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Building a Science-Based Path to Sustainability

Measure Impacts More Clearly

Apply Conservation More Effectively

Follow the Development of EH-IMACS

EH-IMACS is a framework intended to improve environmental and human impact measurement,

support & apply conservation, and encourage more sustainable choices.

Sustain One World aims to help develop and implement EH-IMACS as a practical framework for measuring environmental impacts and linking economic activity to conservation.

  • Related paper: Impact Measurement and Application of Conservation (IMACS). Zenodo. 5281/zenodo.11206388.
  • Related review: The Impact Measurement and Application of Conservation System (IMACS): A Review of IMACS and a Return to Sustainable Conditions. Zenodo. 5281/zenodo.11663825.

Our objective is to support a standardized approach through which products, services, and other activities can be evaluated more consistently and through which conservation and restoration can be expanded over time.

  • Related paper: Providing Conservation as “Title-To-Conservation” under IMACS. Zenodo. 5281/zenodo.11212462
  • Related paper: Calculation of Individual and Product Sustainability under IMACS. Zenodo. 5281/zenodo.11214090. 

The long-term aim is to help reduce damaging impacts, improve transparency, and support a transition toward more sustainable production and consumption.

  • Related review: The Impact Measurement and Application of Conservation System (IMACS): A Review of IMACS and a Return to Sustainable Conditions. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.11663825.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

Damaging Environmental Impacts

EH-IMACS is designed to account for the damaging environmental impacts associated with products and services. Major examples include biodiversity loss, unsustainable freshwater use, soil and sediment damage, climate-related impacts, coastal flooding risk, and other environmental pressures.

The full EH-IMACS framework uses a broader set of impact groups. In addition to environmental impacts, it also includes human-condition impacts.

These impact types are closely connected. Biodiversity depends on healthy land, water, climate, and ecological restoration. For that reason, the system is designed to address multiple types of damage together rather than treating each problem in isolation.

Conserving Environmental Impacts

EH-IMACS also accounts for the conservation and restoration needed to neutralize damaging impacts. Examples include protection and restoration of wildlife areas, watershed protection, soil and sediment restoration, coastal protection, emissions reduction, and atmospheric carbon removal with durable storage.

EH-IMACS is designed to make environmental impacts more visible at the level of products, services, and individual consumption. For participating purchases, the system links measured or estimated impacts to corresponding conservation intended to address those impacts.

This changes incentives in a practical way. Lower-impact products and operations require less conservation, so producers, service providers, retailers, and consumers all have a reason to reduce impacts directly wherever they can.

EH-IMACS would be implemented gradually. Participation, impact measurement, and conservation capacity would expand over time, allowing the system to begin in simplified form and become more complete as the supporting infrastructure develops.

Participation

Theoretically it would be best if every individual in the world would participate on day one and urge all their retailers, suppliers, manufacturers and governments to participate as well. However, practically that would be impossible. It would be more practical to manage the overall process, if the growth of global participation would be limited to about 10% per year. That would also spread the capital requirements and the construction capacity needed to build the C-sequestration facilities over a 20-to-40-year period. However, a 10% rate of new (global) individual participation would still imply a peak annual rate of new individual participants of ~ 1 billion per year, ~100 million per month or ~ 3 million per day.

Without this high rate of growth of individual participation, less carbon is sequestered and most efforts for biodiversity restoration will be ineffective, since the losses in biodiversity due to global warming may be larger than the biodiversity gains due to wildlife areas protection and restoration. In order to be successful, we are stuck with these very high numbers of annual growth of participation. Breakneck speed construction of carbon sequestration factories (DACC&CS) and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is thus of utmost importance. We should not be intimidated by the size of the task at hand but simply and boldly carry it out. This also leads to a sustainable form of economic growth that is urgently needed, but currently impossible.

“We should not be intimidated by the size of the task at hand,
but simply and boldly carry it out.”

Participation Phases

Project implementation needs to take place in three phases.

  1. Preparatory participation
  2. Pre-participation
  3. Full participation

Once the website functionality allows this, the various types of participation can be listed on the website for individuals and organizations who request such.

 

Preparatory Participation

Before pre-participation can start, there will be a preparation period during which the EIMACS principals are communicated to a growing group of people, the website is improved, fundraising is carried out and the various organizations and scientific advisory committees are formed.

Once sufficient funding is available, people are hired, methods are peer reviewed and published, procedures and software are written, field tests are carried out and people are trained for various field evaluation tasks.

Individuals and organization can participate during this phase by volunteering their time or by making financial gifts.

Pre-Participation

During the pre-participation phase, individuals can sign up to show their interest and indicate which retailers/ sellers they would like to see participate as well. We hope for a global groundswell of individuals signing up for pre-participation.

Organizations (businesses, governments) can also sign up to pre-participate, listing the organizations they would like to see participate. For organizations, pre-participation also implies the use of the EIMACS organization provided product, service and labor classification system.

The use of this system allows the determination of the classification code by original product manufacturers (defined as anyone who prints a product label) and printing of the Classification Quick Reference (CQR) code on the product labels and on service billing and documentation.

The CQR code identifies the product or service to “same or similar” types. The CQR code may for example indicate that the product is a 500-gram jar of peanut butter and not a 500-gram pack of butter for which product classes the range of environmental impacts values may already be known. Butter has much higher damaging environmental impacts than peanut butter. The use of CQR codes thus allow the estimation of environmental impacts before accurate calculations become possible.

For any product sold without a CQR code, we need to assume that the environmental impacts are similar to the products with the highest environmental impacts sold in the store. The use of CQR codes thus on average strongly reduces the estimated environmental impacts of products and services sold.

Producers and service providers who label their products with CQR codes are pre-participating and likely have already invested in equipment and buildings with lower environmental impacts. They are thus likely already more sustainable. Therefore, even before accurate environmental impact measurements can take place, individuals and organizations alike will try to buy CQR rates supplies, products and services. This by itself will drive a change towards the use of sustainable systems and methods (“Sustainability by Selection”).

Full Participation

Once full participation becomes possible, participant sellers can request their products to be “rated” (determination of environmental impacts) for the initially limited number of environmental impact variables. Participating (= “rated”) products can then be sold by participating sellers to participating buyers while the environmental impact voucher system is first used and the first types of conservation are automatically applied.

Why Would Individuals Participate?

Individuals who would like to live under improving environmental, economic and human conditions should participate. Participation for individuals is free. Reasons to participate are:

  1. To rapidly improve environmental conditions
  2. To improve conditions of people living under inhumane conditions (slavery, child labor)
  3. To save money and increase standard of living
 
 

During the pre-participation stage, the only benefits will be those of walking the moral high-ground, by creating the conditions needed to jumpstart the EIMAC system. Once (full) participation becomes possible, individual participants will likely create very large demands for wildlife area protection, carbon sequestration and all other forms of E-conservation as needed to allow a rapid change to sustainable conditions.

 

Why Would Organizations Participate?

Aside from the moral arguments, there are five reasons why organizations should participate:

A. Customer Retention
Undoubtedly a few retailers will immediately sign-up to pre-participate once possible, since it costs them essentially nothing. By doing so, they make clear they intend to fully participate once this becomes possible. Non-(pre)-participation essentially tells the customers that the retailer does not care about the reasons listed above that are important for (pre)-participating customers. Customers are increasingly likely to buy their goods and services at pre-participating retailer and later at participating retailers.

B. Lower Costs of Utilities
A supply chain layer can significantly lower costs and thus increase profits, when all or an increasing number of organizations:

  • Install solar panels on roofs (lower costs of power, much less damaging impacts)
  • Use geothermal heat pumps for HVAC (lower HVAC costs, much less damaging impacts)
  • Use electric vehicles (running on solar and wind energy, much less damaging impacts)
  • Relocate to multi-story buildings (less cultivated area use)
  • Use grey water systems and consume less fresh water.

Note that these cost saving aspects would save money today, independent of the participation stage (none, pre, full).
Once participation becomes possible, this can be measured and will result in lower E-damages and thus to lower E-voucher costs. These E-voucher costs are further lowered when an increasing fraction of the employees in their supply chain participates each year and further lower their E-impacts.

 

C. Supply Chain Access
A small fraction of the supply chain will (pre)-participate ASAP. This means that (pre)-participating retailers will try to find and favor (pre)-participating suppliers. Narrow supply chain layers will thus be formed of organizations that (pre)-participate. However, this narrow supply chain layer of participating organizations has a limited capacity. Early adopters will already be part of this narrow supply chain layer, to which later adopters may no longer have access until the (pre)-participating supply chain widens. This makes it more difficult for late adopters to select (pre)-participating suppliers. This may effectively exclude them for buying from the most sustainable earlier adopter suppliers. Early adopters thus have a competitive advantage.

 

D. Low Costs of E-Vouchers
Due to the initial low customer participation (say 1%), the costs for participating organizations are very low. Take the case of a retailer and assume a 6% cost of E-conservation per dollar spending, with 1% customer participation and 10% participating products available. In that case, the average storewide cost increase (as needed to maintain profits) is equal to: 0.06 * 0.01 * 0.10 = 0.00006 or 0.006% of the average product list price and is essentially insignificant. At higher customer participation and a higher fraction of participating products, these costs will go up, but by then the supply chain costs savings due to (the above) savings will eclipse or strongly reduce such “extra” costs. Participating sellers will have created a lower costs position, improving their competitive position compared to non-participants.

For business to business (B2B) transactions, E-vouchers are reimbursed in “supply chain source” direction; meaning that each B2B E-voucher is only issued by the distributor to the retailer after the participating retail customer received an E-voucher from the retailer. This can only be done this way, since early on neither distributor nor retailer know which of the participating products will be purchased by participating customers. This may sound complex but is very simple to do using computers. Alternatively, distributor and retailer may make monthly estimates, after which the distributor “pre-pays” the E-vouchers and the differences are settled at month’s end.

For B2B purchases, the E-vouchers paid by business 1 are deposited in an escrow account in name of business 2 and used for (future) E-vouchers paid by business 2 to participating customers. The E-vouchers paid out are thus cumulative to the final vendor at the end of the supply chain. The “self” paid fraction of the E-voucher for each organization in supply chain would thus be a small fraction of the 0.006% of the price of product or service. Implementing environmental damage preventing improvements would drop these costs by a further 50 to 60%.

 

E. Low Seller Implementation Costs
The EIMACS process is almost entirely automated. The additional tasks needed are to run the software every night to:

  • A. Distribute the E-impacts of “running the store” over the new inventory “for resale” that came in.
  • B. Adjust the E-impacts of “running the store” over the existing products already for sale.
  • C. Audit the E-impact attribution over all products offered for sale to be within the required compliance limits.

Currently (large) retailers use software to determine the list price of all products offered for sale. The new tasks A and B could be integrated with this current software and would in that case not require additional work.

The auditing costs under C are the only truly “new” and additional cost. However, since most of the auditing is software automated and re-runs inputs and outputs calculated using A and B, this is unlikely to add significant costs.

Additional costs of running the EIMAC system are otherwise mostly proportional to the fraction of the store selling participating products. Starting with a low percentage of participating products will minimize any initial additional costs. Gradually increasing the participation product percentage will reduce the EIMACS costs per dollar revenue of participating products and services sold.

The Use of Environmental Supply Chain Steps (ESCS)

The Environmental Impact Measurement and Conservation System (EIMACS) uses specifically designed environmental supply chain steps (ESCSs) and associated calculations (patent pending) to calculate environmental impacts (E-impacts) of products, services and individuals. Three types of ESCSs exist:

  • Individual supply chain step (ISCS)
  • Product supply chain step (PSCS)
  • Rating supply chain step (RSCS).

Individual supply chain steps (ISCS) are used to calculate the net environmental impacts of an individual and represent an individual. Product supply chain steps (PSCS) are used to calculate and represent the net environmental impacts of products and services. This can either be a unique product (or service) or a series of identical products or services. Rating supply chain steps are used to determine the E-impacts of unknown inputs to ESCSs. The word “rating” here means “determination of E-impacts”.

Products, services or individuals can be non-participating, pre-participating of (fully) participating. For a product or service to be pre-participating or participating, the organization providing the product or service needs to be pre-participating or participating, but this can take place “one product or service at a time”.

Each individual supply chain step (ISCS) exists over the lifetime of the individual. Each product supply chain step exists as long as one product or service in the series is not yet sold and becomes “dormant” afterwards.
For all ESCSs, the output (the result) is calculated using the sum of all inputs minus a correction. For individual supply chain steps this correction is the individual sustainable available allowance. As a consequence, sustainable individuals, have no net environmental impacts. A different correction for product supply chain steps prevents supply chain accumulation of environmental impacts. 

Under the EIMAC system, the labor output of employees is an input to the product supply chain step. This means that the net environmental impacts of employees add to the environmental impact of products made and services provided, for which the seller paid the E-voucher costs. The seller (employer) has thus a financial interest in helping employees reduce their environmental impacts ASAP.
For participating products and services all E-impact data are public. For individuals all data are private.

 

From Crude to Accurate E-impact Determination

Currently used “Classic” methods calculating E-impacts, can only calculate product averages. For example, Classic methods can calculate the average carbon dioxide emissions for a 2 lb bread made in Germany for January of 2022. Even in that case, they exclude all E-impacts added to the production process originating from employees. In many cases, the E-impacts from employees are much larger than from any other source. Excluding employee E-impacts thus misrepresents the actual E-impacts of most products and services provided. In contrast, the EIMACS calculations are designed to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions for (say) a 2 lb bread made at Rockland Bakery in Nanuet NY, for (say) the batch of 500 loafs rolling out off the oven between 8:40 and 9:00 AM today for the employees on shift during the production period.

Depending on the availability of input data for the ESCS used, the E-impacts for products, services or individual labor can be one of three cases:

A. Calculated most accurately (between participants).

B. Estimated with significant uncertainty (using CQR codes)

C. Crudely estimated (default, without use of CQR codes)

For all cases B and C, statistical methods are used to make sure that:

  • The E-impacts calculated for case B are in almost all cases higher than for case A.
  • The E-impacts calculated for case C are in almost all cases higher than for case B.

In reality a mixture of methods A, B and C will be used at any given time, until (first) most methods C are replaced by methods B and (later) most methods B are replaced by methods A. Once most individuals and products in the supply chain are participating, the E-impacts can be calculated at levels of accurately currently impossible to reach.
The above calculations are initially applied to one or two environmental impact variables and later (one at a time) expanded to all variables of the ten environmental impact groups.

 

Sustainability Calculations

Sustainabilities are calculated for participating products and services as well as individuals and organizations. Sustainability values can be calculated per environmental impact variable or as the weighted average of all E-impact variables used.

For a specific individual, the sustainability is expressed as one divided by the number of Earths needed if everybody would have the same environmental impacts as the specific individual. Conditions where an individual would live 100% sustainable are referred to as “reference” conditions. If humanity would live “on average” 100% sustainable, we would need one world. The current average overall sustainability of the world’s population is crudely estimated to be about 10% (using my estimates). This means that based on current resource use and damage done, the world population would require about 10 planets Earth to “sustainably” support the current environmental impacts.

Sustainability values for products and services are calculated by dividing the actual E-impacts per dollar spending by the sustainable (“reference”) impacts per dollar spending. This leads to the same ~ 10% sustainability for the average product and service.

In Short

The first actions individuals and organizations need to take is to communicate the existence of the EIMAC system and to provide organizational support, either is the form of “hands-on” volunteer / pro bono or financial support (preparative participation). Following this, individuals and organizations need to sign up for pre-participation (in the EIMAC system) as soon as this becomes possible. Once large numbers of individuals sign up, retailers will soon follow. The same process will play out throughout the entire supply chain. This is what will most strongly drive the changes to a globally sustainable society.

In the meantime, the following actions can and should be taken as soon as possible.

Stop the use of fossil fuels, by:

  • Changing all space heating & cooling and all hot water heating systems to geothermal heating and cooling systems.
  • By installing enough solar panels on (preferably) own roofs to provide the annual amount of power needed.
  • By transitioning to electric transportation (electric trains, bikes, scooters and cars).

For single-family homes, installation of solar and geothermal systems can be done each in two to three days. While these systems earn themselves back in 5 to 10 years, most families need low interest loans to finance these systems. For rental spaces, the landlord would need to install these systems. For buildings with insufficient perimeter space to install geothermal field loops, street supplied geothermal supply and return piping should be made available (town responsibility).

Air source heat pumps are about 2/3 as efficient as geothermal heat pumps. Air source heat pumps need thus more power to provide the same amount of heating and cooling. Power plant efficiencies vary by country and state. On average for the USA, the use of air source heat pumps would produce the same amount of carbon dioxide as emitted by heating with natural gas. Unless the annual required amount of power for a building is generated using (own) roof mounted solar panels, the use of air source heat pumps is not sustainable.

In addition, individuals and organizations need to reduce their resource use and environmental damage by:

  • Reducing consumption of meat (especially beef)
  • Using buildings surrounded by a minimum of land
  • Using buildings with multiple (5 to 10) floors and by reversing urban sprawl
  • Growing crops with water requirements matching the local climate
  • Using grey water and other water recycling systems
  • Buy products and services with the highest EIMACS sustainability ratings.

It will be hard enough to sufficiently reduce cultivated area use to allow the globally required increase of wildlife areas as needed to protect biodiversity. Globally there is ample space available on rooftops to install solar panels for all power we need. Installing solar panels on land instead of roofs is thus not sustainable.

In General

Becoming sustainable is equivalent with the following actions:

  • Resource Use Reduction and Protection:
    • Reduce environmental resource use to sustainable levels
    • Protect environmental resources to render its use sustainable
  • Elimination of Environmental Damage
    • Prevent or minimize the environmental damage done
    • Restore any current and all historic environmental damage done

There are three environmental resources for which limited amounts are sustainably available; these are:

  • The use of surface area for cultivated purposes (cultivated area use)
    • Terrestrial area use
    • Marine area use
  • Fresh water consumption
  • Soil “use” (loss & damage)

For each of these natural resources, a per capita available amount is calculated (the “sustainable allowance”). Soil is formed by natural processes form rock and organic materials, but at extremely low rates, resulting in a very small allowance for its “consumption”. For any amount of natural resource used (say one half), a certain amount of the same resource (say the other half) must be protected in order for the resource amount used to be sustainably available. Any amount of resource used in excess of the allowance represents environmental damage done. Since no allowances exist for environmental damages, all environmental damage done must be reduced to zero by the application of the equivalent amount of restoration.

In order to become sustainable, both individuals and organizations need to reduce the use of environmental resources and eliminate net environmental damage done.

In general, global sustainability improvements are advanced most by buying the most sustainable version of the type of products or service needed and by employing the most sustainable employees. Doing so rewards the more sustainable sellers (and employees) and reduces revenues for the less sustainable sellers. This signals sellers of less sustainable products and services to:

  • Start (pre)-participation in the EIMAC system
  • Selecting (first) pre-participating and (later) participating suppliers
  • Select more sustainable suppliers and products
  • Reduce location based impacts (lower area use, less E-damage, less water extraction, etc.)
  • Making investments in E-impact lowering systems and locations
  • Provide E-impact reducing employee incentives

Note: Location Based Impacts (LBIs) are all environmental impacts originating from the location used (farm, industrial area, yard, garden) that are not yet included in products or services purchased.

Reducing Damaging Environmental Impacts

By participating in the EIMAC system and selecting more sustainable over less sustainable products and services, the damaging environmental impacts will automatically be reduced. These include the following types of environmental damages:

Use of Land and Marine Area: The total area currently in use as “cultivated area” is too large. In order to protect and restore biodiversity, cultivated area use must be reduced. Since most cultivated areas on land are used to grow feed for livestock, the consumption of meat (especially beef, mutton pork and goat) and milk products must be reduced.  Oceans are overfished and open water fishing must be drastically reduced. Farm raised fish should preferably originate from land-based aquaculture (in large tanks) leaving the local freshwater species assemblies (in rivers, lakes and ponds) unaffected.

Wildlife Area Loss and Damage: Wildlife areas are increasingly converted to farmland, leading to fragmentation and reduction of wildlife habitat.

Fresh Water Consumption: The consumption of fresh water must be reduced to sustainable levels. This means growing local climate appropriate crops (not needing irrigation more than a few days a year). Treated (cleaned) wastewater needs to be returned close to the point of extraction, such that its path through the watershed is minimally affected.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Prevention: The use of fossil fuels must be phased out over the next 20 years, by improving the building codes, switching to roof solar systems and wind energy. All low temperature heat requirements (like HVAC and hot water) should be met using geothermal heat pumps. Power plants need to switch to quick starting power generating systems that allow zero to full capacity load changes (and vice versa) in 10 minutes, to facilitate the short-term power fluctuations inherent to PV solar and wind power generation systems. 

Soil Loss & Damage Prevention: Soil loss and damage must be prevented (soil erosion, soil loss with products harvested, loss of soil carbon, other soil components and pollution prevention).

Providing Environmental Conservation

By participating in the EIMAC system and selecting more sustainable over less sustainable products and services, the required environmental conservation will automatically be applied (limited to availability).  These include the following types of environmental conservation:

Wildlife Area Conservation: Protection of remaining wildlife areas in all ecosystems. Restoration, expansion and interconnection of nearby protected wildlife areas in all ecoregions.

Atmospheric Restoration: Removal of carbon dioxide from fresh air through direct air carbon capture and carbon and sequestration (DACC&CS), where all carbon dioxide captured is permanently stored in underground basaltic rock formations. This excludes processes where carbon dioxide is removed from smokestacks and used for further extraction of fossil fuels (oil and gas).

Fresh Water System Restoration: Water flows in rivers and streams need to be restored to sustainable levels, by reducing water extraction and a switch to large-scale use of reverse osmosis (using solar and wind energy) for cultivated purposes.

Soil Restoration: Soils and sediments need to be restored by returning eroded soil components from catch basins, to the origination fields by increasing the carbon content of soils and by cleaning polluted soils.

E-Voucher Funding will Drive E-Conservation

Arguably the best aspect of the EIMAC system is its ability to generate large amounts of funding, even at relatively low initial rates of participation. This funding allows environmental conservation (wildlife areas, other), but is in particular important to kick-start atmospheric restauration (carbon dioxide removal from air or DACC&CS).  For transactions between participants, the seller provides environmental (E) vouchers paying for the environmental (E) conservation to render the overall purchase net free of environmental (E) damage. These vouchers are the source of this funding.

Using the example for carbon (C) sequestration, at 1% global individual participation and 10% availability of participating products and carbon sequestration costs of $100 per ton of CO2, this translates to the need of 44 such C-sequestration facilities, each removing 1-million-ton CO2 from the air per year. To meet this demand, one such facility would need to be completed every 8.3 days. Currently none of such facilities are built due to lack of demand.

One unknown is the rate at which these factories could actually be built? Especially; what would be the upper limit? Looking at the economic history since the renaissance; when an attractive investment return could be made, investment money could always be found, even when the risks were relatively high. For C-sequestration paid using C-vouchers, the money would first pile up in escrow account owned by the EIMACS organization well before each additional factory would be completed. These large and growing amounts of money, waiting to be spent on conservation, would reduce the investment risk of building additional C-sequestration facilities. The EIMACS organization could further reduce the actual risk by finding additional ways to guarantee the full utilization of the C-sequestration capacity available (3rd party guarantors).

Setting Goals and Removing the Bulk of Historically Emitted Carbon Dioxide

Note: The calculation model used below and the related figures are current under peer review and potentially subject to change.

We can set our goals higher or lower for returning to pre-industrial atmospheric conditions. Setting our goal lower would defeat the purpose. We could set our goal to the more ambitious target of reaching this point in 40 year. Following that scenario, and in combination with a fossil fuel phase out in 20 years, about 100,000 of such factories need to be built in the next decades. The world could become “net carbon neutral” in 10 to 15 years. Figure 1 shows that for a targeted elimination of fossil fuel C-emission in 20 years and a return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years, global carbon neutrality would be reached in 12 years (depending on variable settings). The calculation model uses an initial cost of C-sequestration of 600 $/tCO2 dropping to 50 $/tCO2 after 20 years. Sigmoid functions are used to:

  • simulate a gradual reduction of the C-sequestration costs from 600 $/tC to 50 $/tC
  • simulate a gradual initial reduction of C-emissions, reflecting a likely slower initial societal participation.

Figure 2 shows the ramp-up of C-sequestration capacity as needed to reach pre-industrial conditions in 40 years.

Interestingly, in case the phase-out of fossil fuels would take twice as long (40 instead of 20 years), this would delay the time to reach pre-industrial conditions by only one year (to 41 years, no chart shown). The immediate and accelerated construction of C-sequestration facilities is thus essential and more important than a focus on accelerated C-emissions reductions in less than 20 years.

Figure 1: Effects of phasing out fossil fuel use in 20 years and building C-sequestration facilities to return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years. The remaining (dropping) carbon dioxide emission and the increasing C-sequestration capacity, lead to net global carbon neutrality after 12 years. (Figure to be replaced with updated version). Source: Vincent Dert

New building codes should require all new or remodeled buildings to be carbon negative (providing more energy than they use) and sell the remainder to the local utility at market rates. Building codes should require fossil fuel-based heat generating system to be replaced by geothermal heating systems for all low temperature heating application. This means that existing heating systems can be replaced at the end of their economic life cycle (15 to 20 years).

Utility electric power generating systems (typically “Combined Cycle systems) need to be replaced by quick starting “diesel” system mostly using fuels (methanol, ethanol) made from carbon dioxide recovered form air using solar and wind energy. 

After reaching pre-industrial atmospheric conditions in year 40, most of the C-sequestration capacity is no longer needed. Only the newest and most efficient fraction of all C-sequestration facilities should be maintained to remove the remaining amounts of carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes and to remove carbon dioxide still venting from oceans and forests until the new steady state condition is reached between atmosphere, oceans and forests. The solar and wind energy no longer needed for C-sequestration can then be used for powering reverse osmosis water plants as needed to further reduce water withdrawals form rivers and streams as needed to return their flows to environmentally sustainable amounts and to restore aquafers water levels.

Figure 2: Carbon sequestration capacity and remaining C-emissions versus time for phasing out fossil fuel use in 20 years and building sequestration facilities to return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years. Source: Vincent Dert

From Peak CO2 to Rebuilding Glaciers

The calculation model also calculates the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over time, peaking at 235 ppm ten years after the model start date (see figure 3). C-sequestration is purposely continued to reach atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations lower than pre-industrial conditions. Slightly lower than pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations need to be maintained for decades to centuries to create modest global cooling conditions.

Figure 3: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels corresponding to C-emissions and C-sequestration conditions shown in figure 2. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations slightly lower than in year 1750 are used to induce gentle global cooling as needed to cool the world’s oceans and to rebuild global glaciers and polar ice caps. Source: Vincent Dert

These slightly cooling conditions are needed to cool Earth down (the surfaces of oceans and lands) from their still elevated temperatures and to speed up the restoration of snow and ice caps everywhere on Earth. The thus increasing glacier mass will gradually restore melt-water river flows to pre-historic conditions.

A recently published detailed costs estimate for one of the carbon (C) sequestration processes shows that initial costs for C-sequestration are relatively high and estimated at 94 to 232 $/tCO2, and thus lower than the initial costs of 600 $/tCO2 used in the above model. Longer term, costs are expected to drop below 50 $/tCO2. We need to start building these commercial size plants and simply pay the initial higher price to allow their cost to come down.

The calculation model ignores the carbon dioxide absorption by oceans and forests during the first ~ 30 years. If these effects were included, the carbon neutrality condition would be reached earlier, and the atmospheric peak carbon dioxide concentration would be lower than for the current model. The overall period needed to stop global warming would also be shorter.

A similar approach is followed for biodiversity restoration and all other E-restoration variables, leading to a return to (the best approximation of) pre-industrial conditions in 100 to 300 years.

Global Support

Support Needed

The planet is running out of time. For the EIMAC system to enact the fastest possible rate of progress, we need to build our team quickly. We would like individuals and organizations around the globe with skills and experience in the following subject areas, who want to volunteer their time, to contact us. Please list areas of expertise in the email subject field. 

Contact us
Pre-Funding Stage

Pro Bono Legal Support

  • Verification and updates of legal disclaimers and policy statements for website (cookie and privacy policies, terms of use, DCMA, others).
  • Creation of a hybrid organizational structure (combined for-profit and charity organizations)
  • Evaluation and recommendation of legal and financially best international locations for the organizational headquarter.
  • Creation of charity organizations in the first few most important global regions

Website Maintenance, Improvement and Response Capability

  • General improvement of English language version (simpler text)
  • SEO optimization
  • Marketing related text improvement
  • Create email response capability (answering emails)
  • Computer translation (and language editing) to the most important global languages.
  • Newsletter functionality and regular news postings.

Scientific Community Support

  • Peer review of critical Excel calculation models
  • Proofreading, editing, peer review and (book) publication of scientific texts related to measurement of the environmental impact variables.
  • Formation of scientific advisory boards for each of the ten environmental impact groups and the human condition impact group.
Crowdfunding and General Funding Stage

Financial support (gifts)

  • Hosting costs, website maintenance and SEO
  • An 2nd generation improved website with database functionality
  • Pay for contract tasks (scientific, other)
  • Marketing and communication
  • Small scale field testing
  • Hiring of staff members
  • Renting office space
  • Software coding of the various software modules as needed for implementation
  • Implementation prior to receiving sufficient revenues
  • Global trademark protection (follow up on “office actions”)

  • Global patent approval (national prosecution phase)

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