|
Message from the Chief Executive
Tackling THE global environmental issue
The urgency of responding to the crisis of global warming and its potentially devastating effects has been at the center of recent debates in academic, government, and business circles. Indeed, the frequency and intensity of discussions centered on the topic has made "climate change" a household term.
This issue of APPC Post looks at the role that philanthropy has played and can play in the development of a response to this global crisis. We look at what is being done by corporations, individuals, and volunteers, in the face of growing concern over global warming. We also seek to provide ideas and resources for potential "eco-philanthropists."
Closer to home, an APPC staffer provided the inspiration for this issue when, after reading a magazine article on climate change, she proceeded to trade in her plastic shopping bags for brown paper ones. Climate change is everybody's business, and we hope to help provide ideas on how one can make a contribution to the effort to save our earth, however small.
We welcome your thoughts, comments and ideas about what we can do collectively to address this issue which will affect the world, and humankind.
Happy reading!
Walking the talk: Philippine CEOs confront climate change with green projects
To show that climate change was at the top of their agendas, Philippine CEOs kicked off this year's Corporate Social Responsibility Expo by taking a stroll around the country's central business district. The event was followed by a press conference where the CEOs talked about their green projects.
"Today's activity is sending a message about taking a collective effort to think and go green," said Malou Erni, president of the League of Corporate Foundations.
Among the CEOS present were Shell Philippines' Edgardo Chua and Petron President and CEO Khalid Al-Faddagh, who reiterated their companies' compliance with the country's new Biofuels Act, which mandates the blending of biodiesel and bioethanol into diesel and gasoline, respectively.
Apart from complying with the Biofuels Act, Shell Philippines is developing a technology that will produce clean fuel from coal.
Petron, on the other hand, has committed to producing ethanol because of the fuel's many benefits.
Luis Miguel Aboitiz, Vice-President of Aboitiz Equity Ventures, which has holdings in power, banking, food, transport, real estate and construction, spoke of their own initiatives, which include supervising a reef sanctuary and providing technology to farmers to recycle piggery wastes into cooking fuel.
Through its Executive Vice-President Guillermo Luz, the Ayala Foundation presented its environmental programs, which include recycling office and commercial waste and reforestation. The Ayala Group of Companies' local businesses include real estate and hotels, financial services, telecommunications, electronics and information technology, automotives, water infrastructure development and management.
The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Expo, a national annual conference which attracts over 2,000 people, will to be held on July 16-18 at the Sofitel Philippine Plaza Hotel in Pasay City, and will tackle corporate social responsibility and the environment, among other issues.
For more information, visit www.lcf.org.ph.
back to top
HSBC Launches $100 Million Climate Change Effort
With the support of The Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the World Wildlife Fund, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) has created a five-year, US$100 million partnership in response to the threat of climate change world-wide.
The HSBC Climate Partnership aims to:
* Help some of the world's biggest and most urbanized cities - Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York and Shanghai - respond to the challenge of climate change; * Create 'climate champions' worldwide who will undertake field research and bring back valuable knowledge and experience to their communities; * Conduct a field experiment on the world's forests to measure carbon and the effects of climate change; and * Help protect some of the world's major rivers - including the Amazon, Ganges, Thames, and Yangtze - from the impacts on climate change, benefiting the 450 million people who rely on them.
HSBC's US$100 million partnership - including the largest donations to each of these charities and the largest donation ever made by a British company - has significant program targets and offers transformational support for the environmental charities. The donation will help to deliver increased capacity, help the charities to expand across new countries and research sites, and increase their access to more people.
The HSBC Group is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world. The Group has around 10,000 offices in 82 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa.
For more information, visit www.hsbc.com.
back to top
IAVE's eleventh regional volunteer conference: Collaborative Action for Global Environmental Issues
Environmental issues take center stage at The International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE) eleventh Asia Pacific Regional Volunteer Conference 2007, which will be held in Nagoya-Aichi, Japan, from 7 - 11 December 2007.
This event, which is held regularly in recognition of the growing influence of the volunteer sector, will bring together some 500 people from the region to: learn volunteering examples from other countries; provide a unique opportunity for participants to get to know Japan's volunteer sector as well as her traditions and cultures; and help lead to form a network of volunteering beyond national boundaries, thus widening the scope of cooperation.
With the theme, "Collaborative Action for Global Environmental Issues" the conference will feature four special forum sessions on Senior Citizens' Volunteering, Corporate Volunteering, Large-scale Events Volunteer Management, and Volunteering and Disaster Management.
General interest sessions on the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG); Peace, Sustainable Development, Poverty, Environment, Education, Health and Human Rights; Youth and Volunteering; Service Learning; Volunteer Management; IT and Volunteering; Multi-Cultural Issues and Volunteering will also be held during the conference.
For more information on the conference and how to register, visit the conference homepage at http://www.iave2007nagoya-aichi.jp/.
back to top
The Myer Foundation pledges support for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation's latest initiative
The Directors of The Myer Foundation in Australia have committed $100,000 to fund the ZooX Fund, which was created to provide a way in which businesses, philanthropists and the general public could address their more personal concerns about the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. The fund will finance activities to help researchers understand how the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system, responds to stress arising from the impacts of climate change.
The Fund is named after the zooxanthellae, which are the organisms that live inside coral and give it both its life and color. Coral bleaching occurs when, due to rising water temperatures or changes in the water's pH, the zooxanthallae are expelled from the coral tissue. Unless zooxanthellae return to the coral, the coral will not recover.
The first project of the Fund is the ZooX™ Genetic Diversity Study. Over several stages, this project will be a keystone of a risk map of the Reef, identifying those sections with the greatest natural resilience and hence the highest value to protect. This will enable those managing the Reef to develop more targeted strategies that will protect and preserve its future.
The Great Barrier Reef is composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands. It was inscribed onto the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO)'s list of World Heritage Sites in 1981.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has raised $500,000 from the initial coalition of five Patrons, who are KPMG, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Mulpha Australia Limited, Cato Counsel and The Myer Foundation, for the ZooX Fund.
For more information, visit www.myerfoundation.org.au or www.barrierreef.org.
back to top
Sir Richard Branson launches Virgin Earth Challenge
Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, has offered a $25million prize for scientists who find a way to help save the planet from the effects of climate change.
Flanked by the former US vice-president Al Gore and other environmentalists, the boss of Virgin Atlantic airlines called for scientists to come up with a way to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The Challenge was established in the belief that history has shown that prizes of this nature encourage technological advancements for the good of mankind. The Virgin Earth Challenge will award $25 million to the individual or group who are able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects. This removal must have long term effects and contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate.
The recipients of the Prize will be determined by Branson and a panel of five judges: former US Vice-President Al Gore; British diplomat, environmentalist and academic Sir Crispin Tickell, Australian explorer, scientist and conservationist Tim Flannery; Columbia University professor Jim Hansen; and independent scientist James Lovelock. The panel of judges will be assisted in their deliberations by The Climate Group and Special Advisor to The Virgin Earth Prize Judges, Steve Howard.
The announcement of the Virgin Earth Challenge followed the publication of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes, which said that temperatures on earth could increase by as much as 6.4C by the end of this Century.
For more information, visit www.virginearth.com.
For more information, visit www.virginearth.com.
For more information, visit www.virginearth.com.
The Asia Foundation launches program to enhance disaster preparedness in China
Some 90 representatives from Chinese government disaster management agencies, Chinese and international enterprises and non-government organizations attended The Asia Foundation's Private Sector Disaster Management Workshops in Beijing and Shanghai last week.
The workshops launched The Asia Foundation's two-year project to enhance private sector participation in, and contributions to, community-level disaster preparedness, risk reduction, and relief initiatives. The project encourages multi-sectoral approaches to disaster management aimed at promoting greater collaboration among government agencies, private enterprises, and local charities and relief organizations. This effort is being supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
As one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, last year China had more than 400 million people affected and thousands killed by natural disasters. Annual economic losses account for 1-2% percent of GDP. While disaster management systems are well advanced in terms of physical structure and government processes, involvement of the private sector and non-governmental organizations has been limited.
For more information, visit www.asiafoundation.org.
back to top
CNN to direct viewers to charities related to emerging news issues
"Take action! When disaster strikes or horrible events unfold, these are opportunities to effect change. CNN is helping to empower the individual who has asked, 'What can I do?' Bad things happen in the world every day. But good can happen and one person can impact the world." - www.cnn.com
Feeling helpless as one watches the news, which often depicts distressing events unfolding across the world, may soon be overcome by doing something about these events as they happen.
Through Impact Your World, CNN provides the public with resources to take action on news it witnesses. The site, launched early this month, provides resources on six initial categories (Refugees and Homelessness, Poverty, Health, Children, Animals, and Natural Disasters) on immediate ways that one can help. These resources include an initial listing of organizations that one can donate to or volunteer for, along with additional information from CharityNavigator.org, an independent and non-profit organization that rates and evaluates charity groups based on their effectiveness and financial stability. The list is composed of some of CharityNavigator.org's highest rated charities which are also vetted by CNN journalists for credibility.
For more information, visit http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/impact/.
back to top
ILO to measure the economic value of volunteering
The International Labour Organization and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies have forged an agreement to develop an approach for putting volunteer work on the economic map of the world for the first time, reports the John Hopkins Gazette. The effort will be supported by a start-up grant from United Nations Volunteers, the focal point in the United Nations for the worldwide promotion of volunteerism.
According to Sylvester Young, director of the Bureau of Statistics of the International Labour Organization, "The work of volunteers is one aspect of labor that has not been covered adequately in statistical systems up to now. Such work has been growing in importance in both developed and developing countries, but its statistical measurement has been overlooked."
Only a handful of countries, including the U.S. and Canada, do this with any regularity, says Lester Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins center. Business Week reports that an earlier attempt to quantify volunteer work in 36 countries found that from 1995 to 2000, 52% of adults in Norway volunteered their time, followed by Britain (30%), Sweden (28%), and the U.S. (22%).
The new partnership between ILO and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies hopes to overcome this problem by developing a recommended procedure for measuring volunteer work through official labor force surveys in countries throughout the world, fulfilling a mandate established in a 2003 U.N. Statistics Division Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts. This procedure will be presented to the International Conference of Labour Statisticians in Geneva in December 2008.
For more information, visit www.unv.org or www.jhu.edu/~ccss.
back to top
NVPC encourages "Corporate Action for the Community" in this year's President's Challenge
Launched by President S R Nathan in 2000, the President's Challenge (PC) is an annual charitable drive to rally the public towards helping those in need of assistance. This year, the event hopes to involve 250,000 people from all walks of life in Singapore. Aside from making monetary contributions, the PC also enjoins the public to help organizations of their choice by volunteering.
As one of the partner organizations for the PC, the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) is focused on promoting volunteerism in addition to charitable giving. With the theme: "Corporate Action for the Community", NVPC hopes to encourage corporate social involvement by facilitating meaningful partnerships between companies and the community.
HOW IT WORKS:
1. Participating companies receive a list of voluntary welfare associations (VWOs) with volunteering opportunities from NVPC. NVPC provides the relevant contact information for the company to get in touch with the VWOs to discuss the details of the volunteering opportunities. The company will confirm with NVPC upon the agreement of a partnership with the selected VWO.
2. The companies will plan and carry out the activity with the VWO on the agreed date. NVPC will be available as a resource if assistance is required during the planning process.
3. NVPC will evaluate the process after receiving feedback from both the company and the VWO.
4. All projects must be completed by 31 October 2007.
For more information, visit www.nvpc.org.sg.
back to top
|
