Fourth Wave Environmentalism Fully Embraces Business
Multilateral corporate partnerships and market-based approaches have become standard practice.
March 20, 2018 6:31 p.m. ET
American corporations began joining with environmental groups to increase sustainability nearly 30 years ago. This trend was still on the horizon in 1986 when I wrote an op-ed for this page describing an emerging style of environmentalism dedicated to problem-solving, market-based approaches, and partnerships.
Now widely known as Third Wave environmentalism, the idea first became a reality in 1990, when McDonald’s teamed up with my organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, to reduce more than 300 million pounds of solid waste by doing away with its foam-clamshell packaging. The Third Wave built on the progress of the first two: Teddy Roosevelt-era land conservation, followed by mid-20th-century antipollution laws like the Clean Air Act. In the 1990s, the advent of reliable pollution monitoring opened the door to flexible Third Wave solutions such as the U.S. cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, which causes forest-killing acid rain. Since 1990, this program has helped reduce coal-plant sulfur-dioxide emissions by more than 90% nationwide.
Market-based approaches and corporate partnerships are standard practice today. Yet too many environmentalists still regard business as the enemy, and vice versa. That may finally be changing, because an emerging wave of environmental innovation is making these partnerships more productive, and their results more precisely measurable. Call it the Fourth Wave of environmental progress: Innovation that gives people new ways to solve environmental problems.
Last year, for example, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, joined with EDF and other groups to reduce fertilizer waste on the vast network of farms from which it purchases roughly two million tons of corn each year. The move is part of Smithfield’s goal of cutting supply-chain greenhouse-gas emissions 25% by 2025. The company is the first in its industry to set such a target, and its progress is enabled by corn growers’ increasing investment in tools that help determine the most efficient ways to apply fertilizer.
The Fourth Wave not only makes invisible problems visible, it makes them solvable. EDF put sensors on Google Street View cars to measure and map leaks of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and other cities. We challenged entrepreneurs to create methane-detection units that are now being piloted in oil and gas facilities owned by Statoil , Shell and Pacific Gas & Electric. And we teamed with Google Earth Outreach to map air-pollution threats on each block in West Oakland, Calif., giving residents detailed data to help make the case for emissions reductions under California’s new air-quality law.
EDF is just one of many groups doing this kind of work. The World Resources Institute is using satellites to track deforestation in the Amazon, and uploading the data to a website that alerts local authorities and the public to fires. Retailers, consumer brands and tech companies are using blockchain to improve traceability and accountability across supply chains, from verifying the sustainability claims of the Indonesian tuna industry to managing energy trading across a solar-fed microgrid in Brooklyn. And the Nature Conservancy is working on facial-recognition technology for fish to help fishermen in Indonesia identify and track their catches. “The solutions are out there,” says the group’s chief executive, Mark Tercek. “And these innovative technologies are helping us find them, deploy them and scale them up.”
Where Third Wave partnerships tended to be one-on-one, the Fourth Wave boasts many multilateral partnerships. EDF’s work to measure methane emissions from the oil-and-gas supply chain involved scores of academic institutions and energy companies, and now we’re working with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research to derive emissions data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, sent into orbit last year. More than 400 companies have joined Walmart in its effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in its global supply chain by one billion tons—more than the total annual emissions of Germany.
The momentum is building, but we need more groups to take part. Local groups that may not have access to the latest technology deserve access to transparent data about what’s happening in their communities. I encourage environmentalists, tech innovators, business leaders and local citizens to explore the power that unlikely Fourth Wave coalitions can unleash.
In any era, those doing the hard work of solving environmental problems take advantage of the best available tools, and in this era those tools include innovations that can help drive transparency, responsibility and low-cost solutions. Technology can obviously be used for good or ill. But when sensors, machine learning and data analytics are used to shape smart policy, rein in free riders, and reward corporate responsibility, they will enable changes that help people and nature prosper.
Mr. Krupp is president of the Environmental Defense Fund.
Appeared in the March 21, 2018, print edition.
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