为推动可持续发展，美国的企业与环保组织已经开展了三十年的合作。这种企业——环保组织的合作模式在1986年初露端倪，我当时还为此发表了一篇文章，描述了这种致力于解决问题、以市场为基础、建立伙伴关系的环保形式的兴起。

这一合作形式现在被广泛视为“第三次环保浪潮”，它在1990年正式出现。当时麦当劳与美国环保协会合作，通过废除其泡沫壳包装，减少了3亿多磅的固体废弃物。第三波环保浪潮建立在头两次环保浪潮的基础之上 — 第一次是西奥多·罗斯福时期的自然保护浪潮，第二次是20世纪中期利用法律手段进行环境保护的浪潮。在上世纪90年代，污染监测仪器的出现开始让第三次环保浪潮的环境解决方案——例如美国二氧化硫总量控制与交易计划变得更加灵活。

今天，市场手段的运用和企业伙伴关系的建立已经成为普遍的标准做法。虽然仍有许多环保主义者视商业为敌人（反之亦然），但这终将或改变。因为正在兴起的环境创新浪潮使这些合作关系更加富有成效，其成果可以被更精准地衡量。我们称它为第四次环保浪潮：创新。它为人类提供了新的方法来解决环境问题。

去年，史密斯菲尔德食品公司（Smithfield Foods）与美国环保协会及其他组织开展了一项合作，旨在减少其旗下农场的肥料浪费，这些农场每年为全球最大的猪肉生产商提供约200万吨玉米。这一举措是史密斯菲尔德公司是在2025年将供应链温室气体排放量减少25%的计划的一部分。史密斯菲尔德公司第一个在业界制定这类目标的公司，他们之所以有足够的把握这样做，是因为其农场中的玉米种植者纷纷投资购入了精密农业工具，这些工具能够精准地测量肥料的使用，以获得最高的玉米产量。

第四波浪潮不仅使看不见的问题暴露在人们的视野中，还使这些问题得以解决。美国环保协会在谷歌街景车上安装了传感器来检测和绘制波士顿、芝加哥、达拉斯等城市的甲烷泄露情况。我们要求企业安装甲烷检测设备，其中挪威国家石油公司、PG&E以及壳牌石油公司的石油和天然气工厂率先响应了我们的呼吁。我们与Google Earth Outreach合作，以街区为单位，绘制加利福尼亚州西奥克兰地区的空气污染威胁地图，为当地居民提供详细的的数据，向他们证明加州新的空气质量法案能够切实实现污染物减排。

其他的环保组织也开展了许多类似的行动。世界资源研究所（WRI）利用卫星追踪亚马逊森林的砍伐情况，并可以向当地政府及公众发出火情预警。零售商、消费者品牌和科技公司都在使用区块链来改善供应链的可追溯性和责任性，例如核实印尼金枪鱼行业的可持续发展水平，以及管理布鲁克林的太阳能微电网的能源交易。大自然保护协会（TNC）利用面部识别技术帮助印度尼西亚渔民识别并追踪他们的渔获物。“解决方法就在那里，”大自然保护协会的首席执行官，Mark Tercek说，“而这些创新技术正在帮助人们找到它们，利用它们并扩展它们。”

在第三次浪潮中，合作伙伴的关系更倾向于一对一式的。而在第四波浪潮中，将会出现大规模的多方合作。美国环保协会测量甲烷排放的工作涉及了数十家学术机构和能源公司；除此之外，我们正与荷兰空间研究所合作，从欧洲航天局的Sentinel-5P卫星上获取排放数据，该卫星去年被送入轨道；超过400家供应商被纳入沃尔玛的全球供应链10亿吨温室气体减排计划——超过德国年排放总量。

第四次浪潮蓄势待发，我们需要更多的组织参与进来。社区居民虽然并不一定懂得这些新技术，但他们有权利获得数据，了解周围正在发生的事。我鼓励环保人士、科技创新者、商业领袖和当地居民，去探索第四次浪潮中可能释放的力量。

不论在任何时代，环境问题的解决都将得益于最优工具的使用，在这个时代，这包括能够帮助提高透明度、责任感以及最低成本解决方案的创新工具。虽然技术的应用可好可坏，但当传感器、机器学习和数据分析被用于制定行之有效的政策、建立环境治理体系以及奖励企业的行为时，它们将帮助实现人类和自然的共同繁荣。

Fourth Wave Environmentalism Fully Embraces Business

By  Fred Krupp

March 20, 2018

American corporations began joining with environmental groups to increase sustainability nearly 30 years ago. This trend was still on the horizon in1986 when I wrote an op-ed for this page describing an emerging style ofenvironmentalism dedicated to problem-solving, market-based approaches, and partnerships.

Now widely known as Third Wave environmentalism, the idea first becamea reality in 1990, when McDonald’s teamed up with my organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, to reduce more than 300 million pounds of solid waste by doing away with its foam-clamshell packaging. The Third Wave built on the progress of the first two: Teddy Roosevelt-era land conservation, followed by mid-20th-century antipollution laws like the Clean Air Act. In the 1990s, the advent of reliable pollution monitoring opened the door to flexible Third Wave solutions such as the U.S. cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, which causes forest-killing acid rain. Since 1990, this program has helped reduce coal-plant sulfur-dioxide emissions by more than 90% nationwide.

Market-based approaches and corporate partnerships are standard practice today. Yet too many environmentalists still regard business as the enemy, and vice versa. That may finally be changing, because an emerging wave of environmental innovation is making these partnerships more productive, and their results more precisely measurable. Call it the Fourth Wave of environmental progress: Innovation that gives people new ways to solve environmental problems.

Last year, for example, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, joined with EDF and other groups to reduce fertilizer waste on the vast network of farms from which it purchases roughly two million tons of corn each year. The move is part of Smithfield’s goal of cutting supply-chain greenhouse-gas emissions 25% by 2025. The company is the first in its industry to set such a target, and its progress is enabled by corn growers’ increasing investment in tools that help determine the most efficient ways to apply fertilizer.

The Fourth Wave not only makes invisible problems visible, it makes them solvable. EDF put sensors on Google Street View cars to measure and map leaks of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and other cities. We challenged entrepreneurs to create methane-detection units that are now being piloted in oil and gas facilities owned by Statoil , Shell and Pacific Gas & Electric . And we teamed with Google Earth Outreach to map air-pollution threats on each block in West Oakland, Calif., giving residents detailed data to help make the case for emissions reductions under California’s new air-quality law.

EDF is just one of many groups doing this kind of work. The World Resources Institute is using satellites to track deforestation in the Amazon, and uploading the data to a website that alerts local authorities and the public to fires. Retailers, consumer brands and tech companies are using blockchain to improve traceability and accountability across supply chains, from verifying the sustainability claims of the Indonesian tuna industry to managing energy trading across a solar-fed microgrid in Brooklyn. And the Nature Conservancy is working on facial-recognition technology for fish to help fishermen in Indonesia identify and track their catches. “The solutions are out there,” says the group’s chief executive, Mark Tercek. “And these innovative technologies are helping us find them, deploy them and scale them up.”

Where Third Wave partnerships tended to be one-on-one, the Fourth Wave boasts many multilateral partnerships. EDF’s work to measure methane emissions from the oil-and-gas supply chain involved scores of academic institutions and energy companies, and now we’re working with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research to derive emissions data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, sent into orbit last year. More than 400 companies have joined Walmart in its effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in its global supply chain by one billion tons—more than the total annual emissions of Germany.

The momentum is building, but we need more groups to take part. Local groups that may not have access to the latest technology deserve access to transparent data about what’s happening in their communities. I encourage environmentalists, tech innovators, business leaders and local citizens to explore the power that unlikely Fourth Wave coalitions can unleash.

In any era, those doing the hard work of solving environmental problems take advantage of the best available tools, and in this era those tools include innovations that can help drive transparency, responsibility and low-cost solutions. Technology can obviously be used for good or ill. But when sensors, machine learning and data analytics are used to shape smart policy, rein in free riders, and reward corporate responsibility, they will enable changes that help people and nature prosper.

本文转载自美国环保协会

原文链接：美国环保协会主席柯瑞华：全球正在迎来第四次环保浪潮