Four stories about new, more sustainable models for farming, from four countries across Europe:
Category archives: Solutions
Brics create their own development bank
The five ’emerging’ BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for a quarter of the world economy (24.5%). Their voting power at the IMF is only 10.3 percent. They have decided to stop waiting for the US Congress to ratify reforms to that voting structure. At their sixth summit recently they announced …
Schleswig-Holstein about to go 100% renewable electricity
One entire state in Germany is about to product all its electricity (and more) renewably: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/23/100-renewable-electricity-will-achieved-german-state-soon/
Agroforestry is crucial to the food production challenge
The IPCC’s latest report says that that climate change has “already affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and some people’s livelihoods.” In agriculture the solution lies in complexity, which promises a resilience to extremes which fragile monocrop systems can’t match. Farmers know that producing many different crops protects them from …
Continue reading “Agroforestry is crucial to the food production challenge”
Geothermal energy growing
The worldwide market is growing at just under 10% a year and could be a considerable contributor to reduced greenhouse gases. The estimated geothermal resource in the U.S. is between 100 and 500 gigawatts. Iceland is already generating a quarter of its electricity and around 90 percent of household heating from geothermal energy. More information here.
Holacracy
Another in the series of emerging ways of organising is ‘holacracy’. The idea is to treat an organisation as a series of ‘holons’: autonomous self-reliant business units. We are familiar with thinking of a corporation as composed of different business units — defined by geography, customers, or products/services — but holacracy takes the idea one step further and …
Seven new models for work
This Fortune article says that traditional organisations are becoming less attractive as workers become more entrepreneurial and more mobile. Their ‘Unlimited Human Potential M-Prize’ has rewarded a number of emerging new models for how to organise work:
Three reasons why change management fails
If we are going to adapt our businesses in a rapid and controlled way, then we need large-scale organisational change. Based on some of the latest thinking on organisational change, this article identifies three key reasons why change management fails. The reasons are: Change consultants are insufficiently equipped on a personal level. Most change models are incomplete. Capacity is widely overlooked, on …
Continue reading “Three reasons why change management fails”
The Community Maturity Model
As businesses build presence on social media, and as they learn to cooperate with other organisations to achieve their goals, a ‘community’ approach can sometimes help to achieve goals more effectively than transactional approaches. But how does a business, that is used to operating transactionally, shift to a ‘community’ mindset? The Community Round Table exists to help businesses …
UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix”
Back in March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest Working Group II report. The report predicted: food insecurity due to more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, even as global food demand continues to rise water insecurity, due to shrinking of glaciers and changing …
Continue reading “UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix””