Industries

Green Economics

Businesses and individuals rarely pay the “true cost” of goods and services. Economists call the missing deficit an externality, or market failure, because it does not reflect the cost to the environment. Unlike commodities such as iron and corn, the most basic inputs to production such as clean water and air have long been assumed infinite and therefore free. Modern science now realizes that ecosystems are essential inputs to production, that they are a service requiring compensation like any other. As the world is catapulted into a twenty-first century borderless world of limited resources, businesses and governments are grappling with ways to include natural services in the cost structure of products and services.

Environmental Finance, or Carbon Economics, seeks to create capital markets which monetize both costs (such as greenhouse gases) and benefits (such as the preservation of carbon absorption systems like wetlands, oceans and rainforests). Financial instruments are transferable and tradable, and can incent businesses to profit from the reduction of pollution. The hope is that today’s opaque supply chain – from raw materials, manufacture and distribution to end-user consumption – becomes more transparent. Hidden costs to the environment and society begin to be recognized in the price of goods and services. This is at the center of genuine sustainability.

World governments are responding, albeit slowly. The problem is complex, as are even the most promising solutions:

1. Payment for Ecological Services is a mechanism by which individuals and businesses invest in ecological capital projects – for example, tracks of rainforest which sequester carbon – in return for tradable credits which can be redeemed. Green Earth Partners is on the forefront of this quantifiable, project-specific solution.

2. Cap-and-Trade is a carbon market in which large European Union companies participate. Instead of reducing its own emissions, a company can meet its target by purchasing “allowances” from firms with a surplus. This creates an incentive for companies to reduce emissions below the market price and profit from their endeavor. As the United States does not participate, U.S. corporations are able to trade carbon emission allowances under a voluntary scheme on the Chicago Climate Exchange. In 2007, seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces created the Western Climate Initiative, a regional greenhouse gas emissions trading system.

3. The Clean Development Mechanism is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol, administered through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which permits industrialized countries to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive reductions in their own nation. An emerging protocol under this mechanism – Reduced Emissions from Avoided Deforestation – is a related attempt to preserve rainforest ecosystems.

Significant challenges include project verification, valuation methodology and geo-politics. As of 2010, there is no long-term, agreed-on global mechanism to regulate pollution or tax carbon. Kriyom Ventures, Green Earth Partners, and NewFields continue to follow these developments closely.

Integrative Healthcare

American healthcare suffers from a lack of creativity. America spends more per capita on healthcare than any other industrial nation yet it has one of the poorest outcomes. Too often its brightest ideas are the most expensive and the least effective use of limited resources. Integrative, mind-body medicine was widely popularized by Andrew Weil, MD, and draws from the best of global healing traditions, including but not limited to allopathic medicine. Its focus is more on prevention and lifestyle, health and wellness, than on biochemistry and disease-oriented medical procedures. Neither lifestyle education nor surgery and pharmaceuticals are the answer – integrative medicine recognizes the best of both.

View Spectrum of Healing Modalities

View Bird’s Eye View of East-West Medicine

Digital & Print Media

In a knowledge-based, information-rich world, the presentation of products and ideas are as important as the message. Channels are no longer one-way between publisher and reader, or business and customer, but relational and potentially exponential. In addition to traditional publishing, Kriyom has expertise in e-commerce, online social networks, website design and production, as well as creating marketing and product copy, all of which serve the aim of selling and informing. Or, as Cicero said, “to teach, to please and to move.”