Ready for An Era of Ecological Surveillance and Much More

Today, we consume at a rate and scale of 1.75 Earths. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for a professional in the industry of promoting sustainable development? Evidence, data, studies, one after another, year after year, point to an increasingly more devastating trend that we are consuming way beyond the Earth's renewable Bio-capacity and threatening the ecological security for human development.

But recent global satellite on air quality in China, Italy and US during the lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic reminds me of the well-known TV series aired a decade ago - Life after People. It seems "speculative", or even a fantasy by some scientists, mechanical engineers, and other experts about what might become of Earth if humanity instantly disappeared. The featured experts also talk about the impact of human absence on the environment and the vestiges of civilization thus left behind. The series does offer some food for thought or even imagination around how nature would react to the disappearance of humans and what legacy humans would leave behind.

With 7 billion residents, the planetary Earth is overstretched way beyond its regenerative capability. As we have all agreed, pollution, scarcity and climate change are constraining how human society develops and compromising future generations' opportunity of development and sustainability. Thanks to digital and information technology, we are equipped with technical capability to track our own ecological footprint, and from management for sustainability perspective, it is time to build up Ecological Surveillance. If politicians, business leaders and the public are seriously concerned with a Future We Want, time is here to jointly build a Future We Choose.

"The COVID-19 Blue" (nytimes.com)

The Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite data charts nitrogen dioxide, a noxious gas produced primarily by burning of fossil fuels from vehicles, industrial sites and thermal power stations, over China, from December 20th to March 16th. NOx dropped about 40 percent during the lockdown, according to some experts; and particulate matter also dropped around 20-30 percent over large part of the country, partly because NOx reacts with other chemicals in the air to form particulate matter.

The prices, both health and economic, China has paid for such the COVID-19 Blue are extremely high. The pandemic had sickened more than 80,000 people and claimed more than 3,000 lives; the government had shut down factories, refineries and flights across the country as people were ordered to stay at home. Besides better air quality, China's energy use and CO2 emissions during those few weeks were about 25 percent lower than during the same period last year, according to the analysis of the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The numbers offer a sobering reminder of how deeply the modern economy still depends on fossil fuels. According to a NYTimes report, during the national lockdown, construction activity slowed with much reduced demand for steel and other materials. Oil refineries are predicting less fuel than usual as trucks sit idle and the number of flights dropped by about 13,000 per day. Industrial activities decided by 15 percent to 40 percent compared with the previous year.

Italy, the first epic center after China's Wuhan, continues to fight a difficult war to contain the impact of the pandemic that has claimed more than xxx lives. The satellite data from European Space Agency demonstrates a very similar pattern of air pollution reduction, in particular NOx and CO2, due to the national lockdown that leads to much reduced transportation and traffics.

Very recently collected data in New York with more than xxx cases and xxx deaths, the latest epic center after Italy and Spain, suggests that instruction to curb unnecessary travel are also having a significant impact. Traffic levels in the city were estimated down 35 percent compared with a year ago. Researchers at Columbia University have monitored around 50 percent reduction of emissions of carbon monoxide, mainly due to cars and trucks, 5-10 percent drop in CO2, and a solid drop in methane in recent week.

The Earth Overshoot Day (footprintnetwork.org)

Since the 1970s, we have been operating our life on Earth with an ecological deficit, often referred to as global ecological overshoot. According to the assessment of the Global Footprint Network, a not-for-profit platform based in Oakland of California, USA, humanity has been in ecological overshoot since 1970, with an annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year.

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.75 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and eight months to regenerate what we use in a year. We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, over-harvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester, says the 2019 Ecological Footprint report.

Ecological Footprint accounting measures the demand on and supply of nature. It tracks the use of six categories of productive surface areas: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, forest area, and carbon demand on land.

On the demand side, the Ecological Footprint measures the ecological assets that a given population requires to produce the natural resources it consumes (including plant-based food and fiber products, livestock and fish products, timber and other forest products, space for urban infrastructure) and to absorb its waste, especially carbon emissions. On the supply side, a city, state or nation’s biocapacity represents the productivity of its ecological assets as measured in the Footprint. These areas, especially if left unharvested, can also absorb much of the waste we generate, especially our carbon emissions. And both the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity are expressed in global hectares—globally comparable, standardized hectares with world average productivity.

The Ecological Footprint is the only metric today that measures how much nature we have and how much nature we use, says the global footprint network website. If a population’s Ecological Footprint exceeds the region’s biocapacity, that region runs an ecological deficit. Its demand for the goods and services that its land and seas can provide—fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, wood, cotton for clothing, and carbon dioxide absorption—exceeds what the region’s ecosystems can renew. A region in ecological deficit meets demand by importing, liquidating its own ecological assets (such as overfishing), and/or emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If a region’s biocapacity exceeds its Ecological Footprint, it has an ecological reserve.

Earth Overshoot Day (overshootday.org) is used as a powerful instrument to communicate our ecological deficit, especially the sense of urgency when we are well over the budget. It is an ecological debt, and the interest we are paying on that mounting debt—food shortages, soil erosion, and the build-up of CO? in our atmosphere—comes with devastating human and monetary costs.

By Disaster or By Design? (overshootday.org)

With Earth Overshoot Day occurring ever earlier in the year - July 29th, according to the 2019 Footprint report. The importance of decisive action is becoming ever more evident. Mathis Wackernagel, co-inventor of Ecological Footprint accounting and founder of Global Footprint Network, offers a positive note in his new book - Ecological Footprint: Managing Our Biocapacity Budget. The book says that overshoot can only be temporary. Humanity will eventually have to operate within the means of Earth’s ecological resources, whether that balance is restored by disaster or by design.

Now we know that moving the date of Earth Overshoot Day back 5 days each year would allow humanity to get back on track to achieve Paris Agreement target by 2030 and 2050. and cutting CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning by 50% would move the Overshoot day by 93 days. If 100% of the existing building and industry infrastructure were equipped with available energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies from Schneider Electric and partners, the date of Earth Overshoot Day would move back at least 21 days. 

And significant opportunities are to be found in five key areas: cities, energy, food, population, and planet. Wackernagel writes, “Companies and countries that understand and manage the reality of operating in a one-planet context are in a far better position to navigate the challenges of the 21st century.”

Corporate Environmental Scoring (ipe.org.cn)

How to hold corporations accountable for their ecological footprints? Common practice and framework include legislation to mandate companies to reduce emissions, regulation and standards to enforce compliance, policy targets and instruments to incentives innovation and leadership. One crucial instrument and regulation is information disclosure to enhance transparency.

Enabled by information and digital technologies and rapid development of social media, the Institute of Public and Environmental Policy (ipe.org.cn) in Beijing has become an environmental big data platform that integrates the government officially mandated disclosed information through local governments' official websites and mandated voluntary disclosure of state monitored enterprises, with ambient air and water quality across the country, plus supply chain and green finance policies and practices, and presents the information via a live Blue Map. Besides conventional website, the information is presented on social media of Weibo and WeChat (Chinese facebook and twitter).

Chinese government issued "Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (Trial)" in 2008, demanding companies to disclose their pollution emission information. And then in 2013, the "Measures for the Self-Monitoring Information Disclosure by State Monitored Enterprises (Trial)" was stipulated, requiring "state monitored enterprises" to conduct self-monitoring and publicly disclose the monitoring results. The content, frequency, and channels of automatic monitoring data disclosure were standardized, which is a breakthrough in corporate environment self-monitoring information disclosure. The unprecedented measures also helped promoted the timely disclosure of pollution source supervision information.

In 2015, the newly amended Environmental Protection Law turned all trials into mandatory, with a designated session on information disclosure and public participation, which ushers in a time when China's pollution source supervision information disclosure becomes comparable to the leading information disclosure practices in the world. “The Law of the P.R.C. on the Prevention and Control of Atmospheric Pollution” and “The Law of the P.R.C. on the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution”, which were subsequently revised, further required key polluting entities to “install automatic monitoring equipment and connect with environmental protection authorities” to conduct self-monitoring.

The Blue Map has been collecting automatically monitored pollution source data from various environmental department platforms since 2013. In the last six years, the number of companies with online monitoring data that can be accessed through public platforms has grown from more than 6,000 in 2014 to more than 20,000 at present.

In 2006, the Blue Map Database only collected about 2,000 corporate environmental violation records. By 2008, the records rose to 24,000. Ten years of collection and accumulation have witnessed continued rise of data points - more than 1.6 million today, and the total number of enterprise online emissions monitoring data exceeds 1.8 billion. A number of leading cities are achieving “what should be public needs is made public.”

In January 2019, Minister LI Ganjie, at the 2019 National Working Conference on Ecological and Environmental Protection, stated that in 2018, 186,000 administrative penalty cases were imposed in China. As of November 12, 2019, the Blue Map had collected data a total of 257,000 pollution source violation records in 2018, of which 140,000 were administrative penalties, accounting for 75.3% of the number of national administrative penalties disclosed by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The acquisition rate had increased compared to the previous two years.

With the advancement of environmental informatization construction, the release of various types of environmental data in China tends to be platform-based and systematic. Common environmental data platforms include, but are not limited to: real-time air quality release platform, dual publicity platform for administrative penalty and approval results, supervisory monitoring information release platform, key monitored enterprises online data disclosure platform, 12369 Hotline complaint reporting platform, environmental impact assessment information publicity platform, enterprise and public environmental disclosure platform, according to IPE's publication of its Ten Years' journey review.

Today, IPE is also working with its partners to add more layers of data into the Blue Map that further link environmental footprints data with industrial value chains and policy incentives and disincentives, in particular the green finance policy. From two ends of the spectrum, top-down legislation and regulation drive increasing openness and transparency, and bottom-up social media engages the largest-ever public discourse and demand for accelerated improvement of environmental quality. In between, corporations invest in compliance and also innovation to leverage policy incentives for much improved performance, while riding the wave of social media to more actively engage with the public and consumers as a trusted and responsible member of the community and society.

Chinese government has started an initiative of Social Scoring, taking advantage of ubiquitous connectivity and digital technology to create a new kind of governance. This applies to both individuals and companies. Naturally, you can say that an Environmental or Ecological Scoring in China actually already exists through such platform as IPE. And you can expect a powerful Ecological Surveillance System will be the next product. A company's ecological footprint or scoring will be examined when it applies for a bank loan (Finance), when it selects a city or province to expand production (Ecological Redline), when it puts a new product on the market (Market Entry), and when consumers choose what to purchase (purchasing power).

I can literally see this on the horizon, implemented at national level and integrated at international environmental governance system.

From Million to Billion to Trillion Trees (1t.org)

If we say the ecological footprints offers a tool for a nation, city or company to understand the constraints of ecosystem supply and demand, and the Blue Map at this moment mostly focuses on pollution footprint, how about each of us individuals? At the end of the day, it is us, the consumers, whose needs and demands are the biggest driver for innovation of products and services. While we know very well that each of us can make small changes in our daily life, the cynicism often goes like this - "So What?" if no one else is making changes.

Thanks to the age of information and digital revolution, individuals today are so much connected and digital. It is getting harder to find any excuses for not changing your behavior. One such forceful platform is the Ant Forest, a subsidiary app developed and integrated into China's largest online payment platform - Alipay of Alibaba, as a philanthropic program.

Alipay become the world largest third-party online payment platform since 2014, serving more than 1.2 billion people globally. Established in 2004, Alipay works with more than 180 banks globally and credit card brands such as VISA and MasterCard to provide online payment services. Ant Forest was launched in the summer of 2016 to engage consumers for awareness raising and behavior change.

Through online payments for public transportation (subway and bus), water/electricity/gas bills, penalty of traffic violation, online hospital check-in, purchase of travel tickets (air flight, high-speed rail), among others, a consumer "owns" an online carbon account for avoided carbon emissions, measured by "Green Energy" , which can be used to pay for a virtue tree in the online payment system. When the tree "grows" big enough, Ant Forest's partners, organizations and companies, can "purchase" these "virtue trees" to plant it somewhere in the country in real life or conserve equal size of the protected forest areas. The purpose and incentive is very clearly set - to inspire consumers' environmental actions.

Between 2016 and 2019, Ant Forest has attracted the participation of more than 550 million people and planted 122 million trees in desertification-ridden regions in China. In September 2019, it was rewarded as a winner of the Earth Guard Award by UN Environment Program in Nairobi, recognizing its innovation and contribution to change our world through technology innovation to inspire the positivity of its global users/consumers and innovative actions.

On March 21, 2020, the World Forest Day, Ant Forest CEO announced their commitment to plant another 100 million trees by end of this year.

I remember how I led my team back in 2007 and 2008 at the request of Chinese Wikipedia and more than one hundred online platforms back then to roll out a "Carbon Calculator" for individual internet users. We selected 10 easy and convenient actions from a national government's handbook of 100 low carbon actions and turned that into the indicators to capture avoided carbon emissions, such as taking public transportation, walking instead of driving, among others. We used 18 kg as a benchmark. When you accumulated to that amount, you were granted a tree in the virtue space. By using gamification, the Carbon Calculator became viral literally overnight. Within one month and a half, we collected more than one million trees in the virtue space.

Then came more request from those partners who said that their internet users were requesting trees to be planted in real life. Long story short, we formed partnership with China Green Foundation under the State Forestry Administration and launched a Million Tree Program to engage corporations to purchase those trees online and volunteers to participate in tree planting in selected areas. Today, this program is still up and running and continues to engage individuals, families, organizations and corporations for their action participation and contribution to the positive change.

One note to make here is that all the tree planting activities fall under the oversight of China Green Foundation, the government arm in charge to ensure its linked with local needs and science-based from biodiversity and ecological integrity perspective.

Since then, I have seen many more tree-planting initiatives around the world. The most recent number is a Trillion trees. The World Economic Forum launched a global initiative to grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees around the world in the coming decade - in a bid to restore biodiversity and help fight climate change late January 2020. According to WEF, the 1t.org project aims to unite governments, non-governmental organizations, businesses and individuals in a "mass-scale nature restoration". As we all know that trees, when they grow, they actually absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their tree parts above and underground.

President Trump at the Davos early this year, who has proven a climate science denier, announced that "we're committed to conserving the majesty of God's creation and the natural beauty of our world. Today I'm pleased to announce the United States will join one trillion trees initiative." Though no details seen yet, it shall be regarded as a positive small step on his part to contribute to climate solutions.

While governments and companies from around the world have the biggest resources to accelerate the landing of their commitments to the one trillion trees, I do suggest that Ant Forest's model shall be carefully examined and even learned from engaging the public and society perspective. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, has proven to be an active and visionary business leader who works with millions of partners around the world. Bring him and his Ant Forest platform on board for a much more impactful and accelerated tree planting endeavor.

Reset for A Sustainable Future

Globally, we continue to fight to win the war on COVID-19 pandemic. It shall not be a "good crisis to be wasted." If the pandemic is an immediate crisis, climate change, humanity's existential threat, shall not be set aside. As demonstrated by satellite data and daily on the ground monitoring data show, disaster does bring abrupt decoupling of human activity and ecological footprints. But it's very painful with shocks and tremendous losses.

How about by design? We know very well that what's likely to make a major difference to the scale of carbon emissions and air pollution is how governments decide to re-stimulate their economies once the pandemic eases. We don't want to repeat the scenario a decade ago when after the global financial crash, carbon emissions shot up by 5% as a result of stimulus spending that boosted fossil fuel use.

As a professional policy analyst, I advocate for change by design and using the $7 trillion opportunity - a historic-record-size stimulus by major economies on the table so far - to drive fundamental paradigm shift. I do have my own reservations at this moment. But the third-decade of the 21st century is regarded a most critical decade for humanity to achieve the goals of Paris Agreement and UN SDGs. Let's not waste this current crisis!