Pacific Environment
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Founded | 1987, San Francisco, California, United States |
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Focus | Environmentalism |
Area served | Pacific Rim and the Arctic |
Method | Funding grassroots groups, promoting best practice, forging coalitions between environmentalist groups |
Executive Director | Alex Levinson [1] |
Barbara J. Chisholm (Chair), Mark McLoughlin (Secretary/Treasurer), Vawter "Buck" Parker (Executive Committee), James Angell, Karin Holser, Peter Riggs, Stuart Kaplan, Sun Shan [1] | |
Website | Pacific Environment Homepage |
Pacific Environment is an environmental organization based in San Francisco, California, United States, founded in 1987. Its objective is to protect the living environment of the Pacific Rim.[3]
History
The organization was founded 1987 as Pacific Energy and Resources Center by
By the mid-1990s, they began to focus on the linchpin financial role international institutions were playing in resource extraction in Russia and initiated a long-term effort to link grassroots environmentalists around the Pacific Rim to international policy decisions, particularly those of government-supported export credit agencies. Pacific Environment pioneered efforts to block the financing of destructive projects and improve others as one of the founding members of an international campaign to reform the social and environmental policies of export credit agencies, in a program dubbed ECA Watch. While Pacific Environment's biggest successes in the 1990s were in Russia, they also began to focus more broadly on the Pacific Rim.
In
Organisation
Pacific Environment employs 16 employees located throughout the Pacific Rim with offices in San Francisco, California; Anchorage, Alaska; Washington DC; and Beijing, China. The reported operating budget for the 2011–2012 fiscal year was $2.4 million,[5] with the majority of that coming from foundations.
Pacific Environment splits its activities between five main programs: Climate Program, China Program, Alaska Program, California Energy Program, and Responsible Finance Program.[6]
Programs
Pacific Environment takes on specific challenges in key geographic areas throughout the Pacific Rim, and employs key international leverage points to bolster local campaigns. They engage in five major areas of focus outlined below.
Russia
Until 2018, Pacific Environment had partnered with Russian environmentalists to ensure the peoples in these regions have a voice in decisions that impact their environment, health and livelihoods. Pacific Environment worked alongside Russian and international
China
Pacific Environment enhances the Chinese environmental movement by:
- providing partners renewed financial support to hire and retain staff enhancing both their professional capacity and efficacy in accomplishing their advocacy and civil society goals.
- organizing a network for partners to share experiences and information relevant to their water pollution work through biannual workshops and regular consultation with each other and with Pacific Environment
- assisting partners in developing communications strategies that will enable them to generate media attention on local efforts to fight water pollution.
Alaska
Pacific Environment's Alaska Program partners with native, fishing, environmental, and scientific communities to confront cultural and environmental threats to Alaska and the surrounding waters. These partnerships focus on safeguarding critical habitats, including the world's largest salmon run, the feeding grounds of the endangered northeastern Pacific right whale, old-growth seafloor habitat, and areas essential to community subsistence. The three key campaign goals are:
- Prevent all offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling in Bristol Bay and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas
- Dramatically increase shipping safety response and prevention plans along the Great Circle Route[7]
- Facilitate an international coalition of stakeholders to protect the unique biodiversity of the Bering Sea
California Energy
Pacific Environment's California energy program works to maintain California's commitment to clean energy and reducing greenhouse gases by:
- Keeping liquefied natural gas out of the West Coast
- Promoting Community Choice, a plan that would allow off-grid renewablesources
- Retrofitting aging, polluting power plants to increase energy efficiency and reduce overall energy demands
Responsible Finance
Pacific Environment's Responsible Finance Campaign promotes environmentally and socially sustainable policies and practices among public and private finance institutions with interests and projects in less wealthy countries. With a principal focus on the extractive sector (oil, gas, mining, and forestry) operating on the Pacific Rim, Pacific Environment works to persuade these lending institutions to be more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens’ concerns, particularly in project-affected communities.
The international campaign to reform the policies and practices of public and private banks has expanded its focus to include multilateral development banks, export credit agencies, and large private international banks. After a decade of campaigning, a basic environmental policy framework is now in place for each of the three classes of institutions. However, proper implementation of these policies has become a vexing challenge especially in countries like Japan, where banks are playing an increasingly proactive role in fulfilling national security goals to obtain extractive and energy resources.
See also
References
- ^ a b "Pacific Environment | Our Team".
- ^ "Pacific Environment : Our Mission". Archived from the original on 2007-06-08. Retrieved 2007-07-09.
- Stephen H. Schneider, Island Press, 2009, p.521
- ^ "Annual Revenue & Expenses". GuideStar. Retrieved 2013-09-14.
- ^ Pacific Environment : Our Programs Archived 2007-06-08 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ adn.com | alaska : Ship tracks closer to Aleutians Archived 2006-08-13 at the Wayback Machine