SUPPOSE Britain’s prime minister ordered civil servants to make the world’s fifth-biggest economy fully carbon-neutral by 2045, and thereafter to extract more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it emits. In a sense that is what happened on September 10th, when Governor Jerry Brown of California—whose economy last year overtook Britain’s—inked an executive order mandating state agencies to begin such preparations.
The article goes on to discuss several initiatives in which local government is taking global climate change on with its own local – and not so local – projects. It seems that cities are taking the lead when national governments fail to do so. In August of this year, 19 cities, including London, Montreal, Johannesburg, Paris, and Tokyo, vowed to make all new buildings carbon neutral starting in 2030, and also to retrofit older buildings to meet that standard by 2050. See that press release here: https://www.c40.org/press_releases/global-cities-commit-to-make-new-buildings-net-zero-carbon-by-2030
But let’s get back to Governor Jerry Brown for a moment. He’s not happy with the way the US Federal government views climate change, which basically is that government should back off of regulations and that the US must drop out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Brown's view is that climate science's findings - agreed to by 97%+ of climate scientists - is very real, and the facts are compelling that action must be taken to curtail the use of fossil fuels, to work towards renewable sources of energy, and to at least better understand the facts around the issue.
Agree or not, what he thinks – matters, and it matters to project managers and here’s why. At the Climate Action Summit, a California-based event which took place this month (https://www.globalclimateactionsummit.org/), Governor Brown announced that California will launch its own satellites to research climactic conditions worldwide. California will partner with Planet Labs for this project. Yes, it most certainly is a project - or perhaps a program. Either way it will employ project managers.
Here’s a very interesting video from Planet.com that talks about the benefit of these mini-satellites and how they can help baseline and report on variance (sound familiar, project managers) the earth to provide valuable information for agriculture and climate science.
For project managers, look at the feeling of “team” you see in this video:
The sense of purpose seems to really motivate the individuals to coalesce into a team, doesn’t it?
And this movement to ignore and/or leapfrog over national government's hesitancy to take action on climate change is not at all limited to city and state governments – it’s industry as well - big time. An organization representing 800 firms, worth over $17T (yep, that’s a T for Trillion) have joined the “We Mean Business” coalition.
In fact, since it's so big...that will be the topic of our next blog post.
Project manager will be impacted by climate change either by project that will contribute to prevent it, create it or simply adjust existing things due to climate change.
Nice post again
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