Hot List for Thomas Ruddy

Hot List for Thomas Ruddy's Homepage

This page contains links to web sites and pages that I've encountered on my surfing expeditions. The information is divided into the following categories:

Category 1 - Links for speech at Quality of Life conference in Austria, May 1999
Category 2 - German-language, vintage ca.1997
Category 3
Category 4
Category 5

Category 1

Tips on current happenings:

If you start planning now, even after the conference you can continue to pursue activities involving Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI).

Oct.10-29, 1999 -- Attend a course on SDI in GB at Schumacher College (http://www.gn.apc.org/schumachercollege/collprog.htm); look for the Oct. date in that course list, or for globalisation and the "ecological footprint", instructor Mathis Wackernagel of Redefining Progress, San Francisco, CA (http://www.rprogress.org) . Scholarships available.
July - Dec. 2000 -- Join the SDI program of a foundation by and for youth at the World's Fair 2000 in Hanover, Germany: Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations (http://www.srzg.de)

Tips on job applications:

In case you're thinking about getting a job, or changing jobs (and don't necessarily want to work in academia, or for the state), look at these business applications of Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI):

Eco-efficiency indicators have been designed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development WBCSD for use on the microeconomic level, i.e. in corporations. They are used for corporate environmental reporting primarily to shareholders (someday also sustainability reporting to a broader range of stakeholders, see theory below) and for monitoring corporate performance and compliance. This April '99 study (requiring a free downloadable Adobe Acrobat reader) includes practical instructions for applying the theory to the shop floor and an appendix linking it to initiatives emanating from Anglo-American countries such as the Global Reporting Initiative GRI and Canada's National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment NTREE.

WBCSD has also published a book for college students, on the Sustainable Business Corporation, the "SBC Brief," of which samples are on the Web; its Section 6 is on "Accounting for the Environment. Like 10,000 others already have, you too can also take an exam on your comprehension and receive a certificate.

Entertaining introduction

This is new, entertaining, general introduction to the topic of Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI) from Australia is recommended to all:

Guidebook to Environmental Indicators (http://www.csiro.au/csiro/envind/index.htm)

Theoretical basis

Indicators have long been a tool of economists. The theoretical basis now, though, for designing new indicators for sustainable development is to be found in the field of business ethics, and is called "stakeholder theory". It was first named by R.Edward Freeman in 1984; he still teaches at the Darden Business School of the University of Virginia (the "externalities" he mentions will also be dealt with in Burgenland).

Since then, stakeholder theory has been mainly applied to corporate governance, as here on Amitai Etzioni's Home Page (http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/A261.html), and to the mediating of conflicts about locating undesirable environmental facilities such as incinerators. (By the way, Darden and GWU hold the highest rankings of the "Top 8 Green Business Schools" in the U.S.)

Great Britain

Friends of the Earth, FOE UK, has a remarkable Website called Measuring Progress (http://www.foe.co.uk/progress/) with these features based on the Indicator of Sustainable Welfare developed in the book by Herman Daly and John Cobb entitled The Common Good (available for perusal in Burgenland):

make your own ISEW (http://www.foe.co.uk/progress/make-own.html)

international examples (http://www.foe.co.uk/progress/international.html)

international hotlist (http://www.foe.co.uk/progress/contacts.html)

discussion group (http://www.foe.co.uk/progress/frameset.html)

FOE was active in and following the '97 elections in Great Britain (http://www.bbc.co.uk/election97/framedir/issuesframe.htm) as follows:

The Labour government's overall Sustainable Development Strategy is described in [U.K.] Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions: Indicators of Sustainable Development for the United Kingdom: Theory underlying development of UK indicators, December 1997 (http://www.environment.detr.gov.uk/epsim/indics/isdtheor.htm)

FOE's Sustainable Development Research Unit SDRU commented on the government's strategy with a paper by Duncan McLaren and Simon Bullock: Opportunities for Change, a response from Friends of the Earth, http://www.foe.co.uk/camps/susdev/sdsresp.htm). This will be dealt with in greater detail in my presentation at the Quality of Life conference.

Germany

The U.K.'s plans to shift Sterling 7bn from energy consumption to relieve employment taxes from April 2001 may be comparable to Germany's shift of roughly Sterling 3bn from April 1999 as the latter is planned to be expanded in two later stages; for details see http://www.gruene-fraktion.de/aktuell/gesetz/index.htm.

Excerpts from the "Sustainable Germany" study were edited in English by Thomas Ruddy and put on the Web. There is also a related book in English entitled Greening the North that can be ordered online from Zed Books, London (available for perusal in Burgenland). .

Szenarios are listed under http://www.wupperinst.org/Projekte/SuE/HTMLtexts/Pages/t_1_3_7.html

Canada National Sets of Indicators

"There are two, conceptually different approaches to sustainable development measurement frameworks and indicators for national use in Canada. One is based on many years of work in environmental reporting and is harmonized by the Indicators, Monitoring and Assessment Branch of Environment Canada (EC). The other is based on the work of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) to define a new approach to assess progress toward sustainable development." (HARDI, Peter / Stephan BARG: Measuring sustainable development: review of current practice, Occasional Paper Number 17, International Institute for Sustainable Development, November 1997 (http://iisd.ca/)

Database "Compendium of SDI Initiatives and Publications"

The OECD and "a commitment made in Canada's Green Plan (1990), led Environment Canada's Indicators and Assessment Office to undertake a government-wide effort to develop and report regularly on a comprehensive national set of environmental sustainability indicators that gives a representative profile of the state of the environment and helps measure progress towards sustainable development." The result was this compendium database http://iisd.ca/measure/compinfo.htm

Personal CO2 calculator funded by Environment Canada: http://www.climatechange.gc.ca/english/html/index.html

Environment Canada http://www.ec.gc.ca/pdb/ghg/ghg.html

European CO2 calculator http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg11/co2/co2_intr.htm

U.S.

http://www.sdi.org

Australia

The Department of the Environment Australia provides a Primer on Indicators (http://www.environment.gov.au/portfolio/esd/climate/performance/chap2.html) dated May 1996 and prepared for the Department by Dr Mick Lumb (Enviro-Futures, J M Lumb & Associates) and Mr Alan Pears (Sustainable Solutions Pty Ltd)

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Category 2

These links were published as parts of one of my articles in the German-language monthly Oeko Invest.

Eine WWW-Praesenz enthaelt einen Kalender von Umwelt-Veranstaltungen, der von Besuchern ad hoc ergaenzt werden kann: http://www.oneworldweb.de. Auf dem britischen Server
http://www.oneworld.org werden Beitraege aus den Feldern Menschenrechte und Entwicklungszusammenarbeit veroeffentlicht. Oft sind es Journalisten fuer Zeitschriften aus dem Sueden, die berichten, wie _The New Internationalist_, _Gemini_ und _Resurgence_ (http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence).
Tagungen bilden einen weiteren Bereich von gruenen Internet-Aktivitaeten. So veranstaltete der Bund demokoratischer Wissenschaftler (BdW) in Januar 1996 eine Konferenz in Hamburg. Die Ergebnisse sind mithilfe von der Frames-Technik hauptsaechlich unterteilt in Gruen und Rot auf:
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~rillingr/ dargestellt.

Das Wuppertal-Institut fuer Klima, Umwelt Energie hat das Programm seiner Tagung "Grenzenlos" vom letzten Oktober auf http://www.wuppertal-forum.de/boundless/ geladen. Das Thema war die Globalisierung der Weltwirtschaft, das auch an der Universitaet Koeln in der "weltgroessten Studentenkongress" in April '97 behandelt werden soll http://www.ofw.de/
Die Sichtweise dort aber wird voraussichtlich nicht so kritisch ausfallen wie in Wuppertal.

Das Gebiet des Fairen Handels ist auf http://www.fairtradefederation.com international organisiert.

Die Umweltauswirkungen des Kalten Krieges in Osteuropa sind auf einem Server in Wien (http://www.cedar.univie.ac.at/) behandelt. Beide Institutionen verfuegen ueber eigene Datenbanken, Mailing-Listen und umfangreiche weiterfuehrende Links zu Bibliotheken, Quellen westlicher Umwelt-Gesetzgebung, usw.