With its roots in the ecology movement of the 1970s, World Environment Day was originally a response to the awaking awareness that human behavior was negatively affecting the quality of nature. Today, we are beginning to grasp a more-pressing, more-galvanizing realization: natural capital is essential not only for the betterment of human life, but for its mere existence.

We have migrated from the ecological movement of the 70s through the sustainability movement of the 90s (leapfrogging the global party that was the 80s) to a clearer understanding of today’s most urgent issue — resilience.

The language we use to describe the predicament has evolved to reflect our changing and growing understanding of the essential relationship between humans and nature. “Ecology,” where nature was the victim in need of protection, expanded into the idea of “sustainability” in an attempt to focus as much or more on the qualities that allow for human development and improve the quality of human life. As the consequences of resource scarcity and degradation have become more manifest, we now find ourselves in an age where we are beginning to appreciate that we cannot triumph by engaging in a struggle, but must learn the steps in a dance of give and take that requires us to flex and adapt to our partner’s moves.

We have deconstructed the ideas at the heart of the environment and sustainability movements and effectively repackaged them in the name of “resilience” — a concept and a word that are accessible and comprehensible to a far greater number of people.

Resilience acknowledges the cause-and-effect relationships between natural, economic and human systems. It recognizes that our ability to maintain civil societies, prioritize needs and implement the hard decisions ahead of us requires a much better understanding of the interplay among water, food, energy, prosperity and governance.

Under what circumstances will we be able to continue? The quality of our continued existence depends upon the ability of the human species to find a comfortable balance between our needs and desires, and those of the other species with whom we share the planet. The next step is for us to leave behind our outdated notion of nature as some malevolent third party plotting against us (with killer storms, invasive species and toxic shellfish) and re-embrace its potential to surround and protect us with life-giving ecosystem services and natural defense systems.

The advantage humans have is that we are the most creative, inventive, ingenious and collaborative species on the planet.

What I would like to celebrate today is the vast potential we have as a species to unite our ingenuity with that of the natural world and to improve the security and quality of life for every single person on the planet. We are all in this together.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at 91Ӱ��. With more than three decades of experience in the public and private sectors, he has helped shape sustainability theory, policy and practice throughout the world and is actively engaged in current U.N. initiatives to research, mitigate and adapt to climate change and the pressures of urban growth.
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Taken in conjunction with the evidence from HelpAge’s survey of elders affected by climate change who would rather stay in risky rural areas than move to a city, we have a compelling argument that the most politically astute decision any city can make is to invest in strategies that make its city more attractive and livable for every member of society — cities that honor their social contract.

Fulfilling a city’s social contract does not rely upon moral obligation, but rather upon self-interest. The majority of global wealth is held in the private business sector. While more and more corporations are reevaluating their responsibility to society, it is ultimately local, regional and national government that is responsible for both the physical and social infrastructure of our cities — and by extension, for the natural resources upon which both rely.

Government can engage in meaningful conversation with the private sector if it asks, “What is in the interests of the private sector to help society become more successful?” Then, rather than moral obligation, the question becomes one of degree. Is the private sector keeping too much of the wealth from the use of natural resources for which it paid nothing? Does the health burden of contaminated resources outweigh the cost of responsible resource management? What are the financial consequences to business operations of resource depletion or unpredictable availability? What is the impact of civil unrest on business security? Are we investing enough in educating individuals to develop the technical and entrepreneurial capacity necessary for the private sector to be successful into the future? What is the risk of failing to transfer the depth of knowledge held in our elder population to younger generations? What is the impact to business efficiency when employees cannot easily get to their places of work?

We don’t need a revolution. We need a different perspective. If we can reconnect with the understanding that both our health and our wealth are inextricably dependent upon our physical environment, we can improve the way our cities serve their citizens.

Our elders still remember a time when we were not so divorced from our physical environment. I am quite convinced that engaging our elders in a conversation on the complex, vexing issues of unpredictable weather, unreliable water sources, food scarcity, restricted mobility and civil security would yield critical insights into more responsible paths forward.

Our elders are the canaries in the mine. If we can find ways to support healthy, active, engaged aging in our cities, we will have ensured that every citizen has the opportunity for a successful future.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at 91Ӱ��.
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In my mind, these are not separate issues. Cities and nations are only vulnerable because they are full of people. Among those people, one of the most vulnerable and increasingly large groups is the elderly.

By 2050, approximately two billion people on the planet will be over the age of 65 — over one fifth of the global population.

Cities are often a source of great anxiety for elders. Cities are expensive. Access and mobility are challenging. Elders often find themselves dependent upon family members or isolated and alone. A 2009 HelpAge report on elders’ attitudes to climate change revealed that almost all older people surveyed would rather stay in environmentally risky rural areas than migrate to a city. They fear becoming a burden to their families, losing the connection to their community, and being unable to work and contribute. All these factors are known to compromise health and well-being.

“New York City’s food and medicine supplies are all warehoused in New Jersey. If Superstorm Sandy had closed down all of the tunnels instead of just one, over eight million people would have run out of essential food and medical supplies before the tunnels could have been cleared.”

Around the world, there are an increasing number of high-value fixes being proposed for the problems of climate change. Inevitably, the focus is on physical resilience in cities, massive engineering projects, expensive retrofits and additional infrastructure. Less often do we recognize the critical importance of building social resilience in cities — probably because there is no obvious engineering solution. Too often, social issues are simply discussed in terms of higher costs — higher health care costs for aging people living longer, the pension fund deficit, the shortage of affordable housing, etc.

In almost every case, any proposed solution meets strong public resistance. This is because investment in one area of concern comes inevitably at the expense of another. The world’s most developed societies are failing to respond to the warnings. The choice to act is a political one — and cities are forgetting their social contract.

One of the greatest challenges we face in making our cities more resilient and more sustainable is that we too often overlook the most critical system: the human system. We are a very self-interested species, yet, as times of crisis show all too clearly, we are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. If we are to promote better outcomes for all of human society over time, it is critical that we find ways to reestablish the balance between human needs and desires and the natural systems that support life. Our economic and social systems cannot flourish if our physical world overwhelms us.

Building resilience into our cities means finding ways to fail more gently and sustain ourselves in times of need.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at 91Ӱ��.
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What impressed me most was that these young people were beyond smart. At very young ages, they were also very wise. And as they engaged in bettering the institutions and communities in their home nations, they were very brave as well. It is amazing and heartening to hear them describe their initiatives, the setbacks that come with any societal innovation and changing conventional wisdom, and the vigor with which they found ways to bypass barriers and make ever more progress.

Like every continent, there are significant challenges in Africa related to health care, governance, tribalism and nostalgic impulses that create more difficulties than they resolve.

With regard to sustainability specifically, we conversed about a number of details within the context of three so sets of ideas:

• We too often allow ourselves to focus only on the attributes of problems rather than fundamentals. An example, one growing in import, is the need to address water, food, energy and civility as a nexus rather than a set of discrete ideas. One can make progress addressing water supply alone but the value proposition for any solution increases as one tries to find solutions at the intersections of these issues.
• We then talked about what I describe as “the rule of three.” That is, no sustainability problem at scale can be effectively addressed unless the solution is technically feasible, economically viable and politically acceptable. These issues are in constant flux and as one changes others, become more or less viable. A deep focus on sustainability will be constantly looking to the balance of these three elements and trying to maximize the benefits of each.
• And, the third thing we discussed were the various kinds of capital that need to be taken into account in sustainability. They are financial, natural, social and human. In one way, the YALI meeting focused on this last attribute of capital — human intellectual capacity, which is the only natural resource on the planet that is improved by use rather than diminished in use.

After spending a couple of days with these amazing young people, any doubts I had about their ability to borrow the best ideas from around the world and make them African ideas that fit within their culture for the betterment of everyone was certainly resolved.

I’m not sure what I did for them. But, they certainly empowered and energized me to work ever harder at making progress toward a better world.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at 91Ӱ��.
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Photo by Courtney Spearman.

“We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” – Jacques Yves Cousteau

In the U.S., we don’t worry about water. It’s always been there – when we wash our hands, fill a glass, switch on the dishwasher, run a bath, take a shower. We don’t think about it; we just use it and forget about it. For city planners and engineers, water is a logistical problem, something that has to be cleaned, distributed and collected. Farmers probably spend the most time thinking about water. Irrigating crops and watering animals is an essential business function upon which their livelihood depends.

But what value do we place on this essence of life, industry and energy? How much time do we spend lying awake at night worrying about the cost of water? How many of us fret over the possibility that we may wake up one morning and find that water simply isn’t there? Little to none would be my guess.

Just to put the question in perspective, a single 12-ounce can of soda costs about 50 cents. For the same price, many U.S. municipalities deliver up to 1,000 gallons of fresh, clean drinking water to homes 24 hours a day. A typical monthly water bill in the western U.S. is about $50. If drinking water and soda pop were equally costly this bill would increase by about 10,000%.

Because water has always been there and is a resource we take for granted, we don’t price it according to its actual value. The worst consequence of undervaluing this essential asset is that we waste it. The three biggest culprits are food, energy and transportation – all three are intimately intertwined with water.

Our current agricultural irrigation practices are shockingly inefficient. Over half the water used in irrigation is lost to evaporation, so not only does it fail to benefit the crops, but it also fails to reach and recharge the aquifers. Growing and shipping food to other parts of the world is a significant pillar of our economic base and a foundation of U.S. foreign policy. What is underrepresented in the conversation about current agricultural policy is the value of every grain of wheat, every pound of meat we ship as represented by the water embodied in it. Every time we send a shipment of food overseas we’re also shipping the aquifer from American midlands to other parts of the world, and we’ll never get that back.

We also use huge amounts of energy to move water from where it’s available to where it’s consumed and then vast amounts of water for cooling energy plants. In many instances those plants are not reusing the water; they’re simply running it through the plant and then discharging the warmed water back into rivers and lakes. The resulting warming effect on the environment is fundamentally changing the ecology of our rivers and streams. If the warming trend continues, the energy plants put themselves at risk as diminishing cold water supplies threaten production output.

Then we factor in transportation. The average American diet requires approximately 1,000 gallons of water per person per day to produce. But this food is not consumed at the site of production. The ingredients for a typical American meal can travel thousands of miles before reaching our plates. A gallon of gasoline takes nearly 13 gallons of water to produce.

Add to these staggering numbers the fact that water use in the U.S. has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and we begin to see the scale of the problem.

There are a lot of people at the table where water is discussed – but they are not the  right people. Our chambers of commerce and economic development councils are not thinking about water as an essential strategic asset. We don’t have the kind of economic assessment of value at a city scale that would cause policy makers to rethink how we’re wasting this scarce and valuable resource. We are not considering water as the single most important asset in a competitive global economy.

There are economically viable and technically possible ways of assuring a sustainable water supply. The missing link is political will. We have to elevate the importance of water as a valuable economic asset – particularly in our conversations about energy, transportation and agriculture.  Water is, simply put, the single most important determinant of national security and global competitiveness.

Substitute the word “oil” for the word “water” in this discourse and think how differently we would be acting if our oil were being treated so wastefully and negligently. We don’t actually need oil to survive. Yes, our lives would be completely different, but without water there is no life. Which asset should we treat with more respect?

Gary Lawrence is 91Ӱ��’s chief sustainability officer.

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