Roberts Environmental Center

Annual Reports

2004-2005 Annual Report

Prepared by J. Emil Morhardt, 7/6/2005

Overview

· Contributed to curricular programs:

Taught one EEP clinic (normally would teach one per semester but not this year because of sabbatical leave);

Completely redesigned Biology 159, Natural Resource Management to be based entirely on current literature;

Introduced all new material into Biology 165, Advanced Topics in Environmental Biology;

Sponsored Government 120, Environmental Law, and paid for a field trip for all students to Death Valley National Park;

Served on the advisory committee for the Mellon grant to JSD for curriculum enhancement of the environmental sciences;

· Involved students in research:

Involved 8 students in the EEP clinic analyzing corporate environmental and sustainability reports using the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI); these students are coauthors of the Center’s industrial sector reports;

Employed 5 students as research assistants during the academic year, working on PSI research including literature searches, environmental performance data extraction, and scoring of corporate reports;

Employed 6 students as research assistants during the summer working on PSI research, including programming a new partially automated scoring system; increasing our email list to over 30,000 business executives, financial analysts, and NGOs throughout the world; extracting, standardizing, and normalizing environmental and social performance metrics from all corporate reports in our current sector coverage;

Supported and worked with 5 students throughout the summer at the Burger Reserve doing forest fire vegetation recovery analysis in the field; these students are coauthors of the annual data reports to the Bureau of Land Management.

· Attracted scholars:

Employed a full-time masters level research associate, Elgeritte Adidjaja;

Sponsored 2 environmental speakers at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum;

· Conducted public policy research:

Analyzed 200 additional corporate environmental and sustainability reports and published the results to the REC web site in our new interactive graphic format.

Published three additional Pacific Sustainability Index sector reports for public release in September, 2005. These reports are for the motor vehicles and parts sector, the energy and utilities sectors, and the forest products sector.

Conducted the third year of a $60,000 five-year grant from the U. S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management to study the efficacy of reseeding following forest fires. A photographic catalog of different life stages of all plants encountered during the field work will be completed this summer.

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

Attended the invitational World Environment Center Gold Medal Colloquium in Washington DC in May 2005; the 2005 Business and Sustainability Conference in New York in June, sponsored by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; and will attend a Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) industry-NGO roundtable focused on GEMI's newest publication, Transparency: A Path to Public Trust, in Oakland, CA, in August.

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.

Corporate Sustainability

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. During the past academic year the Center has published to the web our second set of industrial sector of Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI) results for all motor vehicle, energy, utilities, and forest and paper products firms listed in the 2004 Fortune Global 500 and Fortune 1000 lists. In response to the release of the motor vehicle data, Honda executives visited the REC and invited the current EEP clinic to visit their North American headquarters where the students got to drive Honda’s one-off $1.5m research hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle (in traffic!). During the summer these data are being formatted into sector reports for release in September to coincide with the beginning of the academic year.

This year we completely redesigned our PSI website which now displays detailed comparative data graphs for companies within specific industrial sectors. The graphs are generated on the fly from the most recent data in our database. Volkswagen tied with GM for top honors in the PSI and is featuring some of these graphics on its own website (http://www.mobility-and-sustainability.com/buster/buster.asp?i=_content/wissen_189.asp).

During the summer of 2005 two students are also writing software to automate some of the report scoring. The process involves creating a single Adobe Acrobat document of all relevant environmental and corporate social responsibility (CSR) materials on a particular company’s website. This pdf document is then subjected to an automated search using keywords associated with the 140 PSI topics. Our software returns a tentative score for each topic along with each of the search hits in context with text before and after the hit and stores all results to our database.

Natural Resources Management

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), vegetation analysis, statistical data analysis, and photographic documentation) and by involving them in summer field research related to agency management. In 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. Two years ago, the Burger students initiated the five-year study under the direction of Dr. Sia Morhardt, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Pitzer College. The study is ongoing with summer students at the Burger Reserve

Activities during the 2004-2005 Academic Year

EEP Clinic Program and the Center’s research

The Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI) - The main goal of the 8 students in the REC clinic program in 2004-2005 (there was no clinic in the fall of 2004 because of sabbatical leave) was to increase corporate scoring using the PSI. In a new initiative last 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. This summer we are formatting the data gathered by the clinic into a new, more-detailed, sector report format for the motor vehicles and parts, gas and electrical utilities/energy, and forest products sectors. These will be publicly released to coincide with the beginning of the academic year in September. Our email announcements announcing the availability of the reports in Adobe Acrobat format on our web site now go out to over 30,000 people. We mail approximately 800 printed copies to a subset of our email list.

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., in June he attended the 2005 Business and Sustainability Conference sponsored by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and run by The Conference Board in New York City, and in August will attend a Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) industry-NGO roundtable focused on GEMI's newest publication, Transparency: A Path to Public Trust, in Oakland, CA. He was invited by Occidental Petroleum.

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 third 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. A change order approved in May allowed us to document photographically most of the life stages of all of the plant species encountered on all four sites during the summer of 2005.

Research Fellow

Elgeritte Adidjaja joined the REC as a Research Fellow in March 2004 for a one-year position which as now been extended 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. She is working exclusively on the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index research and has substantially increased our efficiency in scoring corporate reports

Student Employees and Summer Internships

Academic Year

Gonzalo Cavenaghi ’06, Ben Fleishmann ’05, Chris Frantz ’06, Maggie Witt ’05, and Erin Sedloff ’07 worked as research assistants in the REC during the 2004-2005 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. The number of students decreased from 2003-2004 because Emil Morhardt was on sabbatical during the fall.

Summer

For the first time we have two active summer research programs running simultaneously, one in Claremont and one at the Burger Reserve.

Six students, Joseph Russel ’06, Elizabeth Tedson ’06, Tiffany Chum ’08, Erika Palmer ’06 (HMC), Andrew Kim ’06 (HMC) and Kelly Janes ’07 (SCR) worked in Claremont on research associated with the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index.

The Center also supported Justin Pressfield ’05 in attending an international hydropower meeting in Washington DC in April.

Summer Students at the Burger Reserve

Five students spent the summer of 2005 at the CMC Mono Basin Field Station at the Burger Reserve: Margo Dawley ’06, Chris Frantz ’06, Robert Heilmyar’06, Ina Labermeier ’06, and Elizabeth Thomas ’06 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 2005-2006

Curricular effects

The REC sponsors an EEP clinic each semester (usually 7 or 8 students), a course in natural resources management (usually about 20 students) that changes yearly depending on current political and technical developments, and a course in environmental law taught by practicing attorneys which for the past two years has included a weekend field trip to Death Valley paid for by the Center. The REC will continue these activities in 2005-2006.

Involving students in research

The Center intends to employ at least 10 students during the academic year and at least five during the summer analyzing corporate environmental and sustainability reports, developing new analysis techniques, and conducting associated tasks including extracting and analyzing environmental and social performance data from the corporate reports. The students will collaborate with the Center’s director and research fellow in preparing and publishing at least four industrial sector Pacific Sustainability Index reports.

The Center will also support four students at the Burger reserve during the summer of 2006 conducting forest fire recovery research for the Bureau of Land Management.

Attracting scholars

The Center intends, as usual, to sponsor four or five “environmental” speakers at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Some of these speakers will meet with students in the Center and may give a technical talk in the Joint Science Department as well.

Conducting public policy research

The Center’s principle research is the analysis of the environmental and sustainability reports and other web-based materials of the world’s largest corporations. With the development of sector reports in the 2003-2004 academic year and online data graphics during the 2004-2005 academic year, the Center is the most active and productive entity world wide in this endeavor. Our 2005-2006 goals include making major design revisions in the PSI to incorporate sector-specific topics, and to make quantitative performance scores hierarchical parts of the same questions that address transparency (to facilitate scoring). They also include the partially automating scoring—using purpose-developed proprietary software currently in development in the Center—so as to increase throughput and reliability. Finally, one of our major goals is to increase the amount of detail and analysis in the sector reports (already begun in the Energy and Utilities Sectors report published in the summer of 2005) and to begin a program of annual sector reports for particularly active sectors, including the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors.

The Center will also continue its work on vegetation analysis of forest fire recovery and will produce a digital atlas of all plants observed on its BLM sites in 2005 using macro and micro digital photography and digital scanning. The atlas, the first of its type as far as we are aware, will include a range of life stages of each species as well as microscopic dissections of characters important for identification. It will be designed for use in hard copy, on notebook computers, and on the emerging generation of hand-held digital photography viewers such as the Epson P-2000. The atlas is intended as a prototype of a new type of digital visual field guide with access to far more information than any conventional one. It is likely to substantially decrease the costs of detailed plant surveys by increasing the speed of plant identification and the accuracy of identification not only of mature plants, but of immature and dead plant material as well.

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 (Honorary)

Gary J. Smith ‘73

Cam Tredennick ‘88