Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

Our show today starts with two French communes -- namely, Contrexéville and Vittel -- because these two have some of the cleanest, purest water in all of Europe, but they also almost didn't. Up until 1992, the farms here -- like those across Europe and around the world -- had been dribbling pesticide and cow poop into the water, while home-owners and businessmen had been doing the same for crude oil and other pollutants. But then the communes undertook a massive environmental overhaul. Farmers started getting rid of their cows and weaning themselves off of pesticides by rotating their crops in ways that didn't give bugs a chance. Home-owners and businesses started digging up their oil tanks and replacing them with natural gas installations. Today, more than 90 percent of the land in both communes is under some sort of environmental protection. But this overhaul wasn't led by environmental regulators. It was led by a private company with a very clear incentive. The company was Swiss food giant -- and perpetual

Today we speak with Andrew Mitchell, founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme (GCP). A zoologist by training, Andrew realized that to save the forest, he had to leave the forest and enter the economic system that was impacting it. So he founded and runs GCP in Oxford and recently became a Senior Adviser to Ecosphere Plus, which is an impact investment group that funnels money into sustainable land-use. I caught up to him in May at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona. I first met Andrew at the 2007 climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, when I was just starting to learn about the impact that forestry and farming had on climate change and how our consumption patterns fit into that. I'd done some research on my own and then plunged into the deep end -- jumping from technical panel to technical panel, and sleeping just four hours per night for two weeks.Andrew stood out from most of the other science guys because of his ability to communicate complex issues in simple ways -- which is a rare skill.

When UK retailer Marks & Spencer launched its ambitious sustainability strategy in early 2007, it dubbed the strategy “Plan A” to remind us that we have just one planet, so there is no Plan B. Plan A amounted to nothing less than a complete restructuring of the company’s supply chain – from the thousands of small farmers who produce its raw materials to the millions of people who buy its products – and it launched with an ambitious list of 100 commitments covering everything from the way it treats its partners to the health and well-being of its employees. Despite the name, Plan A was designed to change over time, with an initial five-year phase ending in 2012 and leading to a more ambitious second phase, and then another after that. By late 2009, however, it was clear that the project had succeeded in galvanizing the workforce and winning over suppliers, but it wasn’t resonating with customers. “Internally, Plan A has been a powerful change brand, helping 75,000 M&S employees and 2000 suppliers to

It's been almost a year since a Swiss engineer/businessman named André Borschberg and a Swiss psychiatrist/balloonist named Bertrand Piccard completed the first-ever around the world flight in a solar-powered airplane -- the Solar Impulse 2, a machine that could, theoretically, fly forever without every pausing to refuel. But this wasn't just an adventure. It was a mission to show that we can meet the climate challenge, and it's a mission that Bertrand Piccard is still continuing.  I ran into him in late May at the Innovate4Climate Summit in Barcelona, where he launched something called the World Alliance for Efficient Solutions, which aims to identify and fund 1000 profitable climate-change solutions by the end of 2018. I'll be adding a complete article from Ecosystem Marketplace to the show notes for Episode 16 at Bionic-Planet.com, so be sure to check back next week. Also, if you want to visit the Alliance's site directly, go to alliance.solarimpulse.com.

More than 1.5 billion cows are spread across the planet, each with four stomachs.  That's six billion stomachs emitting methane -- a powerful greenhouse gas that captures about eighty times more heat -- or contributes about eighty times as much to climate change -- as carbon dioxide does, at least in the short term. Now a new product called Mootral -- like "Neutral" but with a Mooo instead of a Nooo -- aims to slash those emissions by killing off the bad bacteria in the stomachs of cows and other "ruminants" -- which is what we call four-stomached beasts like cows, goats, and sheep.By killing off the bad bacteria, Mootral makes the animals healthier and slashes the methane in their burps by about 30 percent. Can this new tool help to slow climate change?  Here is the Mootral web site: www.mootral.com Topics: climate change, mootral, cows, methane, carbon offsetting

With the United Kingdom on the brink of leaving the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), the United States locked in the inertia of a Donald Trump presidency, and populism stoking fears of slackening commitment to meeting the climate challenge, support for carbon markets is coming from two once-unlikely sources: namely, risk-adverse corporate boards and China, according to the International Emission Trading Association’s (IETA) annual Greenhouse-Gas Market Sentiment survey, which was released last week at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona one day after Ecosystem Marketplace’s latest survey of voluntary carbon market practitioners, Unlocking Potential: State of Voluntary Carbon Markets 2017. The Ecosystem Marketplace report identified transactions for roughly 63 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) last year, including the 1 billionth metric ton transacted since the first State of Voluntary Carbon Markets Report in 2006. That represents a 24 percent drop from 2015, in

One hundred and forty-four countries have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement, and 143 of them say they'll stay-in-it – even if Donald Trump pulls the United States out. But staying in and delivering what you stayed in to do are two different things. One way to track progress is to track laws, and a newly-updated database tracks over 1200 of them. 11 May 2017 | The United States may be backsliding on climate under President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled House and Senate, but the country still has 8 federal laws related to climate change and 6 climate policies; and hundreds of lawsuits are going on, including 54 under the Clean Air Act alone. Those numbers come from two databases: “Climate Change Laws of the World”, housed at the London School of Economics, and “US Climate Change Litigation”, housed at Colombia University. Together, they track more than 1,200 climate change or climate change-relevant laws worldwide – up from a mere 60 in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol came into force. The LSE has

Climate negotiators are meeting in Bonn, Germany, the next two weeks to move the Paris Climate Agreement forward – even as Republicans in the United States seem intent on moving it backward. Most countries say they want the US to stay in the agreement, but there’s reason to believe it will be better off without us. 8 May 2017 | The dark-haired man looked haggard and world-weary as he leaned towards the microphone. “We ask for your leadership,” he told US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, with cameras running and the world watching. “We seek your leadership,” he continued. “But if for some reason you’re not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way!” The year was 2007, and the young man was Kevin Conrad, who represents Papua New Guinea in UN climate talks. The place was Bali, Indonesia, where George W Bush’s US negotiating team had been gunking up talks with silly games and doublespeak. The words perfectly captured the exasperation in the room, and delegates roared in r

Today we examine an amazing new tool called "Trase", which launched at year-end climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco. It shows you something we've always known was there, but could never see: namely, 320,000 supply threads, going from individual municipalities in Brazil, through local brokers, to importers in countries around the world. With it, you can see which trading companies are buying soybeans form municipalities where farmers are chopping forests to grow them, and companies can see, too. It's a tool that good companies can use to reduce their impact on forests, and that watchdogs can use to keep bad companies honest.  Read the companion story on Ecosystem Marketplace: Can “Radical Transparency” Save Forests And Slow Climate Change? Bionic Planet is also available on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and elsewhere.

US president-elect ​Donald Trump claims to have an open mind on climate science, but he put an unabashed climate-science denier in charge of his environmental transition team, and he says he'll slash NASA's climate-monitoring capabilities. Might a president who doesn't believe in climate science still find it worthwhile to stay in the Paris Agreement? And who will pick up the slack if he doesn't? These are questions we addressed in three stories on Ecosystem Marketplace: “Can Individual US States, The Private Sector, And The International Community Fix The Climate Despite Trump Election?” came the day after the election, and pretty much says it all “Investors See Rockier Road To Low-Carbon Economy Under Trump, But No Dead End” came in one week later. “Hundreds Of US Companies Urge Climate Action As John Kerry, Others Calls For More ‘Business Diplomacy’” came in a day after that. We harvested all three to generate today's episode of Bionic Planet, which offers an audio mosaic of snippets culled from interviews

Initial reactions from Marrakesn to Trump Victory in US I came to year-end climate talks here in Marrakesh with a clear plan to cover the most complicated elements of these talks and break them down for a general audience. I'd intended to focus mostly on how global supply chains would change in response to this process – and I still will – but Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election has changed everything. The talks are continuing, and the Paris Agreement remains in place with or without the United States, but the backroom diplomacy that the Obama administration had proven so adept at – the unofficial talks inside the talks that lay the foundation for the next round – which was credited with getting the treaty ratified so early – that’s gone, and I’ll cover that in more detail in a later piece. In first hours after Trump's victory, I spoke to some veterans of this process and found something resembling a consensus: namely, that individual US states and the corporate sector can step in to at lea

On Thursday, 65 countries representing 83% of international aviation agreed to cap their greenhouse-gas emissions from international flights at 2020 levels from 2021 onward – in part by forcing airlines to offset emissions above that threshold, and MAYBE by funding programs that save forests and support sustainable agriculture around the world. A final decision on offset types, however, isn’t expected until 2018 Backgrond: The Paris Climate Agreement created a framework for keeping the global rise in temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial levels, but it left emissions from international flights in limbo – partly because their "international" nature made it hard to reach agreement on which countries to charge the emissions to. That changed on Thursday, when the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN agency charged with coordinating aviation regulation, including environmental impact, agreed to freeze net aviation emissions at 2020 levels beginning in

Part One of a multi-part series examining the ways small Kenyan farmers are teaming up with multinational agribusinesses to confront climate change by reshaping the countryside. In today's episode, we meet Prisca Mayende, who ratcheted up yields on her four-acre farm by planting trees. We also visit the Kaptama farmers' cooperative -- a key conduit in the link between subsistence farmers and local grocery stores.

� The United Nations Environment Program says that resources are a factor in 40% of all organized armed conflicts, but only 15% of peace agreements even mention them. Today, we examine the role that carbon finance – especially REDD+ (reducing emissions from degradation of forests, plus other land uses) – can play in helping (or, if bungled, hindering) the peace process by stifling the use of blood diamonds and other conflict resources. Guests include: Canadian Environmental Consultant Art Blundell Liberian Environmental Campaigner Silas Siakor Saw Frankie Abreu, Director of Myanmar’s Tenasserim River and Indigenous People’s Network (TRIP NET) Colombian Vice Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Pablo Viera Samper Kerstin Canby, Director of the Forest Policy, Trade, and Finance program at Forest Trends Accompanying panel discussion: https://www.norad.no/en/front/thematic-areas/climate-change-and-environment/oslo-redd-exchange/oslo-redd-exchange-2016/streaming-osloreddx/

  In 2015, more than 150 countries endorsed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are 17 goals to end poverty, improve health, and tackle climate change. They're broken into 169 specific targets, and billions of dollars in finance are tied to them. In this episode of Bionic Planet, we hear why business leaders like Unilever CEO Paul Polman are building their corporate strategies on the SDGs, and why governmental leaders like UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and the Prime Ministers of both Norway (Erna Solberg) and Cote d’Voi (Daniel Duncan) see them as key to future development. We also examine the interplay between the SDGs and carbon finance.