Monday, April 14, 2008

ENN: Japanese Whaling, The "Green Management Oath", Shark Fishing Ban and Much More


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Monday, April 14, 2008
News of Note

DHAKA (Reuters) - Abdul Majid has been forced to move 22 times in as many years, a victim of the annual floods that ravage Bangladesh.

Top Stories

Those of us in the "people, planet, profits" field recognize the wide variety of stakeholders whose lives are impacted by daily business operations. As such, our role as generators of wealth is taking on a new meaning with new responsibilities. In order to ensure the integrity of what we do, two Harvard business school professors have put forth the idea that managers should take a "Green Hippocratic Oath." What would this oath consist of? How would taking such an oath influence the everyday business decisions for a whole new generation of managers?

At a prison on the East coast of Africa, in-mates are pioneering a sanitation project that is working with nature to neutralize human wastes. The initiative, involving the development of a wetland to purify sewage, is expected to cost a fraction of the price of high-tech treatments while also triggering scores of environmental, economic and social benefits.

Polluting electricity generators in Europe are set to reap another round of extraordinary windfall profits from the carbon trading scheme meant to curb their carbon emissions, a new report revealed today. The study, commissioned by WWF from world-leading carbon market analysts Point Carbon, estimates that the windfall to electricity generators in just the five states of UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland over the current five year phase of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) could be between 23 and 71 billion Euros ($US 36 -111 billion ).

Air pollution in the world's busiest ports and shipping regions may be markedly worse than previously suspected, according to a new study showing that industrial and shipping pollution is exacerbated when it combines with sunshine and salty sea air. In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers that included University of Calgary chemistry professor Hans Osthoff report that the disturbing phenomenon substantially raises the levels of ground-level ozone and other pollutants in coastal areas.

ENN Spotlight

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Antarctic whaling catch fell far short of its target this season, hampered by a series of skirmishes with anti-whaling protesters, the Fisheries Agency said on Monday.

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Consumers for World Trade (CWT), which describes itself as being a "network of consumers," is enthusiastic about everything from the right of the U.S. President to negotiate free trade agreements, slashing import duties and quotas on items such as footwear and apparel and opposing mandatory country-of-origin labeling. You'd be right in thinking this doesn't sound like a normal consumer group, but exactly who they are is not immediately obvious. A little digging though, reveals that CWT is just another front group trying to wrap a self-serving corporate message in a public interest name.

Christine Bader discusses the divergent perception of human rights as a matter of abuse and corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a means to "highlight whatever topics portray companies in the best light." This gap is partly due to a "vacuum of guidance" on how corporations can and should enhance the extension of human rights. Companies operate internationally in weak enforcement environments where they are sometimes called upon to pick up the slack of ineffectual governments, but a fundamental hurdle lies in the fact that the two types of institutions don't share the same "responsibilities, mandate, or expertise."

Washington, D.C. -- A recent decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has prompted Congress to introduce the "Shark Conservation Act of 2008." This legislation would close loopholes exposed in the court decision by improving existing laws, originally intended to prevent shark finning. The Act would require sharks to be landed with their fins, improving current laws that only require fins and carcasses to be landed in a specific ratio.

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Member Press Releases
By: Sea Alarm Foundation
The Sea Alarm Foundation has been shortlisted for the most prestigious of all awards in the maritime sector – the internationally renowned Seatrade Awards, sometimes dubbed the "Oscars for Shipping". By: Center for Biological Diversity
As a lethal ailment continues to be discovered in wintering bat colonies around the Northeast, conservation groups announced today that they will sue the federal government unless it undertakes a review of all its activities that may be harming endangered bat species. By: Architecture 2030
Amidst increasingly dire news about the economy and climate change, Architecture 2030 released a seminal study at the Eileen Rockefeller Growald Symposium on Collaborative Philanthropy today, showing how a small investment of only $21.6 billion in the Building Sector would produce 216,000 permanent jobs and save 86.7 Million Metric Tons (MMT) of CO2 in a single year. By: Center for Biological Diversity
SAN FRANCISCO— Conservation groups have reached an agreement that brings the extremely rare yellow-billed loon a step closer to much-needed protection from threats such as oil development in Alaska and the loss of its tundra habitat in the face of global warming. By: Earth Policy Institute
"Global carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels stood at a record 8.38 gigatons of carbon in 2006, 20 percent above the level in 2000", writes Frances C. Moore in a recent Earth Policy Institute release, "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Accelerating Rapidly". By: International Fund for Animal Welfare
(Bubonitsy, Tver Region, Russia. 9 April 2008) Today, in the forest of the Tver region of Russia, researchers from IFAW (the International Fund for Animal Welfare) and veterinarians from the Moscow Zoo returned five orphaned bear cubs to the wild. Prior to the release, the team performed veterinary checks and tagged the bears for monitoring. By: Center for Biological Diversity
ANCHORAGE, Alaska— The Bush administration Tuesday took the first step toward opening up 5.6 million acres in the Bering Sea to oil and gas leasing. The proposal, published in Tuesday's Federal Register by the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service, would allow oil development in an area north of the Aleutian Islands near Bristol Bay that has been designated critical habitat for the North Pacific right whale. By: Environmental Law Institute
(Washington) A report released this week, Improving Economic Health and Competitiveness through Tax Sharing, assesses the experience of local governments with schemes that share portions of tax revenues in order to get better development results and avoid sprawl.

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