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Eco-Tourism
Categories:
eco-tourism
Categories: eco-tourism
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What happens when a country has been disconnected from the world community and then is “back in the fold”, especially when that country has a whole slew of new species being discovered yearly? Is it a threat or an opportunity for the country to introduce ecotourism as an industry? Will ecotourism bring more money, more awareness, more modernity to this country, or will ecotourism actually damage its delicate ecosystem? The country is Myanmar (Burma), and these questions were posed by Rachel Nuwer in a recent article in Scientific American entitled Saving Eden. As project managers we’re used to looking at threats and opportunities for initiatives, and this is no different. The initiative to introduce ecotourism to Myanmar is an interesting study in risk management, and is particularly intriguing because of the politics and geography involved. For example, although Myanmar has economic benefits of US$7.3 billion in benefits to the country per year, the financial support for existing national parks is US$26,000 – a mere 0.2% of the country’s budget. With this backdrop, the initiative faces these risk questions:
I’m going to suggest that you read this article, and others referenced at the end of the post. In fact, I’ll be able to comment on this issue quite personally and directly, as I’m going to become an ecotourist myself (in Alaska). I plan to post right here in nearly real-time during this visit (coming up in June 2016). I’ll be considering the questions above (but in the context of Alaska, which is admittedly very different). I plan to comment on how our tour of the area is benefiting the environment, the local people, and I’ll focus on the ecotourists themselves – their attitudes their opinions – for example, do they even consider themselves ecotourists? How does the touring company deal with this issue? What are their commitments? I’ll be reporting on these things from personal experience – looking forward to it and I hope you will enjoy it (and learn from it) as well.
Ecotourism in India http://www.sciencelog.net/2015/01/ecotourism-in-india.html
TED case study – Ecotourism in Costa Rica http://www1.american.edu/ted/costa-rica-tourism.htm Ecotourism in Fiji http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5336e/x5336e0b.htm Other studies and published papers: http://www.global-briefing.org/2012/10/how-ecotourism-can-link-conservation-and-business/ |
Pop goes Africa
Categories:
Africa
Categories: Africa
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Busy marketplace in Lagos, Nigeria. Photo courtesy of The Guardian. We estimate that this blog post will take you about 3 minutes to read. Stop reading for just a moment, and pause. Make a picture in your mind of 240 newborn babies. That is how many infants will be born in Africa as you read this post. Well, at least that is the forecast of the situation in 2050, according to a recent UN population study. (summary here). Eighty new babies born per minute in Africa alone. Another way to put this, given the projections: African population growth would fill an empty London five times a year. Okay, you say – that’s all very interesting, but what does this mean to me, to my organization, to me, to projects, to project management? What’s this doing in a project management blog? Well, we blog about the triple-bottom line. That means economic, ecological, and social aspects of business and sustainability in general. The story that triggered this idea for us appeared in the most recent edition of Scientific American, and it came under that journal’s heading of sustainability. But when we dug deeper (that’s what we do for you here!) it turned up some very project-oriented data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. As any good PM would do, let’s start with some orientation and some facts and figures: Here’s a chart that pretty strikingly shows the difference in projected growth among the continents of the world:
So there is your population data, in pretty striking form. Here are some additional facts and figures:
We’ve talked about the facts and the expected results. Let’s discuss the cause and ways to deal with it from a social perspective. It will lead to even more connections to ‘green by definition’ projects. What has led to this population increase? It’s not just more babies. Ironically some of this comes from very good news, and is the result of projects and initiatives to improve the lot for Africans. For example, thanks to better practices in agriculture and the ability to move and store food (we’ve blogged about this recently), life expectancy has increased. “The 12 million Africans born in 1955 could expect to live only until the age of 37. Encouragingly, the 42 million Africans born this year can expect to live to the age of 60.” (see full article in The Guardian by clicking on the link). So – the health of families has improved. People are living longer. One outcome is this burst in population. It’s apparent that this large population is not sustainable. What’s the best reaction to this? According to Scientific American’s Robert Engleman the solution comes from empowering women. What’s the connection? Is there any evidence to show that it has worked? And, selfishly, is there any connection to project management? From the Scientific American article: “A significant fertility decline can be achieved only if women are empowered educationally, economically, socially and politically. They must also be given easy and affordable access to contraceptives. Following this integrated strategy, Mauritius has lowered its fertility rate from six to 1.5 children; Tunisia's rate dropped from seven to two. Men also have to relinquish sole control over the decision to have children and refrain from abusing wives or partners who seek birth control. For such efforts to succeed ultimately, government leaders must encourage public and policy conversations about slower population growth.” There’s much more to that angle – we suggest reading the entire article. There’s other aspects also, though. Is there a connection to education of women? Again, from the article: “Education spurs young people to seek contraceptives and to plan smaller families as they learn about the world, their bodies and the potential to steer their own destinies. African women with no education have, on average, 5.4 children, according to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Women who have completed primary school have, on average, 4.3 children. A big drop, to 2.7, correlates with completion of secondary school. For those who go on to college, fertility is 2.2.”
Yes, there are examples of projects that assist in family planning, in education, generally with population control and management. Here are a couple of examples. http://www.familyplanning2020.org/ Below are some of the references for this post. We encourage you to read more about this issue and the ways in which it may impact you as a project manager, no matter where you are in the world – and the potential for the impact in the opposite direction – that is, your ability to have an impact on the issue as a project manager. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34188248 http://www.techinsider.io/africas-population-explosion-will-change-humanity-2015-8 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-could-help-the-environment-but-not-quickly/
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A deep breadth
Categories:
climate change
Categories: climate change
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Do me a favor. Read this brief paragraph (below in yellow highlighting) and then stop and take a deep, deep breath. A breath of probably much cleaner air than many, many other people are taking. The World Health Organization (WHO) compiled a list of the 1600 cities with the worst air quality in the world. India as a whole is home to 11 of the top 20 cities on the planet with the worst air quality. The worst U.S. city was Fresno, California, which came 162nd on the list. (Compiled by the World Health Organization, which collected pollution levels from these cities between 2008 to 2013.) Most of us have come to associate “poor air quality” with Beijing. It is indeed bad there. But New Delhi (for example) is much worse. The worst US city is number 162 on the list of 1600 metro areas and India has 11 of the top 20? Wow! NPR just published an excellent article about this topic, and another quite striking fact is this: President Obama, who visited New Delhi for 3 days recently, is estimated to have lost 6 hours off of his lifespan based only on breathing the air from New Delhi on the visit. Wow again! The problem of air pollution is the immediate, visible outcome of unsustainable growth. The real problem is actually much more insidious. Quoting from the article: The impacts of climate change would hit people in India harder than almost anywhere else in the world, making it more vulnerable to flooding and drought. "Tropical cyclones are likely to become more intense. We're also seeing that climate change is going to have an impact on the monsoon," says Richard Hewston of the global risk assessment firm Verisk Maplecroft. His company looked at which countries around the world are most vulnerable to storms, flooding and other acts of nature. India is already at the top of the list, first in the world. Two of its biggest cities, New Delhi and Kolkata, with a combined population of more than 14 million, are on the top 10 list of global cities most vulnerable to natural hazards.
What’s happening in India is important – even critical – not just for India, but for the world. What India is able to accomplish in terms of new projects to promote and develop clean energy and to limit climate change will say a lot about what the rest of the world can do. They have set high targets in these areas, and in many ways will lead the world in implementing sustainable development en masse. Again, quoting from the article: In the filtered, cooled air of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, Ambassador Richard Verma tells me he thinks India is poised to take the lead on clean energy and climate change. Already, it has set an ambitious target of 100 gigawatts of solar energy by 2022, which would be a faster buildup than any country has managed. “There’s no other country on the planet that has set the kind of renewable targets and goals that India has. So I think the way to get there is a challenge, but India, I think, is really going to be a trailblazer in this whole area,” he says. The challenge for India is how to manage the tension between development and climate change. What happens next here could have a huge impact on the world and has the potential to write a new story on how developing countries enter the 21st century — including whether the world can alter the course on climate change or not. It’s worth having a look at some of these goals and objectives. Click here for a 30-ish page report which summarizes them. Why is this covered in a project management blog? A few reasons. First, we can see some of the effects of climate change – or at least air pollution – on a population. We can see that a government appears to be taking the threat seriously and is responding to the threat with a detailed, significant plan that launches all sorts of projects and programs. If nothing else, these will employ thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of project managers, to turn these ideas into reality. Agree or not with the concept of climate change, whether to you it is fiction or reality is actually of no import. What you can read from this is that there will be real project work for real project managers. We’d assert that this is good, just work that must be done. So the topic is wider than you may think. It has - for lack of a better expression- deep breadth.
For a recent news story on this topic, click here. Photo Credit: Gajendar Nadav, Financial Express |
Food's Critical Path
Categories:
Goodness
Categories: Goodness
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Photo Credit: Zambia Daily Mail (https://www.daily-mail.co.zm/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/maize-crop-shed.jpg) We posted in April about food waste. Most of that conversation was about initiatives at the consumer level. Remember? It was about throwing away one slice of pizza when you have three on the plate? One third of food served to customers or prepared by ourselves is lost. In fact, in 2015, in the USA alone, 130 billion pounds of food was simply “thrown away” – ending up in landfills and causing other problems, including greenhouse gasses and disease. Turns out, that’s not the only place where there is food ‘loss’. We don’t always think about this as modern consumers, but there is a significant amount of food waste as “post-harvest loss” (described below). PM Network, PMI’s monthly magazine, features this in their excellent section, “The Edge”, with a story entitled “Fixing the Food Chain”. What’s a story like this doing in PM Network? We’re not farmers, or agriculturalists, nor are we (necessarily) economists! We’re project managers. And aside from the fact that this is an important story that effects us as humans, another reason a story like this makes sense in PM Network is that it discusses a seven-year, $130 million project called YieldWise. As project managers, projects like this are – if nothing else – job and growth opportunities. We see them as much more – we see them as ‘green by definition’ projects. This initiative is about Post-Harvest Loss – the spoiling of food that could have been consumed by people. We encourage you to visit the site. But start off with this very short video (you can play it in-place below) about the problem that the project is out to solve. The project will research and implement new ways to store, process, and transport produce to the changing markets of the region. This particular effort takes place in Sub-Saharan Africa. But efforts like this are worldwide, and projects like YieldWise give project managers a chance to practice their profession and contribute to the planet’s health at the same time. Champions 12.3 is another effort, consisting of a family of projects aimed at meeting a UN target. From their website: At the 2015 United Nations General Assembly, countries of the world formally adopted a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. SDG 12 seeks to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.” The third target under this goal (Target 12.3) calls for cutting in half per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level, and reducing food losses along production and supply chains (including post-harvest losses) by 2030. To help convert Target 12.3 into reality, the global multi-stakeholder summit “No More Food to Waste” proposed the idea of developing a group of executives who would champion the cause of achieving SDG Target 12.3 or Champions 12.3. During the United Nations General Assembly’s Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, the government of The Netherlands formally called for its formation. For those interested in these important and interesting projects, we provide the following resources as well: Link to Youtube video on post harvest waste Food Waste - Training effort in Tanzania Drones and sub-surface irrigation in India Good article from The Guardian on Post Harvest Loss 2011 WorldBank report on Sub-Saharan Post Harvest Loss An FAO (Food and Agriculture Office of the UN) report on both food waste and post harvest loss. Outstanding infographic on food waste and post harvest loss.
Key Twitter hashtag for post-harvest loss: #preventphl
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Park it here
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Photo Credit: Gallo Images/Thinkstock There’s a little bit of ‘karma’ associated with this blog post. I sat down to write the post – a post ostensibly to be (only) focused on E. O. Wilson’s, book Half Earth (and I will indeed cover that book a little bit). I had just reached the point where I had the piece outlined, and I went into the neighboring room where I could hear (from the TV) the voice of Peter Coyote narrating a documentary. I sat down with the rest of the family, who had settled in to watch the program. The show was Ken Burns’ excellent documentary, National Parks: America’s Best Idea, being rebroadcast by PBS – it first aired in 2009. Parks, as described by PBS, is “a six-episode series produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan and written by Dayton Duncan. Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales – from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska. In this series, Burns, aided by the talented voices of such celebrities as Adam Arkin, Tom Bodett, Andy Garcia, Tom Hanks, Derek Jacobi, John Lithgow, Amy Madigan, Sam Waterston, and George Takei. The lengthy series covers the history and implementation of 58 US wilderness national parks, featuring some of the most beautiful photography and editing you have ever seen. And yes, because creating these parks required the cooperation of key sponsors and the participation (sometimes forceful) of many types of stakeholders, there are lots of project lessons simply in that aspect of the show. In fact, the subtitle of the show, “America’s Best Idea” aligns with our assertions that project management is about bringing ideas to reality and that is what happened in these 58 parks. So where’s the karma? It is in the connection of (1) the National Park theme, which is one of stopping development and carving out space for nature - - and (2) the theme of Wilson’s book. So now on to E. O. Wilson and his book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. E. O. Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a professor emeritus from Harvard University. In his book, Half Earth, Wilson says, well – I think I’ll let him speak for himself, via this snippet from a recent New York Times interview: Reading your book, one senses you felt a great urgency to write it? The urgency was twofold. First, it’s only been within the last decade that a full picture of the crisis in biodiversity has emerged. The second factor was my age. I’m 86. I had a mild stroke a couple of years ago. I thought, “Say this now or never.” And what I say is that to save biodiversity, we need to set aside about half the earth’s surface as a natural reserve. I’m not suggesting we have one hemisphere for humans and the other for the rest of life. I’m talking about allocating up to one half of the surface of the land and the sea as a preserve for remaining flora and fauna.
It’s a huge, controversial, sweeping proposal. And we suggest you read it, even if you’re highly cynical of the idea. Both the book and the concept of the national park have to do with long-term thinking. Drastic steps such as preserving vast areas of land for the future are not taken by those who are looking to the next quarter’s profits. They are ‘generational’ in nature (excuse the pun) and take a view that is about benefits realization to the extreme. Thinking like this is Portfolio Management on steroids. And that’s a good thing. Moreover, this is the type of thinking we are trying to encourage our project management audience to consider. It does not mean that you have exactly this same attitude on each project – in fact, there are many cases where this thinking just does not apply. But there are many (surprising) cases where it does apply. We, of course, would send you to our two books (Green Project Management and Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success) to see some of these in action. References: National Parks: Americas Best Idea – A series by Ken Burns, written by Dayton Duncan, broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System of the United States (PBS) Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life - a book by E. O. Wilson https://nature.berkeley.edu/breakthroughs/sp15/eo-wilson-on-saving-half-the-earth |