Missy Stults, Sustainability and Innovations Director for Ann Arbor, MI, has seen sustainability grow up in her community and become more mature in measuring the impact on the climate. Stults noted that data is critical to sustainability, but storytelling is just as important.
Stults, one of Constellation Research's Sustainability 50 members for 2024, caught up with me to talk sustainability and rallying a community. Here's a look at some of the takeaways:
Herding carbon cats. Stults noted the challenges with tracking carbon emissions across a community, supply chain or any other ecosystem. She said Ann Arbor's local government is responsible for just shy of 2% of the community's greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions cover buildings, water treatment plans and other infrastructure. "If I'm going to move towards carbon neutrality for the whole community in adjusted equitable way, I got to work with the whole community to do that. So, we do it through a lot of different techniques," she said. There are regulations and sticks, but carrots like resources, services, rebates and utility programs are more fun.
And sometimes you just have to show people what happens if we don't address climate change. Bad beer turns out to be an interesting illustration. Stults said:
"We've worked with local brewers and we brewed a pretty crappy beer, where all the ingredients were stressed to mimic what climate change would do to the conditions here in Michigan. Michigan has really great beer, but climate change is going to threaten that. So, we produced a craft beer and it was called fail of the earth. People got to try it and were like 'beer cannot taste like this.' We simply must do something about climate change."
The data. Stults said Ann Arbor tracks greenhouse gas inventories and there are protocols for local government operations just like businesses have. Standardization is key. But the data wrangling to date is less than perfect. Stults said:
"We also have to figure out things like purchasing. If you think about purchasing it's incredibly complex because we're trying to move to scope 3 and lifecycle analyses. I need to understand not just electric use and natural gas consumption, but what 120,000 people are buying, where those materials are coming from and how they're produced. There's a big movement in the local government field to create methodologies for how we can do that in a meaningful enough way. It'll never be specific, but we can at least have some generalized data that helps us make more informed policy decisions."
Storytelling matters as much as data. "We spend a lot of time to get up quantitative metrics in our work at the local level, storytelling is just as important," she said. "What does this work mean to the actual people who live here? What does it mean for the local business? Why are they making these investments in these practices? Why are restaurants doubling down on plant forward diets? Or why are they working on sourcing from sustainable local businesses? We're a storytelling species. We have to tell stories of what this looks like."
The evolution of sustainability. When Stults started in her role, the team was small and the survival of the department depended on businesses and people wanting to work on sustainability. Today, Ann Arbor has passed a tax to fund climate work with more than 70% of the vote. Sustainability is part of the community identity. And given natural disasters, supply chain impacts and other climate issues sustainability has become more of an issue for everyone. "People are just more they're more aware. And I think there's a willingness to do something about it," said Stults.
Supply chains and sustainability. One reason sustainability has become more prominent is its relationship with the supply chain. And economic incentives between sustainability and supply chain are aligned. Stults said:
"We're paying attention to where we get goods, supplies and materials and where the labor is coming from. We're also asking questions about what our suppliers are doing about that. How are you reducing your own emissions? How are you making sure your supply chains are resilient, and that includes your employees? How are we thinking about this system holistically? I think that has evolved a lot in the last several years. We were pretty unsophisticated in this space, even five years ago."
