July/August 2019: Resources

Sustainability Events Calendar for 2019

Have you started planning your sustainability engagement program for 2019 yet? If so, The Planet Mark 2019 Green & Sustainability Events Calendar is a handy tool to check out what’s coming up.

Click Here to download The Planet Mark sustainability events calendar.

Implement Energy Management Information Systems (EMIS) in your building portfolio

Presented by the DOE Better Buildings Initiative, EMIS gives property owners and managers the ability to see their energy use and take action to reduce waste. This toolkit gives an introduction to EMIS.

Click Here for the EMIS website.

The Current State of Business Interruption

Agile Recovery has made available for download a definitive guide to disaster planning titled “The Current State of Business Interruption”.

It’s imperative that companies understand the risks and potential impacts of business interruptions, regardless of the cause. In this report, we gathered

industry data on what’s been prompting business interruptions (BI) in recent years, highlighting the extent of disruptions and their cost. Having mapped out today’s current landscape of BI, we wanted to once again demonstrate the integral role of a Business Continuity Disaster Recovery plan in a company’s ecosystem.

The Advanced Energy Design Guide—Achieving Zero Energy series

ASHRAE | 2019

ASHRAE has released The Advanced Energy Design Guide—Achieving Zero Energy series provides a cost-effective approach to achieve advanced levels of energy savings. The four-color Guides offer contractors and designers the tools, including recommendations for practical products and off-the-shelf technology, needed for achieving a zero energy building which is defined as a building that, on an annual basis, draws from outside resources equal or less energy than it provides using on-site renewable energy sources.

These Guides have been developed through the collaboration of ASHRAE, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), with support from the Department of Energy (DOE), to help meet all of an owner’s energy performance requirements. In an effort to promote building energy efficiency, ASHRAE and its partners have made these Guides available for download (PDF) at no charge.

Click Here to request the Free Download

World Economic Forum | The Global Risks Report 2019 – 14^th Edition

The Global Risks Report 2019 is published against a backdrop of worrying geopolitical and geo-economic tensions. If unresolved, these tensions will hinder the world’s ability to deal with a growing range of collective challenges, from the mounting evidence of environmental degradation to the increasing disruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The report presents the results of our latest Global Risks Perception Survey, in which nearly 1,000 decision-makers from the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society assess the risks facing the world. Nine out of 10 respondents expect worsening economic and political confrontations between major powers this year. Over a ten-year horizon, extreme weather and climate-change policy failures are seen as the gravest threats.

This year’s report includes another series of “what-if” Future Shocks that examine quantum computing, weather manipulation, monetary populism, emotionally responsive artificial intelligence and other potential risks. The theme of emotions is also addressed in a chapter on the human causes and effects of global risks; the chapter calls for greater action around rising levels of psychological strain across the world.

Click Here to download the 2019 Report PDF

Actuaries Climate Index

The Actuaries Climate Index^® (ACI) is intended to provide a useful monitoring tool—an objective indicator of the frequency of extreme weather and the extent of sea level change. This website provides graphics and data for download for those who wish to explore the Index. The ACI is available for the United States and Canada and 12 subregions thereof, and will be released when analysis of data for each meteorological season is complete, on both a monthly and a seasonal basis (months ending February, May, August, and November).

In April of 2019, a change was made to the ACI calculation methodology. The methodology used to produce releases prior to April 2019 is referred to as “ACI 1.0”, while the methodology currently in use is referred to as “ACI 1.1”. A description of the change of methodology, and the rationale for the change, can be found in the data disclosure.

The six components of the Actuaries Climate Index are: