NEW YORK, NY — Companies such as Starbucks, Nike, Walmart, GE, Honda, Dell and Timberland now send factory managers to a Chinese academy to learn how to make their supply chains less carbon-intensive.
The school, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) Environment, Health and Safety Academy, was launched this month through a broad private-public partnership with members that include Honeywell, the Citi Foundation and China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection.
The partners will open a second academy next year through a $2.3 million commitment announced at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting last week, with the GE Foundation acting as the lead funder with a $1.5 million grant paid over a three-year period. Additional funding comes from the Walmart Foundation.
The academies will each train at least 2,000 managers annually, drawing from the best practices of various companies that helped develop the core curriculum, such as GE, Honeywell and Adidas.
The aim is to teach supply chain managers how to systematically address environment, health and safety priorities and institutionalize greenhouse gas measurement and reduction. China is now the world’s top emitter, with the largest source of pollution coming from industry.
"In China, as in many emerging markets that make up the world's supply chain, the push for growth has outpaced the capacity to safeguard the environment and protect worker health and safety," George Hamilton, ISC president, said in a statement last week. "By scaling up the EHS Academy, we believe we can help Chinese industry significantly improve environmental health and reduce climate pollution."
ISC estimates factory managers trained at the academies over the next three years will help avoid roughly 5.6 million metric tons of emissions.
Also last week, the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $6 million to ISC and the World Resources Institute to launch the U.S.-China Clean Energy and Climate Partnership program to help the provinces of Guangzhou and Jiangsu become more energy efficient and less carbon-intensive. The program will work to promote the use of emissions measurement standards and integrate them within the emerging environment, health and safety profession.
Photo CC-licensed by Flickr user Robert Scoble.