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 books, in REC reports, and on our web site.

This has been our most productive year to date. During the 2006–2007 academic year the Center drafted 15 industrial sector reports of Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI) results (details below)., At the time of this writing these sector reports are out for comment from the included firms, and will be formally issued in September and October 2007. They are much more detailed than in previous years, assigning letter grades as well as ranks to corporate reports, and providing detailed analysis of each of the covered reports.

We release all reports in draft six weeks in advance of publication, notifying all companies involved and soliciting corrections. Many companies respond, sometimes in considerable detail in hopes of raising their scores. We monitor hits on all of our web pages and currently have several thousand per month. It is fair to say that we have substantially increased CMC’s visibility in the upper management of many large corporations. All of our feedback to date has been positive.

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. Four 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 field work was completed this summer by students at the Burger Reserve, and the final report will be submitted in September.

Financial Status—The Center has been supported almost exclusively by endowment since 1996. By the end of the last decade we had accumulated sufficient surplus to be relatively immune from the decline in CMC endowment revenues over the ensuing years. But in the last few years student involvement has substantially increased and present expenditures exceed endowment income by over $150,000/year. The surplus that allows this level of activity will be exhausted prior to the summer of 2009, necessitating a substantial increase in endowment or in annual gifts if the present programs are to continue to thrive. The Center produced a development plan in May and it is presently under consideration by the CMC Office of Development.

Activities during the 2006-2007 Academic Year

PSI Sector Reports:

As of this writing (July 21, 2007) the following 15 sector reports produced during the 2006-2007 academic year are in draft and have been submitted to the included companies for comment prior to publication at the beginning of the Fall 2007 semester. These reports include hundreds of the largest companies in the world. The first of the two reports, which will receive particular press attention in September as they are released, represent two additional types of corporate groupings not previously tried by the Center: a regional comparison (all California companies in the Fortune 1000, compared head-to-head irrespective of industrial sector), and our first look at very large privately held companies (from the Forbes Magazine list of largest privately held companies). This is the largest group of annul sector reports ever produced by the Center and is attributable to the unprecedented number of students we have been able to employ.

2007 Fortune Companies in California

2007 Forbes 25 Largest Private and Public Companies

2007 Pharmaceuticals Sector

2007 Forest and Paper Products Sector

2007 Railroads Sector

2007 Wholesalers: Electronics and Office Equipment Sector

2007 Scientific, Photo, and Control Equipment Sector

2007 Homebuilders Sector

2007 Airline Sector

2007 Food Services Sector

2007 Entertainment Sector

2007 Computer, Office Equipment, and Services Sector

2007 Oil and Gas Equipment and Services Sector

2007 Consumer Food, Food Production, and Beverages Sectors

2007 Petroleum and Refining Sector

All will be available online at www.roberts.mckenna.edu as they are formally released.

Claremont McKenna College Sustainability Report—This year, the Center produced and published the first sustainability report for any of the Claremont Colleges, presaging some intensive research sponsored by the Colleges this summer to collect a much larger amount of environmental data. The current report is available at

http://www.roberts.cmc.edu/PSI/CMCSustainability/profile.htm .

CSRStat.com—During the summer of 2007 the Center developed a simple and elegant new sustainability web site, http://www.csrstat.com, (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Statistics) now in beta testing, based on data in our PSI database and linked to RSS feeds from a wide range of news and financial institutions. Users can type any company name into a search box and receive current information about a company as well as any information developed by the REC. We hope that this will become a major web site for use by the sustainability community. The site will be released with press releases in early fall 2007.

Initiatives with GRI—At the suggestion of Lily Donge ‘94, a securities analyst with the Calvert Group, the Center has begun a project with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the main source of guidance to companies on content for sustainability reports. GRI, headquartered in Amsterdam, provides writing guidelines (developed by industry/NGO consensus) but has no ability to analyze existing reporting. The Center will analyze the full range of human rights reporting from at least 70 large companies that have produced at least two sustainability reports.

Bureau of Land Management Contract¾This summer, the REC concluded its fifth 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 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.

Mellon Foundation Research—Ryan Fitzgerald ’07 and Elliott Vander Kolk ‘08, won two of the Mellon Foundation summer research grants jointly funding students and faculty. As described below, they used them to study forest fire vegetation recovery near the Burger Reserve

The Roberts Environmental Center Press—This year The Roberts Environmental Center Press published two books: Global Climate Change: Summaries of the 2006-2007 Scientific Literature, and 2003-2006 Sustainability Reporting Analyzed Across Sectors. The former is a work product of Biology 159, Natural Resources Management and has 19 student authors. The latter is a book-length compilation of all of the sustainability reports done by the REC between 2003 and 2006 plus an extensive analysis of the data across sectors. Both books are available from the REC web site.

Research Fellow—Elgeritte Adidjaja, who joined the REC as a Research Fellow in 2004 continues as the Center’s research fellow. She is working primarily on the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index research and is involved in all aspects of scoring, report preparation, and web site development and maintenance.

Student Employees and Summer Internships

Twenty students—Jeniffer Aleman-Zometa '07 (PI), Helena Bottemiller '08, Diego Cuenca ’07, Grace DiLaura '08, Scott Eaton '07, Claire Esbenshade '07 (SC), Ryan Fitzgerald '07,Marie-Ana Follett '09, Selene Isaacson '09, Jessica Lewis '07 (PO), Josh Utter Leyton '07 (HMC), Melissa Itsara '08, Sean McGregor '08, Emery Mitchem '07, Elise Novak '08 (PO), Brittany Nunnink '09 (SC), Elizabeth Thomas '07, Elliott Vander Kolk '08, Peter Weisberg '07, Elicia Whittlesey '07 (PO)—worked as research assistants in the REC during the 2005-2006 academic year doing a wide variety of tasks associated with the Center’s research. These included updating our environmental and sustainability reporting email and mailing lists (to greater than 35,000 recipients), 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.

Summer

We have two active programs running simultaneously during the summer, one in Claremont and one in the eastern Sierra.

Summer Students in Claremont at the REC

Five students—William P. Alston (Peter) '09 (PI), Kathleen Harris '09, (SC), Selene Isaacson '09, Elise Novak ’08, (PO), and Andrew Taylor '08 (HMC)—worked in Claremont with Elgeritte Adidjaja, improving the performance of the main database used to store the Center’s Pacific Sustainability Index data and serve it to our web site. They also worked on a series of improvements to the web site itself.

Summer Students at the Burger Reserve and in the Eastern Sierra

The REC, along with some funds from the Mellon Foundation, supported five CMC students— Ryan Fitzgerald ’08, Emery Mitchem ’07, Meredith Stechbart ’08, Peter Weissberg ’07, and Elliott Vander Kolk ‘08—during the summer of 2007 at the CMC Mono Basin Field Station at the Burger Reserve working with Emil and Sia Morhardt on the Center’s BLM contract to assess the effectiveness of reseeding after the Cannon and Slinkard fires near Walker California.

The Center also supported the summer research of Elizabeth Thomas ’07. Working out of the Burger reserve, she is looking for changes in altitudinal ranges of small mammals since the last detailed studies in the vicinity 40 years ago. Changes are expected because of global warming.

Roberts Environmental Center Goals for 2007-2008

Curricular effects

The REC sponsors an EEP clinic each semester based on current corporate environmental reporting, courses in natural resources management and in advanced topics in environmental biology, both based entirely on the current literature, 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 2007-2008.

Involving students in research

The Center intends to employ at least 15 students during the academic year and at least two 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 industrial sector Pacific Sustainability Index reports for at least the Banks Sector, Chemicals Sector, Electronics Sector, General Merchandiser Sector, and Mining and Crude Oil Sectors. It will also complete a study with the GRI on human rights reporting.

The Center will also support four students at the Burger reserve during the summer of 2008

Attracting scholars

The Center intends, as usual, to sponsor “environmental” speakers at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, the number depending on the cost of the individual speakers.

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

Introduction and General Goals

Sponsored Lectures

Roberts Environmental Center Goals for 2007-2008

Curricular effects

Board Members

George R. Roberts ’66 (Honorary)