The 16 Percent Solution Pdf

[Rosalyn Pomposo]

NEFFhas received $30 million from the USDA for a Climate-Smart Commodities pilot project to help forest landowners implement climate-smart forest practices and build markets for climate-smart forest products.

We first considered the carbon emissions prevented by keeping forests as forests and curbing the on-going loss to development, which is the biggest threat to forests in our region. Each year, more than 28,000 acres of forest are converted to solar fields, homes, commercial complexes, or some other use. When that happens, most but not all of the trees are lost and roughly 60 percent of the carbon dioxide stored in the plants and soil of the forest is released into the air, when root systems, trunks, branches, dead wood, and the litter on the forest floor begin to rot. Since, on average, each acre of New England forest stores 160 metric tons of carbon dioxide (not including carbon dioxide stored in soils), preventing clearing of forests for development could save 81 million metric tons of emissions over thirty years. Loss of forests to development not only causes these direct carbon emissions, but it also destroys the potential for the forests lost to development to store carbon into the future. This future potential of the forest is not included in the 81-million-ton estimate.

Finally, we turned our attention from the forest to the built environment to consider the potential carbon benefit from replacing energy-intensive concrete and steel construction with mass timber buildings. The benefit will depend on how much new construction happens over the next thirty years, how much of that new construction will be steel and concrete that could instead be mass timber (which depends on building codes, common building typologies, cost, and other trends in the building sector), and the carbon emissions of these different building sector trajectories. There is inherently some uncertainty in future economic and population trends, and NEFF is attempting to synthesize many different factors into one analysis, which creates further potential complications. However, NEFF staff members were able to generate an initial, conservative estimate of the potential by relying on recently published data and making some necessary simplifying assumptions.

To determine how much new construction we might anticipate over the next thirty years, we first turned to the Building Sector Technical Report of the Massachusetts 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap Study, which includes estimates of future residential and commercial square footage by decade through 2050. By narrowing to the relevant building types, we generated an estimate of the total square footage of residential and commercial building space that is unlikely to be made with wood in Massachusetts under a business-as-usual scenario, but that potentially could be made with mass timber.

Total carbon emissions and carbon storage for new construction were calculated following the methodology of a global study published in 2020 by researchers from Yale University, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Tsinghau University (Churkina et al. 2020; Buildings as a global carbon sink. Nature Sustainability. 3:269-276.). This study provides estimates of the amounts of different materials that are used per square foot to build steel and concrete and mass timber buildings, as well as the associated emissions for those materials.

The carbon storage provided by wood buildings is most climate-beneficial when the material is sourced from harvests that predominantly remove trees that would otherwise have died in the near-term and released a portion of their carbon back to the atmosphere through decomposition. Otherwise, a portion of this storage represents simply a transfer of carbon from the stump to the city rather than an increase in the total amount of carbon stored safely out of the atmosphere. It is likely that current and future harvest activity will be capturing potential forest mortality in this way because there is evidence that the level of disturbance-related forest mortality has increased globally over the last several decades and this trend is likely to continue as the climate warms (Seidl et al. 2017; Forest disturbances under climate change. Nature Climate Change. 7:395-402.), including disturbance from extreme heat, drought, wildfire, and changes in pest and disease outbreak frequency and severity. These trends put some portion of the carbon stored in forests today at risk, making our ability to capture carbon in harvested wood products an especially useful climate mitigation tool.

A percentage solution is an amount or volume of chemical or compound per 100 mL of a solution. It is a relative expression of solute to solvent: X amount/100 ml = X%Percentage solutions are a convenient and easy way to record solution concentrations. An advantage of percentage solutions is that the molecular weight of a compound does not figure into the percentage of the required solution.There are two types of percentage solutions commonly used in histology:Percentage weight by volume (w/v)Percentage volume by volume (v/v)The third type, percentage weight by weight (w/w), is not often used in the histology laboratory and will not be addressed in this course.

According to First Class Education, the organization promoting the 65% solution, additional funds raised by this new formula would enable districts to hire 300,000 new teachers and provide each student in the United States with a computer without raising any taxes (Byrne, n.d.).

At this time, three states have adopted the measure (Kansas, Louisiana, and Texas) and more states are considering similar legislation, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, and Washington. The U.S. public seems to favor this policy. A Harris Interactive Poll shows 70% to 80% of respondents favor its implementation.

The 2% Solution builds from the tradition of household giving. American families, on average, allocate 2% of their income to charity. The 2% Solution asks U.S. companies to do the same by investing 2% of their profits over the next 10 years into communities that have been systematically held back by the racial wealth gap. These are not acts of charity but investments with real, tangible areas of focus, including Black healthcare, education, infrastructure and finance.

The 2% Solution aims to encourage a comprehensive group of stakeholders across all major sectors to address historical injustices Black and other communities that lack access to opportunities face through a significant infusion of capital into the communities. These stakeholders include representatives of our core pillars of focus, such as the leaders in the healthcare and telecommunications industries, top bank and lending institutions, as well as top governmental programs that would work together with private industries to address issues, such as student loan debt, racial disparities in lending and more. Perhaps, more than ever before, we have an opportunity to galvanize multiple segments of the private and public sectors to address these injustices in a truly distinctive and enduring way.

An example of areas where location-based impact could be made are cities with the highest concentration of Black residents. As of 2023, more than 50% of all Black Americans in the U.S. reside in the South, many in just six cities and surrounding communities: Atlanta, GA; Memphis, TN; New Orleans, LA; Birmingham, AL; Houston, TX; and Charlotte, NC. Impactful initiatives in these communities could serve as a replicable starting place for many other cities and communities across the U.S. For example, Southern Communities Initiative, a catalytic program, concentrates its efforts in these areas to accelerate racial equity.

By aligning these types of investments to proposed industry partners, the location of the corporation is not a limiting factor. It can include investment that supports the broader Black community and connects those communities to various growth areas, such as:

Through stakeholder support, The 2% Solution has the ability to make lasting change in Black communities with a focus on four main pillars of action. These main areas are not only where the racial divide is most keenly felt but are also areas where stakeholder corporations already have a vested interest. As it has been noted before, The 2% Solution is not about charity but is instead a direct investment in location-based and solutions-based areas of need in the Black community.

Business support, such as government support programs like PPP loans, are designed to pass through banks to reach small businesses. But, in Black communities, a disparity of major financial institutions has created a banking desert. CDFIs can be the primary vehicle to infuse capital into Black businesses and Black communities. Since 1973, CDFIs have been bringing opportunities to low-income, low-wealth communities left behind by mainstream finance.

To begin to dismantle the digital divide in Black communities, there are several key areas of focus. Local communities could be lifted through investments, such as ISPs funding broadband subscriptions in extremely disconnected communities, through low-cost subscriptions. Computers or laptop devices via loaner programs or at discounted rates to families can be provided through sponsorship of communities. Companies can sponsor STEM programs and internships, like data science boot camps and in-school programs, for aspiring STEM students. Incubators to inspire Black inventors and scientists can be funded to provide not only education but also personal support along with a network to connect and inspire ideas.

Black communities are often medically underserved, and Black patients suffer from decades of removal of services from their communities. To undo these existing problems, The 2% Solution focuses on healthcare as a main tenet. Stakeholders can invest in health clinics and community health outreach in neighborhoods that lack access to opportunities to address needs in healthcare deserts. We can incentivize the increase of services by a diverse group of healthcare providers in communities that traditionally lack access to opportunities by requiring rotations into those areas. Stakeholders, such as biotech and pharmaceutical companies, can fund research for better treatment of rare and prevalent diseases that typically affect the Black community, including prostate cancer, breast cancer, sickle cell disease and other under-researched diseases.

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