Greetings and welcome to issue #24 of Valutus SustainabilityR.O.I., a Recap of things that caught our attention along with some Observations and Intelligence.
Look, there’s no use pretending anything is normal about this time. It’s fraught, gut-wrenching, bewildering, and few among us have gone through anything remotely like it. But there are things we canlearn from this.
Hence, our Recap has – among other stories – a novel take on the novel coronavirus, a reframe of the economic collapse that is underway. Our system suggests the environment rests on the economy, and that is upside down.
But this is no long weekend, no 'return to business as usual' once this is over: we going to need a reset in how we approach sustainability. Intelligence invites you to counter COVID-19 with RESET-20: a new path forward for sustainability that is streamlined, focused, and informed by current events.
Observations is the up-and-coming science of climate forensics, which is about to turn climate legal battles upside down with its ability to attribute various disastrous events directly to climate change.
We hope you find this worthy of your time. As always, thanks for being part of making the world a better place.
Warm regards,
Daniel Aronson,
Founder, Valutus
The Value of Values
Coronas around the sun and moon during a solar eclipse. Photo by R.L.Theis.
What’s up? How’s the weather? Read any good books lately?
Look, this is the time of COVID-19, and small-talk seems inane. It’s hard even to remember when a ‘corona’ was simply a ring around the moon. We little knew that when World War III came, it would not be armies on a battlefield but all humanity against a tiny, animal-borne microbe.
We’re leading off our Recap with a unique take on COVID-19: namely that the old economic systems touted by Milton Friedman, among others, are built for short-term local disasters, not long-term global ones. Climate change is the latter type and the coronavirus is another. With a flick of nature’s tail, it has resulted in the almost instant collapse of our entire economic system. We must jettison those systems and start fresh.
RESET-20™
Intelligence invites you to experience RESET-20, our answer to COVID-19. In lite of what we're learning from this pandemic, sustainability practice needs a very specific type of reset.
How do we work together when we're far apart? How do we maintain distance physically while remaining close socially? How best to prioritize our actions given coronavirus, and what about scenario planning? Ad hoc solutions are being experimented with, but we have a program ready and waiting. Join us for RESET-20. All the details are below in Intelligence.
Danone logo.
Next, another multinational throws more weight on the side of the angels, as French giant Danone lays its own heavy thumb – to the tune of €2 billion – on the climate side of the scales.
Sue Lee / Pixabay
Times like these call for a drink! As long as we’re all stuck like peas in pods, we thought you might like a short break from all things corona. A little gin-and-tonic tale, then, is just the thing to lighten the mood in this very unsettling time.
But this is gin with a twist… that is, as far as we know it’s the first climate-positive spirit and it’s made from, of all things, green peas.
By Ar130405 / Pixabay
Observations details the fascinating new science of climate forensics, the ability to ‘attribute’ actual climate events and impacts directly to climate change. As in DNA forensics, the legal implications are far reaching and, as things are trending, the climate blame game is just getting underway. Climate attribution just could be decisive in the coming legal battles.
Friends, this is an unsettling time, a daunting time. Yet all of us involved with sustainability are temperamentally suited, and professionally trained, to handle something like this. Who better?
Unsplash
Managing long, slow-rolling, critical planetary emergencies, ones that involve galvanizing people to coalesce around humanity’s best interest, is our very bread and butter.
As the triage and emergency room staff for the planet, our sustainability tribe may be sheltering in place, but we will not be idle. There is much to be done and, in some ways, COVID-19 is urging us to look at things differently.
We at Valutus will raise a glass (of the finest climate-negative Scots pea gin, naturally) to all of you, working so diligently to make the world a better place.
It’s Not Just a Ring Around the Moon Anymore: COVID-19 and the Bankrupting of Nature
Corona during a solar eclipse. By Brian Minear.
Here We Are
“We are not fully prepared for the next global pandemic,” Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said in 2018. “The threat of the unknown pathogen – highly-contagious, lethal, fast-moving – is real. It could be a mutated flu strain or something else entirely.”[1]
And here we are.
Daniel Ramos / Unsplash
Hubris
Why didn’t Gates’s prophetic warning (which he also featured in his 2015 TED talk).[2]
But, as COVID-19 has brought into stark relief, the global economy is, undoubtedly, a subsidiary of the environment.[3] One tiny change, a wee mutation in a virus, and boom! The planetary economic system goes into shock.
Local Versus Global
This has always been true locally, to be sure. A hurricane sweeps in and devastates an island nation, batters a coastal mainland, or floods major cities, and life in that area is dramatically altered. But insurers pay out, and governments draw from disaster funds to stabilize the area, and things slowly return to normal.
Can this system hold when the disasters are prolonged and systemic, rather than brief and local? As we’re discovering, the answer is no.
Satellite photo by NASA
Belated Awareness
A third of humanity lives along, works along, builds along, farms and fishes along the 372,000 miles (620,000 kilometers) of global coastline.[4] Both insurers and governments are beginning to question the wisdom of coastal settlement in vulnerable areas, and are looking askance at continuous rebuilding efforts. The entire system is built around insurance mitigating the consequences of disasters, but now those insurers are starting to see the entire carbon-based system as risky.
Investors and reinsurers are withdrawing support from climate-change agents such as Big Carbon. Credit agencies have begun considering climate when evaluating big corporations and cities – for example, Moody’s downgraded Cape Town’s credit rating after their water emergency and did the same to Trinity Public Utilities District in California after the wildfires of 2019.[5]
Theewaterskloof reservoir, Cape Town, S. Africa, at 11% capacity, March 2018.
Photo by Zaian. Source: Wikipedia
Bankrupting the Environment
The current pandemic is putting the scaffolds we have built our society around – carbon, credit, insurance, globalization, unlimited air travel and, especially, free-and-lightly-regulated markets – into stark relief. Our current approaches have bankrupted the environment, in other words, to the point where it is clearly threatening the global economic system.
There’s some scientific sentiment that this bankruptcy – specifically, bringing animals in close contact with dense populations through habitat loss – creates the conditions for diseases crossing to humans.[6] “When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us,” Bard College biologist Felicia Keesing told Ensia.[7]
Bat at the Prague Zoo. By Martin Krchnacek / Unsplash
Climate and Pathogens
Another potential danger is that higher global temperatures may be selecting for disease agents that can survive in hotter conditions, neutralizing one of our bodies’ most effective immune responses: fever.
“As pathogens are exposed to gradually warmer temperatures in the natural world, they become better equipped to survive the high temperature inside the human body,” noted Time in February.[8] “The pathogens that survive – and reproduce – are better adapted to higher temperatures, including those in our bodies.”
Anopheles Mosquito (malaria vector) range map. Source: U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Another potential impact of warming is that diseases usually confined to the tropics – malaria, dengue, Chagas disease, etc. – may become more widespread in temperate zones.[9]
In other words, a bankrupt nature doesn’t affect us through high water levels and more frequent devastating weather events alone. It can also unleash new pathogens and broaden the range and duration of both current and novel diseases.
Beyond the Immediate
Successful responses to COVID-19 are strongly making the case for community and global cooperation, with decisive action and public support helping contain the virus faster. It is a relief to see that we as a species are indeed capable of making a hard turn and changing course.
While we never wanted this, the course changes do show what is possible. In New York City, carbon monoxide was reduced by half, while NO2 and CO2 levels also fell dramatically.[10] China’s atmospheric carbon dropped “by around 200 million tons in February… roughly half as much CO2 as Britain releases in a year.”[11] A bottlenose dolphin or two have been reported off Cagliari, and the Venetian canals are running clear and hosting swans, all rare sightings in the past.[12]
While these changes are beneficial, the pandemic that caused them is not. We need to find a way to recapture the declines in pollution and emissions that doesn’t depend on disease and suffering.
Not So Remote
As others have noted, our response to COVID-19 makes clear that the world can work remotely more than we currently do. “In a recent webinar snap poll, 91% of attending HR leaders (all in Asia/Pacific) indicated that they have implemented ‘work from home’ arrangements since the outbreak,” notes Gartner,[13] predicting that by “2030, the demand for remote work will increase by 30%.” The virus will probably drive that number up permanently and, if so, there will likely be a significant carbon savings globally.
That said, there are three things in particular we must remember. First, as of now, this is a temporary stay rather than a pardon. For example, there is already evidence that China’s air pollution levels are ramping back up.[14]
Second, we’ve paid a steep price for what we’ve done to make diseases like COVID-19 more likely, for our lack of adequate preparation for them, and for the illusion we could separate our economy and our ecology. We’d all be guilty of dereliction of duty if we don’t learn from the mistakes we paid so dearly to discover.
Third, humans are social creatures, and our biology does not – cannot – evolve at the same rate as our technology.[15] As a result, when the crisis has passed there will be some changes but we will mostly go back to the way we socialized before – in person. That means we need to continue rapidly decarbonizing travel, work, and the economy.
By Santa3
When It’s for All the Marbles
The response to this crisis makes it clear that countries, sufficiently motivated, can make powerful decisions, mobilize their forces, and unleash the full range of human knowledge and expertise to solve problems. It also shows how hollow are the bleatings of those who claim the cost of sustainability is too high. To fight this emergency, trillions of dollars are on the table – in the United States alone – for business, social, and medical assistance.
The trick that has – so far – eluded us is convincing lawmakers and citizens that the climate emergency rivals that of this pandemic. Unfortunately, they both have this in common: “if you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it.”[16]
The Highest Stakes
The COVID-19 virus has shown how high the stakes are and how we must respond. Our economies, and our ultimate welfare, are wholly owned subsidiaries of our environment. We must nurse it out of bankruptcy, for all our sakes.
Danone Commits €2 Billion to
Climate Change Programs
Danone research facility, Paris-Saclay, Paris, France. By Cinerama14. Source: Wikipeia
We’ve been talking a lot about the seemingly sudden coalescence of the forces of good, and whether their combined mass can tip the climate scales back into the green before the climate is too far into the red to get back.
We recently recounted[17] a number of major initiatives from the likes of Microsoft, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and others, totaling trillions in assets and billions in funding for sustainability education, carbon programs, and carbon-capture research. Those are some large and meaty thumbs added to the environmental side of the scales.
It’s clear that governments have a powerful role, for better or worse, in the climate battle, that it cannot be won without them. It is equally clear they alone are nowhere near enough. Any realistic chance of reaching perigee with the IPCC’s 2030 deadline for carbon, ever more companies will have to commit to aligning around renewables, carbon negative operations catalytic work up and down their supply chains.
Wisconsin State Capitol building, Madison / Unsplash
And, while all companies have a climate footprint, some have much bigger feet. So, while every business must work hard to make their operations sustainable – from Ted’s Towing to Tesla – having the heavyweights on board is necessary to the equation.
Danone, the European yogurt giant, and parent of such U.S. brands as Dannon, Activia, and Oikos, is the most recent of these, as it has now committed to putting €2 billion ($2.18 billion) over the next three years into a “climate acceleration plan” that is designed to create a “climate-powered business model,” according to Danone’s CEO and Chairman, Emmanuel Faber.[18].
Emmanuel Faber, Danone Chairman and CEO. By Swaf75. Source: Wikipedia
Danone is not proposing a one-time expenditure, but is, according to Faber, intending to suffuse their business with sustainable ideals and practices.
In specific, according to its chairman, Danone has now committed to:
€2 billion overall over three years for climate programs
Evian and Volvic water brands carbon-neutral in Europe this year
100% recyclable PET bottles in Europe by 2025
Eliminate deforestation in supply chain by 2020[19]
50% cut in carbon intensity[20] by 2030 and net-zero by 2050.[21]
Every company jumping on the pile is helpful, and every billion spent towards carbon reduction is meaningful. Yet there remain thousands of companies – including many of the true behemoths of industry – who have not yet stepped up to the plate.
Hopefully, in the months ahead, it will not be so noteworthy when a huge company pledges billions to lighten its footprint.
Peas & Tonic: Gin with a
Climate-Positive Twist
Gin and Tonic. By Jo Pacey
Some alcoholic libations stand on their own, while others work best in partnership.
If a distillery were to set out to make an environmentally friendly beverage, it would then make sense to choose one whose constant companion is not infused with a potent greenhouse gas.
Yet the Arbikie Distillery in Angus, Scotland, chose gin. As anyone who’s ever been to a… well, to a gin-joint knows, this aromatic, juniper-infused liquid is accompanied by one mixer above all others: tonic water filled with CO2.
Bombay Saphire Gin / Unsplash
It would take a course in early European history to trace the origins of this clear and aromatic spirit but in England, at least, barley-based gin rose to prominence[22] when French brandy was heavily taxed, some hundreds of years ago.
Malaria also played a role in the G&T pairing, as the hideously bitter bark used to treat it – quinine – after being dissolved in sweetened, carbonated water, was often taken with gin. Thus, the gin-and-tonic was born.
While gins are usually made from wheat, maize, or barley grain mash, the legal definitions[23] in the U.S. and Canada only call for alcohol “of agricultural origin.”
By Leesa
So, when Arbikie learned that peas – which can be grown on a carbon-negative basis and without chemical fertilizers – could be switched in place of grain spirits without loss of flavor or quality, they took the plunge. Called Nàdar (Gaelic: nature[24]), this ‘climate-positive gin’ was several years in the making, and developed in partnership with two nearby research institutions[25]
A standard grain-based gin has a carbon footprint of +2.3 kg CO2 (eq.)[26] per 700 ml bottle of gin. Nàdar, on the other hand, has a footprint of -1.54 kg CO2[27] per 700 ml bottle, making it ‘carbon negative’, or saving more carbon than is used to make it.
By Veena Gudur
This matters as, according the study’s authors, “In terms of climate change impact, sipping a large measure of gin is similar to… driving one km in a petrol car.” A 2017 evaluation by WorldAtlas[28]noted gin use at a rate of .55 liters per person annually in the UK, a nation of more than 65.1 million[29] people that year. That represents a lot of petrol.
Unlike a majority of plants, most legumes – such as garden peas – cull nitrogen from the atmosphere rather than from soil, hence they are ‘nitrogen-fixing’ plants that actually load nitrogen in soil through a complex microbial process, for the next crops in rotation. The research team from the Hutton Institute found that the “environmental footprint of pea gin was significantly lower than for wheat gin across 12 of 14 environmental impacts evaluated, from climate change, through water and air pollution, to fossil energy consumption,” according to the institute’s molecular ecologist, Dr. Pietro Iannetta.[30]
Angus, Scotland, where the Arbikie distillery is located. Photo by Robert Chofa, 2015. Source: Wikimedia
In addition, “a waste product known as ‘pot ale’ is created from the leftover pea protein and spent yeast,” that is “suitable for animal feeds that reduce the need for imported soybeans, noted the Drinks Business.”[31] It is the reduction in carbon engendered by cutting “soybean cultivation, deforestation, processing and transport,”[32] that pushes this gin into carbon-neutral status.
The first batch – 1,000 bottles – is already up for sale. Bottoms up!
OBSERVATIONS:
Climate Forensics & Attribution Have Arrived
By Saffu / Unsplash
Circumstantial evidence has always been a tricky affair. A fingerprint is found near the scene. A glove, perhaps, thought to belong to the suspect. A phone record appears to implicate an accomplice. There was no eyewitness, but inference points to the culprit.
Not all circumstantial evidence, however, is created alike. The advent of DNA in forensics gave the courts a powerful scientific tool for attributing blame or establishing innocence, often with a very high degree of certainty.
But this science was not always the accurate, systematic and broad-based field it is today. It took years of trial and error, diagnostic mistakes, and false positives. Many thousands of scientists around the world catalogued, sequenced, experimented, checked and rechecked results, and developed new techniques and technologies. Today, DNA evidence is routinely used to screen out the innocent and implicate the guilty.
Up to now, climate change has often presented the same types of problems as crime scenes with only circumstantial evidence. There has been a hurricane, say, that destroyed much of a major U.S. city and killed hundreds, or an unprecedented heat wave across Europe that also took many lives.
But what caused them? Climate change! says one group. Nature! screams another. There have always been storms and heat waves!
Chemist reading a DNA profile. By James Tourtellotte, CBP Today. Source: Wikipedia
Yet, as in genetics, the science, equipment, and climatological techniques have improved greatly over the years and “extreme event attribution is rapidly advancing due to improved understanding of extreme events, improved modeling,”[33] etc.
As a 2016 report[34] by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine asserted, “In the past, a typical climate scientist’s response to questions about climate change’s role in any given extreme weather event was ‘we cannot attribute any single event to climate change.’ The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified blanket statement.”
In fact, at this point, “the existing body of detection and attribution research is sufficiently robust to support the adjudication of certain types of legal disputes,” according to the exhaustive, 238-page study of attribution by a team from the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.[35]
Using climate forensics – what climatologists call ‘climate change attribution,’ experts can now sit in courtrooms just as DNA experts do, and say with “increasing statistical certainty,”[36] that X event was increased in likelihood and severity by anthropogenic climate change.
Horseshoes. Source: Wikipedia
In an analysis of “high-resolution computer simulations,” scientists were able to attribute[37] the tropical storm that devastated Houston in 2019 to human-generated climate change which, they said, had made the storm as much as 2.6 times more likely and up to 28% more intense.[38] Indeed, “several studies have found that certain extreme events could not have been possible in a pre-industrial climate,” according to the Columbia report.
And just this week, the New York Times reported[39] that scientists had pinned a specific percentage of the damage and severity of the 2019 Australian wildfires on climate change. The scientists involved belong to World Weather Attribution,[40] a collaboration of scientific, meteorological and educational institutions that was “initiated in late 2014 after the scientific community concluded that the emerging science of extreme event attribution could be operationalized.”
A 2019 Carbon Brief[41] analysis of “more than 230 peer-reviewed studies looking at weather events around the world” concluded that “68% of all extreme weather events studied to date were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change. Heatwaves account for 43% such events, droughts make up 17%, and heavy rainfall or floods account for 16%.”
By Felipe Caparros
Thus armed, the battle over climate change is shifting from courtroom analogy to actual courtroom drama.
As we forecast this January in Blame: The Worm Will Turn in 2020,[42] as costs and damages from human-driven climate events continue to rise dramatically, so will lawsuits against Big Carbon industries, and governments who have supported fossil fuels.
As the authors of the Columbia study point out in their executive summary,[43] “In several foreign cases, plaintiffs have successfully used attribution science to demonstrate that a government’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at adequate levels endangered the public health and welfare of citizens within the country, and thus the government had violated its duty of care to its citizens.”
While there are also dozens of climate cases working their way through the U.S. courts, as we noted in Blame, “for those considering the current state of the U.S. judiciary, we suggest that such decisions are just as likely to happen outside the U.S.” Such extranational decisions, however, could “still affect multinational companies, including those based in the U.S.”
Interestingly, notes Vox,[44]in the U.S. courts,“climate science itself isn’t up for debate… in nearly all (U.S.) cases, the parties agree on these facts: Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are heating up the planet, which in turn is fueling sea level rise, more extreme weather, and changes in the overall climate.” Rather, the cases hinge on “fundamental interpretations of law” rather than the facts of climate change.
The tobacco industry once found themselves in a similar pickle, insisting they didn’t know their product’s dangers, and burying information to the contrary as early as the 1950s.
A public hearing in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), known as the
'World Court,' The Hague, Netherlands. Source: Wikipedia
As a result, for a time they were able to fend off most of the suits brought by individuals alleging fraud and other charges. Eventually, however, as smoking-related cancers and health care costs mounted, a 46-state suit was settled[45] for more than $206 billion over 25 years covering, along with restrictions on marketing and sales, the dissolution of key industry groups. Many successful class-action and individual suits have followed.
A key difference here is that, while there is overwhelming scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer in general, it is difficult to attribute any given case to that cause. Climate change attribution can now, in many cases, point to what Carbon Brief labelled, “the human fingerprint on extreme weather, such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, and storms.” And the science will likely continue to improve.
Climate attribution can also be used “by plaintiffs to demonstrate that they have suffered an injury as a result of anthropogenic climate change,”[46] and that greenhouse gas emitters are responsible.
In any courtroom, some will continue to believe in guilt or innocence – regardless of proof – to suit their own beliefs and agendas. But the proof is nonetheless there to allow a verdict beyond the legal standard for it. And that is a powerful development.
INTELLIGENCE:
Announcing
RESET-20
RESET-20™
Remember when we had things planned out, budgeted for, and underway? That feels like forever ago, but it's just been a few months.
Then again, that is forever ago in COVID time.[49]
It is a new challenge to do our jobs in the COVID era, with one eye on its global and human impacts, and a never-ending stream of news about the swath it’s cutting through our communities, our countries, and our world.
But our jobs – and the other global needs we’re working on – haven’t gone away.
But how do we do them today, after COVID-19 has upended everything?
Individual: “How do I remain professional and productive in my home office?”
Organizational: “Company revenues are down, and so is my department’s budget”
Societal: “What if there’s a second wave of infections and the country isn’t even close to normal before the New Year?”
How do we adapt to all of this – not only today, but this quarter, this year, and beyond? And what tools and actions can help us?
In response to those questions, we’ve launched our RESET-20 offering (RESET-20 is what comes after COVID-19). Here’s more about it, followed by some insights you can use today:
What is RESET-20?
RESET-20 looks at what to do for each of 4 timeframes:
Today
This quarter
This year
2021+
It includes tools and activities for each timeframe. A few examples:
Six left feet: Why our current remote habits don't work, and what to do instead
Not even remotely: How remote workspaces and habits are set up poorly for productivity, and what to do about it
Close from afar: How to practice physical distancing but avoid social distancing
Real connections, virtually: How to recreate face-to-face when we can't move from place to place
4 Sight: Scenario planning along multiple dimensions (health, economy, government action, social action)
Tri-orities: How to adjust priorities and actions while dealing with COVID-19 needs, budget pressure, and all the same issues as before
How can you benefit from RESET-20?
There are three ways you can access our RESET-20 insights:
Free webinars and articles: We’ll be hosting free webinars on the overall scope of the RESET-20 process, and on each individual piece (e.g., on Six left feet and on the 4 Sight process)
Premium training and tools: We offer premium training and tools – processes, templates, software – to help make the transition quicker and easier
Expert help: Do you need expert assistance tailored to your specific situation? Do you need someone to do the heavy lifting? We can support you through the process with a RESET-20 project designed just for you
Insights you can use now
Here are some of the lessons we learned in the course of creating RESET-20 that you can use today:
(This) timeis different: The four timeframes that form the basis of the 4 Sight process, today, the current quarter, the rest of 2020, the new year and beyond, each have their own demands. Here is what we suggest:
Separate these timeframes in both your thinking and planning, and a lot of the fog and difficulty will melt away. (We’ll show you how to do this in the webinars)
Confusion and conflict comes from having conversations without delineating which timeframe you’re each talking about. This is compounded by trying to compare actions and priorities between timeframes. Start by separating the timeframes, addressing each individually, and only then comparing and integrating across them (we’ll give you tips for doing this as part of the webinars as well)
(Broken) clock speeds: Just as timeframes differ, there are different natural clock speeds for different matters based on the physics of the issue
COVID’s clock speed – COVID time – is lightning fast. Think how quickly total infections grew from one day to the next. And the full cycle is fast too, from exponential growth in cases to decline – then additional wave(s) of infection – all in a matter of months
Many other things, such as climate and inequality, have a very different clock speed. How long does it take to double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Or to double the percentage of women in top management? A lot longer than to double the number of COVID cases.
We need to be close from afar:
As we’ll discuss in the webinars, as necessary as physical distancing measures are right now, we need to protect against 3 side effects of social distance:
It conflicts with our biology and what makes us human
Humans evolved as social creatures. Our technology can evolve quickly, and so can our actions, but our biological evolution operates on a different timescale[50]
Loneliness affects our health, with physical effects comparable to smoking.[51] Unfortunately, remote workers are even more susceptible to loneliness.
The other – the one that’s true and constructive – is that “we’re in this together, but six feet apart”[53]
The webinars will cover techniques for being close from afar, and how they can bring us nearer to the way we’re built to work and the productivity we need.
All the best in this difficult time – and stay safe!
Thanks for reading. I hope you found this worth your time.
If not, please accept my apology and click the unsubscribe link which should take you off the list. (Or, stick with us and we’ll work to make the next issue worth your while!)
1] Yahoo Finance, Bill Gates: ‘My Biggest Fears About What’s Coming Next for this World,’Sept 2018
[5] Inside Climate News, Climate Change Becomes an Issue for Ratings Agencies, Aug 5, 2019
[6] The Guardian, Tip of the Iceberg: Is Our Destruction of Nature Responsible for COVID-19?March 18, 2020
[7] Ensia, Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge, March 18, 2020
[8] Time, The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics,Feb 6, 2020
[9] Scientific American, What Could Warming Mean for Pathogens Like Coronavirus?March 9, 2020
[10] BBC News, Coronavirus: Air Pollution and CO2 Fall Rapidly as Virus Spreads, March 19, 2020
[11] Autoblog.com, China’s NO2 Emissions Rising as Country Recovers from Coronavirus Lockdown, March 20, 2020
[12] Esquire Middle East, Covid-19 Upside? Dolphins Return to Italy and Clear Venice Canals as Humans Self-isolate,March 18,2020
[13] Gartner, With Coronavirus in Mind, is Your Organization Ready for Remote Work?March 3, 2020
[14] Bloomberg Green, Satellite Pollution Data Shows China is Getting Back to Work, March 2020
[15] As we will discuss in an upcoming article, while we need physical distancing to contain COVID-19, social closeness is important to our health, happiness, and productivity. [16] Yale Eco365, March 15, 2020 [17] Valutus.com, Davos Declarations, Feb 2020 [18] Food Business News, Danone Investing €2 Billion in ‘Climate-Powered Business Model,’ Feb 27, 2020 [19]Danone Climate Policy,Had previously reduced carbon intensity by “46% since 2007” [20]Danone Climate Policy, 24.7 million tons full-scope GHG emissions [21]Ibid [22] Wikipedia, Gin [23] Wikipedia, Gin
[30] Food and Wine, ‘Pea Gin’ Could be a Breakthrough for More Environmentally-Friendly Cocktails, July 16, 2019
[31] The Drinks Business, World’s First ‘Climate Positive’ Gin is Made from Peas, Feb 2020
[32] Science Daily, Just the Tonic!, July 8, 2019 [33] Columbia University Press, The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, Executive Summary, 2020 [34] National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change, Report, 2016
[35] Columbia University Press, The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, 2020
