Toronto, Canada — The MaRS Cleantech Fund is pleased to announce the completion of a venture deal with Woodland Biofuels, positioned to become North America’s lowest-cost producer of ethanol.

“The MaRS Cleantech fund seeks technologies with the potential to revolutionize the energy sector,” says Tom Rand, co-managing director of the Fund. “Woodland Biofuels is on track to become the first company to profitably make renewable fuels from non-food sources without requiring any form of subsidy. That’s the kind of game-changer we target.”

Woodland Biofuels produces cellulosic ethanol from wood chips and other types of biomass, converting forestry and agricultural waste into fuel using a proprietary gasification and three-step catalytic conversion process. The company recently opened a demonstration plant in Sarnia, Ontario.

“Woodland’s demonstration plant will show that our technology can produce renewable fuels from cellulose, reliably and at low cost,” says Greg Nuttall, CEO of Woodland Biofuels. “We look forward to working with MaRS to bring this important technology into full commercial production.”

Rand notes that liquid fuels – gasoline, diesel and jet fuel – are the most difficult components of the fossil fuel infrastructure to replace with renewables.

“First-generation fuels from food are a non-starter – they can’t scale up,” says Rand. “There were a few early, high-profile failures in cellulosic fuels, which made investors flee the sector. But if you do your homework, it’s clear not all second-generation technologies are equal. With Woodland, we believe we’ve found a technology that can deliver on the promise of renewable fuel.”

Murray McCaig, the Fund’s co-managing partner, says it targets the technology component of a sustainable economy – investing in companies that solve big problems in order to reap big rewards.

“According to Ottawa-based Analytica Advisors, the global cleantech market is expected to reach $3 trillion by 2020,” McCaig says. “If Canada got just two per cent of the cleantech market by 2020, which happens to be our share of carbon emissions, we’d build a $60 billion industry. That’s the market we’re going after.”

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Milwaukee, U.S.A. – In celebration of Earth Day, Johnson Controls, the global leader in delivering solutions that increase energy efficiency in buildings, released its Top Earth Day Champions list to highlight organizations saving the carbon equivalent of 45,000 acres of pine forests through energy efficiency and renewable energy projects at their facilities.

Carbon emissions from building energy use are predicted to grow faster than any other sector in the next 25 years, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, making building efficiency critically important for the protection of the environment.

“These organizations have already made significant environmental improvements while at the same time attacking energy waste and reducing operational costs,” said Dave Myers, president of Johnson Controls Building Efficiency. “We recognize those who have committed to making their organizations more sustainable, their facilities more efficient, and their occupants more comfortable. Importantly, each one of these projects will also have strong financial paybacks.”

Here are the 2012 Top Earth Day Champions and the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emissions they are saving annually through projects with Johnson Controls.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn. tops the list with its annual reduction of 49,135 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. In 2008, ORNL replaced a natural gas steam plant with a wood gasification biomass system, reducing its carbon footprint and cutting fossil fuel consumption by 80 percent.

The Champions earned a spot on the list by making their facilities more efficient using a variety of measures, including: utilizing building management systems to optimize energy and operational efficiency, installing distributed generation and renewable energy technology, using more efficient lighting, and updating heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Since January, 2000, Johnson Controls energy performance contracting projects have saved nearly 18 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to that saved by 3.5 million acres of pine forests, and generated savings of $6.5 billion in North America alone. With performance contracting, savings in energy consumption from facility upgrades pay for the project over the term of the contract.

If the savings are not realized, Johnson Controls pays the difference between the value of the measured and verified consumption and the guaranteed consumption under the contract.

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According to a study conducted by an international team of researchers, the rate at which the oceans are currently becoming more acidic has increased due to carbon emissions from humans.

Oceanic acidification is nothing new; oceans have been naturally acidified in the past, notably, as scientists learned, several times in the last 300 million years.

During the process of acidification, the oceans moderately draw excess carbon from the atmosphere. The carbon then reacts with the seawater to create carbonic acid, which causes most marine life to die off. Over time, the carbon acid is neutralized to form fossils of dead organisms.

“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out—new species evolved to replace those that died off,” Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, states in a press release from the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about—coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”

Due to the rate at which carbon is entering the atmosphere, oceans are forced to draw it in more quickly and, therefore, are unable to deal with the excess.

Based on their studies, researchers discovered that acidification causes mass extinctions of marine life and disrupts ecosystems. In the 1990s, scientists found a layer of mud between two beds of carbonated fossil beds (the mud was created from dissolved fossils) from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago.

They learned that in a span of 5,000 years, concentrations of atmospheric carbon doubled, and that the global temperature increased by 6º C (43º F), and the ocean pH dropped by 0.45, indicating that the acidity level rose.

Past research has revealed two other definite past occurrences of rapid seawater acidification, caused by massive volcanism. The first occurred in the Permian Period, 252 million years ago. In the vicinity of present-day Russia, immense amounts of carbon spewed from volcanic eruptions.

A staggering 96% of marine life went extinct. Researchers found dead zones around Russia’s coast and discovered that they only contain organisms able to withstand the high levels of carbon. The second occurrence took place 201 million years ago, during the Triassic period. A likewise percentage of species became extinct. In addition, the coral reefs were destroyed.

Numerous studies of oceans and the correlation of rising acidity levels and diminishing marine life are being conducted around the globe. For example, as stated by an article in the journal Nature, one study of the coral reefs at Papa New Guinea shows that the pH dropped 7.8 (a lot higher than the 0.48 stated before, as one can see), and so has coral reef diversity.

Christopher Langdon, a biological oceanographer at the University of Miami who co-authored the study on Papua New Guinea reefs, says “These studies give you a sense of the timing involved in past ocean acidification events—they did not happen quickly.”

Despite the present evidence of the build-up of carbon emissions and the detriments it has caused, decades would have to pass before the acidification would truly have to show its effects.

“Considering the effects we detect through fossil records,” Patrizia Ziveri, researcher at ICTA tells Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, “there is no doubt that we must tackle the problem at its roots as soon as possible, adopting measures to immediately reduce our CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.”

A number of the researchers involved with the original studies are from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA).

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The worldwide movement toward sustainability has made significant progress over the past half-dozen years as companies and cities have pursued strategies that balance future and current societal needs. Now, sustainable development is entering a new phase, characterized by greater alignment within and between the public and private sectors.

The road to sustainability has been plagued with roadblocks, including an unprecedented global financial crisis and attempts by entrenched business and political interests to deny climate science. Perhaps the greatest obstacle has been the lack of consistent and comparable standards for defining and measuring sustainability. Although these issues have yet to be fully resolved, many well-coordinated initiatives in recent years have pointed the way forward for companies and cities.

In 2012, major trends shaping the sustainable development movement include:

Transparency – Buildings, companies and cities are measuring and disclosing energy usage, carbon emissions, and other information relating to sustainability. Commercial building owners do not always have a choice: Five major U.S. cities and two states have enacted energy performance measurement and disclosure policies to date, and nine more cities and states have bills under considerations to help tenants and investors make better informed decisions. Buildings in Europe are required to display energy performance certificates, and Australia is implementing similar requirements.

Corporations do not require legal mandates to encourage disclosure. In 2011, more than 3,000 companies voluntarily reported their carbon emissions, water management, and climate change policies to Carbon Disclosure Project in 2011, perhaps swayed by CDP’s 551 investor members, who use the information in deciding where to place more than $71 trillion in investment capital.

Transparency is also on the rise at the city level. CDP invited 58 cities worldwide to report sustainability related data for the first time in 2011.  Forty-two responded, with 38 of them making their responses public. This year, CDP Cities is expanding its request to 150 cities and continues to see a high response rate, as well as extraordinary awareness and commitment on climate change issues by city leaders.

Global Consistency – Deeper sustainability reporting by cities and multi-national corporations has intensified the need for consistent ways to measure the effectiveness of energy, water, and other sustainability strategies on a worldwide basis. Given the wide regional variation in environmental priorities around the world, the end goal may not be a single global standard, but a way to translate local government and business practices into a common global vocabulary for measuring effectiveness and recognizing achievement.

LEED, the building sustainability rating system originated in the U.S., is now frequently pursued in many countries with their own systems, as owners seek to attract international tenants. Energy Star, the U.S. EPA energy benchmarking standard, will soon be able to provide accurate ratings across North America, thanks to a new cooperative agreement with Canada.

In 2011, the International Organization for Standardization released the ISO 50001 standard for energy management systems, which includes specifications for measurement, documentation, and reporting on energy consumption.

Consistent measurement is important to corporations as they focus on sustainability, not only in their own operations, but increasingly throughout their supply chain as well. And while CDP Cities is not attempting to rank the sustainability of cities, it is developing a globally cohesive framework for understanding the effectiveness of sustainability strategies pursued by different cities.

Public/Private Collaboration – 2011 stood out as a year when government and business organizations explored their shared green goals and realized that public-private partnerships and collaborative initiatives are often the best way to overcome obstacles to sustainability. Some of these joint efforts will start to bear fruit in 2012.

A clear example is the December announcement of a $4 billion energy retrofit commitment by the U.S. federal government and 60 CEOs, mayors, university presidents, and labor leaders. Called the Better Buildings Challenge, the eight-year initiative includes $2 billion in energy upgrades of federal buildings and another $2 billion of private capital to improve energy by 20 percent in buildings totaling 1.5 billion square feet.

The Better Buildings Challenge illustrates the alignment between business and government goals in seeking energy and carbon reduction. Achieving those goals also requires cooperation; for example, groups ranging from the World Economic Forum to Greenprint Foundation have called for changes to loan underwriting guidelines set by governmental bodies to facilitate financing of energy retrofits.

More directly, U.S. states have found they can increase renewable energy installations at buildings by offering incentives that would make solar power cost-effective for owners within a relatively short period.

As a firm that serves government and business entities, Jones Lang LaSalle sees tremendous untapped synergy between the two groups in achieving energy and sustainability goals, particularly in the area of public-private partnerships. As just one of many examples, airports and other government entities often have surplus land that is unsuitable for commercial property development, but could be leased to private companies for development as large solar energy installations;

Focus on Solar Energy – Speaking of solar power, 2011 was a breakthrough year for new installations in the U.S. and continued growth is seen for 2012, albeit at a slower pace.  More than 1 gigawatt of photovoltaic solar energy capacity was installed across the U.S. in the first three quarters of 2011, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. By comparison, 887 megawatts came online in all of 2010, which represented a doubling of the total installed base at the time.

Solar energy installations at commercial properties drove much of the market growth in 2011, but the pace of new installations dropped significantly in the third quarter, SEIA reported. The big story going into 2012 is the unprecedented rise in utility-based installations, which jumped by 325 percent from the second to the third quarter.

The strength of the solar market in 2012 and beyond will be affected by several variables, including basic supply and demand economics, technological improvements, and the amount and type of available incentives. It is clear, however, that interest in solar energy continues to grow as payback periods grow shorter and fossil fuel costs continue to rise.

2012: Taking Sustainability to the Next Level

The common theme to all these trends is of an industry poised to break through to the next level. The industry has moved swiftly through initial phases of understanding the basic costs and benefits, implementing low-cost initiatives, exploring more sophisticated strategies, and navigating around roadblocks.

Today, it is easier to see the opportunity for dynamic progress by cities, property owners and corporate tenants that have laid the groundwork for growth and success.

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Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a statute titled the National Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, known as RAN-GRK, or Presidential Decree No.61/2011, on September 20, the Indonesian government announced on September 26.

The plan, which Yudhoyono had announced two years ago, details how major national agencies, such as the Ministry of Forestry, would curb emissions. It calls for a reduction of greenhouse gases by almost 30 percent, approximately 627 million tons of carbon dioxide, by 2020. If rich countries provide aid, financial or otherwise, to the country, the Indonesian government said it could reduce almost one billion tons of emissions.

A major focus in the decree is forestry, but it also focuses on energy, agriculture, and industry. Dipo Alam, the Indonesian cabinet secretary, said the plan was an attempt to follow Bali’s action plan, and echoed the plan to reduce emissions between 26 percent, or up to 41 percent with international aid.

The announcement came one day before Forests Indonesia, held on September 27 in Jakarta and organized by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). At the conference, Yudhoyono pointed out the benefits and disadvantages of forestry as an industry which the country relied on.

“I call upon our business leaders, particularly those in the palm oil, pulp wood, and mining sectors to partner with us by enhancing the environmental sustainability of their operations,” he said.

Indonesia is the third largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the world, behind the United States and China. Indonesia currently accounts for almost 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse emissions, and almost 80 percent of that comes from deforestation in the form of burning and clearing.

Deforestation constitutes about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and Indonesia accounts for more than half of that total. Rainforests contain high amounts of carbon dioxide because of the process of photosynthesis in plants which remains under the cover of trees and other vegetation until it is released  during deforestation.

Peat bogs are drained for palm oil and timber. To access peatlands, which are also rich in carbon dioxide, developers first dig a canal in the swamps to drain them. When peat is released into the air, it oxidizes rapidly, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When the swamps are dry enough, timber is removed, and then other vegetation is burned.

The burning then releases more carbon dioxide into the air. In a 2007 World Bank Group report regarding climate change and Indonesia, it was said that underlying problems were the real reasons why Indonesia was having such serious problems in the forestry sector.

The issues related to institutional practices, government regulations, and economics limited the ways forests in Indonesia could be managed in a sustainable way.

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