But as conference speaker David Refkin said, "[A]t the end of the day, it's about finding answers, and we need more answers in this world."

Aligning policy with reality

Making economics tell us the truth

GNP measures only gross production and consumption of marketed goods and services, relegating environmental and social impacts to the category of "externalities." It drives policy around the globe, with ruinous consequences. What will it take for nations to adopt ecological economics' reality-based measure of human well-being and ecosystem health?

Will ecological economics shape the thinking of economists within (1) federal, state, and local governments; (2) the World Bank and IMF; (3) major investment banks; (4) business schools; (5) major foundations and think tanks—fast enough to matter?

What strategy for gradually transforming tax policies to reflect ecological realities can earn political support? Will a "green tax shift" toward ecotax policies gradually occur?

If governments embraced ecological economics and altered their policies accordingly, how would the market valuations of major corporations change? What forms of investment would capital seek?

Making government serve sustainability goals

How within the political arena can environmental and energy issues be repositioned so that environmental security and energy security are taken as seriously as military security? When will the archaic U.S. defense budget and archaic tax subsidies be reshaped to reflect these realities?

Thinking the unthinkable: How might governments engineer significant income redistribution peaceably?

Beyond fundamental changes in policy and budget priorities, for the U.S. government to pursue sustainable development in earnest, what changes to the executive branch and the current congressional committee structure are required? How severely would the federal deficit constrain efforts?

How successful will London's attempts to become an "exemplary, sustainable city" prove to be? How successful will other cities+ be?

Will developing nations develop, implement, and fully enforce sound environmental regulations?

Making better decisions

How can the public and private sectors rapidly increase their ability to absorb scientific knowledge and deal with complex scientific issues, so that decisions made by legislators, judges, agency administrators, and corporate officers are adequately informed and soundly reached?

To be useful, credible, and defensible, a decision-making process must be clear and transparent to all parties. Can current processes adequately handle the decisions that sustainability goals demand? How can they be strengthened?

Industrial ecology illuminates how materials and energy flow through economies and impact the environment. Exactly how can economic, political, regulatory, and social decision making be modified to methodically take these impacts into account?

Making politics more responsive

How can we get the issues that matter the most into the center of public debate, particularly when urgent issues such as Iraq, a nuclear Iran, and natural catastrophes dominate the news?

How can the relentless pressures of U.S. election cycles be moderated, so that elected officials can more easily address critical long-term issues?

Do we need a "new kind of politics," or do we just need to work much harder to make the current system serve sustainability goals? Will ventures like the new, bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection alter political alignments?

What networked alternatives to the current political system can advance the sustainable-development agenda? Will Internet-based initiatives like OneWorldTV, which harnesses mobile phone technology to "lift the voices of the people above the noise of the crowd," and Stop Global Warming, which is promoting a "virtual march," contribute to real political change?

Absent U.S. government leadership, how far can Americans get toward achieving sustainability goals?

More philanthropists and nonprofit groups are engaging with problems related to sustainable development. How much of a difference can they make? Will efforts funded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett produce results that not only benefit poor people in developing countries but make issues related to poverty a higher priority in the developed world?

How severe will the impacts of climate change and ecosystem destruction have to become to trigger action on the scale and schedule needed to address these problems in earnest?

Helping the public understand

For a distracted public with a short attention span, how can scientists best "get the message out"? How can they become more effective communicators?

How can the media in developing as well as developed countries be helped to tell this story more effectively?

To help citizens better grasp the challenges we face and motivate them to act, what specific messages are appropriate? How can insights from marketing, advertising, and the social sciences help?

How will the growing attention to climate change, energy issues, and humanitarian causes in popular culture—movies, books, and TV—shape individual behavior, public opinion, and political action? Will celebrities' efforts and documentaries like Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth and New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman's TV special, Addicted to Oil: Thomas Friedman Reporting, drive real change?

Why have efforts to help Americans grasp how very little their government spends on foreign aid failed so miserably?

Population and geopolitical concerns

Will global population growth be slowed?

How will demographic trends affect the geopolitical landscape and sustainability goals?

Will increasing demand for food, fresh water, and fossil fuels aggravate regional political instabilities? Will the international community have the capacity to manage potential conflicts?

Will burgeoning megacities spawn political unrest? Will high-density population centers promote greater efficiency of resource distribution and use?

How successfully will terrorists exploit the vulnerabilities of an increasingly networked, globalized world? With what consequences for sustainable development? for global cooperation?

Over the long term, will democracies prove more or less environmentally responsible and than other forms of government?

Capacity building

Changing perception and behavior in the developed world

Is there any evidence that individuals and societies can change their behavior fast enough, and on the scale needed, to alter current destructive trend lines?

Are most citizens in affluent nations too addicted to consumption to ever focus on the sustainable development agenda? What can motivate them to voluntarily moderate, let alone curtail, consumption?

What sustains widespread societal denial of the fact that we're destroying our life support systems? Do the dazzling successes achieved by science and technology induce a complacent belief that future solutions will materialize?

Will moral concern for future generations and the moral imperative to prevent deaths related to poverty acquire enough force to drive change?

As more religious leaders champion environmental goals, how will their congregations respond?

More broadly, what role will religious institutions play in promoting social equity and environmental responsibility locally and around the world?

As consumers concerned about sustainability come to understand how much energy is required to produce foods at the high end of the food chain, will they change their eating habits?

In an increasingly resource-constrained world, what can the developed world learn from developing nations about efficient use of scarce resources?

Building capacity within institutions

Poor farmers in ecologically fragile regions and poor people in urban slums face radically different problems. More and more of the world's poorest people live in cities. Are agencies and organizations that are working to alleviate poverty adjusting their agendas to keep pace with this shift?

Will the UN be able to reform and revitalize its own administration, so it can pursue its laudable goals more effectively? Is the UN the most effective mechanism for pursuing those goals? What other institutions could champion them as well if not better?

Will the Millennium Development Goals be revisited in light of concerns about energy and the impacts of development on ecosystems?

Some governments in poor nations aren't reliable conduits for aid, because they're poorly administered and/or corrupt. Where, specifically, can businesses exert leverage to demand the stable, level playing field that healthy markets require?

How can universities around the globe more aggressively and creatively mobilize the knowledge they possess to promote sustainable development?

Many grave problems are competing for scarce resources. What new synergies are possible among government agencies, NGOs, business, and universities?

Strengthening education

By how much can the Internet, cell phones, and computers augment education in developing nations?

How can students of all ages and citizens everywhere be helped to understand the complex interdependencies between the human-made and natural worlds and to develop a sense of stewardship for both?

How can levels of scientific literacy be dramatically raised, everywhere?

If science and technology are to contribute to meeting sustainability goals, an adequate supply of scientists and engineers will be needed. Many initiatives are under way to build the science and technology capabilities of developing nations. How effective will they be? Will the U.S. produce the new generations of scientists and engineers it needs? Will the brain drain from developing nations be reversed?

Strengthening research

What knowledge do we most need to acquire? Are R&D dollars invested in the right lines of inquiry, and in the best hands? Will science and technology deliver advances that can be implemented widely enough and quickly enough to make a material difference?

Will desalination ever produce large-scale benefits?

What advances will minimize the staggering and accumulating volume of physical waste that the developed world generates each day and that developing nations will soon be generating.

What public policies can stimulate the development of safer industrial processes and products? How can industry's capacity for innovation be more fully tapped?

Alleviating poverty, facilitating development

Pressures on developing nations

Climate change has the potential to harm developing nations most. By how much will it retard their economic development?

With more of the world's population now urban than rural, and with population growing, how will cities absorb more desperately poor people and minimize impacts on already overstressed ecosystems?

In India, vital infrastructure improvements needed to sustain economic growth threaten to uproot slum-dwellers, who vote. How will these conflicts be resolved?

Will efforts to privatize drinking water supplies succeed, and with what consequences for people who can't afford to pay for water?

As outsourcing proceeds apace in developed nations, will it erode their willingness and capacity to extend aid to developing nations?

Trade, finance, and enterprise

Regulatory and administrative barriers in developing countries can impede enterprise. Why aren't they being dismantled more quickly?

Will the agricultural subsidies and tariffs in developed nations that so disadvantage developing nations be reformed?

Will the World Bank and IMF modify their approach to development, to achieve more impact?

Microfinance/microcredit is a powerful tool for raising incomes. How can it be scaled up by orders of magnitude?

Can entrepreneurs cultivate lucrative markets—on a scale that matters—by collaborating with people "at the base of the pyramid"?

Science & technology and technical assistance

Clean drinking water and safe sanitation are urgent needs. How can the deployment of simple, affordable, existing technologies that meet them be rapidly and massively scaled up?

Will techniques to exploit rainwater be adopted swiftly enough to make a material difference to farmers in water-stressed regions, especially Africa?

What gains can be realized from novel applications of existing low-tech techniques, like making charcoal from agricultural waste, and of high-tech devices, like solar-power LED lamps, GIS, and GPS? From new technologies?

What forms of technical assistance can best foster enduring indigenous capabilities? What forms are widely replicable? Will the Millennium Villages Project succeed? If so, how replicable will it prove to be?

What more can be learned from projects that fail? From "bright spots"?

Can genetically modified crops boost nutritional benefits and resist pests and prove safe and earn wide acceptance? What non-GM research holds the most promise? Can the international agricultural research community deliver gains fast enough? Will the Africa Fertilizer Summit produce results?

For the International Rice Research Institute and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, scientists are devising indicators to assess the sustainability of rice production in South-East Asia. What will they learn, and how will it affect productivity and agricultural practices?

Human health

How can we reconcile protection of intellectual property rights that spur innovation with the goals of (1) making the benefits of life-saving drugs affordable to the world's poorest people, (2) promoting R&D directed to their urgent needs?

Will the growing but still under-funded array of organizations now tackling malaria and other neglected tropical diseases achieve breakthroughs soon?

What will it take to get long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed nets deployed in every sub-Saharan African village? What further advances in mosquito control will be realized?

Will the ability to predict local seasonal climate become a standard tool for reducing the incidence of malaria? of other diseases?

What could an Africa freed of malaria achieve?

Safeguarding ecosystems and human health

Ecosystems

Species are finely tuned to their habits and are temperature dependent. How will rising temperatures affect specific species? Whole ecosystems? Human society and our use of natural capital?

How will what's been learned from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment be used? As destruction of ecosystems accelerates, where is scholarly research most urgently needed to inform decision making?

How much difference will forest certification programs make? Can destruction of the Amazon rainforest be slowed?

Will developing nations moderate the rising nitrogen emissions that threaten to damage plant life in biodiversity "hotspots"?

Has destruction of the world's fisheries passed the point of no return? Can damage to coastal waters, deep seas, and open oceans be slowed?

China's economic boom has brought widespread, severe, and worsening environmental degradation. Will matters get better or worse in the near term?

Agriculture and water management

The "industrial model of agriculture" has been characterized as "too energy intensive, wasteful of water, and dependent on chemicals." As a growing world population increases demand for food in a resource-constrained world, how will this model evolve?

By far the greatest loss of habitat results from food production. Climate change will adversely affect food production; a growing population will require more food, which will require more water. Can growing demand for agricultural land and water be met without depleting the land and water needed by ecosystems?

How can holistic watershed management be fast-tracked around the world?

Disease and adverse health effects

Under what conditions does species diversity decrease or increase the risk of specific diseases for human beings?

Will a global health system to monitor for infectious diseases and act swiftly to prevent pandemics be implemented?

Economic growth in China and India has resulted in the release of toxic chemicals into the environment and, as more coal is burned to generate energy, worsening air pollution and water pollution. How much damage to human health will these countries absorb before strict measures are taken to arrest and reverse these trends?

Chemicals

To increase crop yields, huge amounts of fertilizers and pesticides have been introduced into the environment. As growing population increases demand for food, how will concerns about this chemical loading converge with concerns about genetically modified crops that could obviate the need for some chemicals?

Toxic chemicals used in manufacturing are steadily accumulating in the environment and in our bodies. Will the EU's REACH approach, which requires that chemicals be demonstrated to be safe before they're approved for use, be widely adopted? Will the precautionary principle eventually prevail?

Government agencies can't adequately regulate the many small companies that use toxic and hazardous chemicals. What can induce better self-regulation?

Climate change

What course will human-driven nature take?

How fast will the ice caps, permafrost, and glaciers melt? How quickly will rising sea levels flood islands and low-lying coastal regions?

How will precipitation patterns change—and with what consequences for crop yields? drinking water supplies? desertification?

How much more frequent will extreme weather events become? Will storms become more frequent and more severe?

How far-reaching will the effects of ocean warming and acidification on marine life be?

Will climate change abruptly? Will some effects prove irreversible? How will impacts on regional climate vary?

What will prove to be the net effects of global warming, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, and global dimming, driven by air pollution?

What will advances in regional and long- and short-term climate modeling reveal?

As accounting of GHG emissions becomes more complete and accurate, and as scientists learn more about carbon sinks and cycles, what insights will be gained?

Will today's large natural carbon sinks remain sinks under future climate conditions?

Impacts on the human world and mitigation strategies

Will climate change create large numbers of environmental refugees?

As sea level steadily rises and flooding becomes more frequent and severe, what will be the effect on coastal cities and their infrastructure, including power plants, within ever-expanding flood plains? How will impacts be mitigated?

More than half the world's population depends on rice. Will scientists be able to develop strains that can tolerate climate change?

How quickly will climate scientists acquire the ability to make reliable near-term predictions of extreme weather events? As those predictions become a commonplace tool, how effectively will they be used for mitigation?

Government action

What's the optimum achievable energy portfolio for the United States over the next two decades? How should U.S. energy tax subsidies and R&D funding be allocated to best promote it?

What will break the stalemate between China and India, which haven't committed to Kyoto because they're developing nations, and the United States, which hasn't committed because China and India haven't?

Will the U.S. government cap CO₂ emissions? How effective will voluntary CO₂ caps prove to be? Should a tax on carbon be adopted? How much difference will voluntary schemes make?

Will the U.S. EPA's voluntary Methane to Markets Partnership prove effective in reducing human-caused emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is emitted in smaller quantities than CO₂ but, gram for gram, has a cumulative warming effect 23 times greater?

How can China and India be induced to cut their soaring CO₂ emissions when coal-fired power plants are fueling economic growth and offer the easiest energy path forward?

How should the burden of reducing carbon emissions be allocated among nations to minimize inequities? Should nations whose cumulative emissions are largest bear the greatest burden?

Will the EU's mandatory, troubled, carbon Emissions Trading Scheme succeed?

In the absence of federal legislation, how will U.S. state and city initiatives to cap CO₂ emissions and promote renewable energy evolve?

How much difference will they make? What will the impacts of planned collaborations between the State of California and the UK to reduce carbon emissions be—on actual emissions, on markets in emission allowances, and on the politics surrounding climate change? What about the collaboration between the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group?

Whatever the regulatory scheme, how adequately will actual emission reductions be verified? Will accurate, transparent data on emissions be widely shared?

Given that demand for energy is such a huge driver, why isn't energy conservation promoted as aggressively as energy efficiency, which in some instances actually increases demand?

To what extent can climate be stabilized by achieving greater efficiency and reducing consumption of fossil fuels? To what extent are much deeper technological fixes necessary?

How can U.S. federal and state regulatory processes be modified to promote, not thwart, the development of new energy technologies, while ensuring protection of human health and the environment?

Will the U.S. government adopt far stricter vehicle fuel-economy standards and/or a higher tax on gasoline to discourage unnecessary driving?

Given its crushing need to repair and replace crumbling infrastructure, will the United States ever undertake large-scale expansion of public transportation?

Fossil fuels & clean energy

The power-generation sector

Will carbon sequestration prove feasible on the scale needed? Affordable? How energy intensive will it be? Will storing CO₂ underground or underwater adversely affect local ecosystems? Is cost-competitive "clean coal" achievable?

How quickly will affordable, new clean-energy technologies come to market? Which alternatives to fossil fuels can be adopted fastest, on a large scale?

How quickly could a "clean energy revolution" occur worldwide, given the lifetime of existing infrastructure, lead time for new projects, and cost constraints?

Will collaboration between the EU and China to develop clean-coal plants succeed—and succeed fast enough to matter?

How influential will World Bank, IMF, and G8 clean energy initiatives prove to be?

As concerns over climate change grow more acute, will nuclear power enjoy a resurgence in the United States? If so, at what cost in federal subsidies? Will the long-unsolved problem of disposing of nuclear waste impede a resurgence? How will that problem be solved?

Will the UK's government succeed in its new effort to promote nuclear power?

As more nuclear power plants are built around the world, can nonproliferation safeguards and security be adequately managed?

Can science provide more accurate bases for crediting the carbon offsets provided for as Clean Development Mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol?

The visibility of wind turbines has made siting wind power facilities controversial in some communities. Will public perceptions of wind power facilities gradually shift? Will future generations wonder what all the fuss was about?

What advances in wind power technology, both onshore and off, lie ahead?

To what extent has the United States outsourced its environmental and energy impacts by outsourcing manufacturing?

The transportation sector

Will the Pentagon's initiatives to increase its fuel efficiency and streamline logistics serve to catalyze industry?

What will happen to gasoline prices in coming years, and with what consequences?

Will Americans embrace hybrid vehicles?

If biofuels are produced on a large scale, what sources of energy will be used, with what net impact on CO₂ emissions? Will cellulosic ethanol take off as a viable alternative fuel?

How will developments in biofuels alter the energy market? Will demand for biofuels aggravate deforestation?

Will China beat the U.S. auto industry to the world marketplace with more fuel-efficient vehicles? How can Detroit compete when it's saddled with huge health-care and pension costs?

If, by 2020, one billion cars and light trucks are on the road, what will life be like? What will be the impacts on the environment? Will the EU's approach to "management of end-of-life vehicles" through promotion of recycling and reuse of component parts succeed? Will it be widely adopted elsewhere?

Market forces

Responsible—and savvy—investing

How influential will the Equator Principles prove to be in shaping decisions that large banks make about what projects to finance?

How many more investment dollars will companies that pursue environmental, social, and corporate-governance goals attract? How will these investments influence the performance of other corporations?

Over the long-term, will companies that perform responsibly yield better—or at least competitive—returns?

Many investors are driven by short-term goals. How much of an impediment is this to investing that's focused on long-term values related to sustainability?

In an increasingly competitive marketplace driven by short-term accounting, will companies cut spending that affects the "triple bottom line" of economic, social, and environmental performance?

How adequate are current methodologies for assessing corporate performance against "the triple bottom line"? What kinds of data afford the best insights? How might methodologies and data be improved and shared more widely? At what cost? What kinds of information, in what forms, should corporations volunteer or be required to provide?

Are some companies exporting their environmental problems to countries with lax regulations? How can their performance be assessed? How can their stock be appropriately valued?

How deeply into their supply chains will corporations reach to demand more environmentally and socially responsible performance from suppliers?

Suburban development has had devastating impacts on ecosystems. When will assessment of such impacts be routinely integrated into decisions about development made by banks, insurance companies, mortgage lenders, and municipalities?

Carbon constraints

Will more companies that insure corporate officers and directors against liability demand that they explain how they're addressing risks posed by climate change?

How will the prospect of caps on CO₂ emissions affect the market valuations of big CO₂ emitters?

How will legal systems assess responsibility for damage caused by climate change? How will the threat of litigation for CO₂ emissions affect companies' market valuations?

How will the actual physical impacts of climate change on companies' operations affect market valuations?

How dramatically will climate change affect the property insurance business?

Will the capital markets supply the huge sums required to build new clean-energy infrastructure?

Green markets

Will other major corporations follow BP and GE into the alternative energy market? Will other investment banking firms follow Goldman Sachs? With what consequences? Will small green-power marketers be crushed?

Will clean energy technology become a lucrative 21st-century industry? What countries will dominate it?

Will consumer demand for "green" products and services, including "green power" options offered by utilities, continue to grow? How price-sensitive are these products and services? Will they become more cost-competitive?

How rapidly will the "green" building trend accelerate within the private and public sectors? Will developers in China and India adopt this on a scale that matters?

How much difference will Wal-Mart's commitment to sustainability—including its support for a federal cap on CO₂ emissions—make?