The science of climate change is clear, so shouldn’t passing new climate policy be simple? The folks at Climate Interactive have a way for you to decide for yourself: the En-ROADS (Energy Rapid Overview and Decision-Support) climate solutions simulator. According to their website, En-ROADS is a “global climate simulator that allows users to explore the impact that dozens of policies— such as electrifying transport, pricing carbon, and improving agricultural practices— have on hundreds of factors like energy prices, temperature, air quality, and sea level rise.” Practically speaking, it’s an easy and intuitive way to look at future climate scenarios based on the latest climate science.
Princeton Energy and Climate Scholars (PECS) members exploring the En-ROADS climate solutions simulator. Background left to right: Max Elikan, Maya Chung, Carli Kovel, Marco Rupp, Front: Aaron Leininger, Moriah Kunes.
In October, I introduced En-ROADS to the Princeton Energy and Climate Scholars (PECS), a diverse group of graduate students interested in climate issues from departments all across the university (politics, chemistry, engineering, geosciences, atmosphere and oceanic sciences, ecology and evolutionary biology, and more). I have led these En-ROADS events for the past three years and was excited to share with a group of Princeton students who were really invested in climate mitigation. For this event, I led a role-playing game where players act as climate stakeholders in a simulated emergency climate summit organized by the United Nations (UN). Acting as the UN secretary-general, I called on the group to propose a climate action plan that would keep total global warming under 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Over the course of three rounds of play, the PECS attendees— role-playing interest groups like “Agriculture, forestry and land use” or “Clean Tech”— suggested policy or mitigation strategies to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions that could be implemented in the En-ROADS simulator.
We started the first round with the baseline scenario in En-ROADS, which results in 3.3o C of warming by the year 2100 (Figure 1). This baseline assumes social and technological progress continues at the current rate, without additional climate policies or action, similar to the “Current Policies Scenario” of the Integrated Assessment Models or the IPCC reports.
Figure 1: Dashboard of the En-ROADS simulator, displaying the baseline scenario resulting in 3.3o C of warming by the end of the twenty-first century.
In the first round, each stakeholder group unilaterally proposed one mitigation strategy that aligned with their own priorities, but quickly found issues with this approach. One group proposed subsidizing renewable energy sources and another subsidizing nuclear energy, both with the hope of reducing fossil fuel emissions from the energy sector. Adding a $0.03 /kWh subsidy to renewable energy expanded the energy market share of renewables, thus reducing the more fossil-fuel intensive sources like coal and oil. This change resulted in reducing the projected 2100 warming by a modest tenth of a degree to 3.2o C. However, adding a subsidy for nuclear not only reduced fossil-fuel intensive energy sources as intended, but also ate into the market share of renewable energy. This is because nuclear and renewable energy compete with each other as much as with coal, oil and gas (Figure 1). As a result, adding the nuclear subsidy on top of the renewable energy subsidy had a negligible effect, keeping projected 2100 warming at 3.2o C. This surprising result demonstrated a need for more synergistic mitigation strategies, fueling negotiations between stakeholder groups in the next round.
Round two saw periods of intense debate between stakeholder groups, as individual actors formed coalitions with two blocs emerging. One coalition, led by “Conventional Energy”, which included “Clean Tech”, “Industry and Commerce” and the “Developed Nations”, proposed investment in technological carbon removal, or carbon capture, to offset emissions. This would prop up the “Industry and Commerce” and “Clean Tech” sectors by increasing funding for research and development without negatively impacting the status quo of “Conventional Energy” and “Developed nations”. Alternatively, the second coalition led by the “Climate Justice Hawks” in coordination with the “Agriculture, forestry and land use” and the “Developing Nations” focused on reducing methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that were more relevant to their sectors. This two-pronged approach resulted in a total 2100 temperature increase of 2.7o C, a significant improvement from the 3.3o C starting baseline, but short of the 2o C goal set out at the beginning of the game.
By the start of the third round, no one had proposed any mitigation strategies that would directly reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning. This was, in part, to accommodate the strong personalities of the “Conventional Energy” team, who had aggressively lobbied for anything else. However, in the third round, the PECS role-players were encouraged to open the En-ROADS simulator themselves and quickly discovered the power of a substantial carbon tax.
“We just need the carbon tax to be $100 [per ton CO2]” said one member of the “Agriculture, forestry and land use” team.
“Who’s going to pay the carbon tax?” asked a member of “Conventional Energy”.
The conversation quickly escalated as the groups sparred over which mitigation strategies should be implemented in the final round. In short order, the two blocs became one, with every PECS member gathered around a single table, advocating for their stakeholder interests. Ultimately, with a compromise on the carbon tax, increased energy efficiency, a tax on oil, investment in carbon removal technologies and decreased deforestation, the group argued and laughed their way to the targeted 2o C of warming by 2100.
The event was a great success, and the players walked away with a new appreciation for the various perspectives at play when discussing our climate future. “We need to invest more in research; we need to put money into new technologies,” said one student who thought that negative emissions were a powerful factor in their final scenario. Another student said, “This really validates the “all of the above” energy policy of the Obama era” noting that there are still ways to the 2o C threshold without slashing the fossil fuel industry. In the long run, the PECS members all agreed that the solution was complex, requiring cooperation across sectors and a variety of mitigation strategies, with no “one-size fits all” answer. The En-ROADS Climate Action Simulation worked; it facilitated an informative, engaging, and fun discussion of climate change mitigation and policy.
The roleplaying game is my favorite way to introduce the En-ROADS simulator but Climate Interactive also has other ways of engaging. If you’re interested in bringing En-ROADS to your classroom, group or workshop, check out: https://www.climateinteractive.org/en-roads/ or reach out to Abigale Wyatt in the Geosciences department for more information.
Abigale Wyatt is a PhD Candidate in Geosciences working with Prof. Laure Resplandy to study how ocean physics and climate variability impact surface ocean biogeochemistry. After completing her degree, Abigale will join the team at [C]Worthy, an initiative investigating the efficacy of marine-based carbon dioxide removal, as a postdoctoral research scientist.
This blog is compiled and edited by Shashank Kumar Anand (Associate Editor, Highwire Earth; Graduate Student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University). It is based on the work of Sara Cerasoli and Amilcare Porporato that appeared in the Journal of Hydrology early this year (See the peer-reviewed article here)
In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi gained notoriety for running a fraudulent scheme that now bears his name. Imagine a magic trick where someone promises to turn a small amount of money into a fortune in no time. This sounds amazing, right? Well, that is the trick a Ponzi scheme plays – except it is not magic; it is deception.
Here is how it works: Imagine you meet someone who says they have a fantastic investment opportunity. They say that if you give them $100, they will double it in just a few weeks. That sounds like an incredible deal, doesn’t it? You might think, “Why not? I will get back $200 so quickly!”
Now, to make this trick seem real, the person might even show you some “proof” by giving you $200 after a few weeks. But here is the trick – that $200 did not come from any real investment or profit. Instead, they used money from new people who joined the scheme after you. So, when new folks give them $100 each, they use that money to pay you back. It looks like you made a profit, but they just used someone else’s money to do it.
This is where the trick gets tricky. People who got paid back tell their friends and family about this amazing investment. More people join, each giving their money, and they are also paid with money from the newcomers. This cycle continues, with the person at the center collecting money from new members to pay off the earlier ones. It creates an illusion of profit and success, and more people become attracted, hoping to get rich quickly.
Now, if one starts thinking about this cycle of the Ponzi scheme, it is unsustainable as it relies on an ever-growing number of new members to keep paying off the earlier ones. But as more people join, there comes a point where it is impossible to find enough new members to cover the payments. When that happens, the scheme collapses. The person running the scheme might disappear with whatever money is left, leaving many people who invested with nothing but empty pockets. This can be seen as “an example of market failure with an unsustainable economic trajectory”.
Cerasoli & Porporato draw a parallel to this investment fraud with groundwater extraction, in which over-exploiters of groundwater from past generations play the role of the early investors, profiting from excessive overdraft and gaining in terms of higher agricultural productivity simply because more water input results in more agricultural output. But if one thinks about the next generation, this over-extraction of water will eventually leave more and more depleted aquifers for the next generation (the late investors). This means that if we only focus on the short-term benefits of maximizing agricultural output for a few years, in the long term, we might be on an unsustainable path that can only end with the exhaustion of the water resource. Using the case study of Kern County in California, the authors suggest that we might be in a Ponzi scheme of groundwater extraction. This finding resonates with the news that we have been hearing regarding the Central Valley groundwater depletion crisis (1,2). Just imagine how many more Kern County we might have around the world that we may not know of!
The original Ponzi scheme collapsed after nine months. In that sense, we are fortunate that aquifer dynamics operate on much longer time scales, giving us time to take timely action. The question hence arises: what can be done to ensure that we get out of this dangerous path? The authors suggest that there can be two different policy approaches based on their optimality framework of groundwater extraction.
The hard policy scenario assumes that state/federal regulations immediately reduce pumping rates to a value lower than the natural recharge. On the environmental side, the plus is a speedy recovery of water tables. The cumulative profit over several decades from the hard policy path is the highest. Still, the challenges are obviously human adaptation, which does not seem plausible, and at the same time, the investment to make that change now may not be very practical.
The soft policy option is a more realistic approach to tackle the Ponzi scheme of groundwater extraction. Pumping rates are gradually decreased by some percentage, say 5% of current values each year until they reach the long-term sustainable pumping rate by some year, say 2040 so that we reach the long-term sustainable path slowly but eventually.
Whether we will manage to escape this scheme is a question that can only be addressed if we first realize that the short-term gain can hurt in the long term. The challenge also arises because the best, or rather, the long-term optimal way of extracting groundwater will result in initial lower gains. To safeguard the interests of future generations, it will require us, to avoid being our own Ponzi.
Authors of the scientific publication:
Sara Cerasoli is graduate student from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University
Prof. Amilcare Porporato is affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
Project Plastic is the brainchild of two Princeton Architecture students, Nathaniel Banks and Yidian Liu, who sought an innovative solution to the problem of aquatic plastic pollution. Since their launch in 2021, they have accumulated various awards and commendations such as: People’s Choice Award at the Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network Startup Pitch Competition, 1st place at the Princeton Startup Bootcamp, 1st place at the BASE Accelerator Program in Philadelphia, and a $50,000 grant from NSF I-Corps. Their work awarded 1st place at Shenzhen Biennale focused on urbanization in Shenzhen, China. Highwire Earth is excited to see Project Plastic continue to grow and make a positive impact on aquatic environmental pollution.
Originally posted on July 23, 2022 at www.projectplastic.site. This article was republished with permission from Project Plastic and the original author.
Some of humanity’s greatest threats — pandemics, climate change, water contamination — are invisible. They escalate because we don’t see them coming, or we ignore the data that help us see them.
Microplastics are an emerging example. Defined as any plastic smaller than five millimeters in diameter, microplastics pose a big problem to the environment and ourselves. They are easily ingested, potentially toxic, and everywhere. In fact, microplastics are found in nearly every corner of the world, right down to the tissues of living organisms.
Microplastics exist via two pathways: they are mass-produced to be this size (‘primary’), or they come from the degradation of larger plastics (‘secondary’). Primary microplastics are difficult to target because production is controlled by industries including textiles, cosmetics, and household items. Considerable persuasion of regulators and corporations is necessary to reduce microplastic production. Some progress has been made on this front, as the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 prohibits microplastic use in wash-off cosmetics. However, secondary microplastics are difficult to target because a lot of plastic already exists in the world. The sheer difference in scale between microplastics and the landscapes they inhabit prohibit remediation. Even if we ceased all plastic production today, there are still 200 million tons of plastic circulating in our oceans.
Despite their huge threat, there are no consistent protocols available for the accurate and
systematic recording of microplastic pollutant concentrations in water. There is also no existing technology available to sequester all microplastics from tributaries, effluent streams, reservoirs and lakes. There are three approaches to reducing microplastic pollution. We can:
1) Produce less plastic,
2) Prevent existing plastic from entering the environment, and
3) Remove microplastics directly from the environment.
Project Plastic was moved by the third approach to develop the world’s first portable, affordable, and environmentally friendly microplastic measuring and sequestration device. Project Plastic is a team of chemists and architectural designers, but we aren’t just a filtration technology company. Driven foremost by the microplastic problem, we follow microplastics to the end of their aquatic lifetime. We strive to collaborate with riverkeepers, water treatment companies, and private bottled water companies to monitor, collect, and upcycle microplastic pollution from waterways.
Our device utilizes a patented ‘artificial root’ technology that acts as a filter to remove small debris (including microplastics) from the upper water column, where most plastic pollutants accumulate. Our root technology is modeled after organic aquatic plant roots. Long fibrous filaments are suspended in water and sediments physically adhere to the dense fibers on each root. Naturally-occurring biofilms accumulate on the ‘artificial root’ network over time, which further traps small particles. By applying an array of ‘artificial roots’ to the underside of a flotational frame, our device can entrap large quantities of microplastics while allowing aquatic wildlife to swim below or between our filter. Each biofilter is attached to a removable pad, making it easy to swap biofilters once they become saturated. Each pad is housed within a hydrodynamic flotation frame for application in rivers, streams, and reservoirs.
The Plastic Hunter has a key advantage over conventional filtration technologies: it has no mechanical components, meaning it can operate passively with no electricity and minimal maintenance. This makes the device far cheaper to produce, deploy and maintain compared to any existing microplastic filtration system.
Lastly, our team is currently working on establishing protocols for the separation and purification of contaminated sediments from our filter media. In doing so, our team hopes to extract relatively pure microplastic sediments from our devices to be forwarded to our research collaborators at the University of Washington in St Louis. The aim is to develop a method of converting microplastics into chemical compounds like carotene. If successful, our team may be able to upcycle microplastics into useful chemicals for other industries like pharmaceuticals, turning harmful waste into sustainable resources. This, we hope, will avoid environmentally harmful storage or processing of contaminated sediment through incineration, and instead propagate a circular economy for microplastic waste.
Written by Shashank Anand, Hezekiah Grayer II, Anna Jacobson, and Harrison Watson
Sustainability is the notion that we should consume with caution, as the Earth is a delicately balanced ecosystem with limited natural resources. Social justice generally aims to eliminate disparities and inequities between discrete demographics. These include inequalities between persons of different socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Environmental justice (EJ) intersects both of these movements: EJ is the notion that specific ecological burdens of society should be shared equitably across communities. Historical trends suggest that as we expand, consume, pollute, and produce, the benefits and costs of industrialization are inequitably distributed. This inequality comes at the cost of poor health for those living in highly polluted areas. Inequitable distribution of pollutants has recently brought EJ to the center of political discourse due to its correlation with increased Covid-19 mortality and racially skewed disease outcomes.
Unfair treatment of workers at farms and manufacturing plants is a prime example of an injustice that ethical spending can aim to rectify. The misuse of pesticides, low worker wages, poor living conditions for farmers, and child labor are all sources of social and environmental injustices in food production. Socially conscious purchasing could be key in fighting these injustices. Academic institutions, which often purchase food en masse to serve thousands of individuals, have a sizable impact on humanity’s social and environmental footprint. Institutions like Princeton thus have a practical interest in reducing their footprint and a deontological obligation to mitigate their negative societal impact.
In general, it is difficult to assess the relative social and EJ impact of discrete products due to the inherently unquantifiable nature of justice. Certifications like Fair Trade and the Rainforest Alliance attempt to assuage buyers’ concerns by identifying and establishing environmentally just organizations. Certifications like USDA Organic and the Non-GMO Project endorse products and operations from an environmental sustainability standpoint.
CASE STUDIES
Rainforest Alliance (RA) is an international NGO that provides certifications in sustainable agriculture, forestry, and tourism. RA seeks to “protect forests… and forest communities.” For farmers, the certification process involves site audits that check for compliance with the Rainforest Alliance Standards for Sustainable Agriculture. Standards include child labor protections and worker protection against the use of harmful pesticides listed in the Sustainable Agriculture Network Prohibited Pesticide List. RA Standards address economic and gender disparities on farms through the use of an “assess-and-address” approach. Farms are responsible for setting the goals that will mitigate the effects of “child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and workplace harassment and violence”. RA Standards also enforce implementation of a “salary matrix tool” for the collection of comprehensive wage data and identification of wage gaps.
Support from RA has historically proven impactful, most notably on certified cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer. A 2011 survey conducted by the Committee on Sustainability Assessment analyzed the impact of RA on the economic, environmental, and social dynamics of these cocoa farms. RA certification was shown to increase school attendance (noted as the percentage of children who have completed the appropriate number of grades for their age) by 392%, thereby reducing child labor; increase crop yields by 172%; and improve farm income by 356% compared to uncertified farms (see figures 4, 6, and 10 at this link). Despite these documented successes, there has been a history of exploitation of previous Standards on certified farms. In 2019, for example, pineapple farms in Costa Rica were cited employing undocumented workers and illegal agrochemicals despite RA restrictions.
Fair Trade USA (FTU) is a certification that focuses on social and EJ much like RA does. FTU cites ideals in democratic and fair working conditions for its workers. FTU employs an Impact Management System (IMS) towards these ends; the IMS is used to assess the social and economic impact of growers’ practices. FTU is distinct from its well-known parent company, Fairtrade International: the two split in 2012 over a dispute about certified growers’ company size.
FTU implements a price premium, ensuring that if the market value of a product falls, FTU products have a floor price on store shelves, thus ensuring workers earn some minimum wage. FTU also requires a small additional fee, the “Fair Trade Premium”, on top of the purchase price of the product. The premium is used to improve local infrastructure for the producers. How it is used is decided democratically by workers at the farm. In a poor economy, Fair Trade products are likely to be pricier than their uncertified counterparts. In a thriving economy with high demand, this difference will be negligible (see figure 1 at this link). A 2009 case study of coffee production in Nicaragua found that many Fair Trade coffee producers still had trouble finding places to sell their coffee. In times of high coffee prices, producers found that they reaped little financial benefit from the Fair Trade label.
The Non-GMO Project (NGP) certifies distributors and farms whose procedures align with “standards consumers expect.” Certification is obtained after evaluation of the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in produced foods. GMO crops are often bred to be more resistant to drought or pests. This may lead them to outcompete local crops and flora. Combined with the potential unknown behavior of these nonnative crop variants and risk of gene flow, e.g. through cross-pollination, many communities want to keep excessive GMO cultivation out of their neighborhoods. NGP upholds the long-standing Non-GMO Standard, which outlines requirements for companies looking to sport the butterfly label. These standards necessitate greater coordination between cleaning and transference of products between storage facilities (termed “elevators”) as well as increased investments in process monitoring to account for the potential introduction of GMOs along the production process. NGP partners with third-party certification bodies (also known as technical administrators) that audit businesses and farms for compliance with all Non-GMO Standards. Application fees, as well as Non-GMO product premiums, contribute to the conservation of environmental health through the protection of genetic diversity in organic agriculture.
USDA Organic was created by the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990, which mandated the USDA to develop federal-level regulations in the US for organic food. It was actualized in 2002, after 10 years of public debate, as a compulsory certification requiring producers and handlers with annual organic sales greater than $5,000 to discontinue the use of prohibited substances. To ensure the insulation of formed policies from special interest groups, OFPA also instituted the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) that includes 15 volunteers representing the consumer, organic farmer/handler, retailer, scientist, and environmental conservationist. A two-thirds majority of NOSB is required to add a material in the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances (NLAPS). Third-party certifying agents issue the product as organic after confirming that the producer or handler has discontinued the use of prohibited substances for three years.
USDA Organic and a growing market for organic produce have resulted in high product premiums. Unfortunately, a booming market does not guarantee good wages, living standards, or fair treatment for farm labor. There are cases recorded where working conditions have worsened due to the heavy work and time demands of organic farming. Some new programs build on USDA Organic’s structure with additional focus on standards for animal welfare and worker fairness. Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) is an example of such a program. It is too early to determine whether these certification programs will be successful or will earn the trust of the market.
DISCUSSION
Consumer activism flourishes with effective metrics on desired qualities (e.g., EJ) to inform conscientious purchasing. Certification efficacy for social and EJ depends on two main questions: on a policy level, how relevant are the certifications’ guidelines to the social and EJ movement? In practice, how successfully are rules enforced; are audits thorough, unbiased, and based on clear criteria? These questions help us establish whether certifications actually impact procedure at the farm-level. Certifications lacking in the first quality risk being irrelevant to social and EJ, while certifications lacking in the second risk being inconsequential.
The missions of certifications like RFA and FTU to enable sustainable livelihoods for farmworkers and promote environmental stewardship are in line with core tenets of social and EJ. However, the auditing processes of these certifications have demonstrated weaknesses, as noted by recent RFA-certified pineapple farms in Costa Rica. Furthermore, the guidelines for these certifications may be poorly communicated with farm workers as shown by a study from Vakila and Nygren on Nicaraguan Fair Trade-certified coffee farms.
USDA Organic and NGP are more closely aligned with environmental sustainability than social or EJ, yet they have more streamlined auditing processes because sustainability can be more directly quantified (e.g., unit volume of water usage). USDA Organic, for example, strictly regulates pesticides and herbicides, thus protecting farm workers’ health. Prohibited chemicals in NLAPS include methyl bromide, sulfuryl fluoride, and phosphine (aluminum phosphide or magnesium phosphide), exposure to which can affect fetal development and can lead to irreversibledamage. NGP, on the other hand, does not regulate chemical substances; on the contrary, the products it promotes forgo the health benefits associated with reduced pesticide use in farming GM crops. In general, many larger social justice themes (minimum wage, underage labor, unfair working conditions) are not addressed by these sustainability certifications.
The cost of buy-in is one major obstacle for smaller distributors. For example, the harvest process for GMOs and Non-GMOs must be separated to prevent contamination, leading to more labor for farmworkers. Investigations check for use of USDA Organic’s prohibited substances for three years leading up to product harvest; a waiting period that may prove prohibitive to some smaller farms. These smaller farms may not be able to afford the fees of the certification process, or the costs of regulations/liability insurance as required by schools’ procurement offices. Interviews with local players in food distribution, however, alleviated these concerns: Ms. Linda Recine of Princeton Dining Services confirmed that many small farms have difficulties affording the certification label, but asserted that a network of farmers, larger distributors, and university support systems help small businesses obtain necessary certifications and build a sustainable customer base. She cited a pilot conference hosted by the Princeton University Department of Finance and Treasury and Princeton University Central Procurement. This conference focused on woman-, veteran-, and minority-owned businesses; through the conference, Princeton offered to subsidize the first year of various certifications at no cost to the vendor. For obtaining expensive liability insurance, as well, outside help proves paramount: Ms. Recine says that many small farms may be able to get their goods onto campus by partnering with larger distributors. Jim Kinsel of Honeybrook Organic Farm stated that open communication with customers about the certification waiting period usually assuages their concerns about uncertified crops.
Image of tomatoes being grown on a farm (Source: Canva Images)
Cost of buy-in shows that many certifiable farms may lack a formal label. Additionally, if farms pursuing certification already employ environmentally just practices before they apply for the label, we may see biases which interfere with our ability to assess certification efficacy objectively. A recent meta-study confirmed that many reports investigating the efficacy of certifications did not control for possible selection bias.
With certifications alone, we are left with an incomplete picture of ethical consumption. If EJ certifications rely on vague self-improvement, sustainability certifications are not as justice-relevant, and all certifications are audited by third parties whose reliability is hard to ascertain, is a certification stamp on a unit of packaging truly enough to assert that a product was ethically produced? The ethical consumer is caught between a rock and a hard place; incomplete information makes it impossible to gauge EJ using certification labels alone. We will need additional information from producers to rely more comfortably on the value of consumer certifications.
The solution to these concerns may lie in local purchasing. Sarah Bavuso and Linda Recine of Princeton Dining Services emphasized the importance of forming relationships with producers, citing the value of allowing farmers to see the campus and of university officials taking trips to farms and production sites. This relationship allows Princeton to be more hands-on with its food and to interfere when questions of ethics arise. Indeed, a 2007 study suggests that forming relationships with local farms decreases the distance that products travel, allows for cooperative relationships with individual farmers, and introduces flexibility in verification processes.
Decreasing food-miles through local purchasing may be a critical component of both sustainability and EJ: as food travels and the supply chain lengthens, more middlemen get involved, and there are more opportunities for injustices and unsustainable practices. Each border that food passes through serves as another regulatory vulnerability for the introduction of harmful pesticides and food contamination. At each stop on the road, food loses freshness and emits greenhouse gases (GHGs) by burning fossil fuel through transit. Additionally, laws and regulations are more easily ascertained locally: consumers are more likely to know the minimum wage and regulations on working conditions for farms near their own homes.
Local farms may also be smaller and more sustainable than larger national chains. Mr. Kinsel claims that larger farms are more likely to cut corners in the name of profit. While Ms. Recine confirms that larger producers may be less inclined to act ethically, she states that these farms have “come a long way” towards humane and ethical behavior, largely thanks to students and universities vocally lobbying for causes that were important to them. Purchasing certified food that is also locally grown may address many of the concerns introduced by the information gap mentioned above.
Image of vegetables displayed at an outdoor stand (Source: Canva Images)
CONCLUSION
Rather than relying entirely on certifications like USDA Organic, a supply chain can be created where the university shares the risk of crop production under unpredictable hydroclimatic conditions with the local farming community. One realization of a more local supply chain is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where schools select membership for a season and receive fixed volumes of freshly harvested produce from local farms. Students receive fresh and nutritional food from farms that abide by local regulations. Farmers get money from subscriptions upfront, allowing them to expand and invest early. Schools build working relationships with constituent farms and their management, creating a point-person on the farm grounds who can verify safe conditions for farmers. Many local farms in the Princeton area (like the Snapping Turtle Farm and the Cherry Grove Organic Farm) already have some of the same certifications as larger factory farms.
A CSA supply chain would fit neatly into many residential colleges for small portions of salads or boiled eggs and meats. Non-perishable products like crackers and cereals could still be purchased from larger certified producers. In this supply chain, certifications are relied upon for goods that are difficult to buy from local producers. The local economy around the university is enhanced by the CSA program employed for fruits, vegetables, and meats. There are, of course, logistic questions to be resolved: a supply chain where crop proportions are not predetermined is quite different from the institutional status quo. The feasibility of such a supply chain will likely need to be vetted through a pilot program or a case study of other institutions implementing a similar program. CSAs have been implemented on some scale at schools like the University of Kentucky, Rutgers University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. We suggest schools start small: by implementing a CSA supply chain in an on-campus cafe or residential college. The program can be scaled up over time, after feasibility studies and conversations with local farmers.
The feasibility of establishing a local supply chain will depend on how universities currently source their food. Ms. Bavuso indicated that many schools fall into one of two classes: self-operated schools, whose food procurement departments are university-run and in-house, and non-self-operated schools, whose food procurement is outsourced via contracts. Many schools employ some combination of these operations, with state schools being particularly strictly regulated via contracts (Aramark, University of Delaware; Sodexo, The College of New Jersey). Self-operated schools like Princeton will likely have more flexibility in vetting and choosing vendors. Non-self-operated schools aiming for social change will likely have to do so by lobbying distributors through the schools’ purchasing power or threatening to withdraw their business if practices are not improved. Not all schools will have the means to investigate each food product on their shelves: it will likely be useful to leverage an inter-school consortium of food procurement research, see the National Association of College & University Food Services, allowing inter-institutional procurement departments to swap findings and relevant research.
The authors of this article do not wish to claim that certifications are entirely ineffective in gauging the social and EJ of food procurement. But certifications are not a panacea for ethical supply chains. Universities relying solely on these certifications for assessing food safety and social and EJ are not doing due diligence when it comes to ethical spending. It may take additional effort to switch to a CSA-style supply chain like the one suggested above; but if institutions are serious about the values that they promote in their dining services brochures, this added effort will be well worth the improvement seen in the quality and justice of the campus food.
Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber wrote in June of 2020: “As a University, we must examine all aspects of this institution — from our scholarly work to our daily operations—with a critical eye and a bias toward action. This will be an ongoing process, one that depends on concrete and reasoned steps[.]” The authors of this article believe that a CSA pilot program would be one such concrete step towards action, a step that would be directly in line with the larger themes of environmental and social justice that have become more pronounced in the societal collective consciousness during recent years. At the very least, it is the duty of university procurement departments to state the steps they intend to take to address inequity. Princeton’s recent Supplier Diversity Plan is one example of such an effort in that it aims to support more diverse-owned businesses. As entities with large economic impacts, universities do have the power to effect real societal change.
Shashank Anand: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, working with Prof. Amilcare Porporato. My research focuses on understanding the role of ecohydrological and geomorphological processes in the evolving landscape topography by analyzing process-based models and learning from the available observations.
Hezekiah Grayer II: I am a 2nd year PhD candidate in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, where I am fortunate to advised by Prof. Peter Constantin. My academic goals intersect fluid mechanics, plasma physics, and partial differential equations.
Anna Jacobson: I am a 3rd year PhD candidate in the department of Quantitative and Computational Biology. I am affiliated with the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. For my thesis work, I study energy systems and environmental policy.
Harrison Watson: I am a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology working with Professors Lars Hedin, Rob Pringle, and Corina Tarnita. My work currently focuses on clarifying the forces that influence land carbon cycles using eastern and southern African savannas as a study system.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started building coastal flood protection over 60 years ago, they weren’t thinking about climate change, but a PhD student at Princeton University shows that old Army Corps projects may hold valuable insights for future climate adaptation efforts.
By D.J. Rasmussen (STEP PhD student)
Grandpa’s flooded garage
On the third day of November 2012, Joseph D’Amelio sat on his front porch looking down 14th Street. For over five decades, he and his wife had shared coffee on countless Saturday mornings in that same spot. It normally would have been unusual for D’Amelio to be out on the porch this late into the year, but this particular morning was unusual. A cacophony of construction noises rang throughout the Broad Channel neighborhood of Queens. Diesel engines idled loudly. The back-up alarms on a half dozen dump trucks rang out simultaneously. Workers were attending to two homes in the neighborhood that had collapsed into Jamaica Bay just days earlier. Joseph D’Amelio sat and thought about the families who lived in those two homes, the once-in-a-lifetime storm that caused their destruction, and something he had discovered in his garage just a few hours ago.
For those who have never visited Broad Channel, they might be surprised by what they see. This corner of New York City resembles little of what someone might think of when they imagine the Big Apple. Instead of skyscrapers, taxis, and bright lights, visitors of Broad Channel are greeted by something resembling more of a small, quiet New England fishing community.
Broad Channel is situated in the middle of Jamaica Bay, an 18,000-acre wetland estuary filled with islands, meadowlands, and a labyrinth of waterways. Jamaica Bay is also home to several Queens neighborhoods and John F. Kennedy International Airport, the busiest airport on the east coast. D’Amelio often took his fishing skiff out to troll for striped bass on the edge of the bay’s marsh banks, sometimes with his three grandchildren.
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the Broad Channel neighborhood of Queens (New York City). Photo by Richard York/The Forum Newsgroup
Broad Channel is also one of New York City’s lowest lying neighborhoods. To prevent severe flood damage, the first floor of many of the residences in Broad Channel sit atop either concrete pilings or a single car garage. Joseph D’Amelio is no stranger to floods. Over the past half century, he had personally witnessed many of the strongest nor’easters and hurricanes, including Hurricane Gloria in 1985, the December 1992 nor’easter, and Hurricane Irene in 2011. Each time his property had survived with little damage. But all that changed a few days ago. Earlier that week, the D’Amelio residence’s garage was flooded by Hurricane Sandy.
The D’Amelio’s home sat atop a garage just big enough to squeeze in a 1950’s Chevrolet. But instead of accommodating a car, the D’Amelio’s garage now served as a storage unit filled with fishing gear, dusty equipment from Joseph’s firefighting career, and boxes of old forgotten junk.
Joseph D’Amelio had spent the past few days cleaning up the aftermath of the flood in his garage. In the process, something peculiar popped out at him. It was a small booklet, nearly fifty years old. The paper of the booklet had browned over the years, giving it a distinct vintage look. In it, a proposal was described for a massive barrier across the Rockaway Inlet, the western entrance to Jamaica Bay. In 1960, Hurricane Donna had reminded New Yorkers how exposed the Jamaica Bay region was to flood waters produced by coastal storms.
The report D’Amelio had found was written by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the primary government agency tasked with managing flood risks. The intention of the Army Corps proposal was to keep storm water out of the Bay. The plan had been distributed in the mid 1960s, just after the D’Amelios had first moved into their 14th Street home. At the time, Joseph and his wife hadn’t paid much attention to the plan; they were too busy taking care of their three young children. After years of planning and deliberation, the barrier was never built. The exact reason why remains a mystery.
Clasping his coffee close to his chest, Joseph D’Amelio sat quietly on his front porch, staring at nothing in particular, and wondered how the past few days would have been different had the Jamaica Bay flood barrier been built.
A pamphlet from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers describing a proposal for a flood barrier across the Rockaway Inlet, the western entrance to Jamaica Bay, the same pamphlet that Joseph D’Amelio found in his garage. Photo by the author.
The status of coastal flood adaptation today: multiple plans, but little action
Just like Joseph D’Amelio, many Americans on the coasts are increasingly finding themselves cleaning up garages, basements, and living rooms that have been flooded by coastal storms. Studies using observational data have shown that coastal cities around the U.S. are experiencing an increasing frequency of high-water events. These events can lead to costly and deadly floods when water over tops natural and engineered defenses, such as sand dunes or seawalls. The increase in the frequency of high-water events is largely a result of rising mean sea levels due to global warming. The problem is only going to get worse. Through our research, colleagues and I have found that local sea levels in New York City are expected to rise by almost a foot by the middle of this century.
Over the past decade, several U.S. cities around the country have begun devising plans for flood protection. Following Hurricane Sandy, New York City began to investigate several proposals in earnest, including a flood structure across the Rockaway Inlet, much like the one Joseph D’Amelio found in his garage. However, after roughly eight years of deliberation, many of these plans again failed to progress beyond the drawing board, including the second attempt at the Jamaica Bay Barrier.
An artist’s rendering of the most recent proposal for a storm surge barrier at the Rockaway Inlet/Jamaica Bay (2019). Source: New York District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (New York, New York).
New York City’s experience highlights a disturbing trend for coastal climate adaption efforts nationwide. Projects have continually struggled to gain political traction. Years of detailed planning go wasted, as does valuable time (project construction can take multiple decades). As the cliché goes, the can gets kicked down the road. Nothing gets done, and the risk of a major flood disaster remains.
Detectives on the case: enter two curious Princetonians
Over the course of a few meetings in my advisor’s office, he and I started to contemplate the reasons why technically feasible Army Corps projects rarely progressed beyond the drawing board. Specifically, we wondered what non-technical factors might explain the variation in whether projects got built or not. Was it simply a question of having the money at the right time and place? Or is it more complicated than that? For example, were politics and social conflict the reason? If so, what specific factors were contributing? We wanted to know the answers.
It slowly became apparent that these questions had not been studied before. A multi-month literature search turned up little information on the subject. I called experts around the country and wrote letters to the Army Corps, but no one seemed to know the reasons. Freedom of Information Act requests turned up nothing, sometimes after waiting an entire year for a response. Frustrated with the little success I had, I contemplated more drastic measures, including visiting archives (cue the ominous music).
One could describe archives as repositories for all types of media (letters, memos, newspaper articles, photographs, microfilm, etc.) that provide information about the function of an individual person, a group of people, or an organization. I figured that archives might have more information about past projects, such as the failed Jamaica Bay Barrier pamphlet that Joseph D’Amelio had found in his garage.
The answers are in the archives
I began contacting archives across the country to see if they had any information on historical coastal flood protection projects. After calling and visiting roughly a half-dozen locations, I finally got some promising news. An archivist called to tell me that there was a handful of archives in Massachusetts and Rhode Island that had several boxes of documents relating to two coastal flood protection megaprojects. These two megaprojects had emerged simultaneously in Rhode Island following Hurricane Carol in 1954, which at the time was the third major hurricane to hit the region in 16 years.
One of the two projects was the Fox Point hurricane barrier, a closeable flood gate intended to protect downtown Providence, Rhode Island from major floods. It was completed in 1966 and has been deployed several times over the years. The other project was a series of storm surge barriers across the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The Bay barriers ultimately failed to progress beyond the planning stage, after more than ten years of study and deliberation. I thought that if I was able to understand the political and social reasons for these project outcomes, it might offer hope for understanding why some contemporary climate adaptation efforts break ground and why others do not.
The completed Fox Point Hurricane Barrier in March 1966 (Providence, Rhode Island). Photo taken by the New England Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Waltham, Massachusetts).A map showing the Army Corps’ proposal for storm surge barriers at the entrance to Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. Source: New England Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Waltham, Massachusetts).
While archives may contain treasure troves of information about a subject, it is often not in a coherent format than can be easily interpreted. There are no published books or summaries. Each document is like a random puzzle piece but not necessarily a part of a puzzle that you’re trying to put together. To make matters more complicated, you may not even know what puzzle it is you’re trying to put together! Information is chaotically scattered. One must sift through thousands of documents in order to produce a coherent story. Ultimately, you never really know what you will find in an archive. While it is time consuming, in some ways the uncertainty creates an air of suspense that makes digging through boxes all day a bit more bearable.
A photo showing a sampling of a few letters from local residents in opposition to the Narragansett Bay Barriers. Hundreds of letters were sent to elected officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, nearly all in opposition to the project. Photo by the author.
What can modern climate adaptation efforts learn from the two Rhode Island projects?
After months of collecting and analyzing materials from the archives, I was able to piece together the first ever historical account of the two Rhode Island projects, from the point of their inception all the way through their ultimate fates (completion and cancellation). Informing the historical account were hundreds of newspaper articles, memos between the Army Corps and elected officials, and letters from businesses and residents from around Rhode Island.
I learned that the Fox Point barrier progressed beyond the planning stage as a result of minimal environmental concerns and strong, sustained support from both the public and Rhode Island’s elected officials. At the time, the waterways around Providence were so polluted that there wasn’t much natural life in the water to protect. I also concluded that the Narragansett Bay barrier project failed to break ground due to strong public opposition. The public opposition was related, in part, to projected increases in channel currents that had the potential to complicate maritime navigation and cause uncertain impacts on marine life. Unlike the waterways around Providence, Narragansett Bay was a rich ecological system on which many communities depended. Further hampering the Bay barrier’s chances was an almost decade long planning period during which the public’s flooding concerns declined.
While these findings had historical significance, by themselves they were not obviously relevant to modern-day projects. Much has changed since the 1960s. Most notably, the emergence of environmental laws has made it much easier to legally challenge government projects that have the potential to impact the natural environment. After assessing a handful of coastal climate adaptation projects that have recently been considered by the Army Corps, some common political and social factors emerged. Most notably, these factors included 1) environmental protection concerns (including modern environmental laws that elevate oppositional viewpoints), 2) a lack of leadership and support from elected officials to help carry projects forward, 3) the allure of alternative options that are more aesthetically pleasing to residents and also cheaper and faster to implement (think beach nourishment and buried levees with promenades on top for biking and walking), and 4) lengthy and complex decision-making procedures that coincide with fading memories of floods.
Looking backwards to go forward
As sea levels continue to rise in coastal cities around the country, the urgency grows for protecting populations and both the built and natural environment. Since the mid-20th century, several years of planning have gone into a number of proposed coastal flood protection projects around the country. While some of these projects have gotten built, many have failed to advance beyond the drawing board. My work has shown that archival research is a viable option to better understanding the political complexity faced by contemporary climate adaptation projects. The more we learn about this complexity, the more we can improve the efficiency with which coastal risk reduction strategies are deployed. For example, instead of investing years of planning into massive, environmentally harmful, and financially risky megaprojects, scarce planning resources could be allocated towards projects that are deemed more palatable by the public, elected officials, and organized interests.
Thanks to the archives, we now have some answers. But the question remains whether the Army Corps and governments will learn from the past and change their behavior. Hopefully Joseph D’Amelio’s grandchildren will one day live in a better prepared version of New York City, one in which Army Corps projects don’t end up as forgotten relics in flooded garages.
D.J. Rasmussen is an engineer, climate scientist, and policy scholar. He studies coastal floods, sea-level rise, and public works strategies for managing their economic and social costs. His research has informed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has been published in Science Magazine as well as other academic journals. He is completing his PhD in the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) Program at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. A portfolio of his research can be viewed at https://www.djrasmussen.co. He can be reached at dmr2@princeton.edu
This Giving Tuesday, I decided to offset my 2020 carbon footprint. And help protect endangered biodiversity. And help eliminate poverty. And improve air, water, and soil quality. And support gender equality. And empower historically marginalized communities. And maybe even decrease the risk of killer diseases like COVID-19 and malaria.
But I only made one donation. And its price tag was the equivalent of about a dollar a day.
How? I’m donating to an organization that will use the funds to restore tropical rainforests. I may be biased as a restoration ecologist, but in my mind there are few ways to offset your emissions that carry as many co-benefits to nature and society as regrowing rainforests. More on that below, but first I want to address the elephant in the room when it comes to carbon offsetting: most don’t offset anything.
Seedling nursery
Per a 2016 European Commission report, 85% of carbon offsets fail to offset carbon. A big problem is scam organizations that simply do less than they promise. But even well-intentioned, reputable groups can fall short. The two main problems are failures to account for ‘additionality’ and ‘leakage’. Additionality means that the carbon that is pulled out of the atmosphere wouldn’t have been pulled out anyway. Some organizations offer to do things like establish tree plantations in areas that would otherwise be recovering forest–forest that would, in many cases, store more carbon than the tree plantation!
Leakage becomes an issue when a group’s actions to draw down greenhouse gases from the atmosphere lead to increased emissions elsewhere. This is a pernicious problem with many efforts, even ones that have huge positive local benefits. Protecting stands of old-growth forest or using farms to produce biofuels can be really great in theory, but if you don’t address the demand side of the equation, economics dictates that you’ll end up with compensatory logging or farming elsewhere. (Side note: one pet peeve of mine is that biofuel studies sometimes come up with rosy predictions because they simply assume we will produce less food and eat fewer calories in the future.)
If you pick carefully enough, however, tropical forest restoration projects often evade these two pitfalls. Many (if not most) involve jumpstarting the recovery of land that would not heal on its own because of challenges like invasive vegetation that chokes out seedlings, absent seed sources because of widespread forest clearing, or heavily degraded soils from overgrazing or nutrient depletion. So you can go ahead and tick that box for additionality. And so long as the restoration activities take place in protected settings like national parks or community forest, you shouldn’t see compensatory carbon emissions elsewhere. Ergo, no more leakage.
But carbon offsetting is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tropical forest restoration. Pound for pound there are more species in tropical forests than any other ecosystem on Earth. In places like Madagascar or lowland Borneo, many of those species are in serious danger of disappearing forever because of past habitat loss. We are talking millions of species hanging on by a thread. Most don’t even have scientific names yet. Their only lifeline is the resurrection of lost habitat. The biodiversity benefits of forest restoration alone can and do justify restoration projects across the tropics.
Caterpillar at reforestation site
Forest restoration through planting seedlings and controlling weeds is a super labor-intensive activity. 22-23 year old me can definitely attest to that fact after spending two seasons co-managing a reforestation project in Gunung Palung National Park on the Indonesian side of Borneo. But the required blood, sweat, and tears is a feature, not a bug. Labor means employment opportunities, and in impoverished tropical communities, that means poverty alleviation. One of the top requests from the villages where I worked was for more opportunities to be paid to reforest. And it’s equitable work too. It was common at our site to see planting teams led by women from an indigenous ethnic group– women who would be less likely to get jobs with the commercial oil palm plantations, the main local employers.
Reforestation site
There’s another reason those communities love reforestation work. They know healthy forests mean less smoke and haze from invasive grass fires, less flooding, and more consistent and cleaner water in the streams running out of the forest. The water perks span the wet and dry seasons. Forests decrease rainy season flooding via increased and root-mediated groundwater infiltration into the water table, which then feeds streams during drier periods.
At this point I’m starting to feel like Billy Mays: “But wait! There’s more!” I think it’s safe to say that most people would relish the opportunity to kick an anthropomorphized version of this global pandemic right in the nu… uhh, somewhere really painful. Tropical forest restoration is actually the next best thing. One of the big insights of the scientists in the emerging discipline of eco-epidemiology is that unhealthy ecosystems tend to yield greater risk of wildlife diseases crossing into human populations. There’s a whole slew of mechanisms for this–from stressed animals like bats shedding more virus to many malaria-spreading mosquitoes preferringopen habitat to closed canopy forest– but the punchline is that when scientists looked at how to prevent the next pandemic, halving deforestation made the list of cost-effective preventative measures. My current research looks at how reforestation could protect against malaria in Madagascar, and past work I’ve been a part of showed that deforestation upstream of impoverished rural communities leads to more cases of diarrhea in kids and infants.
There are many organizations that need your support for their tropical forest restoration work, and many online tools for calculating your annual carbon footprint. I’m choosing to donate to the organization I worked with in Borneo. Not only do I know from firsthand experience that they are doing truly additional and leakage-free offsetting, but they also are super transparent about how they calculate and track their offsets.
There are tons of great organizations out there, though. You could even pick one in a country you plan on visiting once the pandemic is over– maybe they’d even show you the forest you helped replant. Just make sure you are asking three questions: will the trees you help plant cause forest clearing elsewhere? Would the replanted forest recover on its own anyway? And finally, how are they calculating their emissions reductions?
If you’re happy with your answers, congratulations! You’ve found a way to give that really does keep on giving.
Tim completed his PhD at Princeton in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (*18), where he studied large-scale tropical forest restoration. He was a 2018 AAAS Mass Media Fellow and currently a Gund Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vermont, where he studies whether and how reforestation can be used as a tool for combatting malaria in Madagascar. You can find him on Twitter (@treuer) and at www.timothytreuer.com.
In the US, the fight against climate change often looks more like a fight to achieve the public recognition that climate change is real. Flat out denial of science by the dominant strain of conservative politics and the reticence to take bold action on the part of moderates, combined with the self-interested, well-funded and short-sighted survivalist instinct of the fossil fuel industry, continues to hamper sustainable development in our country. We stagnate at home even as we attempt to export models for sustainable development to other parts of the world.
In our national culture, broadly speaking, we still uphold the rugged cowboy individual as the model for how to exist in the world. Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia pointed out the degree to which Americans’ individualism hindered our collective response to the coronavirus. Lately, science and individualism haven’t seemed able to get along.
A good cultural marker for this is country music. In the US, recent years have given us country songs like “Coal Keeps the Lights On” by Jimmy Rose (championing a phrase that has been used widely in the coal industry’s propaganda campaign) and “Coal Town” by Taylor Ray Holbrook (the music video for which was produced in partnership with the United Mine Workers of America). It is worth noting that these artists are rather marginal country artists, both little known and both hailing from Appalachia, but have taken on specific significance in the debate around the political and cultural value of coal. More widely popular country music artists, at least those that produce popular music that is marketed as “country,” eschew the specifically political in favor of a few main themes: booze, romance, and general patriotism (guns, religion, troops, sports, farming, hunting, the paterfamilias, etc.). The wildly popular band Florida Georgia Line, in their summer 2020 hit “I Love my Country”, exalts the use of styrofoam plates while rattling off a list of American stuff: “Barbecue, steak fries / styrofoam plate date night.” It seems that, regarding sustainability, American country music either takes a hard pro-fossil fuels stance, or nonchalantly implies approval of the status quo. As far as the market is concerned, apathy towards climate change reigns. This is not entirely surprising, given the political climate.
What is surprising is how the analogous genre in Mexico, música regional, compares. Many of the themes heard in contemporary American country music are still present, both the good (importance of family, romantic love), the bad (binge drinking, misogyny) and the more complicated (guns, dogmatic religion). Mexican country music is even starting to incorporate Latin hip-hop and pop into their music, similar to how bands like Florida Georgia Line imitate rap lyricism in their own vocals. This all makes sense; to paint with broad strokes, it’s safe to say that Mexican society and cowboy culture developed in a manner parallel to the development of their American counterparts, and pop musical trends, such as the increasing relevance of hip-hop forms across the boundaries of genre, are increasingly global phenomena. However, Mexican country music, despite its conservatism, finds it within itself to engage with climate change.
At approximately the same time Florida Georgia Line was working on “I Love my Country”, Edén Muñoz, the lead singer of the Mexican group Calibre50 (“50-Caliber”) was working with fellow artists Alfredo Olivas, la Arrolladora Banda el Limón (“the Irresistible Lemon Band”), Pancho Barraza and C-Kan on a song called “Corazón Verde” (“Green Heart”). The song amounts to an impassioned plea for the listener to become conscious of climate change, understand how it is detrimental to human society, and actually do something about it. Pancho Barraza sings: “Estamos cavando nuestra propia tumba / y no es por asustarlos, viene lo peor” (We are digging our own grave / and not to scare you, but the worst is yet to come”). He goes on: “Falta de conciencia y no es coincidencia / que todos los días haga más calor” (“[There is] lack of awareness, and it’s no coincidence / that every day it gets a little bit hotter”). Tough solutions are not proposed, just tough rhetoric about what is happening right now. The music video shows the artists planting trees (which is more symbolically important than it is effective as a long-term strategy). Still, it’s a fine start, at least rhetorically.
Perhaps most importantly, the artists express concern for future generations: “¿Para qué esperarnos? Limpiemos el mundo / y cuidemos la casa. O ya se preguntaron / a tus hijos y a los míos / ¿qué les vamos a dejar?” (“What are we waiting for? Let’s clean up the world and take care of our home. Or have you already asked yourselves what’s going to be left for your children and mine?”). In the words of the singers, recognizing and fighting climate change is an urgent civic duty. The fact that this urgency is absent from cultural representations of American patriotism is baffling.
I mention this song not to hold up Mexico as an exemplar of environmental or cultural sustainability, or as an example of a society that always leverages science to increase the public good. Certainly, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Mexico has hardly stood out as successful in its response. What’s more, these artists don’t exactly have a blank check to claim the moral high ground on whatever topic they choose. The same artists that here sing about making cultural and political shifts to fight climate change also sing in a glorifying way about guns, corruption and cheating on their wives and partners. I make this comparison between American and Mexican country music to illustrate that, outside of the US, even politically conservative cultures and ideologies elsewhere pass the very low bar of urgently believing in science. It is a bar that the US needs to pass soon. Coal may “keep the lights on” for now, but it will eventually burn down the house.
Ashford King is a PhD student in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. He is also a musician and poet. He is originally from Kentucky.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be persuaded that the planet is on fire, and we need to do something to put it out fast. We see evidence all around us: California is again in the throes of a record wildfire season, glaciers the size of Manhattan are sliding into the sea, and in some of the most densely populated parts of the world, massive cities are being swallowed by the tide. There is little dispute that these disasters stem from our burning of fossil fuels, and that by most any measure, we are failing to prevent the worst.
Meanwhile, in balmy Princeton, New Jersey, the university’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) and Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment have signed splashy agreements with BP and Exxon (respectively) to fund research into renewable fuels, carbon capture and storage, and other climate innovations. Since 2000, these companies have pumped over $30 million into CMI and the Andlinger Center, with the latter recently extending its Exxon contract for another five years.
To put it politely, we of Divest Princeton say these partnerships do more harm than good. True, they may create new and valuable knowledge, but that isn’t really why they exist. In one leaked exchange from 1998, Exxon representatives strategized about the need to “identify and establish cooperative relationships with all major scientists whose research in the field supports our position,” and to “monitor and serve as an early warning system for scientific development with the potential to impact on the climate science debate, pro and con.”
Taking this statement literally — and why shouldn’t we? — BP and Exxon’s support for Princeton is more than simple altruism. It’s more than good PR. Rather, it’s part of a years-long effort not to aid, but to manage climate research toward ends not in conflict with their extractive business model. Tellingly, these do-gooder oil companies plan to increase production 35% by 2030. This would be cataclysmic.
Their schemes are made possible by funding and power gifted by Princeton. We cannot tolerate, let alone enable these activities any longer. Not when they pose such obvious conflicts with our university’s core values and threaten our fellow students and faculty working around the world. Princeton must stand up for itself. How better than by divesting from fossil fuels?
The divestment movement has grown rapidly in recent years, with institutions like Georgetown University, Brown, Cornell, and Oxford recently joining its ranks. Collective actions have taken a toll — Goldman Sachs says that divestment is partly to blame for widespread credit de-ratings in the coal industry, and Shell is on-record saying divestment will present “a material adverse effect on the price of our securities and our ability to access equity capital markets.” Essentially, divestment works.
We argue that the moral imperative of divestment should be compelling enough on its own; if Princeton moved to divest and the markets didn’t budge an inch, at least then our conscience would be clean. At least then we could call ourselves “sustainable” with a straight face and live honestly by our motto: “in the nation’s service, and the service of humanity.”
Detractors maintain that any “demands” on Princeton’s endowment would constrain its ability to earn huge returns, depriving students of the financial support they need to prosper. This is absurd. Billion-dollar endowments like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have demonstrated that divestment can be a net positive. Fossil fuel stocks have also been declining for years. It looks increasingly clear that an investor gains little “diversifying” in fossil fuel, and that the risks of divestment have been well overblown. Shareholders — especially shareholders with a fiduciary responsibility like Princeton’s — should be looking for the exit.
In order to remain within 1.5°C of global warming by mid-century — the threshold at which the IPCC and Princeton’s own Sustainability Action Plan say “catastrophic consequences” will be unavoidable — the fossil fuel industry’s ambitious exploration and development will need to be mothballed. Undrilled oil fields and unmined coal will become stranded assets, or dead weight on their companies’ books. To have faith in these investments, Princeton must think stranded assets will actually go to use, in which case, Princeton ignores its own scientists and legitimizes the activities central to our climate crisis.
Video showing a progression of changing global surface temperature anomalies from 1951-2019. The average temperatures over 1951-1980 are the baseline shown in white. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red and lower than normal temperatures are shown in blue. The final frame represents the 5 year global temperature anomalies from 2015-2019. Scale in degrees Celsius. (Source: Lori Perkins / NASA and NOAA)
Others have argued that regardless of donors’ ulterior motives, divesting would only leave good money and research on the table. To these people, the “greenwashing” corporations seek from partnering with elite institutions is both inevitable and of little consequence compared to the novel scholarship their funding provides. The catch here is that quality research and a morally invested endowment are not mutually exclusive. There isn’t a rule saying our research must be funded by BP or Exxon — if Princeton truly valued this knowledge, it would channel its creative energies toward finding funding elsewhere.
“Elsewhere” could very easily be the university’s own wallet. Princeton is quick to remind us it holds the biggest per-student endowment in the country. The endowment today is a bit larger than $26 billion, roughly the size of Iceland’s GDP and larger than GDPs of half the world’s countries. In the lastten years alone, Princeton’s endowment has more than doubled. In this light, the money needed to sustain current research is practically a rounding error. If just a few Trusteesput their donations together, they could recoup Exxon’s latest $5 million donation in under five seconds!
We tried to anticipate these doubts in our divestment proposal, which was given to Princeton’s administration last February. Since then, we have met with Princeton’s Resources Committee and invited experts — former Committee Member Shannon Osaka, President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Stephen Heintz, and Stanford researcher Dr. Ben Franta — to help present our case. Discussions will continue through the end of 2020, culminating in a forum with 350.org’s Bill McKibben in November.
As a reward for our persistence, the Resources Committee has indicated it might decide on our proposal by Christmas. If it approves, the proposal goes to the Board of Trustees, and the clock starts over. This, dear readers, is the “fast track.”
It has been demoralizing to watch Princeton, one of the world’s great centers of higher learning and a temple to empirical evidence, run interference for companies that have scorned the truth, knowingly endangered billions, and literally confessed to their ill intent. From its byzantine system for proposing divestments to its arbitrary requirement saying divestment must take the form of complete dissociation (a prohibitively high bar), Princeton’s strategy is to frustrate and outlast causes like ours. Most of the time, it succeeds.
But our cause is different from the others. With climate change, waiting is simply not an option. The immovable object will meet an unstoppable force, and the unstoppable force will win.
The longer we delay, the longer we allow fossil fuel companies to weaponize Princeton’s gravitas, spreading disinformation and quack science while purporting to be part of “the solution.” Until Princeton inevitably divests from these bad actors, we will continue to withhold our donations, continue to protest, and continue to organize, fighting fire with fire.
Divest Princeton is a volunteer movement of Princeton students, alumni, parents, faculty, and staff. Sign their “No Donations Until Divestment” petition and learn more here.
Finding an internship as a Ph.D. student is hard. Finding one at a company you have legitimate interest in is even harder. In search of a more refined answer to the dreaded question, “so what do you want to do after you get your Ph.D.?” I started looking for opportunities in what is very broadly and vaguely referred to as “industry.” I stepped into Dillon gym on a muggy August day in the only pair of dress pants I own and looked around. Finance, biotech, management consulting, and oil & gas companies filled the room with tables and recruiters.
After talking to what turned out to be a bunch of dead ends that didn’t excite me much, I decided to check out one last table before leaving. A far cry from the multi-table, multi-recruiter teams with tons of free swag to give away like Exxon and Shell, Momentum Solar had a table with some flyers, business cards, and one recruiter. I didn’t wait in line or crowd around like at the others, and immediately got to talking with Peter Clark. What I remember most was his message that they were simply looking for “intellectual horsepower,” something that the CFO would repeat to a group of students who went to their South Plainfield HQ for an information session later that school year. I came away from my conversation not exactly sure what I would be doing if I worked there, but excited about joining a small, quickly growing company founded in sustainability.
At that info session some months later, I was impressed that the CFO, Sung Lee, took the time out of his schedule to speak directly with the group of prospective interns, and gave us all some background about where Momentum has been, and where it’s going:
Momentum Solar is a residential solar power installation company that was founded in New Jersey in 2009 by Cameron Christensen and Arthur Souritzidis. In 2011, they had just four employees. In 2013, six. They were ranked on the Inc. 5000 most successful companies in 2016 (with 250 employees), Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in 2017 (700 employees), and Inc. 5000 most successful again in 2018 (950 employees). They doubled their revenue from 2017-2018, and doubled again 2018-2019. Currently, Momentum has operations in seven states, from California to Connecticut, and shows no signs of slowing down. The solar industry as a whole also shows promising trends: since 2008, solar installations in the US have grown 35-fold, and since 2014, the cost of solar panels has dropped by nearly 50%.
After hearing this pitch, we toured the office, which, while full of diligent employees in front of huge screens, also boasts two ping pong tables and a darts board. The energy in the space was palpable, and Sung’s enthusiasm was contagious: I was sold.
Fast forward a couple months, and I was about to have my first day there. I *still* didn’t know exactly what I would be doing. On day one, my supervisor presented me with a few different projects I could choose from. While I wasn’t using the specific skills related to my research area here at Princeton, I was using crucial skills I developed along the way during my PhD research: programming and exploratory data analysis. I jumped right in to their fast-paced, quick-turnaround style of work, and had check-ins with Sung nearly every day. He made a concerted effort to include me and all the other interns on calls and in meetings, even if it was just to observe. The main project I worked on was writing a program to optimize appointment scheduling and driving routes, with the goals of improving efficiency from both a time and a fossil fuel standpoint: a great example of a sustainability practice helping a company’s bottom line.
People had told me before starting my Ph.D. that, unless I was planning on taking the academic route, the most valuable things I would learn would not be in my dissertation, but skills developed along the way. This rang true during my first professional experience in industry. Problem solving and independence were probably the two most valuable qualities that a graduate student can bring to an internship. Somewhat unexpectedly, teaching skills proved useful as well: it wasn’t enough to prove a point through a certain statistical test; it was crucial that a room full of people with diverse backgrounds understood what a certain figure or result meant.
Momentum continues to grow, regularly setting and breaking records. To date, Momentum has installed 174 MW of residential solar energy, enough capacity to power the equivalent of more than 33,000 average American homes. I know my experience was unique: I was treated as an equal, was mentored thoughtfully and intentionally, and had regular interaction with corporate-level executives. Working there was rewarding, and Momentum’s success is a glimmer of hope during an ever-worsening climate crisis.
Graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in internship opportunities with Momentum Solar should contact Peter Clark, Director of Talent Acquisition, at pclark@momentumsolar.com.
Sources: energy.gov
Molly Chaney is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering. Advised by Jim Smith, her research focuses on the use of polarimetric radar to study tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events. Originally from Chicago, she is a die-hard Cubs (and deep dish pizza) fan. In her spare time she enjoys cuddling her dog, playing videogames, and indulging in good food and wine with her friends and family. If you have more questions about her experience at Momentum Solar you can contact her at mchaney@princeton.edu.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16: “To promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” (Source: UN SDG Icons)
In 2013, a Liberian government official was recorded colluding with another high-ranking government official to embezzle public resources. On the tape, he was caught saying “you eat, I eat,” which signified an acceptance that the two would engage in personal enrichment at the public’s cost, without fear of consequences.
The Representative faced serious public backlash, but as with most cases involving top officials, there was no action. About two years later, the Representative’s daughter died from an asthma attack during Liberia’s Ebola crisis. The hospital could not treat her because they were overstretched by the pandemic. He sued the hospital for neglect and recklessness. This was the talk of the town. Ordinary Liberians thought his lawsuit should not be taken seriously because his allegedly corrupt acts had diverted resources from the health system.
While a case like this generates intense public disgust and debate, there are many layers of corruption in Liberia that are almost universally accepted. These cases are practically routine. For example, the Liberian police regularly stop taxis and private vehicles, and the driver reaches their hand out of the window for a handshake every time, exchanging bribe money in their palm. In most cases, public taxis don’t have the correct documents and these small bribes are less disruption than jail time.
Case
Liberia is recovering from fourteen years of civil war and still trying to restore basic social norms. By the end of the war in 2003, corruption had permeated all layers of society, a by-product of a prolonged civil war that weakened government capacity to monitor and enforce rules, and a corroded social fabric that tolerated—and valorized—corruption. Often, paying bribes was more expedient than dealing with dysfunctional bureaucracies, and so bribes became normalized.
Generations of citizens have grown accustomed to believing that all public officials are corrupt. They tolerate instances of bribery in their daily lives, struggling to imagine a country where civil servants serve the public good over their own interests. Public officials, on the other hand, feel little pressure to pursue reform as long as citizens believe corruption to be an inseparable part of Liberian culture.
Corruption has hindered much needed reconstruction and development in Liberia. Large-scale development projects have stalled or sputtered out as significant portions of their funding has bled out to expensive contracts, salaries for non-working employees, and skimming by management.
Ruins of the Ducour hotel, one of the most promising developments in Monrovia, which was destroyed due its strategic location during the civil war. (Source: Sakari Ishetiar, July 2018)
Relation to SDGs
Implementing the United Nations’ (UN) ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires substantial public sector financing and strong government institutions. In low and middle income countries, where the bulk of these investments are needed, public sector institutions are usually resource-constrained. High levels of corruption and financial mismanagement significantly reduce public sector resources allocated to enhance the public good and to tackle big structural problems, making corruption one of the biggest impediments to achieving the SDGs. Corruption also undermines the institutional capacity of agencies that should be in the frontline of implementing programs to alleviate inequality and multiple forms of deprivation.
“Almost one in five firms worldwide report receiving at least one bribery payment request when engaged in regulatory or utility transactions.” – United Nations Sustainable Development
Recognizing that resource-skimming reduces the per-dollar impact of otherwise effective development programs, the SDG committee designed Goal 16 towards improving “peace, Justice, and strong institutions” across the world.
Implementing and monitoring partners have also taken note of the link between corruption and the development cycle. José Ugaz, Chairperson of Transparency International, stresses that “with corruption, there’s no sustainable development,” highlighting the inability of institutions that are riddled with leakage to deliver upon major development projects. Similarly, Transparency’s Advocacy Manager, Rukshana Nanayakkara, comments that “without sufficient, careful investment taking place in just and inclusive societies, development happens very slowly.” Even where development projects are implemented nominally, corruption and embezzlement can prevent them from reaching their intended level of impact.
An analogy of a road funded by public money goes a long way in explaining how corruption can hinder development. Suppose that in rural Liberia, six villages are not connected to the main transportation system, rendering both inward service delivery and outward participation in the economy difficult. An international aid agency has delivered to a Liberian transport official some millions of dollars to construct the road, and expedite the integration of these villages into the service and good economy. With 50% of funds lost to embezzlement, one can imagine three of the villages remaining unconnected entirely, reducing the public goods output of the project. More commonly, however, the road is built to all six villages – but with the use of poor construction materials due to lucrative service contracts and skimming, the road may last only a year. After a few short months, the villages are in need of development assistance once again.
Problems like these indeed kept the Liberian Port Authority from reopening for almost a decade, stymieing the post-war recovery of the entire national economy.
Integrity Idol’s Answer
Despite the omnipresence of corruption in Liberia, some organizations continue to think critically about attacking the core biases that enable it. One such organization, Accountability Lab, supports change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change. One of their flagship programs is Integrity Idol, which fights corruption by spotlighting non-corrupt civil servants to promote non-corrupt practices and encourage public confidence in governance. Integrity Idol began in 2014 in Nepal, spread to Liberia in 2015 after the end of the Ebola crisis, and has since spread to four other developing countries around the world. The program operates in Liberia as follows:
“Local teams of volunteers travel across their countries gathering nominations from citizens, hosting public forums and generating a national discourse on the need for public officials with integrity. The nominees are narrowed down to a final five in each country with the help of independent panels of experts.
“These finalists are then filmed and these episodes are shown on national television and played on the radio for a week, creating a national discussion offline and online. Citizens can vote for their favorites through SMS short-codes and through the website. The winner is crowned in a national ceremony in the capital.
“Integrity Idol celebrates individuals, but those that serve the public good. It provides an outlet for a national conversation in positive terms about the change we’d like to see and the people we would like to be working in government on our behalf.” –Integrity Idol website
What problems did Integrity Idol face?
Though Integrity Idol’s answer to the sources of corruption is novel, it nonetheless faces a few key challenges in implementing its program in Liberia. The program’s answers to these questions may offer useful tools for policy designers of public visibility programs in other developing countries.
Initially, many of Liberia’s numerous non-corrupt public servants may have feared that exposure would make them targets of more corrupt colleagues or superiors. Integrity Idol addressed this problem by forging partnerships with key Liberian ministries, portraying the program and its contestants as no direct threat to current corrupt officials. The public visibility of the program, and its non-confrontational approach to publicity, encouraged proper participants while almost totally eliminating government interference.
To identify non-corrupt civil servants in remote or less accessible municipalities, Integrity Idol utilized a word of mouth system for nominating applicants. Rather than limiting nominations for civil servants to only current public employees, the applications were open to all citizens. Anyone who had positive interactions with a public servant was encouraged to share their story in the form of a nomination, and a plurality of nominations was the first indicator of a strong candidate.
To ensure identified civil servants indeed conducted their jobs with integrity, Integrity Idol implemented a system of multiple checks and verifications. Program staff traveled to the workplaces of the nominees and interviewed the nominees, their public servant colleagues, and citizens with whom they interacted. This multi-layered and personal process has helped keep glory-seekers outside the Integrity Idol net.
Finally, Integrity Idol faced an additional challenge of reaching contestants in remote areas of the country due to poor road conditions, especially during the rainy season. The program skirted this challenge by adjusting their annual calendar to the rhythm of the geography, avoiding intensive travel during the rainy season – including the showcasing of final contestants in the capital, Monrovia. The program’s solicitation and presentation dates are flexible, adjusting yearly to the seasons and to local conditions.
Streets flood during rainy season in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, making it harder for citizens to hail a cab and get to work. (Source: Sakari Ishetiar, July 2018)
Integrity Idol’s Impact
Arriving in Liberia as researchers, we expected high-level government resistance to Integrity Idol. After all, any program seeking to undermine the ability of corrupt officials to profit from their position will create the conditions for spoilers – those officials have something to lose if the national culture moves past corruption. Surprisingly, we observed no government opposition whatsoever; in fact, many branches of the national government were extremely receptive to the program’s goals and methods, and had facilitated its growth and spread over the past few years with such favors as space on the national public broadcast radio.
Because Integrity Idol focuses on “naming and faming,” it is seen as a positive force for the morale of civil servants and the citizenry alike. Avoidance of “naming and shaming” ensured that the program was not seen as a threat even to corrupt officials; whatever challenges they might face would come from national sources of anti-corruption authority, mostly other government agencies. It also focuses citizens on medium-level bureaucrats: nominees are often those who interact with both citizens and their fellow civil servants. The conduct of high-level bureaucrats is more difficult for a citizen to observe at a granular level, while most street-level bureaucrats have too personal a relationship to the citizens who know them, and their conduct is not readily observed by their superiors. Therefore, both the high-level official and the bribe-collecting policeman who opened this article are nominated less often than the mid-level office manager of a public waste system, or water management office, or land deed office – to name a few examples.
But Integrity Idol’s goal is not to expose every policeman who takes a bribe. Certainly, in countries with high petty bribery, inventive citizens have developed smartphone apps to report such misdeeds and help citizens feel more empowered to resist corruption, but this can also make them targets of retribution. Integrity Idol seeks instead to address the national culture of corruption endemic in its host countries where, like in Liberia, a generation of young adults have grown up believing corruption is ubiquitous. By focusing on so-called “mules,” public servants who quietly do their duties with diligence, Integrity Idol is trying to strike at the heart of this misconception, with the idea that in a decade or a generation, the impact of anti-corruption society will trickle up and down to those petty police and high representatives.
Integrity Idol events receive wide viewership when shown on television, and even wider listenership when broadcast over the national radio. Additionally, solicitation for Integrity Idol has been consistently high in the 5 years since its foundation, hovering at around 5000 applicants per year. These numbers were sustained even during periods of hardship, such as during reconstruction following the Ebola Crisis. Finally, the Liberian government has backed up its tacit acceptance of the program with visible and high-level attendance at Integrity Idol events. Notably, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf joined the award ceremony for the 2017 Idols, and more recently, the nomination of a defense sector employee as a finalist brought public buy-in from the formerly obstinate security agencies.
Despite its successes, the impact of Integrity Idol in Liberia has been observably less positive than in some of the other 5 host countries, such as founding host Nepal. On the program’s ultimate goal of changing public perceptions of corruption, the figures are lacking. Where Integrity Idol Nepal has brought public opinion against endemic corruption to record high levels (80% of survey respondents believe “some public officials work in the interest of the people”), the work in Liberia has struggled to penetrate as deeply (just over 50% of Liberian respondents to the same question). This question, polled in 2018, ignores the respective changes over time, and massive country-level differences, but it does capture at least part of the scope of the problem. Perhaps this reduced penetration is due to Liberian culture and the lasting impacts of conflict; either way, it must be tackled.
For researchers interested in furthering the UN SDGs, it is worth asking whether Integrity Idol is actively contributing to anti-corruption per Goal 16. Measuring corruption is incredibly difficult because much of corruption is based on public perception. With just a quick survey of public opinion or a glance at NGO-collected democratization figures, Liberia appears to be getting worse, despite Accountability Lab’s best efforts. Transparency International releases an annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) that measures perceived public sector corruption based on expert assessment and opinion surveys. In 2011, Liberia scored 51/100 on the CPI, where 0 demarks a highly corrupt society and 100 a very clean one. The country worsened by 10 points in 2012; today, Liberia scores only 31/100. Furthermore, Liberia’s corruption indicators are always contested and disregarded by the public when they do show signs of improvement because people believe they do not represent the views of the average Liberian.
An analysis of country-level trends in Liberia reveals, however, that Integrity Idol might simply have a tougher job in Liberia than in Nepal or other host countries. Under President Sirleaf (2006-2017), the Liberian government instituted a number of anti-corruption and auditing institutions and enacted laws to make corruption harder to carry out. It also instituted other transparency initiatives that have made the public sector more accountable. Compared to the immediate post-war years, Liberia has made progress in decreasing corruption, but with the absolute figures so high, and amidst a number of highly-public scandals, the public struggles to believe in any improvement. Even President Sirleaf noted in her final state of the nation address that she had failed her pledge to make corruption public enemy number one. Given the scale of corruption in Liberia and the vast income differences between public officials and the ordinary citizen, the average Liberian will still remark that corruption has not decreased or will say they do not believe corruption can be eliminated, especially in the public sector.
But these trends are not unique to Liberia. Transparency International notes that of the 180 countries measured for their index, “more than two thirds of countries score below 50 on this year’s CPI,” a trend that is “contributing to a crisis in democracy around the world.” Under these conditions, it is worth asking whether Integrity Idol is not stemming the tide of an even worse backslide in Liberia or other countries. Consider the following counterfactuals. Since 2014, a few high-level officials have been charged and brought to court, but the government has lost almost all the cases. Other officials have simply left the country during their trials in an attempt to wait out public outrage. It would appear these perpetrators have escaped justice. But if the deeper goal of Accountability Lab is to make citizens reconsider their views on the ubiquity of corruption, perhaps these are victories: the official has not been convicted, but he has been tried; he has not been caught, but he has been forced to flee the source of his illicit gains. Without Integrity Idol and the anti-corruption measures of President Sirleaf, it is difficult to say whether these officials would have ever stood trial in the court of public opinion.
Liberian citizens gather for a game of pickup football in a northern coastal village. (Source: Sakari Ishetiar, July 2018)
Moving forward
Integrity Idol has made some significant progress in penetrating national awareness, but the problem of corruption remains intractable due to its deep relationship with years of conflict and hardship. Changing the national culture in Liberia will take time, and each incident of high-level corruption that is exposed will damage public confidence, even as such revelations (and hopefully, prosecutions) demonstrate that other elements of the Liberian justice system are beginning to get their act together. While Integrity Idol itself is not outing and prosecuting highly public, high-level officials who engage in large government scandals, it may be fostering a government or a national culture that is more willing to demand this accountability. The impact of the program, while difficult to measure, is likely wrapped up in microscopic normative changes.
Given a longer time horizon, Integrity Idol’s biggest achievement may actually be its relationship with the national government; without pressure to nominate ethically-compromised candidates, the program is free to build up genuine public confidence in its pool of non-corrupt public figures. As that pool grows each year, and Idol winners return to their communities as current and prior civil servants, they will inspire a new generation of Liberians to ask more from the leaders and accept less in the way of corruption. Maybe some of the idols’ contemporaries will be inspired to give up petty corruption and join the Liberia of the future themselves.
Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.
James Kiawoin is an MPA candidate in Public Affairs studying International Development and Global Health. As a Liberian native, James has seen firsthand the impact of years of war and transitions on citizen confidence in the government. He is available on Twitter (@JEkiawoin).
Sakari Ishetiar is an MPA candidate in Public Affairs studying US policy competition with Russia especially in the Middle East and North Africa. He is interested in how governments communicate their policies to citizens. He is available on Twitter (@ishetiar) and by email (Ishetiar01@gmail.com).
