During the course of the 2003-2004 academic year the REC:

· Involved 11 students in EEP clinics, analyzing corporate environmental and sustainability reports using the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI); Over 450 reports have been scored to date and the results posted to the REC web site;

· Published four Pacific Sustainability Index sector reports—for the pharmaceutical, chemical, electronics, and petroleum refining industries. Reports were distributed to more than 700 business executives, financial analysts, and NGOs throughout the world;

· Employed 15 students as research assistants during the academic year and two during the summer. This year more than half of these were Government or Economics majors;

· Supported five students with summer internships - four of them at the Burger Reserve—and provided additional support to another;

· Hired a post-masters research fellow, Elgeritte Adidjaja, now a part-time Ph. D. student in the politics and economics department at CGU;

· Added two new board members—Thomas J. P. McHenry and Cam Treddennick—both environmental attorneys;

· Published, by the University of California Press, our first field guide to southern and eastern California: California Desert Flowers—An Introduction to Families, Genera and Species;

· Sponsored five environmental speakers at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum;

· Was awarded a $60,000 five-year grant from the U. S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of and Management to study the efficacy of reseeding following forest fires;

· Conducted the second year of the BLM study with the four Burger Reserve students. The study is being directed by Dr. Sia Morhardt (Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies, Pitzer College);

· Responded to additional requests from Calvert Securities Social Research Department in New York City to provide data from the PSI for use in a pilot project; Added nine topics to the PSI at Calvert’s suggestion;

· Continued as a member of the US Technical Committee 207 working group writing the ISO 14063 international standard on corporate Environmental Communication;

· Modified the Center’s physical space to accommodate a new tenure-track ecologist, Dianne Thomson, appointed to the Joint Science faculty in July 2004;

· Attended the invitational World Environment Center Gold Medal Colloquium in Washington DC in May 2004;

· Attended the 2004 Business and Sustainability Conference in New York in June, sponsored by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and The Conference Board;

· Initiated a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop graphical representations of interactions between industry and the environment.

Introduction and General Goals

The principal goal of the Roberts Environmental Center (REC) is to involve students in real-world environmental issues and to train them to analyze the issues from as broad a perspective as possible, taking science, economics and policy into consideration. The Environment, Economics, and Politics (EEP) major which incorporates all three disciplines is sponsored by the REC, and the REC Director is the Chair of the major. Many, but not all, of the students involved with the REC are EEP majors.

We are pursuing this primary goal in two largely orthogonal venues: 1) corporate environmental and social transparency and performance, and 2) management of natural resources on public lands, particularly those in California’s deserts and eastern Sierra where we have academic interests and field facilities.

We are approaching the corporate issues by researching—and through that research attempting to influence—global corporate environmental transparency and performance. Our approach is to analyze the environmental and sustainability reporting of the world’s largest corporations and to publish the results in technical papers, in commercial books, in REC reports, and on our web site. Our first paper on this topic was published in 2001, another done jointly with two EEP students was published in December 2002, and a book, Clean Green & Read All Over: Ten Rules for Corporate Environmental and Sustainability Reporting documenting the results of the Center’s research of the past two years was published by the American Society for Quality in June, 2002. During the past academic year the Center has published, both to the web and in hard copy, our first four industrial sector reports of Pacific Sustainability Index results for all pharmaceutical, chemical, petroleum refining, and electronics firms listed in the 2003 Fortune Global 500 and Fortune 1000 lists.

We are approaching the land management issues by teaching students some of the primary skills used by agency specialists (including geographic information systems (GIS), geographic positioning systems (GPS), satellite image analysis, vegetation analysis, statistical data analysis, and photographic documentation) and by involving them in summer field research related to agency management. In November 2003, the REC was awarded a $60,000 contract by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management to study the success of reseeding two major forest fire areas about an hour north of the Burger Reserve. The Burger students last year initiated the five-year study under the direction of Dr. Sia Morhardt, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Pitzer College and the study is ongoing with summer students at the Burger Reserve

The University of California Press published the Center’s California Desert Flowers, Introduction to Families, Genera, and Species in April 2004. If commercially successful, it may be the first of a series of natural history field guides of eastern and southeastern California partially supported by the Center.

Associated with these activities is the goal of increasing the visibility of the REC through our publications, websites, and personal contacts at meetings and other venues.

Activities during the 2003-2004 Academic Year

EEP Clinic Program and the Center’s research

The Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI) - The main goal of the 11 students in the REC clinic program in 2003-2004 was to increase corporate scoring using the PSI (developed in the Center and published in its 2002 book on environmental and sustainability reporting). The REC PSI web site went live in February 2003 accompanied by an announcement by email to a mailing list, developed by the center, of more than 700 people - mostly corporate environmental executives and governmental environmental personnel around the world. By the end of the summer we had 450 reports scored and the results posted. In a new initiative this year, the scores in the chemical, electronics, petroleum refining and pharmaceutical industrial sectors were compiled into sector reports published to the web and in hard copy.

Meeting attendance - We are continuing to publicize the PSI efforts through meeting attendance. In May, Emil Morhardt attended the World Environment Congress Annual Gold Medal colloquium and ceremony in Washington D. C., and in June he attended the 2004 Business and Sustainability Conference sponsored by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and run by The Conference Board in New York City. These are two of the principal international annual forums for corporate environmental executives discussing their environmental and social programs and reports. The meetings have been invaluable in getting personal feedback on our activities from the people responsible for these reports.

The Calvert Group - The PSI scoring has caught the eye of the Director of Research, Julie Gorte, of the Calvert Social Research Department and of one of its analysts, Lily Donge ’92, who are proposing to use a subset of its results as the basis for judging corporate environmental and social transparency for use in assembling socially responsible mutual funds. The have made suggestions which we have implemented to improve the PSI, and we have shared some of our raw data with them.

Bureau of Land Management Contract - This summer, the REC began its second year’s fieldwork on a 5-year $60,000 contract with the U. S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management to evaluate the effects of reseeding on the recovery of four areas in the eastern Sierra burned last year in two separate major forest fires. This is a major field effort involving over a hundred randomly-placed transects each year of 7 or 8 quadrats each. The quadrats are large squares, 2 meters on a side, within which the amount of area covered by each of every plant species present must be estimated. The students therefore must learn a significant amount of plant taxonomy and be able to identify many plant species at all stages of their life cycles. They also must record the GPS coordinates of all transects, enter them into the Center’s geographic information system (GIS) and produce maps, enter the field data into a custom Microsoft Access database developed by the Center, and produce a summary data report. Dr. Sia Morhardt is managing the project, training the students in plant taxonomy, and overseeing the fieldwork.

Research Fellow

Elgeritte Adidjaja joined the REC as a Research Fellow in March 2004 for a one-year position, extendable to a second year. She has a B.A. in business and operations from the University of Wisconsin, and an M.A. in urban and regional planning from Cal Poly Pomona, and has just been admitted as a part-time Ph. D. student in the politics and economics department at CGU. She is quite skilled in Microsoft Access which is making her extremely valuable in maintaining and modifying the REC PSI database which serves all of our sustainability reporting data to the web, and which is the basis for all of our sustainability reporting research.

Student Employees and Summer Internships

Gonzalo Cavenaghi ’06, Sarah Conway ’05, Tom Dibley ’04, Ben Fleishmann ’05, Chris Frantz ’06, Mary Beth Houlihan ’04, Katherine Leland ’04, Sara Leverette ’03, Tim Karp ‘04, Joseph Miklich ’04, Fabian Ngo ’06, Katie Smillie ’05, Daniel Cahir ’05 Carrie Snow ‘05, and Marta Young ’04 worked as research assistants in the REC during the 2003-2004 academic year doing a wide variety of tasks associated with the Center’s research. These included a comprehensive literature search, focusing and doubling the size of our mailing list for environmental and sustainability reporting email and mailing lists, scoring corporate reports, extracting and standardizing numerical performance data from corporate reports for correlation with PSI scores and with corporate size and sector, and extracting numerical performance goals from reports Chris Frantz worked in the Center throughout the summer of 2004, and scoring and extracting numerical environmental metrics from corporate environmental and sustainability reports. He was aided by Ben Fleishmann who also did scoring this summer.

The Center supported Emily Englert ’05 during the summer as a full-time Research Intern at The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) in Washington DC. She helped the staff conduct research and write publications on current issues concerning natural resource protection and pollution prevention, and attending Congressional hearings.

The Center also partially supported Justin Pressfield in meeting with hydrologists at San Andreas University in La Paz, Bolivia, and in conducting field interviews and site visits in Cochabamba and at the Bala Dam site on the Beni River in his development of a case study of why the resistance to privatization of the water supply system became violent, why the government trusted a negative cost/benefit analysis of the Bala Dam, and how the results of the cost/benefit analysis were used successfully to block dam construction.

Summer Students at the Burger Reserve

Four students spent the summer of 2004 at the CMC Mono Basin Field Station at the Burger Reserve. Margo Dawley ’06, Maggie Witt ’06, Jenna Goodward ’06 (Scripps), and Amy Watson ’04 (Pitzer) conducted fieldwork on the Center’s BLM contract to assess the effectiveness of reseeding after the Cannon and Slinkard fires near Walker California.

Roberts Environmental Center Goals for 2004-2005

The director will be on sabbatical during the fall semester but Elgeritte Adidjaja will continue the Center’s programs and will supervise two or three students working in the Center. This year we are planning on publishing sector reports for motor vehicles and parts, gas and electrical utilities, (either combined with the energy sector, or both separately) forest and paper products, metals (either combined with mining or both separately), and railroads. Student involvement, both during the spring semester and the summer are expected to be much the same as this year.

Annual Board Meeting

The annual board meeting was held on April 14, 2004 in the Roberts Environmental Center.

Board Members

Richard C. Adams, Jr. '62

Dale Burger

Terry D. Evans '59

Michael G. Graber '74

Brent F. Howell '62 Chair

Suzanne Maltby-Burger

Thomas J. P. McHenry

J. Emil Morhardt Director

George R. Roberts ‘66

Marshall C. Sale '62

Gary J. Smith ‘73

Cam Tredennick ‘88

[1] in conjunction with a Mellon grant to the Joint Science Department.

Roberts Environmental Center at Claremont McKenna College
W.M. Keck Science Center
925 N. Mills Avenue
Claremont, CA 91711-5916
(909) 621-8190 or (909)621 8698 or (909) 621-8298
FAX (909) 607-1185
emorhardt@cmc.edu

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