Defines the challenges facing climate goals and offers achievable solutions to meet these goals by 2050—without sacrificing economic growth.
Climate change and other environmental dangers are considered an existential threat, yet mankind is falling further behind in addressing these challenges. Policies aimed at fixing these issues have consistently missed the mark by focusing on the symptoms, such as CO2 emissions, rather than the root cause problems, such as the limitations of human systems and global poverty.
In Environmental Innovation, Jack Buffington provides a unique perspective on environmental sustainability and how it can be addressed: rather than assuming humans can solve environmental challenges as a global community and indirectly blaming poverty and overpopulation on the poor, Buffington points to 21st-century solutions to reduce poverty levels, transform human systems, and enable environmental innovation. If we correct the failures of environmental policy that has existed for five decades, there are great possibilities for solving the planet’s existential crisis. Buffington also highlights innovation opportunities in energy, food systems, water, materials, geopolitics, and ecosystems.
Ultimately, Environmental Innovation provides a comprehensive perspective of how the world needs to define the problem of environmental sustainability, with specific focus on the great divide between the rich Global North and the poor and developing Global South. Readers will come away with a clear, detailed roadmap for how environmental sustainability can be achieved by 2050 and what technologies are required to achieve this balance between the natural and built environments. For humanity to succeed, Buffington argues we must replace the grandiose notions of the so-called global community and instead create new models for action that are consistent with human progress over thousands of years.
Jack Buffington is the director of the supply chain and sustainability practices for First Key Consulting, a global consulting firm, and director of the supply chain program at the University of Denver. In his research and practice, Buffington has advocated for a balance of policy, science and supply chain to achieve global sustainability and economic growth. Buffington has published over twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and eight nonfiction business books, winning various awards. including Reinventing Supply Chain: A 21st Century Covenant for America, Peak Plastic, and The Recycling Myth. He lives in Colorado.
Defines the challenges facing climate goals and offers achievable solutions to meet these goals by 2050-without sacrificing economic growth.
Buffington, who directs the supply chain management program at the University of Denver, has written extensively about the impact of climate change on our economy. Here, citing works from scientific sources as well as government programs, he focuses on how climate change must be addressed through collaborative strategies that will empower communities and individuals to take action. Buffington describes the challenges wrought by climate change on the supply chain. He outlines solutions to eliminate carbon emissions and enhance natural carbon sinks, using a multi-sector approach that includes scientists, corporations, policymakers, and the media. We must transition from twentieth-century practices that have engendered public distrust and resistance, he writes, and focus on collaboration—and the economy must be included among our concerns. At the intersection of environmental economics, public policy, and climate change, this is a practical and compelling deep dive into high-level solutions to address climate change, its impact on the economy, and our very survival.
— Booklist
Buffington’s new work on environmental innovation is nothing less than a tour de force that succinctly criticizes the post-World War II supply chain economy that delivered profits but also threatens the world with ecological collapse and severe socio-economic dislocation. By adopting 21st century principles of glocalization—focusing on community institutions within the West and Global South—the balance sought by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand over a free and balanced market can deliver an ample life for the Earth’s eight billion people. Buffington lays out the specific technologies and innovations needed for this great transformation. His chapters detail how precision agriculture, decentralized solar fusion energy, 3D printing and blockchain marketing technologies supported by de-finance, de-growth, and de-materialization policies can make us producers of food, energy, and products. Localism permits communities to successfully compete economically with present day monopolies without impending privation and political chaos. The challenge is whether or not we have the courage and political will to follow these trailblazing humanitarian ideals to achieve local self-reliance in a cooperative world setting.
— Neil Seldman, PhD, co-founder Zero Waste USA, Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Zero Waste International Alliance
Jack Buffington, with deep experience working in corporate supply chains, lays out an inspired plan to solve the biggest challenges in the world. When the next generations read this book, theyll realize that one of the places where theyll be able to make the biggest difference is working inside of these antiquated supply chains. Buffington makes a clear case for how radically changing our entrenched systems is the only way to the other side of Earths man-made crisis. We need the world’s best and brightest willing to go into the belly of the industrial beast—to fix the climate and plastics crisis from the inside out.
— Dave Ford, founder, Ocean Plastics Leadership Network (OPLN)
This is an interesting book that captures global environmental sustainability challenges and the growing negative impacts in the Global South as well as the failure of global institutions to address most of these challenges. Buffington touches on fragmented strategies aimed at solving too many problems at a time among multi-lateral institutions such as the United Nations. He underscores a new approach and the importance of science and technology through cooperation at the community level rather than global competition, while engaging local stakeholders to implement this new approach. This is an important contribution to discourse on environmental innovation!
— Ademola A. Adenle, PhD, founder, African Sustainability Innovation Academy
