New Approaches: A View from Aspen Environment Forum 2011

June 22, 2011
By Katie Scolari-Borden and John Sauer, Special for the Huffington Post

At the Aspen Environment Forum 2011 (May 30-June 2) discussions focused on the implications of reaching the 7 billion global population mark, which should occur by Halloween. This will have serious implications for food supply, public health, energy, and the environment. Discussions at the forum covered topics such as viewing cities as metabolism, harnessing social media for mobilizing environmentalists, and allocating more resources for family planning. The conference exhibited the breadth and complexity of achieving balance on a crowded planet.

Despite the enormity of the challenges of mitigating our footprint, reducing carbon emissions, and providing sanitation to the 2.6 billion people without a toilet, the forum was a good reminder that adversity brings opportunity. There is a sense that some of the thought leaders at the forum are working on approaches that could produce big results.

For example, one of the grand challenges will be feeding the world population as it careens toward 9 billion or more. Only 4% of African farms have irrigation, according to Sandra Postel, Freshwater Fellow of the National Geographic Society. Is this an opportunity? What if urban/city farming could go mainstream and spread to megacities in developing countries like Lima and Nairobi? What about the potential of perennial grain seeds, as discussed by Jerry Glover from USAID: "70% of the Earth's farmland is planted with annual crops (wheat, corn, rice), which provide nearly 70% of the calories that sustain the world's populations. The problem is that annual crops must be planted from seed every year."

So, just as irises bloom from year to year, we could have perennial wheat crops to regenerate and sustain the soil.

Two of the key challenges of controlling population growth will be greatly improving global public health and drastically reducing poverty. Safe water and adequate sanitation underpin both these challenges. But part of the issue impeding progress is that development metrics are based on inputs instead of outcomes. This lack of systems thinking has resulted in several unintended consequences, such as working at a scale not large enough for replication, as well as not meaningfully engaging the private sector and other local partners, including governments, in the development process.

The result is that there are still many barriers to development, such as corruption, bad policies, and lack of human and technical capacity. But bigger-picture thinking and engagement can break these walls down, and probably more quickly than we think. Water For People's CEO, Ned Breslin, spoke about impact investing and how small business could greatly benefit from early-stage social enterprise funding in order to expand the business approach to solving water and sanitation challenges in the face of population growth and migration.

What do you think?