Mercy Corps made cutting down trees for cooking fuel more sustainable through a reforestation project in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. Photo: JGrant for Mercy Corps.

A new program in Brazil is turning tragedy on its head by paying the poor to preserve their natural surroundings.

Resource depletion and environmental degradation are common echoes of poverty. Desperate to get by, many rural poor turn to the only income source around: the natural environment.

That's why Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff outlined a new program called Bolsa Verde (green allowance) to promote environmental protection and decrease deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, according to mongabay.com. The program will provide BR $300 (US $180 US) every three months to extremely impoverished families living in national forests and sustainable reserves. Recipient families must currently have monthly incomes of less than BR $70 (US $40) to qualify.

In exchange, residents pledge not to deforest illegally or to poach timber. It’s a huge jump in income for the poor, and in one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies, it's a small price for the public to pay.

“Incentive is important because we assign an economic value to nature. It's as if it were compensation for conservation," said Manuel Cunha, president of the National Council of Extractive Populations of Amazonia.

The program is modeled after Brazil’s existing and widely respected Bolsa Familia (family allowance) program, which has helped reduce poverty and inequality over the past several decades, according to The Economist.

Bolsa Verde seeks to expand these successes, reducing the strain of poverty on ecosystem services as well. And when the environment is protected, the poor lead better, healthier lives. So Brazil plans to increase people’s income so they take better care of their environment and themselves.

The government, however, isn’t trying to stop resource consumption that people depend on. "It is an incentive to have sustainable use of natural resources. [Residents] have the right to use biodiversity, but in a sustainable manner," Roberto Vizentin, Secretary of Sustainable Rural Development of the MMA, told Globo News.

If effective, this could mean both improved financial livelihoods and reduced vulnerability for Amazonian residents. And the environment and the rest of the world get something from the deal as well.

A SELCO technician installing solar panels. Photo courtesy SELCO

This article was reposted on The Christian Science Monitor's Change Agent section.

Harish Hande is democratizing electricity. In India, nearly half of all households lack power. Hande has made it his life’s work to change that, and he’s doing it with affordable, sustainable technology.

Hande is the managing director of SELCO, a social enterprise in Bangalore, India, that develops sustainable technology to improve the lives of India’s underprivileged masses. In the past ten years, Hande says, SELCO has increased Indian fuel efficiency, enhanced the financial power of India’s rural banks, and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of low-income Indians.

Dr. Harish Hande.

In a September talk at MercyCorps in Portland, Ore., sponsored by the Lemelson Foundation, Hande told SELCO’s story to an enthusiastic audience. It was a glimpse into the potential of sustainable technology and the difficulties of motivating charitable service in a profit-oriented culture.

SELCO works to customize products for underprivileged consumers, using sustainable values to cut costs and improve lives. In India, “sustainability is not getting subsidized," Hande explained. "Sustainability is subsidizing other industries.” SELCO ‘subsidizes’ the work of India’s poor, he said, by providing sustainable technology that boosts productivity and income for poor workers.

For example: Most street vendors in India use kerosene lights, which leave a substantial carbon footprint. Perhaps more importantly, kerosene costs about 15 rupees per day. So SELCO offers these street vendors solar lighting for about 10 rupees a day: a 33% personal savings. Those savings can make all the difference for many of SELCO’s clients.

SELCO’s recent success belies the difficulty it had in getting off the ground. According to Hande, his venture is quite unique, making it difficult to gain traction in Indian culture.

First, how do you convince entrepreneurs that values are more important than sales?

Most salespeople “sell up,” meaning they sell to clients who are of a higher socioeconomic standing than they are. But SELCO's sales team “sells down” to people with little expendable income, and Hande feels it's ethically unacceptable--contrary to SELCO's business, in fact--to sell clients products they don't need. This complicates SELCO's worker training, and in a caste system like India’s, these relationships are all the more difficult.

Another challenge for Hande: recruiting young employees. How do you convince economically minded parents that joining a not-so-lucrative industry is a solid decision? As Hande explains, his “biggest question is, 'How do we convince our parents?’” India’s economy is growing fast, developing a success-oriented culture that prioritizes profitable career choices over service-minded work.

And once you’ve convinced the parents, how do you get urban youth to think and care about the rural poor? Satisfying these conditions is key for recruiting what Hande calls "holistically oriented" salespeople who care about what they do and whom they do it for.

Yet despite these difficulties, SELCO is bringing sustainable technology to India’s underprivileged classes, improving their lives and helping the environment with more than 115,000 new solar energy systems in the last 15 years. Overcoming the cultural barriers, Hande has found a ready supply of holistically minded entrepreneurs. SELCO’s base has grown quickly in recent years, and the resumes keep coming in.

At Green School in rural Bali, K-12 students learn not only the staples of a traditional education — reading, writing and arithmetic — but also how to grow organic rice and build with sustainably produced bamboo. Students from the local community, as well as around the world come to receive a "green education." The holistic approach taken by the teachers is intended to develop the "whole person" in students, and helps them adopt a more responsible and sustainable lifestyle, Green School founder and Principal John Hardy explains in his TED talk.

Green school is a place of pioneers — local and global, and it’s a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together I know they’re working out how to live in the future.

In John Hardy's TED talk below he shares his inspiration for Green School, and what he sees for the school's future.

Take one basic little black dress (LBD), a cool girl from India, sustainability, and education for underprivileged children… What do they all add up to? The Uniform Project: the brainchild of Sheena Matheiken of New York, who grew up in India.

Sheena vowed to wear the same dress every day for a whole year to show people it's possible to reinvent your basic wardrobe while creating new looks through smart accessorizing. The LBD was mixed and matched with vintage, flea market, eBay, and Etsy.com finds. Additional accessories came in the form of donations from eco-designers and hand-me-downs from fans.

Through the project Sheena promoted her personal passion for sustainability in fashion while also garnering an awareness around education for underprivileged children in India. The Uniform Project has an impressive following of 6,894 fans on its Facebook page, which is just over a year old. The cause has raised $95,090 for the Akanksha Foundation whose mission is to provide “a positive impact on the lives of less privileged children.”

The Akanksha Foundation provides children from India’s slums the same opportunity for quality education as those enrolled in public schools. In a country where it costs an average of $360 to send a child to school for a year, roughly 264 kids can attend a year of school thanks to the funds raised by The Uniform Project. Check out this video to learn more about how The Uniform Project came to be.

The Uniform Project Trailer from The Uniform Project on Vimeo.

The Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump by KickStart can irrigate up to 2 acres of land. Photo: KickStart

What does someone in poverty need most? Martin Fisher's answer: “A way to make more money.” Fisher is co-founder of KickStart, which pledges "a systematic approach to the end of poverty" by helping people create small enterprises selling simple but highly desirable tools like irrigation pumps.

He was recently named OneWorld.net’s person of the year, and gave an online interview with readers in which he challenges widely held views on poverty and the often incomplete ways we attempt to solve the issue of poverty.

Fisher says, "There is too much of 'us' giving 'them' what 'we' think 'they' need." For example, a women-only training program in a community with a lot of unemployed men, or solar-powered stoves that cause more problems than they solve. Fisher believes that the best way to lift people out of poverty is to help them start an enterprise. His website explains why giveaways don’t reach as many people and aren’t as efficient.

But Fisher isn’t just looking at how we address poverty, but how we measure our success:

“You want to reduce malaria? Great. But don't tell us about your success based only on the number of bed nets you gave out. That tells us nothing. Go out and measure the proper use of those nets. Measure the pre and post incidence of malaria and prove that you are cost effectively reducing the number of people suffering and dying from malaria.”

He even challenges microcredit firms to stop evaluating their success on the rate of loan repayment. If the businesses being created are really profitable, how profitable? Is it getting people out of poverty, or as Fisher says, "[is it] just making it a little easier for them to survive?"

Fisher says he's not trying to be harsh or confrontational; he's only trying to ensure that the resources go to where they are needed — to plans that will help to end poverty instead of just making it "less awful."

Read how Fisher distinguishes "Real Good" from "Feel Good."

Dubai's Construction Skyline at Night. Photo: twocentsworth (flickr)

The financial crisis is crimping construction in the Middle East and other places that had been experiencing a building boom, Der Spiegel reports.

Developers in Dubai — once synonymous with high profit margins and high-concept architecture — have delayed lavish developments, including a chain of palm-tree-shaped islands and a $600-million Trump hotel and tower.

The slowdown has affected the migrant workers who make up the core of Dubai's workforce, 43 percent of whom call India home. The Times of India reported that thousands of laid-off construction workers have applied for visa cancellations.

Der Spiegel says developers elsewhere in the Middle East, namely Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are scaling back as oil prices fall.

And in Moscow, developers halted construction on what was to be Europe's tallest skyscraper. The Russian economy is "a house of cards that is built on Western loans and which is now collapsing," German architect Peter Schweger told Der Spiegel.

Eating bugs is already a common practice in over 13 countries. Photo: Vilhelm Sjostrom (flickr)

Scientists are jumping on an underutilized protein source that is abundant and environmentally friendly.

Sounds great — until you realize that what the scientists from National Autonomous University of Mexico are suggesting is dining on insects.

Entomophagy, or eating bugs, is already a common practice in over 13 countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, according to this week's Economist.

And what better then bugs? Gram for gram, bugs provide more nutrients than beef or fish.

And while the Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations considers livestock “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” bug farming is a low-impact process.

Khon Kaen University in Thailand has already developed an inexpensive cricket-rearing technique and taught it to 4,500 families. On just a 100 square feet of land, a family can raise enough crickets to make a tidy profit. Or they can even be “grown” inside homes. Because bugs are a crop that doesn’t require much food or water, grows and reproduces quickly, the yield can be incredible.

The Mexican university researchers themselves cite numerous reasons for insect eating: the 75 percent rise in some food prices, the additional 100 million people pushed into poverty, and global warming as reasons to shift to these more sustainable sources of protein.

Of course, there are perils to introducing new species of insects to areas. And there are those who just plain won’t eat bugs.

A more palatable option suggested by the Economist might be to replace supplements in processed food or animal feed with insect-derived protein, which would still help make carnivorous habits a little more sustainable.

Alternatives to Plastic: Home Gardens. Photo: key lime_pie (flickr)

I recently came upon a blog by a Chicago woman committed to living as close to a plastic-free life as possible. Her journey to a life without plastic began last September, and over the months her postings about her adventures and increasing knowledge have gathered an audience in the thousands.

The statistics about our reliance on plastics are shocking: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the amount of plastic in our waste stream has increased from less than 1 percent in 1960 to 11.7 percent in 2006. And, while Americans drank 50 billion bottles of water in 2006, 38 billion of those ended up in the trash, according to Fast Company magazine.

The anonymous blogger, whose blog is titled Life Less Plastic, explains that she's doing this for personal health reasons, as well to do better by the environment. Among her most popular posts is an entry describing "What I'm Doing to Be Mostly Plastic-Free," which includes:

10. Washing my dishes with Dr. Bronner's bar soap. It works! I'm not kidding!
11. Bringing my own stainless steel coffee mug to the coffee shop. This is important because paper cups are lined with plastic.
12. Bringing along a reusable water bottle or mug for water, and NEVER drinking bottled water.
13. Bringing my own takeout containers to restaurants in case I have leftovers. This sounds embarrassing, but no one has ever even noticed that I've brought my own container except for the people I'm with.
14. Not buying aluminum food cans, excluding canned tomatoes and vegetable broth, which I haven't been able to give up yet. Hopefully, I can/jar some tomatoes this summer and do away with this plastic use, though.

In a society where plastic is pervasive and packaging alternatives are few, even Life Less Plastic's author hasn't been able to do without medicine, which comes in plastic bottles; toothpaste; and even some packaged foods she hasn't been able to find in the bulk section of nearby supermarkets.

Plastics have been around for a while, but we are only beginning to understand their potentially negative consequences. Without plastic, we wouldn't have seen the advances in science and medicine we saw in the last century. However, as the Chicago blogger points out, there are a lot of ways to "live a life less plastic."

Last month, IPS news reported on recent trends toward sustainability and green business within the global economy. According to the January "State of the World 2008" report released by the Worldwatch Institute, "innovative green efforts by governments and business are becoming commonplace." It seems that almost daily, large corporations are announcing their green efforts, however Worldwatch's report warns, many of these announcements are greenwashing.

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Can poor countries afford to be green?

A new report, the annually released Environmental Performance Index suggests that poor countries have been justified to disagree with blocs who demand environmental and other green protections even to the opposition of economic growth, according to the Economist. The connection between economic growth and the environment is not entirely clear, the study finds.

“Economic growth, coupled with good governance, may yet prove to be a source of solutions rather than problems. At the moment, perhaps 2 billion people have no formal access to modern energy—they make do with cow dung, agricultural residue and other solid fuels which are far from healthy. Unless foresight and intelligence are applied to the satisfaction of these people's needs, they may embrace the filthiest and most carbon-emitting forms of fossil-fuel energy as soon as they get the chance.”

The report concludes that a combination of growth and transparent government may be the only solution to avoiding this potential disaster. In fact, if developing countries were able to bypass the most polluting stages of their economic development, all parties would be better off.

Photo: Costa Rica from Above. BlindAmbitionBlog (flickr)

This week, Norway declared that it will become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, by 2030. It turns out that the idea of “going carbon-neutral” is becoming quite the fashion around the globe, though – and Norway might find more competition than it bargained for: In 2007, Costa Rica announced it's intention to become carbon neutral by 2021, the 200th birthday of the Central American country. If Costa Rica meets its goal, it will beat Norway to claim the title of first carbon neutral country.

Update: In the weeks since this was posted, the United Nations has launched the Climate Change Network, which aims to unite global responses to climate change. Since Norway announced its intention to go carbon-neutral, three more countries have made the same declaration: Iceland, New Zealand, and Monaco. A National Geographic News article posted in March figured that Costa Rica was most likely to win the race to carbon-neutrality, considering for example that 80 percent of that country’s energy comes from renewable resources already.

The Economist recently took a look at how the process of recycling is helping to sustain one community in India. The dalits, a lower caste of Hindu, are participating in an economy that not only provides them with income, but helps to reuse some of India's waste.

Disposable plastic cups are many times reborn in Dharavi. In a spiralling continuum, they are discarded and gathered in, melted down to their polypropylene essence, and re-moulded in some new plastic form. Recycling is one of the slum's biggest industries. Thousands of tonnes of scrap plastic, metals, paper, cotton, soap and glass revolve through Dharavi each day.