Participating in the New Green Economy panel
discussion at the San Francisco Earth Day celebration was a
valuable opportunity for me to engage in a dialogue about policies and trends
in sustainable development with a group of leaders in the field. The panel
included Alan Tratner & Lielle Arad, authors of Green to Gold; Greg
Wendt, author of Responsible Investing; Maggie Winslow of Ecological
Economics and the Presidio
Graduate School; and Kevin Danaher of the San Francisco Department of
Environment. As part of the panel, I explained the work of the Bay2Rio+20
Initiative, which is spearheading the San Francisco Bay Area's efforts to
build collaborative bridges between the Green Economy innovation centers of
Brazil, the United States, and beyond. The Bay2Rio+20 team is a
group of entrepreneurs, activists and innovators working to promote city-scale
leadership around global green
economies, sustainability,
and social innovation,
creating opportunities for collaboration between governments,
private corporations, NGOs, and individuals engaged in global dialogue about
environmental stewardship, social justice, and poverty eradication.
Earlier in the day, I attended a panel discussion about
the Sharing Economy, which addressed the rapid evolution of web-based platforms
networking consumer-to-consumer cooperation for the sharing of products and
services. Panel participants from companies like RelayRides, Getable, and ZimRide underscored how the
practice of sharing resources is evolving among consumers as a means to reduce
consumption, build community, and develop alternatives to traditional
consumption-based models of economic growth. From a profit standpoint, the
success of this new economic trend is indicated by the fact that it has drawn
the attention of government officials who are now exploring ways to develop a
system of taxation for what is often otherwise an informal market activity. The
discussion demonstrated how Sharing Economy trends have a key part to play in
the new Green Economy. The Sharing Economy has a number of advantages that are
consistent with Green Economy objectives:
- Sharing everything from tools, to recreational equipment, to vehicles, reduces the need to purchase these items, saving consumers money while efficiently maximizing the utility of the item in question and thereby reducing production resource consumption;
- Sharing products within local communities reduces the use of resources related to packaging, transportation and storage that are integral parts of traditional production models;
- The communication and social interaction that is part of the Sharing Economy reaps intangible benefits related to improved social cohesion, networking and a sense of community stewardship;
- Ride sharing and other transportation oriented sharing models help lower the total number of vehicle trips by creating viable alternatives to owning a vehicle, thereby reducing road congestion, air pollution, and our dependency on fossil fuels;
- The growing mainstream appeal of sharing resources is helping shift our consumer-based culture towards a conservation-based culture where pooling our resources to reduce consumption is a tenet of our daily lives.
Aside from the conservation and social benefits of
sharing consumer products, the services portion of the Sharing Economy is
having a direct impact on innovation in the Green Economy by helping nascent
startup companies to minimize operation and logistics costs so that
entrepreneurs can instead focus on growing their customer base and scaling
their business. Companies like TaskRabbit and SkillShare offer alternatives sources for labor and knowhow
on a task-by-task and skill basis. Coworking spaces like TechShop and The Hub offer inexpensive
alternatives to leasing office space or purchasing costly manufacturing
equipment for building prototypes and early production runs. The viability of
the Shared Economy is demonstrated by the fact that in each case, these
companies are one of many in their sector, competing for the expanding
opportunities in the sharing marketplace. Companies like Kickstarter are even
using shared funding models to directly finance startup ventures. But, because
Green Economy returns are not always measured in financial terms, getting seed
funding for a promising social venture or green technology can often be
extremely difficult. In these cases, the cost saving offered by shared
resources can mean the difference between a truly innovative green technology
idea making it to the market place, or dying on the vine from a lack of early
stage financial support.
Everywhere we look, innovative thinkers are combining their individual creativity with connection technologies, in the form of internet platforms and applications,
to respond to the economic challenges that we are currently facing. As the
tools and techniques of the Sharing Economy and the Green Economy grow,
established business owners, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and consumers alike
are finding new opportunities to collaborate and cultivate new economic
opportunities, demonstrating that as we shift towards economic models that
place an appropriate value on the tangible and intangible benefits that
traditional consumption-driven and GDP-based models fail to recognize, economic
growth and financial prosperity can be achieved while still protecting our
environment, reducing natural resources consumption, and growing our sense of
community.
