People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Photo: National Geographic

I’d like to start this post off with a very brief biology lesson.  It’s about “symbiosis”.

From National Geographic’s article, The Art of Living Together

Sea anemones live attached to the surface of coral reefs. They trap their prey with stinging cells called nematocysts, which are located on their tentacles. Nematocysts release toxins when a small animal contacts an anemone’s tentacle. This paralyzes the stung animal, allowing the anemone to easily bring the animal into its mouth for ingestion.

While other fish succumb to these toxic stings, clownfish secrete a substance in the mucus covering their bodies that suppresses the firing of nematocysts. This allows the clownfish to swim comfortably between the tentacles of anemones, creating a protected environment in which potential predators are killed off by anemone stings. This clearly benefits the clownfish, but how about the sea anemones? The brightly colored clownfish attract other fish looking for a meal. These unsuspecting would-be predators are then caught and eaten by the anemones.

Now, I am not saying that ESG leaders are clowns, nor am I saying that project managers trap prey with stinging cells.  Or vice-versa  This is not that strong an analogy.  What I am saying (and have been since 2010 with our book Green Project Management) is that there is a much stronger relationship between sustainability and project leadership than previously thought.

So, I was very pleased to see a pair of articles right here on Projectmanagement.com that talk to this symbiosis of sorts.

My favorite part of Andy Jordan’s feature story on The Rise of the CSO is this gem:

“…every project committed to by an organization will ideally be developed and approved with sustainability in mind. I mentioned above that the approach to delivering a project should be subjected to a sustainability assessment, and that should be built into the organization’s overall project methodologies. But there should also be a review of each proposed initiative to ensure that the specifics of it are aligned with an organization’s sustainability goals.”

The symbiosis: projects that embed sustainability will be better aligned with company mission, and thus more successful in the true sense of the word, and sustainability professionals will get ESG-related projects done more effectively.  Do well by doing good.  Do good by doing well.

In Andy Jordan’s excellent post, he talks about the general role of the CSO but importantly says that some of it is project work, such as:

• "Requiring a sustainability assessment to be carried out on the planned execution approach for every project. Regardless of what the project is designed to deliver, this assessment ensures that the work is carried out in a way that promotes sustainability.
  • That could be ensuring that software is optimized to minimize the power consumption needed to achieve performance targets.
  • It could mean verifying production methods to confirm that environmentally conscious materials and processes are used.
  • Or it could be addressing packaging and distribution methods to ensure recyclability and minimized waste.

• Defining project environment best practices and policies. This is about building sustainability into how projects are delivered. While it may be limited by corporate policies, this would cover everything from recommended approaches that are designed to limit travel for team members (both regular work-from-home policies and plans for onsite meetings of remote work teams), to best practices around turning off lights, computers, and so on. Depending on the types of projects undertaken, it may also define a list of approved suppliers, provide a framework for securing sustainability endorsements from industry or community groups, etc.
• Integrating sustainability into project environment maturity and improvement plans. Because sustainability is a relatively new consideration, organizations are generally starting from a baseline of low performance. PMOs are expected to continuously improve the overall performance of the project environment over time through things like improved planning, better resource management, greater variance recovery and so on. Sustainability can be built into these plans through targets focused on whichever sustainability goals are relevant to the organization."

The other article that gave me increasing hope about this symbiosis was from Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, called The 10-Step ESG Health Check for Project Managers

In his article, Antonio details 10 steps (you really should read the article) for PMs, because the transitions and changes and initiatives needed to achieve sustainability goals ARE PROJECTS and REQUIRE PROJECT LEADERSHIP.  The 10 steps are highlighted below:

1. Align ESG Goals
2. Engage Senior Leaders
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
4. Focus on Benefits
5. Leverage Volunteers
6. Allocate Resources
7. Evolve Your Cultural (and Allow for Failure)
8. Develop an ESG Data Strategy
9. Persuade Leaders to Make More Sustainable Decisions
10. Embrace Continuous ESG Improvement

I am encouraged by the momentum developing in this symbiosis.  In Part 2, I want to make this as real as possible to you by (ironically) introducing artificial intelligence into the mix and to focus on jobs and careers for project leaders related to ESG, or supporting ESG efforts.

Thank you to Andy Jordan and Antonio Nieto-Rodgriguez for their excellent posts and the spark for this two part-blog post!

• One of the power skills that project leaders need to increase is negotiation.
• Nations need to make progress on reducing plastics on behalf of life on Earth.

Those two statements are not incompatible and in fact, they’re quite intertwined.

Projects to reduce plastics, to increase the effectiveness of recycling and to remove plastics from the oceans (for example) are numerous and frankly insufficient in number.  I’ve already blogged about the Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup  and other such efforts.  A quick update on that amazing initiative is here:

This post is about the negotiations which, hopefully by the end of 2023, will result in significant reduction of the amount of plastics produces and to ‘clean up’ the supply of plastic, not the removal or recycling of existing plastic.

From this recent article, we learn that

“Humanity produces more than 430 million tons of plastic annually, two-thirds of which are short-lived products that soon become waste, filling the ocean and, often, working their way into the human food chain”

Yes, you read that right.  As you read this and snack on ____ (fill in your favorite guilty-pleasure food here), you are probably ingesting some plastic.  Not good.

Despite efforts to curtail this, according to that same article,

“Plastic waste produced globally is set to almost triple by 2060, with about half ending up in landfill and under a fifth recycled, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

As project managers know, stakeholder identification and engagement is key.

In this negotiation, there are several powerful, interested, and opposing stakeholders that need to be engaged. 

A recent article from Reuters goes through the debate, the support, and the opposition for this negotiation – in fact, the quotes below, in green, come from that article.

• A few large countries, like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia, which want country-based rules and are opposed to global standards (for now)

"The United States is committed to working with other governments and stakeholders throughout the INC process to develop an ambitious, innovative and country-driven global agreement," a U.S. State Department spokesperson said in a statement.  Washington has said it wants the pact to resemble the structure of the Paris climate agreement, in countries set their own greenhouse gas reduction goals and action plans.

"Although in the minority, there are some powerful opponents of global rules and standards, which risk potentially weakening obligations on countries to take action,” said Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF global plastics policy lead.

• Most other countries, led by Norway and Rwanda, which want to forge a set of global standards and initiatives.  More about this in this article from Politico.

Norway, alongside Rwanda, is leading a self-named High Ambition Coalition of more than 50 countries pushing for an ambitious global plastics treaty aimed at ending plastic pollution by 2040.Environmentalists, like the World Wildlife Federation (WWF)

• The plastics industry

Industry representatives at the talks touted the essential role of plastics in daily life, calling for the treaty to focus tackling waste rather than measures to sap production.

"At the end of the day, we hope the committee comes to the same conclusion we do, which is that increasing recycling offers the best solution to reducing plastic waste," said Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association.

• The fossil fuel industry (plastic is mainly created from fossil fuels – see this site to understand that, and the quote from it below)

Just as the world begins to realize the dangers of plastic pollution and take action to reduce it, industry is poised to invest billions in expanding plastic production. Over 99% of plastic is made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels, and the fossil fuel and plastic industries are deeply connected. Indeed, the shale gas boom in the United States is fueling a massive build-out of plastic infrastructure in the US and beyond.

In as little as five years, these investments could increase global plastic production capacity by a third, driving companies to produce ever greater volumes of plastic for years to come. If this plastic is produced, companies will find markets to consume it. Production will drive demand. This wave of investment increases pollution risks to frontline communities throughout the plastic supply chain and directly undermines efforts by cities, countries, and the global community to combat the growing plastic crisis.

It’s an interesting case study in progress that project leaders may do well to watch and from which they may be able to learn – and perhaps even in which they can participate

 Here’s a quick, short, recent (less than 2 minute) summary of the treaty in progress:

I'll be keeping an eye on this for People, Planet, Projects, and Profits.

References

https://wwf.panda.org/act/plastic_pollution_treaty/

https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230603-un-agrees-to-draft-landmark-treaty-against-plastic-pollution-by-end-of-2023

No, this is not a science fiction thriller about 20-foot humanoids, although...that would be a good follow-up!

If you look at the featured picture for this post, it's a street sign for the topic of the post. And in that street sign, people (even kids!) are bigger than cars.  The reason for this will become evident if you just read on.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about The Built Environment and what that means for people in general, but also very special people – project leaders.

So let me start with the term, “Built Environment”(there will be more terms as well here, some in other languages, so fasten your linguistic seat belts).

What is The Built Environment?  Some may say it’s just another word for ‘construction’ or for buildings.  That’s a partially correct answer but it is nowhere near fully correct.

Here, from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is the definition:

(The Built Environment encompasses) the buildings we live in, the distribution systems that provide us with water and electricity, and the roads, bridges, and transportation systems we use to get from place to place. It can generally be described as the man-made or modified structures that provide people with living, working, and recreational spaces.

So, not just buildings, it’s anything that we humans make or modify to make our lives comfortable, productive, and fun.

I’ll be posting about this topic a lot in the next few months – its an area of focus that project managers will need to learn about because of the amount of money business and governments are applying to infrastructure projects.  And PMI knows this, having recently introduced the PMI-CP® certification.

My first post in this vein is a concept that has begun to catch hold worldwide, although it started about 70 years ago in Delft, The Netherlands.  I told you – you’d learn new terms in this post, and here is one I am not only going to define, I am going to get you to pronounce it properly!  Respect language!

The term is Woonerf.  It is a mashup of two Dutch words, woon and nerf (literally ‘living’ and ‘grain’) Together, however, the word woonerf becomes “living yard”, and practically, it describes a ‘shared space’.

Let’s get the pronunciation right, though.

• The “woon” part does NOT rhyme with “tune”.  Woon is pronounced something like “phone”, with a slightly voiced ‘f’, almost a v. 
• The “nerf” part does not rhyme with “surf”.  It’s close to “neer-uff”.
• Say “phone-neer-uff” and you’re reasonably close

Listen to it pronounced in Dutch here: https://www.howtopronounce.com/dutch/woonerf

A woonerf is a place where cars, trucks, bikes, kids, dogs, people share a space and in which the motorized vehicles do NOT have the right of way, and in which there is less demarcation between the road and a ‘sidewalk’, and in which the roadway is often either narrow, populated with barriers (not speed bumps, but pieces of art, for example) that prevent fast driving.

The four principles of a woonerf (see pic below) are:

• Visible Entrances
• Physical Barriers
• Shared and paved space
• Landscaping and “street furniture” (often sculptures, plants, benches, artwork)

From a project management perspective, there is a very interesting angle – one that involves culture and communications and stakeholder engagement.  A very good example is this one, which compares the introduction of a woonerf in two different Canadian cities.

It’s a short video.  But watch it -very interesting to note the project management lessons learned here. 

Below is a photo of the successful woonerf in Banff.

I find it amazing how one word – in this case, woonerf – in effect, killed a project because it carried the ‘baggage’ of a Euro-centric culture that ‘won’t work here’, according to some key stakeholders. 

But the second part of the video shows how the woonerf concept did work in Banff.  And it’s catching on all over the world in the past decade.  This article from Bloomberg talks about six examples, from the USA, New Zealand, Germany, England, Sweden, and, of course, The Netherlands.  And that’s from 2015.  Since then, it’s become much more popular, with woonerf projects taking place everywhere.

Here’s a recent example of a woonerf in Singapore:

And I close with a great summary of how a woonerf works in The Netherlands.

Stay tuned to this blog for more upskilling in linguistics and the Built Environment!  We’ll be covering software platforms that facilitate planning and executing building projects with sustainability in mind.

A news item that popped up on several news outlets caught my attention this week – it was about the combined effect of the weight of the built environment in Manhattan (and New York City in general) and the rise of the sea level along NYC’s coastline.

Bottom line 1: the City of New York is sinking, and the concurrently, the water is rising.

Bottom line 2: This means programs, projects, and meaningful opportunities for project leaders

Let’s start with the background:

Coming Down!

According to an article from The Guardian:

New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found.

The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.

Going up!

The Guardian article goes on to say:

The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm, since 1950 and major flooding events from storms could be up to four times more frequent than now by the end of the century due to the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes strengthened by climate change.

Referenced in the Guardian article is a paper from a Wiley publication called Earth’s Future.

The study is titled: The Weight of New York City: Possible Contributions to Subsidence From Anthropogenic Sources

Its plain-language summary is below:

New York City faces accelerating inundation risk from sea level rise, subsidence, and increasing storm intensity from natural and anthropogenic causes. Here we calculate a previously unquantified contribution to subsidence from the cumulative mass and downward pressure exerted by the built environment of the city.

A 2022 sea level rise report from the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) says that without remediation (and this does NOT account for ‘that sinking feeling’) the sea level in NYC will rise by one foot by 2050.

This is about triple the rate of the past 100 years.

If you would like to see what that means for New York City - or your area of the world, you can actually generate interactive maps for your region in a cool site provided here by Climate Central.  Here’s an example of Boston with 5.5 feet of sea-level rise.  Doesn’t look too promising for MIT, Fenway Park, or Boston University:

To mitigate the situation in New York City, the US Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a very large program (mistakenly called a project by some) which I will cover in detail in a follow-up post.

From an article recently published in The City,

The Army Corps estimates construction on the $52 billion project would begin in 2030 and be complete by 2044. The project must be first approved by federal, state and local officials and funded before any of the work can start.

The public can comment on the project proposal through Jan. 6 — via email or snail mail — in order to inform the design, which is expected to be finalized in 2025.

Some specific proposals for neighborhoods include:

• Sheet-pile reinforced dunes along Rockaway Beach and boardwalk
• Floodwalls, seawalls and levees along Coney Island peninsula and along the Greenpoint/Long Island City shore
• Elevated promenades near East River Esplanade and Coney Island Beach
• Bulkheads, berms and elevated roads in Broad Channel
• Seawalls at Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side and Hunters Point in Queens

In the next post, I would like to cover the Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal, but also the way in which they considered stakeholders and presented this major, important program to taxpayers and other stakeholders.

REFERENCES:

Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/new-york-city-sinking-skyscrapers-climate-crisis

Parsons, T., Wu, P.-C., (Matt) Wei, M., & D'Hondt, S. (2023). The weight of New York City: Possible contributions to subsidence from anthropogenic sources. Earth's Future, 11, e2022EF003465. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003465

I’ve previously posted “ChatGPT Ate My Brain”.  Now, here, I’m posting on AI’s increasing and seemingly unquenchable thirst for water.

I was triggered to write this based on an email exchange with fellow BU professor Dr. Dave Silberman, who went me a recent article from Forbes, “AI’S Unsustainable Water Use: How Tech Giants Contribute To Global Water Shortages” which quotes a to-be-peer-reviewed article (download here): which states:

"training GPT-3 in Microsoft's state-of-the-art US data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater", which they calculate could be used to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles.

Furthermore, ChatGPT 'drinks' the equivalent of a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of 20-50 questions and answers. Which may not seem like much... until you consider that the chatbot has more than 100 million active users, each of whom engages in multiple conversations.

So, I thought it would be a worthy use of a little H2O to ask ChatGPT what it thought of the situation.

It was surprisingly frank:

My question: As a person interested in sustainability, I am alarmed to see that AI is very 'thirsty' for freshwater, based on this article https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/amp/ . Is it true that AI consumes large amounts of water, and what is being done about it?

The answer from ChatGPT: Yes, it is true that AI systems consume significant amounts of water, especially in the training phase of machine learning models. This is because AI requires vast amounts of computational power, which generates heat that needs to be dissipated, and cooling systems that use water to maintain the necessary temperature. Additionally, data centers that host AI models require a lot of water for cooling and other operational needs.

The impact of AI on water resources is an important concern, and there are ongoing efforts to address this issue. One approach is to use more energy-efficient hardware, such as specialized processors that can perform AI computations with lower power consumption. Another approach is to develop more efficient cooling systems that use less water, and to use recycled water or other sustainable sources of water for cooling.

In addition to technical solutions, it's important to consider the environmental impact of AI in the design and deployment of AI systems. This means taking a holistic approach to sustainability and considering the entire life cycle of AI systems, including the raw materials used to manufacture hardware, the energy used to power AI models, and the disposal of electronic waste.

Overall, the AI industry and the broader technology sector are increasingly aware of the need to address the environmental impact of their activities, including water use, and are taking steps to reduce their impact on the planet.

The video just below from Amazon Web Services (AWS) tackles the issue and provides some ways that AWS is helping to battle this, wanting to be “water-positive” by 2030.  When you watch this video, note that what they are really discussing, without saying it directly, is that they have a portfolio of programs and projects which initiatives that execute the strategy aimed at that goal, which is in turn, aligned with their sustainability-oriented mission and vision statement.  This is very much in line with the model that (for example), folks like Gilbert Silvius, Alexandra Chapman, and others have been promoting for a long time.

Google recently shared a blog post revealing its water use – a staggering 4.3 billion gallons of water in 2021, which works out to an average daily water footprint approaching a half-million gallons per data center. 

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-commitment-to-climate-conscious-data-center-cooling/

It gets complicated as well, because there is a trade-off (we’re used to those as a project manager, though) between reducing water and reducing carbon.  The initiatives you see in the video, I’m sure you have already guessed, take energy and have their own impact.   From the Google blog post:

When used responsibly, water cooling can play an important role in reducing emissions and mitigating climate change. Water-cooled data centers use about 10% less energy and thus emit roughly 10% less carbon emissions than many air-cooled data centers. In 2021, water cooling helped us reduce the energy-related carbon footprint of our data center portfolio by roughly 300,000 tons of CO2."

 So it is a complicated, convoluted, higher-level, higher stakes balancing act that we must perform.

“Going Waterless” was one of the top eight trends identified by Data Center Frontier.  So at this point it seems we’re at least conscious of the problem.  Now – can we get the right amount of talented project, program, and portfolio leaders on the job?  It’s an important enough problem to pour over…

References:

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.pdf
2. https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/amp/
3. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2342490-how-much-water-do-data-centres-use-most-tech-companies-wont-say/
4. https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/sustainability/article/21438279/aws-targets-water-use-in-its-cloud-data-centers
5. https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/21439020/the-eight-trends-that-will-shape-the-data-center-industry-in-2023