this film was created with the goal of inspiring nuance in whatever stance you take on animals in the captivity of zoos & aquariums.

to watch the full short film, please click here.

in my podcast, i explore the benefits of multifaceted and cross-sectoral approaches that bridge sustainability and environmental policy. i argue that environmental sustainability should not be an after-thought to economic or social development, but instead a foundational intention in the mission of global development.

i explore ways that we can achieve the trifecta of environmental sustainability, economic prosperity, and support for local communities through creative and collaborative pursuits. to do this, i interview three female leaders from ikea, syngenta, and the recycling company, mr. green trading africa, kenya.

we discuss the initiatives and progress that these organizations have made. as all three leaders share, efforts in sustainability have trickle down effects on the economy and the social ecosystems of their respective regions. it can be argued then, that the future of sustainability and creating better policy in this space, relies on shared accountability – not just from ngos, policy makers, and environmentalists, but from corporations, community leaders, and individuals.

i truly believe that pivoting the way we approach sustainability issues such as climate change and food security to prioritize the fair treatment of local actors in support of local economies can act as a bridge that brings people together. happy listening!

full transcript below:

samyudha rajesh: welcome to the bridge, where we explore stories and showcase solutions that connect our people our prosperity and our planet. environmental issues, climate challenges and ongoing food security threats, when seen as standalone issues, perpetuates the impact that they have collectively on our planet. our global economic history has enough examples, where we have taken a siloed approach to development, mainly economic development, through which we have neglected the after effects of unsustainable production standards, haphazard waste management, and violation of human rights, all in the name of productivity, we need a paradigm shift that allows for more multifaceted and cross sectoral solutions to sustainable development across the globe.

today’s story shows us that this is possible. in the next few minutes, we will look at how three different corporations from three different industries are achieving economic and environmental aspirations by investing in integrated sustainable solutions. these businesses and their efforts are making a case for people and communities, profit for companies, and care for our planet. we will hear from three distinguished leaders who will touch on the following questions.

first, what actions are their companies taking to be champions for environmental sustainability. and second, how does their company improve social and economic wellbeing in the regions that they work with, through their environmental initiatives. our first guest is christina niemela strom, head of sustainability at ikea.

christina niemela strom: well, first of all, we have such a very clear sustainability strategy that goes for the entire brand and where we actually are targeting healthy and sustainable living, we’re targeting to become climate and circular, positive. and we’re also aiming to be working in the fair and equal agenda. so that we also see the social aspects of what we do. we are a global company, but we have local presence, and the difference you make on a local level, and then that will be aggregated to become global, but it’s actually very, very local and regional. and when it comes to working with farming communities, you will need to work what we call in a systemic way.

so it’s ikea is the government is ngos is other brands. and we work that together all of us wanting the region to flourish because it’s good for business, it’s good for people, and it’s good for environment. so we try to tackle climate, nature and people at the same time. that is a triple kind of dilemma that we can also solve together. so not to go only thinking about climate or only about biodiversity loss, we’re only thinking about labor, do the three at the same time. and then we can get the best return on investment and actual results on the ground.

so for instance, what we do, we put goals to all of our suppliers what kind of energy sources they can use to try to go more and more to renewable energy, we put demands on our product development that they use the right materials go into more and more recycled materials, we also develop and secure that we have value chains for more recycled materials. and then we also secure that we do responsible sourcing, for instance, through working with our supplier code of conduct to secure that working and social and environmental conditions and also animal welfare is on the right level.

so by actually securing livelihoods for the local communities securing that to have decent a meaningful work with also a fair fair income and fair pay. so we are monitoring all those things and trying to secure that we haven’t improvement from year to year. so this is not any area that you’re once you’re done, you’re never done. you need to be there. and we do it very much through our presence, and also taking in the expert etc. social partners who can also help us with this, who has the competence that maybe we don’t have yet.

and by that we can actually have an entire region flourish. it’s not a short term thing, you have to go in there with a long term. and you have to be stay put, for instance, we don’t great work when it comes to the cotton farmers, for instance. so we work with better cotton initiative, where we’re helping the farmers to learn how to cultivate cotton and using less water, less pesticides and less fertilizers. and by that also actually getting more money to themselves to the farmer or actually being empowered.

and we also working if i continue on the cotton piece working in pakistan and india, for instance, helping the the cotton farmer to launch more things than just cotton so they also have fruit, and so on so they can get more money out from their picture of wood. so we are working with our wf, for instance then planting 400,000 seedlings in pakistan, and very much actually helping the women for them to get their own economy decides to cotton harvest also on the running gear with the fruits and vegetables cetera.

samyudha rajesh: now we will hear from pamela gonzalez lennon, head of asia group at syngenta.

pamela gonzalez lennon: my company is in the industry of agriculture. so the angle i will take for that is, is in agriculture. and normally when people think about sustainability and myself in the past, you think about large farmers, climate change, and like the typical sustainability things, but when you look at asia pacific, small farmers are the backbone of the economies in the whole region. so sustainability can mean many different things, for instance, to get higher yields in their production. and just to give you an example, why this is so important, asia pacific wheel home 250 million more people by 2050, which is a full indonesia, and only with 1/3 of the land of the planet.

so that means that to be sustainable, we need to be able to produce more in less land, we work with farmers across the region, this is small farmers, we have more than 450, millions of small farmers that have less than one actor, each one of them, which is a very small amount of land. so we work with them, giving them protocols of products have practices, training them giving them medication in the in, in field activities. giving them tools i can i can give you some examples like access to credits, just to give you an example, because farmers face many challenges in this production, small farmers, for instance, they don’t have access to formal credit. so the interest rates are very high.

they don’t have access to training or education of what are the best practices to get better yields. they have lack of infrastructure and lack of power of embarking with their production, there are many middlemen in between. so what we are doing is creating an ecosystem of solutions. so farmers can have access to that. it’s a big challenge because it reached them. it’s it’s not easy, it’s 450 million, so one company cannot do it alone. partnership and all the stakeholders working together is critical to solve this issue for food security in the region.

so just to give you an example of a specifically what we’re doing partnerships, one of these example is in rice in basmati rice in india, we are working with small farmers now piloting full protocol, end to end protocol from the variety, the crop protection protocol with the products, but also looking for the soil, the health of the soil, the soil health, because in the soil, many of the carbon can be captured. so this is one of the important part of how agriculture can help in sustainability in the future, or actually now.

so they are putting in place many practices like the management of the residue of the rice on the soil, water management, and all of these elements will help us to add less carbon like that to food protocol help farmers to produce more sustainable with better yields. so it’s just a small example. so now i think the team in india is working with around 50 farmers him i’m not wrong, but the idea is to keep doing that we work with many institutions coming back to my point of nobody can do it alone.

so with universities, with ngos, and even with other companies in some countries, we work with fertilizers company, so we can do soil health as samples to put the right fertilizers on the on the soil. so maybe if i can summarize my answer in three points, there are basic needs the sustainability, nature, pacific life, food security, and higher yields. but at the same time, we are putting some tools to make sure we also are fighting against the climate change with the carbon emissions with the soil health. so we help them with protocols, but we are also trying to reach them through digital so we can make information more. i call this democrat ties seeking for rich or poor farmers.

when purpose and profit meets is when things really happens. because if a company or an organization are only focused on on profit is good for the short term, you get your numbers, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. on the other extreme with ngos or organization only meet on purpose is also not sustainable because you need to fund the initiatives. right. so this is why it’s so important that all the partners, all the stakeholders work together to make these tools available, in our case for small farmers, right. and that’s why one company cannot wait alone. and it’s so important that everybody plays a role.

samyudha rajesh: to finish we will hear from sonia orwa, general manager at mr. green trading africa, kenya.

sonia orwa: i think so maybe just a quick brief mr. green africa works in the plastic recycling space. and we are a force for good company, the first b corp recycling company to be rated. so in africa, and what makes mr. green what steps we have taken is at the core of our business is working with waste pickers, as being the solution to collecting plastic from the environment, and then manufacturing the same and converting it into a valuable resource.

that could be when used for plastic packaging. so replacing the virgin plastic, right. and so for us having a circular solution, and working with the people locally to solve a critical problem globally, is one of the ways we are really addressing and using sustainability in everything that we do from the collection, to the recycling and to the off taking of the same locally. the plastic that we actually use in our manufacturing process is collected from streets from oceans.

so from an environmental perspective, we’re already addressing the environmental impacts, obviously, because making a cleaner environment, a more vibrant environment, but more so the fact that we use waste pickers in our value chain is really a great contributor to the social impact in the fabric of for example, kenya, where we’re currently based, because then we’re using a group of people that normally is very under under supported, and are also not really valued in the community to pick what other people think is that an invaluable resource and making it valuable and that way, the socio economic impact on the person who is picking the waste, they get to directly get impacted from their collection activities in a fair manner, where they are given an opportunity to earn a minimum wage, and then hopefully when they are living wage from their collection.

and on top of that, they’re really the heroes that are cleaning up the environment. so overall, i think mr. green’s business model really just uses the people that require the help right, to clean up the environment, which is really needed. and obviously you making sure that the benefits from the sale of the plastic are trickled back down to the environment as well and to the people that we work with.

samyudha rajesh: as our three leaders shared, the future of sustainability lies in accountability, not just from ngos and policy makers, but from corporations who can be allies in this journey. to achieve the environmental, economic and social progress trifecta demands a holistic approach to sustainability issues, such as food security, climate change, and pollution. better policies and initiatives are community centric. they are receptive and respective of local communities and farmers.

these policies are partnership focused, bridging communication and coordination between different but equally important actors such as governments, ngos, corporations, and community leaders. lastly, these policies are flexible and creative. they adopt new technologies, perspectives and approaches to sustainability. together we can bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. we can 2022年卡塔尔世界杯官网 . this is samyudha rajesh reporting from washington, dc.

when proposing ideas for this video project, many of my classmates had wonderful ideas, ranging from interviewing experts on palm oil in indonesia to experts on ape conservation in africa. my idea felt small in comparison: to interview a professor at our own university. however, after speaking with him and hearing his expertise on environmental health and sustainable living, my eyes have been opened to innovations happening in my own backyard.

professor lapuma has been involved in a variety of environmental areas, including researching fossil fuels and teaching environmental health, but what amazes me most about him is his personal lifestyle and how seriously he applies the concepts he teaches in the classroom.

many ideas of sustainable living – such as natural insulation, complete solar power, and subsistence food production — often seem like high-minded ideals that we would use in a best-case-scenario, absent of realistic economic and physical pressures, but professor lapuma lives this ideal and enjoys it immensely. this intriguing interview ultimately gives me hope for the mainstream application of other ideas revealed and discussed in spaces like planet forward.

we address why composting is so important to the environment, and esf’s history when it comes to sustainability on campus. the program is off to a fast start, and we believe the campus’ total diversion rate could be close to 47% by the end of the spring semester.

she assures us that through food and flies, or the distinct lack thereof, composting is attainable for anyone, whether at home, work, or on a college campus. 

we broke it down so that you can break it down too.

in this podcast, i try to tell the story of cartography and how mapping has evolved throughout human history. the story of maps is deeply intertwined with some basic human beliefs. maps used to be a bridge between the people who made them and the places they represent.

we now live in a world where our society is saturated by maps, and in this modern world we have lost that emotional connection to maps and the places they represent. please take a listen:

planet forward: how did you come to pursue a career in climate change assessment?

katharine mach: my research background when i was a graduate student was focused on the oceans. i was looking at the way crashing waves shape what grows in the ecosystems right along the edge of the water. it was very challenging and exciting work. basically saying – what’s environmental risk in the world right now? how does that shift as the climate warms and extreme temperatures play out and waves potentially change in terms of when they are crashing? however, what i didn’t like about that was some of the biggest issues regarding the ocean were acidification, overfishing, pollution, and climate change – and these were all left out. so, when i went for my ph.d. i did something a little bit wild and i jumped to the ippc, not really knowing what it was going to be like as a postdoctoral research associate. it was incredible, i was working with experts from around the world – physicists, moral philosophers, people looking at food security – every continent, every discipline, coming together trying to figure out what’s the state of knowledge of all aspects of the climate challenge and how can you make that knowledge relevant in real time to societies in the decision-making processes. i was fascinated by assessment; i really liked how it was a full state of knowledge, what we know and what we don’t and how that requires a lot of interactions among people to figure out what are the strengths and weaknesses of different lines of evidence. from there i shifted my focus to figuring out how to do assessment well.  

pf: what are some economic risks, that you’ve seen through your assessments, that will be a result of the effects of global warming?

mach: one easy entry point for thinking about damages in a changing climate are the economic losses associated with extreme events. increasingly we can look event by event, whether it’s a heatwave, heavy rain event, or even complex things like fires and cyclones and understand the ways in which our emissions of heat trapping gases are driving up the risks. these types of events carry with them huge financial price tags. in the u.s. last year, there were 15 events that caused each a billion dollars in losses. this year, the total damages from all of the events we’ve seen unfolding are going to be vast.  so, we can add those up event by event [and determine] how much more likely were those types of occurrences due to climate change? there’s increasing work in understanding what climate change means for economic impacts overall. it’s an exciting area of science, in that some of that work hadn’t really been massively updated since the 1990’s and so now it is. what we see is there are countries in the world right now that are ‘cold countries.’ if they get warmer, their economies might actually improve, such as in norway. there are other countries that are already so hot that further warming will drive their economies down, which is the case for many of the countries in the tropics, which are also some of the poorest countries presently.  

pf: do you find it difficult in your studies to assess the economic risks of loss to biodiversity?  how do you determine the value of a species in economic terms?

mach: so one thing that we often say in the space of assessment is that there’s no one way to assess the risks in a changing climate. that essentially means that there are impacts for you and i in our current world and then there are impacts that our children and grandchildren might have many years into the future. how we prioritize those impacts, based on our current experience, there is no right answer for how that unfolds. the same thing goes for people in the world presently: we’ve got the rich and the poor simplistically cut; different people will put different priorities on outcomes across that socio-economic spectrum. the same goes for nature. some might argue that nature should have value that is intrinsic to life while others will say the value of nature should be tied to the services directly applied to people. there is no one right answer in that space.

pf: can you briefly describe the three different approaches to negative emissions and tell us which approach you think is most likely to be implemented on a mass scale?

mach: so i think of the spectrum of carbon-dioxide removal as having two poles. on one pole we have biology and on the other we have engineering. i’m going to describe three [categories], one at the end of each of these poles and one that lies in the middle. the first [category] are approaches that are tightly linked to stewardship. so if we better manage our forests, they can hold more carbon. if we better manage our agricultural fields, the soils can take in more carbon. we know how to do these types of approaches and in some cases know how to do them really well. for example, california’s forest offset program is the first legally enforceable program in forest offsets. it’s happening at 5 million tons per year at a relatively cheap cost of $10 a ton. the second [category] is still biologically based in terms of how carbon is taken out of the atmosphere but it’s more engineered. this could be anything from bio-char, to building with biomass, or bioenergy paired with carbon capture and storage (beccs). these are approaches that are more expensive, not quite ready but could in many cases play an increasing role depending how in particular we decide to value the role of carbon in that equation. the third category [that includes] direct air capture, is a fully engineered approach. with this approach you are using carbon capture and storage to get carbon into geological formations underground. looking across this spectrum of approaches, we have an order of magnitude differences in current cost: about $10, $100, $1000 per ton [respectively]. we are looking at different levels of engineering complexity, different spatial footprints for each approach. direct air capture might make a whole lot of sense once we have abundant clean energy but until we have a lot of energy to put into the “capture” part of the equation it’s hard to imagine bringing it rapidly to scale. i see all of these [approaches] providing a lot of different opportunities for industries at the millions and to many millions tons scale. the real question moving forward is which ones, if any, can we get to the billion tons scale.

pf: how far out are we from developing these technologies and utilizing them?  how many years of development do we need in order to utilize these technologies in a way that is fully beneficial?

mach: for that first category we know how to do a lot of that now. managing forests well, utilizing cover crops or compost additions in agricultural management are things that are available now. so the question is how do we create a financial signal – either through conservation or climate policy to make it a reality. in the beccs space [second category] we see a number of plants at demonstration scale, about 1 million tons per year, we are starting to figure out how to make this happen. some of our work at stanford has tried to look at near-term, low cost, and commercially available opportunities in that space. for example, bio refineries that are working on a yearly basis to produce ethanol are a low cost option in capturing co2. direct air capture [third category], we are also starting to see prototype scale projects. for example there is a company now in switzerland that is using direct air capture to filter co2 into greenhouse agriculture as a way to get plants to grow faster. it’s hard to say exactly how long the [timeframe] is, recognizing for direct air capture you need a lot of energy to make it happen and across that spectrum you need some way to price carbon so we can make these policies translate into reality.

pf: while human ingenuity seems almost endless in this day and age, do you think it’s harmful for us to rely on technology alone to confront the challenges of global warming?

mach: responding to climate change is something that we as people, have never seen the likes of. on the one hand we need to transform our energy and land systems globally, at a rate and scale that we have never done proactively. let’s say that we are phenomenally successful and we figure out abundant clean energy storage, grid integration, efficiency, pulling some co2 out of the atmosphere, we grapple [the challenges of] land, and we meet the budget of limiting warming to under 2 degrees celsius. even if we are unbelievably successful in the realm of reducing our emissions of heat trapping gases, we still have more warming in the pipeline. it will very likely be twice as much warming as we’ve already seen to date. and that warming carries real risks that will be unfolding in every part of the world… no matter what aspect of risk you look at, it’s unfolding around the world and we will also have to prepare for those types of impacts.  

pf: what are some policies that we could adopt today that would greatly reduce our risks of climate change?

mach: i think the exciting thing is that there is a huge amount of momentum already in the climate change response space. that ranges from the fact that we are seeing increasing deployments of clean energy technologies around the world, we’re seeing very ambitious pledges towards electric vehicles, whether it be countries or companies and we’re seeing adaptation on every single continent. here in the u.s. it is mostly states that are starting to figure out all sorts of different options. in terms of becoming more prepared for impacts or adaptation, one real challenge is what is happening in risk assessment and planning. we are just starting to actually implement actions and we are also just starting to really figure out: once we’ve implemented actions, are they going to be effective? the most compelling options for policies in the near term are figuring out: how can we take some of this really ambitious progress so far and crank up “how fast, how much” and grapple with all of those barriers from finances, to making our legal system work, for something that is really different from how we’ve acted to date.  

pf: my final question for you is: what do you think the biggest barrier is for the federal government of the united states from passing comprehensive climate change legislation?  

mach: in the u.s. we have had the climate narrative get swept up in a whole lot of ideology and fear. i think in some ways the best way to think about federal action moving forward in the u.s. is to recognize that we already see so much action at the city level, state level, and by the private-sector. those are the enabling factors that at some point are going to make it easy for congress to take action.  

check out all of the episodes in the podcast here: http://www.getitdoneaz.com/tags/uw-madison-0

q: hi nate, thank you for answering some questions for planet forward! first off, what would you say is the goal of sewanee’s forest management?

a: the goal of sewanee’s forest management is to create forests that will be resilient to a changing climate, provide high quality habitat for a myriad of wildlife species, and maintain the biodiversity that is a cornerstone of our region. 

q: what are some of the most unique characteristics of sewanee’s geology that define this area?

a: as with just about any other location on the planet, we are dictated by our geology. the cumberland plateau was able to form because of an impervious sandstone cap that allowed the plateau to remain intact while the surrounding landscape eroded. so it is really this sandstone cap that establishes the geology and dictates the topography, both of which provide for the unique microhabitats and microclimates that enable such a high level biodiversity here on the domain.

q: how does sewanee manage the use of local timber resources for new development projects?

a: one of the sustainability goals laid out in sewanee’s sustainability master plan is to use local wood as a means of helping students and the community better understand our interconnectedness to the natural world. we have tried several different approaches, including using wood harvested from our local wood basket, middle tennessee. recently, we have been trying to showcase, from tree-to-finish product, how we can harvest on the domain and use sewanee-sourced timber in our buildings. the biggest project we have undertaken is harvesting for the sewanee inn flooring, all of which came from the domain. we would like to be offsetting new projects with wood harvested from the domain to come as close to replicating a closed-loop cycle as possible.

q: how have students contributed to past or ongoing management practices on the domain?

a: students participate in lots of different ways. we have had forestry students work on timber sale preparation and administration, eco-bio students work on wetland restoration projects, and students from a variety of disciplines have cataloged invasive species, carried out prescribed burns, and performed invasive species removals on the domain. generally, there is a lot of cataloging, including performing vegetation and tree inventories, and inventorying rare threatened and endangered species for both plants and animals.

q: as domain manager, one of the problems you face is controlling for exotic invasive species. what are some of the strategies for limiting and mitigating their growth on the domain?

a: as with any property that has had over 150 years of european inhabitation, there are a lot of exotic species on the domain. so, we try and differentiate between those exotic species that are pernicious invaders, and are able to really knock the ecosystem off kilter, and those that seem to present less of an immediate threat to the larger ecosystem processes. and that is an imperfect science. but in general, we manage and eradicate aggressive plant species such as garlic mustard and kudzu, species that can rapidly take over an area. with so many exotic invasive species, the naturalization of some is inevitable. it is a matter of choosing our battles.

q: how does sewanee plan for and manage prescribed forest burns, and how do these contribute to forest restoration and regrowth?

a: using dendrochronological records and historical land records, we believe that some fire has played a part in the landscape over the last several thousand years. so, we are working to reestablish fire on the landscape. we believe fire played a role in the oak-hickory forest that dominates our landscape today, and we know that through a process called mesophication, we are losing those forests, and prescribed fires are one tool we are using to counteract this. prescribed fires also help to promote new growth in the understory, which benefits all sorts of wildlife species, particularly birds and meso-mammals. from a human standpoint, these also help control for the wildfire risk by reducing fuel loading in the forest.

q: what are some of the ongoing ecological restoration projects taking place on the domain?

a: we are currently using prescribed fire and harvest to help reduce the density of some of the young forests that we have on top of the cumberland plateau, in an effort to increase their wildlife habitat value and promote native forest regeneration. we are also reintroducing short leaf pine, which we believe had a broader distribution on the domain in pre-european times. overall, we are harvesting some of the overstory, planting new seedlings in the understory, and using prescribed fires to help promote the species we want. we have also been planting native grasses in some of the harvested areas.

q: although it is nearly impossible to say with any level of certainty now, would you say parts of the domain are beginning to experience the effects of climate change?

a: i would say that we are noting changes from extreme weather. what appear to be extreme droughts, extreme rain intensities, and extreme temperatures seem to be creating stressors on the forest. whether or not that is a direct result of climate change, it is too early to say. but it is happening, and it is driving some of our shifts in management towards more resilient landscapes.

q: here is a separate, non-sewanee related question… you and your wife run an organic farm. can you tell us a little bit about this?

a: yes, my wife and i have an organic farm where we raise sheep and goats. we run all of our equipment and vehicles off of vegetable oil, so i commute here everyday in a vegetable oil-powered car. i have been retrofitting petroleum-fueled cars to run on vegetable oil for about a dozen years now. all of the vegetable oil comes from the sewanee inn.

q: anything else you would like to share about the domain?

a: it is an amazing resource for students, and if you don’t spend any time on it, you are missing out.