"Our future well-being depends on taking actions now for conservation and environmental sustainability. If we lack the leadership from the top, then we must have leadership from below."
These words from Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and keynote speaker at the first Alcoa Foundation Advancing Sustainability Conference in 2006, capture the essence of the Foundation's global effort to address the serious and challenging sustainability issues facing the world today.
Alcoa Foundation’s biennial Advancing Sustainability Conference is a unique event bringing together Alcoa and Alcoa Foundation’s key sustainability partners, other leaders in the field and Alcoa’s senior global leadership. The conference shares the results of the conservation and sustainability research conducted in other 30 countries by 90 academic and practitioner fellows through Alcoa Foundation’s Conservation and Sustainability Fellowship Program.
The theme for the second Advancing Sustainability conference – Connecting Partnerships and Networks for Sustainable Solutions – reflects this evolution in thinking about what it takes from all of us, individually and collectively, to move to the next level of unlocking our collective potential to address global conservation and sustainability challenges.
Developments on critical sustainability issues such as global climate change are pointing to new ways of making progress and at the same time underlining the need for more concerted action and research:
- Globally the release of the IPCC report and United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali – December 3 to 14, 2007 brought together partners from business, finance and the United Nations system, and led to an agenda for action for both developed and developing countries;
- As a founding member of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) in January 2007, Alcoa and its USCAP partners called on the US government to quickly enact strong national legislation to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions;
- Alcoa Chairman Alain Belda joined 99 global business leaders in June 2008 calling for the Group of 8 (G8) leaders to take the lead on climate change and to commit to halving emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050; and
- In 2007, Alcoa Foundation began long term partnerships with the leading non-governmental organizations with an $8.5 million portfolio of multi-year grants for climate change initiatives, including the Make an Impact program, to raise awareness and mobilize action to limit GHG emissions in Alcoa communities
Building a Global Network
The first Advancing Sustainability Conference in Brussels, 2006 marked the launch of a global network of future leaders and premier institutions – called the Advancing Sustainability Alcoa Foundation Global Conservation and Sustainability Network – to leverage research and share interdisciplinary work.
Within this network, common issues are emerging in the geographically diverse research projects under the Conservation and Sustainability Fellowship Program, academic and practitioner fellows are sharing their research findings and developing networks to enhance further collaborative research and joint implementation of projects addressing local and global challenges in conservation and sustainability.
Program Research to Drive Change
From Australia to Zambia, Alcoa Foundation fellows are currently conducting research and tackling issues that have local impact and global implications - with a goal of providing government and business leaders with usable information they can apply to meet specific sustainability and conservation challenges. Common issues are emerging in the geographically diverse research projects. For example, research on the types and quantity of products extracted from the mangrove ecosystem in Cameroon, Africa, is helping with the development of sustainable management directives for the coastal ecosystem. A continent away in Mexico, research on ecological services provided by desert oases to biodiversity and human welfare will foster sustainable practices by demonstrating the incentives for conserving these critical habitats.
The fellows' research is centered on four critical themes:
- Protecting and conserving fragile ecosystems and biodiversity;
- Climate change and energy solutions;
- Integrating sustainability into public policy and governance; and
- Sustainability, livelihoods, and economic growth.
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Alcoa stays sustainability course
Alcoa President and CEO Klaus Kleinfeld announces a six-year extension of Alcoa Foundation's Conservation and Sustainability Fellowship Program
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Alcoa Foundation Conservation and Sustainability Fellowship Program
Alcoa Foundation’s $9.2 million Conservation & Sustainability Fellowship Program was launched in 2005 to advance knowledge in the field of conservation and sustainability through fellowships to outstanding academics and practitioners from non-governmental organizations.
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2006 Conference
More than 140 current and future leaders in the field of conservation and sustainability gathered for the Alcoa Foundation’s first Advancing Sustainability Conference in Brussels, Belgium, from November 29 to December 3, 2006.
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