Founded in 1995, in honor of late Republican Senator H. John Heinz, III (1938-1991), the Heinz Center is a nonprofit institution dedicated to improving the scientific and economic foundation for environmental policy through collaboration in different sectors among industry, government, academia, and environmental organizations.
Senator Heinz was always active as a politician in initiatives to preserve the environment and to understand the impact of human actions on it. By the mid-1980s, Heinz claimed that human actions were damaging the environment and, with Democratic Senator Tim Wirth, he set up Project 88. The Project contributed to the landmark legislation Clean Air Act Reauthorization passed by the Senate in 1990. Heinz also introduced bills to encourage the recycling of newspapers, motor oil, and other hazardous wastes.
The Senate version of the Clean Air Act reauthorization bill included a Heinz amendment protecting the right of local communities to fix strict limits on radio-nuclide emissions from nuclear facilities. Heinz was one of the main supporters of legislation to require banks to encourage sustainable growth in developing nations by considering the environmental implications of projects they finance. Heinz also proposed legislation to protect groundwater and ensure proper maintenance of above-ground storage tanks, and cosponsored a bill to curtail global warming. Heinz was a firm believer that many environmental problems went beyond national borders, so he was a founding member of GLOBE (Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment) International, created in 1989 as a forum for the world’s policy-makers to exchange environmental ideas and concerns. He also chaired GLOBE-US. Heinz served in the U.S. delegation to the Interparliamentary Conference on the Global Environment in 1989. In his capacity as a member of the national board for Earth Day, Heinz sponsored a variety of organizations with educational missions. He co-chaired the Alliance to Save Energy, served as a board member to the Environment and Energy Study Institute, and, along with Senator and future Vice-President Al Gore, supported EarthTech 90, a fair of environment-friendly technology on the National Mall in 1990.
To carry out the environmentalist legacy of Senator Heinz, the center focuses on issues that confront policymakers regarding the environment. The diverse membership of the center’s board of trustees, its steering committees, and all its committees and working groups, mirror its guiding philosophy that aims to involve all relevant parties to offer solutions to the complex issues surrounding environmental policymaking. Industry, environmental organizations, academia, and government are the four components that the center attempts to involve in each of its program areas and projects. All four sectors are actively involved in all aspects of environmental policymaking, from the identification of a problem, through the suggestions of recommendations, to implementation of a policy. The cooperation between these four sectors produces solutions to the environmental challenges that face the United States and the world. The center, thus, gathers leading policymakers and practitioners from government, industry, environmental organizations, and universities to work together to identify pressing environmental challenges and to agree upon ways of meeting those challenges.
Three problem areas
The center has identified three program areas: the state of the nation’s ecosystems, global change, and the sustainable oceans, coasts and waterways. The report on the state of the nation’s ecosystems is the most comprehensive document on the condition of U.S. lands, waters, and living resources. The report supplies business leaders and the general public with essential information concerning local, state, and national environmental policy. It provides decision-makers a scientific basis to decide on the best course of action, without putting forth prescriptive recommendations. The focus of the project is on ecosystem indicators, agreed upon by hundreds of experts from universities, government agencies, corporations, and environmental organizations. Funded by the federal government, foundations, and corporations, the report also emphasizes key gaps in data that must be filled to allow a complete picture of ecosystem conditions. One of these missing data has been identified through a national "carbon storage" indicator. Also, as part of the report, the center has formed an air quality working group that has the task of identifying the suite of chemicals that pose the greatest risks to human and ecosystem health.
The Global Change Program stems from the consideration that global changes in climate pose challenges to policy-makers in both developed and developing countries. The Global Change team analyzes policy responses to global environmental changes, both in terms of limiting change and in terms of adapting to it. The Global Change program includes domestic and international collaborators. Both its present and past projects have tackled issues that are relevant for global warming. For example, the "Evaluation of Technology Policies to Help Lower Emissions of Greenhouse Gas" (1999) assessed the effectiveness of policies to accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases. The "Lowering Emission of Greenhouse Gases Through Emission Trading" (1988) examined alternative plans to include emissions trading into a potential U.S. program for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Researchers analyzed how different potential trading systems worked under realistic conditions, and provided advice to Congress and the Administration on the cost-effectiveness of the major options. The Heinz Center plays a major role in the international Global Energy Assessment (GEA) project, an effort to provide essential information for global energy policy development and future energy strategies. GEA is structured around four main areas of analysis: major global issues and energy, energy resources and technological options, possible sustainable futures, and policies advancing energy for sustainable development.
A major project of the Global Change Program is the Eco-thresholds initiative, which was established to explore the subject of defining acceptable levels of greenhouse gas concentrations and to determine how to anticipate and deal with rapid changes in ecosystems. Started in 2005, Eco-thresholds is the result of the cooperation of the Heinz Center with The Nature Conservancy and the Joint Global Change Research Institute. The project has gathered members of the scientific and policy communities to explore the science behind thresholds and their implications for decision-making. The Eco-thresholds project aims to enhance collaboration among government, business, academia, and environmental nongovernmental organizations to define key issues caused by abrupt changes in ecological systems. The project also intends to promote long-term cooperation among the sectors and stakeholders to cope with threshold changes in natural, managed, and socioeconomic systems. Finally, the participants will discuss acceptable levels of greenhouse gases necessary to limit those threshold changes that cannot be dealt with through management actions. In addition to the Eco-thresholds initiative, the center sponsors the program "Methane 2100" to document the global distributions and concentrations of methane, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere, by sensors aboard a polar retrograde orbiting satellite. The third area of intervention by the center is the Sustainable Oceans, Coasts and Waterways Program to devise policies to stop the decline in quality and sustainability in these vital areas.
