Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

The California Sustainability Alliance recently attended the Los Angeles Business Council 2010 Sustainability Summit as a cooperating organization – here’s part three in our series on what we learned there. The event was brimming with impressive speakers and panelists, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who expressed pride in his perfect attendance record at this 3rd annual event.

The mayor began by expressing his perspective on the sustainability value proposition, which he believes contributes not just to the environment but also to jobs and the overall economy. He then took a quick dive into the financial crisis currently facing the city of Los Angeles, which has tried to raise electricity rates in order to maintain solvency. He explained that he believes rates need to go up not just to keep the city solvent, but also to enable action on important policy goals. In particular, the city is heavily reliant on coal for its power generation. While this choice helps to keep rates down, Villaraigosa expressed his conviction that the city must change its generation mix to incorporate more low-carbon sources such as natural gas and renewables.

Villaraigosa spent the remainder of his keynote addressing one of his passions – improving public transit in Los Angeles. He focused on Measure R, which was approved by LA County voters in 2008 with an overwhelming two-thirds majority. The measure provides $40 billion in funding over the next 30 years for numerous transportation projects, including several related to sustainability, such as:

• Doubling the size of the rail system in Los Angeles County
• Building a “subway to the sea”
• Establishing bikeways and pedestrian improvements
• Maintaining low fares for public transit while expanding service
• Carpool lanes

Measure R is an unprecedented investment in public transit; and to make it even more impressive, Villaraigosa has championed accelerating the timeline from thirty years to ten. While completing the numerous projects in Measure R will be a challenge – it requires cooperation amongst all 88 cities in Los Angeles County – the initiative will be a true game-changer, vastly improving both environmental sustainability and quality of life for Los Angelenos. Measure R is also expected to create 166,000 jobs and save 10 million gallons of gasoline annually, contributing to economic growth and energy independence. Emphasizing the diverse benefits of this project, Villaraigosa called on business, academia, and health professionals to work together in support the initiative, concluding, “The time to act is now.”

As a former Angeleno, I can’t wait to see my hometown finally build a more sustainable transit system. For those of you currently living in Los Angeles County, tell us – how is implementation of Measure R affecting your daily life? What do you think the County’s transit priorities ought to be?

Getty Center Gardens features efficient irrigation techniques and drought tolerant plants

For part two of our series on the recent Los Angeles Business Council 2010 Sustainability Summit, we’ll be covering the first of the two morning keynotes. These speeches were given by California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. We’ll be reviewing Michael Peevey’s keynote here – but stay tuned for a discussion of Mayor Villaraigosa’s keynote later this week.

Both keynotes (and many of the panelists as well) centered around the idea that it’s time to move from talk about sustainability to action on sustainability. Peevey illustrated the magnitude of the challenge ahead by outlining the requirements of AB 32. Today, he explained, California emits 13 tons of carbon per person per day. To meet AB 32 goals, these emissions will have to drop to 10.5 tons per person per day by 2020, and to 1.5 tons by 2050. For comparison, 1.5 tons of carbon per person per day is roughly equal to India’s carbon intensity today.

To meet such aggressive goals, Peevey emphasized, radical changes will be necessary. In particular, Peevey expressed a belief that realignment of market forces, while preferred by many major corporations such as Safeway (as we discussed previously in our review of the first panel), will be insufficient to meet the goals and deadlines set by AB 32. As with many of the speakers at the conference, Peevey was unafraid of controversy, stating that while AB 32 has many “command and control” requirements, he believes such strong mandates are necessary to achieve the state’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.

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Getty Center facilities, certified LEED-EB Silver

Building a Green Economy: Connecting Sustainability to Business and Job Creation-The Los Angeles Business Council’s annual sustainability summit was held on April 6th at the Getty Center, a museum overlooking the city that is impressive not only for its extensive art collection, but also for its beautiful, LEED-EB Silver facilities.

The day’s events featured three panel discussions and keynote speeches, with participants representing major public and private organizations such as Safeway, Jones Lang LaSalle, the California Air Resources Board, LA Unified School District, Southern California Edison, the LA City Council, Kyocera Solar, Arden Realty, and others. Notable panel participants and keynote speakers included Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, California Attorney General Jerry Brown, LA City Controller Wendy Greuel, and Michael Peevey, President of the California PUC.

The summit featured a terrific collection of speakers and panelists, and we were thrilled to be in attendance as a cooperating organization. We’ll be sharing what we heard with all of you in this short blog series, beginning with this report on the first panel of the day, Discussion of Best Practices among Sustainable Industry Pioneers. Read more…

Sharing of best practices is central to the mission of the California Sustainability Alliance, so we were particularly thrilled to observe the many organizations openly sharing their experiences and learning from one another at this year’s Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Environmental Sustainability Symposium. This is the second posting in our two-part series documenting this great event. In part one, we discussed the keynote speeches; here, we’ll be delving into the panel sessions.

But first, we’d like to share with you a few of the big takeaways from this year’s event, themes we heard numerous keynote speakers and panelists bring up repeatedly throughout the day:

• Take a long view – align your company around important human challenges, rather than around next quarter’s earnings; make sure everyone agrees on what’s coming in the 21st century economy and what goals the company should pursue
• Use sustainability as an opportunity to better understand your business processes and improve both economic and environmental performance
• Collaborate – internally, with competitors, with non-competitors, and with policy-makers
• Engage employees and customers; be transparent
• Get specific, both in terms of what each individual can do to contribute, and in terms of metrics

In addition to the keynote speeches discussed in our previous post, the symposium included several panels addressing frameworks for implementing initiatives, the benefits of collaboration, procurement issues, reporting, and more. Read more…

On March 25th, the Alliance attended the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) 2010 Environmental Sustainability Symposium, which provided attendees with tools, resources, and strategies to help businesses more fully adopt environmental sustainability in their products and corporate operations. Titled The Sustainable Corporation: Solutions from the Innovation Economy, the program featured keynote speakers Aron Cramer, CEO, Business for Social Responsibility; Engelina Jaspers, VP, HP Environmental Sustainability; and Adam Werbach, Global CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Author, “Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto.”

Aron Cramer’s talk focused on the role of corporations in achieving sustainability. Demonstrating a positive perspective on the growing interconnectedness between business and sustainability, he told the audience, “this is no longer about the green economy, it’s about the economy.” Listening to his talk, we found his recommended steps for corporate greening to be particularly thoughtful:

1. Shape business strategies to meet global challenges

   Shareholder value should not be the primary target. Rather, the companies that succeed in the 21st century will be those tackling important health/nutrition/environmental/other challenges. One example given by Cramer is Ford, which is working to transition from being a car company to a transportation company.

2. Use sustainability as a driver of innovation
3. Get the incentives right

   a. Change compensation criteria
   b. Change stock valuations to consider long term investment in sustainability

4. Embrace collaboration and transparency

   Bring NGOs into corporations to advise on sustainability and collaborate on product development. Consumer transparency (barcodes, labeling) is also essential.

5. Bring in consumers

   Provide more information on products and product care/operation, to empower consumers to make better choices.

Cramer also discussed how to get board buy-in for corporate greening. His advice? Be clear about expectations of what tomorrow’s economy will look like. Once you agree on this, everyone is working towards the same goal, rather than trying to fit investments for the future into today’s economic framework.

Engelina Jaspers’ lunchtime keynote discussed HP’s Journey to Environmental Sustainability. We found that HP has an interesting perspective on what it means to be a “sustainable corporation”: Since IT is only 2% of Carbon emissions, while HP is interested in greening its own practices, the company sees its real opportunity in using IT to reduce the carbon intensity of the other 98% of Carbon emissions. Examples of HP’s sustainability-related initiatives include developing videoconferencing software, handheld printers for UPS that print directly onto packages without the use of labels, and energy efficient datacenters.

Internally, HP’s goal is to be more efficient energy-wise and economically, and to reinvest savings in targeted growth – “it’s about being smart businesspeople,” said Jaspers. Beyond the pursuit of economic efficiency, drivers for HP’s corporate greening include: market competition, customer demand, and the desire to stay ahead of regulation.

To achieve its sustainability goals, HP believes employee engagement is crucial. To do this, Jaspers emphasized bringing together the right people, and giving them clear direction, as opposed to telling all employees to just “be green”. Jaspers also encourages thorough exploration of how sustainability applies to each group within an organization. For example, what does sustainability mean to HR? To Procurement? With this approach, groups of employees in different parts of the organization will come up with unique sustainability initiatives that reflect their role and leverage points within the organization.

For the final keynote of the day, Adam Werbach spoke on implementing a strategy for sustainability.

Werbach’s speech was more inspirational than specific; however, he did offer a broad definition of sustainability, which he believes is a combination of social, environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability. Werbach emphasized that most people are not strongly motivated by this broad perspective when they make purchasing decisions, and so it is incumbent on corporations to offer products and services that incorporate sustainability yet don’t sacrifice on performance or cost.

Werbach also discussed the importance of a “North Star Goal”, an overarching goal that the entire company works towards over the long term. Such goals are:

1. Actionable by every employee
2. Core to the business
3. Solving a global human challenge
4. Achievable in 5-15 years
5. Inspirational

As an example, Werbach noted Toyota’s goal to make cars that never crash and clean the air as they drive. Despite Toyota’s recent setbacks, the company’s dedication to this North Star goal is undeniably impressive.

These keynote speakers provided attendees with a considerable amount of information on best practices and a unique way of looking at business strategies that include the holistic adoption of environmental sustainability. Stay tuned for part two of this series, in which we’ll discuss some of the best practices we learned about at the panel presentations.