PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

What's the opposite of a boycott?

The answer is a "carrotmob".

Imagine going around to the shopkeepers in your neighbourhood and asking them what percentage of their sales they would be willing to invest in improving their energy efficiency. Identify the highest bidder and, using social media, you mobilise the local community to "mob" their shop on a mutually agreed date. Document everything on YouTube and get others to repeat the experiment around the world.

Corporate social responsibility and activism, the development 2.0 way. (Via the Guardian)

P.S. As well as being the opposite of a boycott, carrotmobs might also be an antidote to "slacktivism".

Energy efficiency, the web 2.0 way

First there was the announcement of Google PowerMeter, an online tool that displays information about residential electricity use. Imagine logging on to your email account and being confronted with how much energy your dryer is consuming, real time. Initial studies indicate that access to this information can lead to savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills.

Now Michael Bauwens at the P2P foundation points to the emergence of more social energy tracking systems. Open Shaspa, in particular, turns energy efficiency into a game that "creates a 3D model of your house, thereby making power consumption a visually navigable space. If you go on vacation, an avatar friend can keep tabs on energy use."

Pollution for breakfast, lunch and dinner

Editor's Note: The following post also appears on Dave Lawrence's personal blog, Out of Mongolia.    

The winter air in Ulaanbaatar is hard to imagine. It is basically a thick blanket of smoke spewing out from the stoves of thousands of people living in gers, which are traditional Mongolian homes made from wooden frames covered in felt. Raw coal is the main fuel, since it is much cheaper than wood. Traffic and power plants play their part too, but it's the smoke from the gers that makes breathing such a challenge at this time of year.

Half a million people in the city live in the ger districts. They are mostly poor; recent migrants from the countryside in search of better lives. The poorest cannot even afford coal, and burn whatever they get their hands on.  Even garbage and old tires. Just think of what's going into the air.

Are virtual worlds a tool for better government?

As virtual worlds gain increasing popularity, what should policy makers do with them (beyond, of course, visiting the Doing Business island)?

A report by IBM, Government in 3D: How Public Leaders Can Draw on Virtual Worlds attempts to provide some answers. The authors identify several areas where virtual worlds could benefit policy makers: from reaching out to citizens to emergency training, from recruitment to fostering tourism and economic development.

The report is full of interesting (if, admittedly, still isolated) examples: from the first US congressional hearing in Second Life to five tons of carbon emissions saved by teleporting a speaker to the UNCCC meeting in Bali (always in Second Life); from "beta testing" the impact of policies through games such as a World Without Oil to SecondHealth, a 3D tool to educate the British public about a new health plan and its implications for citizens.

Financial wizardry has its uses

Financial wizardry has gotten a bad name lately - some in the U.S. have even called for a Financial Product Safety Commission. Innovation in financial products clearly has its uses, though. One case in point is the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. Established in 2007, the facility provides insurance against natural catastrophes for 16 Caribbean nations. And it just recently won two industry awards in quick succession.   

Web 2.0: Ignore it at your peril

As the Global Environmental Management Initiative releases its Guide to Successful Corporate-NGO Partnerships, the Economist recently reminded us that in a Development 2.0 world, the balance of power in environmental campaigning is shifting. Thanks to the viral nature of tools such as blogs and Youtube, local issues can gain visibility and quickly become global. Here's my favourite example from the Economist article, Revolutions Coloured Green:

Take the fallout from a deal between the Russian aluminium concern Rusal and the government of Guinea to mine bauxite. Green protests were the last thing Rusal expected. But Kamara Secu, a leader of the Guinean community in Russia, was undaunted. He rang Rusal’s press officers and taped their response; they were dismissive and mocked his accent. Mr Secu then posted a recording of the exchange on YouTube, the video-sharing site; it was picked up by green bloggers, and helped to rally support for a demonstration against Rusal.

What's a second in development?

How many mobile phones are sold in a second around the world - and how many trees are cut in the same fraction of time? What if you could dynamically visualise these statistics rather than just reading about them - would they have a greater impact?

 

"So_many_a_second" is a visualisation tool that displays world statistics "on a human scale" by getting users in touch "with the emotional actuality of ... objective data" (hat tip: Flowing data). The visualisation for plastic cups usage by airlines should be enough to convert even the most skeptical environmentalist. Interestingly, the website allows users to create their own data flows: it's easy to envisage plenty of applications for education and advocacy purposes.

Markets vs. climate change

Last year, HSBC launched its climate change index to much fanfare. ClimateBiz reports that companies producing goods and services geared towards dealing with climate change produced some $300 billion in annual revenues.* (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). Kevin Bourne, a managing director at HSBC, argues that "[c]limate change is set to be one of the defining investment opportunities in the years ahead and this is often underestimated." The last year, however, hasn't been very kind to this index - as of yesterday, it was down about 43 percent.

   

* The original version of this sentence was missing "billion". Thanks to Mudit for pointing out this ommission.

Department of creative solutions

Having trouble flipping that property you bought before the subprime crisis hit? Perhaps you just need a more creative approach. You could try raffling it off, like this apparently unsellable 'eco-house' in the UK (Hat tip: Adam Smith Institute). Or if you're in the market to buy, you might consider paying for a £25 ticket for a chance to win the house. It's  "illuminated with a Rako wireless mood lighting system." Lovely.

The cost of carbon dioxide reduction

Emma Clarke, writing for ClimateChangeCorp.com, reports on the development of more environmentally friendly concrete in The truth about...cement. Don't ask me to explain the chemistry behind it - chemistry was my worst subject - but here are the basic facts. Cement accounts for some 5 percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Traditional cements emits about .6 tonnes of carbon for every 1 tonne produced, and that's not counting emissions from the fuel burned to heat the kiln.

A new type of cement called geopolymer cement produces only about a third of the carbon of traditional cement. A company called Zeobond based in Australia has managed to produce it in small quantities at a price of only 10-15 percent more than traditional concrete. Assuming there are some economies of scale involved, I would guess that this price could be brought even lower. So it looks like the tradeoff in increased price vs. reduced pollution could be attractive. But there are naysayers.   

The price of organic food

The Guardian reports that organic food sales in the UK have started to tumble (Hat tip: African Agriculture). Sales have fallen nearly 20 percent in the last four-week period. Fortunately for developing countries, it looks like UK consumers were never very interested in buying organic produce from the developing world. Meanwhile, Juliette Jowit asks whether organic food was just a fad?

 

Fighting climate change through trade liberalization

The Institute of Public Affairs, a free market-oriented think tank in Australia, has issued a mini-manifesto on combating climate change. In Undermining Mitigation Technology, Tim Wilson puts forth two arguments about how best to develop and spread new technologies to combat climate change. His big argument is that patent rights ought not to be violated. I think that part of the argument will prove contentious.

More interesting to me is Wilson's argument that trade barriers present a significant obstacle to the diffusion of mitigation technology. This one looks like a no-brainer. In his own words:

The global market for environmental goods and services is worth between USD$550 billion and USD$613 billion per annum. Of this figure, 35 per cent is in goods and 65per cent in services. Yet some countries impose tariffs of up to 70 per cent on these technologies. In Asia and Latin America the average tariff on environmentally sensitive technologies is between 15 and 20 per cent. If the governments of developing countries want to promote the transfer of CO2 mitigation technologies, they can do something immediately—remove their tariff barriers.

Pollution in Beijing after the Olympics

I knew that Beijing has been cracking down on pollution, but I didn't know how they were going about it. It looks like authorities have banned vehicles on alternate days based on the last number of the vehicle's license plate. However, a representative of the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communications has said they will not extend the law after the end of the Olympic games.

I had heard about bans like this before in Mexico City. I've been told that wealthier families would often buy two cars and drive them on alternate days. As far as I have been able to find out, it looks like this idea started in 1986 with a program called Proconve in Sao Paolo. Apparently, local authorities have attributed large reductions in gaseous pollutants to the program. I'd love to know how many families have opted to buy multiple vehicles to get around restrictions like these. How much more pollution is created by this additional demand for vehicles?

Creating a carbon market at your supermarket

One of Friedrick Hayek's key insights concerned the pricing mechanism - to put it very simply, prices convey an extraordinary amount of data, and it is this aggregation of data that allows independent economic actors to coordinate their activity. This insight was central to Hayek's support of the free market over a planned economy.

However, as many have pointed out since, prices don't take into account externalities, perhaps the most notable being pollution. One solution to this is to tax products and services in proportion to the degree of negative externality involved. Prices ought to then represent the 'true cost' of the product. Tesco, Marks & Spencer, and other retailers in the UK have another idea: provide customers a carbon label. Last year, the Carbon Trust rolled out an initiative to do just that. The idea is that customers can compare products in terms of their carbon footprint and make purchases accordingly. In theory, this should mimic the price signal, but one has to wonder whether consumers will bite?

The many uses of Second Life

Last year the World Bank's Doing Business team released its annual report in Second Life. For those of you without the appropriate level of nerd credentials, Second Life is an online virtual community that allows users to create avatars and interact in constructed virtual worlds. Doing Business took advantage of this platform to reach some 700 "residents" of Second Life and another 1,000 audio listeners. (The DB team's Dahlia Khalifa sums up the event nicely in a post on the Doing Business Blog. Also see below for a video of the event.) As it turns out, the Second Life event continues to generate interest, and DFID's quarterly journal Developments dedicated a story to the role of online communities in promoting development. According to one non-profit cited in Developments:

...Second Life offers an unprecedented opportunity for global meetings which are not just interactive and participatory, but which are also carbon neutral. And the UN is watching closely to see if...Second Life provides a domain where non-profits and NGOs might promote campaigns and share ideas as never before.

Rising food prices, climate change, and a dire prediction

While rising food prices threaten to increase poverty, they are not quite the unmitigated disaster that they are sometimes represented to be, at least according to Dani Rodrik. Rodrik points out that the effect of rising food prices on the world's poor depends on whether the poor are net producers or consumers of foodstuffs:

The fact is that millions of very poor growers of rice and other food products are much better off as a result [of rising prices]. The poor that are affected the worst are the urban poor, not the rural poor.

Nevertheless, the net effect of rising food prices on global poverty in the short term is probably still negative, given the number of urban poor. But in the longer run, it's more of an open question. A permanent rise in food prices might prompt a shift in the allocation of labor to the agricultural sector. (This is the kind of thing that may already be happening in Brazil and could spread to other emerging markets.) Increased demand for agricultural labor could help reduce poverty, but it is not without risks.

The real threat to the environment? Your TV!

Michael Prather, a researcher at University of California, Irvine, warns that flat-screen televisions may be a dire threat to the climate. According to an article in the Guardian:

Manufacturers use a greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride to make the televisions...As a driver of global warming, nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Air Products, one company that produces the gas for electronics, says that "very little is released into the atmosphere." Interestingly, however, a recent Air Products 'Safetygram' had this to say about nitrogen trifluoride (aka NF3):

G8 via Skype

Given the amount of resources expended on the G8 - think of the jet fuel, huge dinners, and 20,000 police officers mobilized for security - many bloggers have happily pointed to the irony of world leaders discussing the food crisis and global warming. But one blogger in Japan going by the name of fookpaktsuen offered a novel proposal: run the G8 meetings via Skype (Hat tip: Global Voices Online). Here's what he had to say (translation courtesy of Global Voices Online):

Over 20,000 police officers were mobilized from Shikoku and Kyushu…and global warming is the main agenda, while the fact is that holding this summit is itself “earth-unfriendly”...If terrorist attacks are considered a threat, then instead of all state leaders getting together, it's better to have the meeting over Skype. The number of police on defense was larger than that of the 120 protesters in the anti-Summit demonstration, [which took place] in a rural area far away from the summit. It's absurd.

iPhone 3G = Organic Farming?

I haven't quite figured out what the connection is, but some folks have apparently found a link between organic farming and the iPhone 3G. An organization called Waiting for Apples is pulling a bit of a publicity stunt in New York by waiting in line days in advance of the release of the iPhone 3G, due to be out this Friday. What exactly is Waiting for Apples advocating? It's not 100% clear from their website. But here is what they're doing while waiting for the new phone:

• We will drink NYC's renowned tap water.
• We will have local healthy food (especially Apples) delivered by our community gardener friends, Greenmarket farmers, and locavore restauranteurs via bicycles and pedicabs.
• We will compost our foodscraps, to help sustain our fragile soil.
• And most importantly, we will talk to whoever happens to stop by about local organic farming as a critical element to sustainable healthy living, food security, youth education, and climate change mitigation.

The World Bank Wants You!

No, it’s not a joke—the World Bank Group is undertaking consultations right now on its Strategic Framework on Climate Change and Development. Yesterday I attended an internal consultation, and the turnout – over 100 staff – made it clear that World Bank staff are seeing that climate change affects their work. Global consultations with governments, civil society, the private sector, and other groups have been going on since March 2008 in places as far-flung as Brasilia and Jakarta. You also have a chance to get your two cents (or eurocents, pesos, or whatever) in by commenting online. The deadline for submitting comments has been extended through July 7. You can also see what others are saying on the site.

Sign of the times

This is perhaps related to PSD only indirectly, but I couldn't help posting this picture of an intersection in Manchester during rush hour. Notice anything missing? I have to admit my initial amazement at the empty streets, but perhaps people can kick the driving habit if gas prices go high enough. The Manchester Evening News had this to say: 

Traffic analysts confirmed there has been a dramatic fall in the number of cars on the region's roads as the price of unleaded petrol heads towards £1.20 a litre.

For developing countries that are suffering the ill effects of climate change, this is a very small piece of good news.

A solution to urban homelessness?

A little food for thought this morning. Dickson Despommier (pictured), a professor at Columbia University, made a semi-novel proposal last Thursday on an appearance on the Colbert Report: vertical farming. The idea is that farming on a large scale could be done in cities indoors to reduce the need to transport food long distances. While the idea has been suggested before—see this PSD post on the topic from April 2008—Dr. Despommier took it a step further when he suggested vertical farming could help reduce or eliminate urban homelessness. While I'm not exactly convinced of the economics of the proposal, I wonder what implications it would have for the Harris-Todaro model of urban unemployment? Follow the link for Dr. Despommier's interview with Colbert.

Update: Graham Harvey offers a somewhat more modest proposal than vertical farms in the Guardian.

Comparing businesses' environmental commitments

Climate Change, an environmental interest group, released a new ranking of "green" companies. The survey purports to measure how serious companies are about climate change in comparison with their sector competitors. 

The survey, which is updated annually, uses 22 criteria to analyze whether companies measure their climate footprint; reduced their impact on global warming; supported progressive climate legislation; and publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively.

A (LED) light at the end of the tunnel

Close to 75 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans, about 550 million people, do not have access to electricity. Lighting Africa, a conference in Ghana that ended today, is tackling how to mobilize the private sector to supply modern off-grid lighting such as Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to over more 250 million people living in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. This is a timely effort given surging oil prices and the fact that Africa spends about $17 billion on inefficient lighting fuels such as kerosene lamps and paraffin yearly.

Earth Day celebration ideas

To celebrate Earth Day some people join protest rallies, some others disappear into the wild, but here is a list of more conventional ideas. Feel free to send your own.

• Calculate your carbon footprint (and preferably try to reduce it).
• Plant a three to offset 730kg of carbon emissions (if not one cuts it down).
• Bike to and from work.
• Recycle (even if no one is looking).
• Avoid plastic bags.

Sustainable banking awards: who's winning what?

The Financial Times and IFC announced shortlists of potential winners for the 2008 Sustainable Banking Awards. The awards recognize financial institutions that have led the way in integating their policies with social, environmental, and corporate governance objectives. Below is a sample the categories and the shortlisted candidates, the full list is available here.

Sustainable Bank of the Year

• Banco Real, Brazil
• Citi, US
• HSBC, UK
• Rabobank, Netherlands
• Standard Chartered, UK

Sustainable Deal of the Year

• BlueOrchard Finance, Switzerland/Morgan Stanley, US (microfinance loans)
• Calyon, France (solar thermal power plants)
• Citi, US (financing for rural housing)
• Glitnir Bank, Iceland (geothermal power generation)
• Merrill Lynch, US (carbon finance to reduce deforestation)

Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid

• ASA, Bangladesh
• Banco Bradesco, Brazil
• ICICI Group, India
• Opportunity International, UK
• Wizzit, South Africa

Locally-grown food in the middle of New York City

New York Magazine asked four architects to design whatever they would like for a full city block of space with no clients to worry about. One design offered was a vertical farm, complete with water tanks and each floor would be used for the cultivation of a different crop. Amale Andraos, of Work AC, the firm responsible for the intriguing idea, said in the article that they “are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels].”

Ok, maybe that’s taking sustainable design to an extreme; does anyone have more eco-friendly (and preferably profitable) ideas?

Richard Posner on food prices

"The demand for agricultural products has grown, though not as a result of population growth; instead as a result of increased demand for ethanol and other biofuels, and for food that requires more agricultural acreage to produce. Today, besides people and pigs eating corn, our motor vehicles "eat" corn that has been converted into ethanol."

Read the entire piece here.

Here's your diploma, now go pump some oil

In times of off-the charts oil prices and environmental concerns, it may be surprising to find out that thousands of people graduate every year to go work in the oil industry. The Wall Street Journal published an article analyzing where these graduates are coming from. During the 70s and 80s, most petroleum graduates came from Texas A&M and other top U.S. and European institutions, says the article.

The tables have turned. Today, schools in Azerbaijan, Brazil and other nations with state energy firms that manage vast hydrocarbon resources are expected to produce more than 12,000 petroleum-engineering and geoscience graduates in 2008, double the roughly 6,000 in the U.S., Canada and Europe, according to recent data from Schlumberger Ltd., the world's biggest oil-services firm by revenue.

Ethanol production and access to finance

What does the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 and its mandatory doubling of renewable fuel additives by 2012 have to do with access to finance? A recent paper uses the sudden increase in demand for U.S. corn, the primary input for ethanol production, as an external shock to see how access to finance affected corn producers in the U.S. It shows that productivity increased after 2005 in corn production as opposed to soybean production and more in counties with better access to finance. Now, just imagine the effect in developing countries!

The big green monster in the closet

The word is out that Wal-Mart, the giant U.S. retailer, will hold talks with hundreds of its Chinese suppliers to discuss significant reductions of the environmental impact of its entire supply chain.

Given the magnitude of Wal-Mart’s activities – according to the Financial Times, Wal-Mart alone is responsible for about 30 percent of foreign purchases in China and close to 10 percent of all US imports from there – this may be a more significant step toward minimizing its ecological foot print than its previous attempts.

Going green as an strategic risk

A new report by Ernst & Yong ranks a growing "greening" concern as one of the top 10 strategic risks businesses face. The top three risks are: regulatory and compliance risk, global financial shocks, and aging consumers and workforce.

The report calls this increasing concern about the enviroment "radical greening" and states that going green is expensive at first, but it could be worthwhile if consumer tastes and the regulatory enviroment start to demand it; ok, perhaps that wasn't a jaw-dropping discovery, but the entire report still makes for a good reading.

Joining the dialogue: Environmental Capital

Following up on today's theme, it's worth adding the recent addition by the Wall Street Journal - it's own blog about the business of the environment. Here's more from the editors themselves:

"[This blog] tracks how growing green concern, particularly over climate change, is roiling established industries and spurring new ones – and how that shift is affecting investors, consumers and the planet."

Putting a price on carbon: time to get hands-on

The recent spate of announcements by financial institutions looking forward to a world with a price on carbon - and their decisions to set a price for carbon in their own calculations on project viability or to adhere to generic principles on carbon which may influence the future shape of their portfolios - are the latest evidence of a world preparing itself for some kind of public policy context to emerge from international negotiations. But perhaps of equal significance is evidence that the risks and opportunities from managing exposure to carbon are seen as real and present, not potential and distant.

To dig down into performance and beyond rhetoric a number of challenges face financial institutions. A carbon price helps one understand risk in a future where carbon carries a price, but how do you decide where to invest in carbon intensive projects and where not?

Global warming gets cool in Japan

A group of business leaders including executives from global corporations like Sony, Nike, and Nokia singed the Tokyo Declaration this week. The signatories expressed concern over greenhouse gas emissions and said that such emissions need to be reduced by 50 percent by 2050. Thanks.

On that same note, a McKinsey Quarterly survey finds that 60 percent of global executives consider climate change an important issue to take into account within their companies' overall strategy.

Sustainable tourism competition open

Proponents of "geotourism" believe that it benefits local residents in many ways, including economically, since travel businesses strive to use local workforce, products, and services.

A new National Geographic competition aims to raise awareness to ways geotourism may be beneficial to the local communities. Winners will be innovators in geotourism and applications are now open through April 9.

If you are part of a committed organization or governemnt you can also sign the "Geotourism Charter" (p.s.: totally non-binding and unenforceable).

Africa: (self-powered) light at the end of the tunnel

Actor Tom Hanks is better known for his role in Forrest Gump than for his work with self-powered energy. But that might soon change, at least for some people in sub-Saharan Africa, where Hanks is funding a project that will create assorted lights and lanterns to serve an area where less than 15 percent of the population has proper lighting.

These devices work by transforming winding-up motion into electricity and in some cases one minute of winding can generate two hours of lighting. The company making the products cites several applications for its devices including enabling businesses to stay open later and increasing night-time studying hours. They can also power radios, and other devices such as the "One Laptop per Child" laptops.

Maybe with oil prices breaking $100/barrel and having much of our electricity generated from oil, these devices will become commercially viable in the west as well.

Climate policy map

Econsense created an interactive database for all-things climate. Much like our Do-Your-Own-Analysis, it allows to compare and contrast data across countries, in this case, on topics such as greenhouse gas emissions, fuel tax, emissions trading and biofuel production.

Not so green after all

Ceres, a coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations, believes that the financial services industry – with nearly $6 trillion in market capitalization – should play a role in combating climate change.

Most recently, Ceres released a first comprehensive assessment of how the world's 40 largest banks fulfill their commitments to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The study found that, despite an overall widespread positive trend, only 12 banks made climate change a governance priority; only 6 said they were calculating carbon risk in their portfolio and "no bank has set a policy to avoid investments in carbon-intensive projects such as coal-fired power plants."

Unusual champions of global sustainability

It is often assumed that the greatest potential for improving business environmental practice in developing countries lies with foreign multinationals and not with the countries' own businesses.

These case studies reject this common assumption and point to the crucial role of developing-country firms as they serve the world's most populous and fastest growing markets

Says Simone Pulver the guest editor of "Greening Development: The Role of the Developing-Country Private Sector" published in the "Studies in Comparative International Development" [subscription required]. The recent issue is based on case studies of selected firms in China, India and Latin America.

Withdrawing the claws from data: a new year's proposal for the private and development sectors

Now, here's a mash-up that got me really excited. Mapecos provides information on the environmental performance of more than 20,000 industrial facilities across the US. Interestingly, government data on toxic pollution for each facility are displayed side by side with the data provided by the facilities' managers themselves.

PR vs. reality, the malignant might say. The site, however, is designed to move beyond finger-pointing "to provide an even handed view of industrial environmental performance": a "natural experiment" with increasing access to information, as one of its founders put it.

Creating incentives to publish "hidden data" and combining data sets from different sources - it is this type of "natural experiments" that the development (and private) sector needs more of to increase transparency and citizens' empowerment.

Locomotion for $2500

Though above $2000, at $2,500 the Tata Group found a way to build the cheapest car in the world.

Tomorrow, India's biggest company will show what taking out one windshield wiper, radio, moving the engine to the back, and putting in a cheaper, hollowed out steering-wheel shaft can do to a price of an automobile.

Its impact on the environment? It is predicted to be either very positive or negative.

Update: Tata Nano a.k.a the "people's car" is out now.

Going green for the holidays

Feeling guilty at the excesses of yet another office party or Secret Santa exchange? Envirowise in the UK has come up with a company guide to a green Christmas. Most suggestions are pretty undemanding, but hopefully the impact adds up given the sharp spike in waste generated by the typical holiday season.

In reinforcing the call for climate-friendly celebrations, Lloyds of London notes that over 8 million Christmas trees are bought in the UK alone, generating an estimated 160,000 tonnes of additional rubbish. This is apparently equivalent to the weight of 21 Eiffel Towers.

There are also business opportunities around environmental concerns. In the retail sector, firms are seeing the growing trend for green giving. Deloitte's holiday survey finds that 18% of consumers will buy more eco-friendly gifts and many are willing to pay more for them.

On the receiving end, 58% of Americans want to get a green gift this year according to the 2007 Cone Holiday Environmental Survey. So don't be surprised to find your stocking stuffed with products proudly proclaiming their green credentials from organic to carbon-neutral to biodegradable. If you don't like what you find, perhaps you need have no guilt over recycling gifts.  You would simply be doing your part for the environment.

A roadmap for international financial institutions

International financial institutions too need a clear climate change roadmap. While the Bali negotiations continue into the night, it is not too early to think about what the G8 when it meets in Japan in seven months should ask these institutions:

1. Leverage commitments from donors with private financial flows to a leverage number of their choice.
2. Come up with tools for developing countries and the firms that drive their economies to understand their adaptation risk and engineer financial products with the private sector to insure against and offset those risks.
3. Never use public aid funds to undermine the development of a market where a market may flourish and never act to become the market, but rather facilitate their creation.
4. Target subsidy to speed up the adoption of new clean technologies based on a carbon price.
5. Ask each institution to report its baseline for GHG emissions from its portfolio in FY09 with a goal to reduce over that baseline over time with criteria for exceptions based on meeting the energy access needs of the poorest countries.
6. Climate proof long range development programs.
7. Work with developing countries to create the investment climate necessary to support clean technology adoption, promote distributed, local renewable energy solutions, and water pricing policies.
8. Campaign against trade barriers that act against the interests of the climate change agenda.

A low hanging fruit?

According to IETA, carbon capture and storage – CCS for the connoisseurs - is a low-hanging fruit which could potentially be one of the main solutions to climate change. Friends of CCS met today to exchange their latest news. The European Commission is only days away from presenting to the Parliament and the Council new legislative amendments to allow for the transport and storage of carbon.

Rio Tinto and BP have together created Hydrogen Energy, a company investing in hydrogen fuelled power stations. This is how it works: coal is burned, the CO2 is extracted and stored, which leaves hydrogen as a fuel. CCS should really fall under the Clean Development Mechanism, argued Eskom, the South-African power utility.

So how low is this fruit exactly? Enel, Italy's largest power company, warned that the technology for power plants is not yet ready. And because the process of capture and storage is in itself high energy, it requires very efficient power plants. Rio Tinto confessed that none of Hydrogen Energy's plants are yet in operation. One plant requires a capital investment of about $2 billion, and finding adequate reservoirs is extremely difficult and costly. Furthermore, some plants are faced with objections from a public which has not yet bought into the idea. ECN, the Dutch energy research center, called "emotional" those reactions against CCS.

Flashbacks at Bali

Walking into the Bali Convention Center, you know that you have become a fixture in the world of international sustainable development when the UN security guard welcomes you with a broad smile and a "how have you been." You swore as a younger woman and an activist you would never become one of those grey haired incrementalists around the negotiating halls.

And then you look around and you see your old friends, all with traces of grey at the temples, reporting, representing UN agencies, working the trade agenda, running think tanks, hanging out on the west coast of the US with other ageing activists and having fun being still irreverent, or slightly proud that Michael Crichton may have based his caricature of the evilly powerful NGO on you.

Looking around you see a remarkable repository of knowledge, not just of the substance of the negotiations, but of the social anthropology of summitry. Of the personal that makes up the political and the history of institutions, a history that often impedes collaboration and undermines trust.

A public/private partnership to the moon

The technologies are available, the savings obvious, yet consumers are slow in adopting energy efficient products. Speaking at the Bali Global Business day on the margins of the UN Climate Change conference, a Philips official wondered why two thirds of the world still uses old lighting technologies when switching to existing modern technology would represent a 40% saving in total lighting energy consumption.

The private sector is asking for a public/private partnership where governments implement stronger energy efficiency standards, including labeling, adopt greener public procurement requirements, and grant financial incentives.

In developing countries, investors' appetite for clean technology investment is also growing but private companies are facing additional obstacles: the risk perception, the lack of market research, the need to adapt technologies to the requirements of these markets. Again, a public/private partnership makes sense.

GEF and IFC launched today the Earth Fund which aims to give those businesses keen to invest in environmental technologies in developing countries that extra support they need to take the leap. The most exciting feature of the fund: a prize! The very same company that stimulated with a prize the launch of the first private rocketship in outer space, will manage the Earth Fund's prizes for innovative environmental technology.

Development in 3D

What do a community project in the Philippines and the U.S. Air Force have in common? An appreciation for the power of 3D modeling to visualize and manage information.

The project from the Philippines is based on Participatory 3D Modelling "aimed at facilitating grassroots participation in problem analysis and decision-making." One has to wonder whether providing communities with a chance to see the impact of future projects on their land would engage them.

And this is what the U.S. Air Force is up to, according to The Economist:

Last year Waterstone, a consultancy, assembled the geodata for 13 American air-force bases and wrapped them up in a modified version of NASA's World Wind geobrowser.

Money on trees

The host sets the tone: last year's climate change talks, held in Nairobi, revolved around adaptation. This year, with Indonesia hosting the UN climate change conference, the prevalent issue is deforestation.

The malaise here in Indonesia is clear. Rising commodity prices and a boom in biofuels have led to uncontrolled deforestation. To improve its image and to offset the conference, Indonesia has just been on a planting spree with 79 million new trees in the ground. The word is that the conference, as a result, is "carbon positive." The question is: what measures, if any, will flip the current incentive scheme and will make it financially more interesting to keep the forests standing.

In a new report CIFOR suggests payments to land users for environmental services. The report, however, does not mention how high those payments should be to represent a real alternative, nor where those payments would come from, nor where local people previously employed on these lands would find a new job.

A little while ago, when offered to be paid as custodians of the country's landscapes, French farmers vehemently declined the idea. A real job and their dignity, that's what they wanted.

Straight from the Climate Change Conference in Bali

Our own code-breakers in Bali, Lucie Giraud and Rachel Kyte, kindly agreed to keep us abreast of the developments on the ground throughout the second half of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

In the meantime see the World Bank's official conference site and the list of delegates.

We'll keep the track of their dispatches below.  Comments are encouraged.

• Lucie - Money on trees
• Lucie - A public/private partnership to the moon
• Rachel - Flashbacks at Bali
• Rachel - Disciplined financial mechanisms
• Lucie - A low hanging fruit?
• Rachel - A roadmap for international financial institutions