environmental business innovations
The Kyoto Protocol, Greenhouse Gases (GhGs) and Environmental Business Innovation in the US, Africa and India
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In this brief (2 min 9 sec) audio snippet, Charlie Williams and Ben Henneke (of Clean Air Action) explain how Clean Air Action took part in developing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) used in the Kyoto Protocol, which is in turn used by the United Nations to verify carbon credit projects worldwide.
Clean Air Action is the environmental business innovator for the TIST Program, a sustainable reforestation slash Small Groups and Best Practices project. With help from The Institute for Environmental Innovation (I4EI), TIST empowers local farmers in India, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda reforest (and afforest) their land and receive health and HIV/AIDS education, among many other benetfits.
These Small Groups, which are already planting over 8,000 trees a day, receive micro-loans from TIST to get started. A revolutionary quantification and verification process follows for the life of the group and the trees, involving the use of handheld Palm devices to collect key data and photographs on a continual basis. The model was based on transparency at the core, and the database is freely available online anytime. Head straight to see the latest data on the recent quantification page. TIST has been running for nearly a decade.
Grow Clean Air makes these fully-certified, unique carbon credits available to consumers for offsetting their environmental impact while supporting sustainable agriculture in Africa and India.
This is not Clean Air Action's first time innovating for the benefit of business and the environment. They are responsible for a number of "firsts" in US for environmental regulation work with both public (EPA) and private (Dow Chemical, Ford Motor, Shell Chemical) industries in the 1990s, including the first Ozone Alert Program.
But it was in the months leading up to the formation of Clean Air Action Corporation that some work ended up having a larger impact than anyone involved could have imagined. The work was embedded in the core of the Kyoto Protocol, the international framework convention for reducing Greenhouse Gases (GhGs) that cause climate change.
The specifics of this work will is the topic of an upcoming article for Grow Clean Air... for now, please consider supporting by offsetting your carbon footprint. Thanks for your interest and involvement!
