This article is from Josh Kearns of Aqueous Solutions.
I have been playing around with a concept that might be useful to help evaluate humanitarian engineering/community development project environmental sustainability.
Most of us in the international humanitarian engineering/sustainable community development sector are professionally concerned with environmental sustainability. But most of us, myself included, do a lot of long-haul air travel for fieldwork, incurring substantial CO2 emissions. I’ve often wondered that if, in many cases, the good we do advancing sustainability in our fieldwork gets negated by the CO2 we emit getting there and back again.
I used to work as a researcher in the development of the Ecological Footprint, a sustainability accounting tool. From this I know that people in the “developing world” have much smaller Ecological Footprints than we do in the US.
So I wondered, how long would a humanitarian scientist or engineer from the US have to live at a local, developing community Ecological Footprint level in order to offset the CO2 they emitted getting out into the field?
I call this concept the “BEEF,” for “Break Even Ecological Footprint,” measured in units of time (e.g. months). The BEEF concept could be applied to international “sustainable development” and “humanitarian engineering” efforts as a metric to gauge net environmental benefit of a particular work/study trip.
The BEEF would be the minimum amount of time a scientist or engineer would have to remain in-country/community in order to have a net sustainability benefit. Any trip shorter than the BEEF would be futile from a sustainability perspective as the environmental costs of getting their would outweigh the sustainability benefits of living at a lower Ecological Footprint level relative to the US lifestyle.
Most of my fieldwork is in SE Asia (Thailand mainly). So using Ecological Footprint analysis, I calculated a BEEF for myself of 2.2-11.7 months. That’s a wide range, because it takes into account a couple of scenarios depending
- upon how closely I approximate an average Thai lifestyle, and
- whether a radiative forcing multiplier is used for CO2 emissions at high altitude.
One major take-home message, however, is that short trips (i.e. less than a month), particularly to far-flung destinations, are almost certainly futile from an environmental sustainability perspective. That’s an implication that should cause some concern, and hopefully stimulate contemplation and conversation about sustainability in the sector.
