policy

Reducing Food Waste by Setting Goals

- Adam Clare
fruit store

The best way for a regional government to reduce food waste is to set goals. Previous and common efforts focus on messaging and even in increasing the cost of managing food waste for households. New research shows that simply setting food waste reduction goals is enough and even better than other approaches.


This study investigates the effects of food waste (FW) reduction goal setting on waste generation. Using a unique dataset on the status of policy response with goals for household food waste reduction across Japanese municipalities, we estimate the causal effect of setting FW reduction goals in the public plan on household waste output. The results indicate that goal setting reduces waste output by 3.38 kg per capita per year, resulting in a reduction in economic loss due to the discarding of food of approximately US$ 689 million per year. Moreover, we find that goal setting has a larger influence than other waste reducing and recycling policies that do not include reduction goals, such as collection frequency and unit-based pricing systems. Our results highlight the importance of goal setting by local authorities in designing environmental policies for common social goals.

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A New Guide to Science Advocacy

- Adam Clare

Scientists used to think that sharing the facts and evidence of an issue was enough to sway policy makers and the general public. Unfortunately, with many issues facing us today there are vested interests looking to derail civil discourse around topics like climate change and vaccines. Today Evidence for Democracy launched a toolkit for scientists to better advocate for evidence based policy decisions. The idea now is to provide scientists with guides on how to share facts and evidence so that the general public can benefit from their research and not be manipulated by lobbying campaigns and the like.

Whether you want to dip your toes into advocacy for the first time, or are looking to fine-tune your skills, this guide will help you expand your toolbox of advocacy strategies, and build and nurture relationships with decision-makers.

Fostering a better relationship between scientists and policy-makers is not just about enabling ground-breaking discoveries or strengthening the economy. It’s also about how science can serve the collective good — for a healthier, more prosperous, and just society.

Within the guide, you will also find firsthand experiences from parliamentarians reflecting on their experiences interacting with the science community. Personally, I’m still thinking about this quote:

“Conversations around science are frequently centered around funding. They are less often about how [the] government can make better evidence informed decisions using the research that is being produced by the stakeholders I meet with.” — Member of Parliament

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18 Countries Easily Decreased CO2 Emission with Policy

- Adam Clare
wind turbine

There’s now even more evidence that countries around the world can reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing economic growth. Carbon intensive industries often argue that regulations will destroy the economy and do little to protect the planet. They couldn’t be more wrong. A recent study looked at emissions and economic growth and found that countries can indeed reduce emissions and increase their GDP.

The study looked at emissions from between 2005 and 2015. Globally, CO2 was on the rise — about 2.2 per cent annually — but in 18 countries, their emissions saw a decline. These 18 account for 28 per cent of global emissions.
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What the researchers found most encouraging about their study is that, for the two countries that were the control group, if you removed their economic growth, policies encouraging energy efficiency were linked to cuts in emissions.

“Really, this study shows it’s not a mystery. We have the technology: you put the effort in place, you develop the policies, you fund them, and then you get emission decreases,” Le Quéré said.

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How Good Policy Alongside Good Design Improves Lives

- Adam Clare

subway transit

Tishaura Jones, the first female treasurer of St. Louis, set out to improve her city through good design. Through her own struggles dealing with the city’s bureaucracy she identified many problems with how information is presented, she noted she wasn’t the only one running into bad design. Jones decided to do something about it; the policies were there but nobody knew how to understand them since the information was presented in a Byzantine way. She has led St. Louis to alter how information gets communicated to its citizens.

As treasurer of St. Louis, she used two key design techniques to improve policy delivery and outcomes. First, she reached out to other cities that had prototyped and tested new, human-centered policies. Building on what other cities had learned allowed St. Louis to springboard forward instead of getting stuck reinventing wheels. Second, she brought together policy and processes, applying people-centered design to the rules that governed services and the delivery of them. By building connective tissue between policy, process, and people, Jones was able to built new trust in old institutions to deliver real change impacting residents’ lives.

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Justin King, policy director of the family-centered social policy program at New America, where I did research, has spent his career working on issues at the intersection of children’s lives and government policies. “Tishaura and Jose before her are reinventing what’s possible inside government,” he says. “People see the state and municipal government, in a lot of cases, as a predator on them and their communities . . . [Their work] is against the tide. It is really positive and really innovative and really worth talking about.”

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Urban Living Cheaper, More Sustainable Than Suburban

- Adam Clare

UrbanVSuburban

Years of car-focused suburban designs have unleashed problems in the 21st century that we will have to deal with and accommodate. The years of the suburbs are coming to an end and it can’t be soon enough. With every passing years more and more municipalities discover that urban design is the better choice.

The above image is composed of data taken from a report done by Halifax in 2005. Undoubtably the costs of supporting suburban households has only increased relative to urban housing.

Recently, the New Climate Economy released a report titled Analysis of Public Policies that Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Sprawl and advocates for a change to policies to encourage better urban design.

The report, Analysis of Public Policies that Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Sprawl—written for the New Climate Economy by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, in partnership with LSE Cities—details planning and market distortions that foster sprawl, and smart growth policies that can help correct these distortions.

Sprawl increases the distance between homes, businesses, services and jobs, which raises the cost of providing infrastructure and public services by at least 10% and up to 40%. The most sprawled American cities spend an average of $750 on infrastructure per person each year, while the least sprawled cities spend close to $500. In its Better Growth, Better Climate report, the New Climate Economy has found that acting to implement smarter urban growth policies on a global scale could reduce urban infrastructure capital requirements by more than US$3 trillion over the next 15 years.

The New York Times ran an article on urban versus suburban costs back in 2010.

So we set out to do the math, based on an apartment and a house in the New York metropolitan area. Here’s what we found: a suburban lifestyle costs about 18 percent more than living in the city. Even a house in the suburbs with a price tag substantially lower than an urban apartment will, on a monthly basis, often cost more to keep running.

It’s very clear that as we populations grow urban design needs to focus on sustainable infrastructure planning and all of us should encourage it.

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