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Are we failing to see the wood for the gadgets?
Martin Hunt, March 10th 2010, Built environment, General
I’ve recently found myself questioning whether we are becoming over-reliant on technological fixes to the sustainability challenges we face today. Are we in danger of falling for ‘techno-wash’ as a way of avoiding some more fundamental (and maybe more painful) decisions about the way we live our lives? Does technology sometimes obscure the bigger picture?
Did you see the story about one of the government’s new flagship schools pulling the plug on interactive whiteboards and other wireless components, and reverting to pen and paper? Teachers wanted to avoid wasting time when systems failed to function properly, and losing the attention of pupils.
How about this recent post on our website? It made me laugh. Apparently iPhone users can now download an app to show them whether they should stop using said app, and pocket their iPhone. The so-called ASBO app displays 'anti-social behaviour' statistics for the user's current location. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume the reason for the app was to simply tell users to “get off the thing, be sociable and actually talk to your mates”. And I know I wasn’t alone in that reaction.
Get off your Luddite high horse I hear you cry. Ok, I’ll admit to being a bit of a technophobe. I’m frequently in deep and murky waters when trying to talk about apps or Twitter and feel a killjoy when I question whether the latest fashionable gadget really does makes life a lot easier or much more pleasurable. Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic benefits to most of our advances in technology, be that the wheel, windmill or the worldwide web. I just become a bit irrational or disconcerted about our reliance on shiny technology sometimes.
But this is a really important issue as we seek to develop a low carbon economy and society. For example, the Zero Carbon Hub’s report rightly suggests that a lot more needs to be done to market zero carbon homes. It highlights the fact that while consumers are happy to take a risk on the next cool gadget, they won’t take a punt on a zero carbon home because it is perceived to be too futuristic, hi-tech and experimental. When you consider the money involved, that’s not a surprise – the appetite for fashionable, innovative technology will obviously take the consumer only so far.
Of course in years to come, I’ve no doubt that the highly fashionable iPhone or a super duper variation will be integral to remotely managing the heating in your home, rotating your roof top renewables, or altering the tints in your windows! And I acknowledge we will not be able to deliver a truly zero carbon home that is fit for our expectations without the help of technology.
It’s all very well to try and paint a positive vision of a low-carbon future, replete with whizz bang applications (sorry, apps) and smart technology, but there is a danger that we can turn some people off (not literally) by placing too much emphasis on high-tech solutions. Indeed, from my work with building design professionals and their clients, I know that technology can be a distraction from low-tech, passive solutions that can have a bigger overall impact.
The old adage of avoid, reduce, then replace (fossil fuel sources on energy) continues to serve us well. Being clever about building form and orientation, and concentrating on the fabric of our buildings must come before the signing of cheques for ground source heat pumps or micro-wind turbines. And it is certainly time we stop hearing about buildings that have photovoltaic arrays or solar panels on north-facing roofs!
So, here’s a plea – don’t forget the simple, low-tech decisions we can all take which deliver greater benefits than that shiny item that sits on your roof, in your office or in your pocket. Technology has its place in making our world more sustainable, but our collective understanding of what our priorities should be and the changes in behaviour which will flow from that should have much more of a lasting legacy.
Martin Hunt is Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future
The Marmot Review: health and inequality in the spotlight once more
Jonathon Porritt, February 18th 2010, Forum founders, General, Public Sector
I spent last Friday at the launch conference for the Marmot Review – a report on health and equality and what we should be doing about them here in the UK.
It’s a really good report and powerfully reminds all those who see themselves as active in the ‘sustainable development community’ of the overlap with the public health/health and equalities community, and the importance of working much more effectively together than we’ve sometimes been able to in the past.
I won’t bang on about those synergies, two graphics in the Review illustrate these well. (See Fig 4.6 on cycling on page 127 or Fig 4.7 on green spaces on page 130 of the Review)
Some people say that this is all old hat. The Black Report, the Acheson Report, the Wanless Report. And now the Marmot Report. Same old, same old.
In some instances, that’s true. But there are many completely new insights in this report, building on new evidence. For instance, the principal recommendation (‘give every child the best start in life’) is based on new research looking at what happens between birth and the third year of any child’s life.
Just looking at the difference between the most advantaged and the least advantaged on indicators like birth weight, post-natal depression for mothers, regular bed times, being read to every day, breastfeeding and so on, you can see why this is the critical point of intervention. After the age of three, a lot of future interventions may well be far less impactful. And by the age of five, brighter, poorer kids have been overtaken by less bright kids from families that are better off.
Intriguingly, the most inspiring talk of the day came from the Deputy Chief Fire Officer from Merseyside. The Fire and Rescue Service on Merseyside has been running a community engagement and advocacy programme for the last 10 years, providing advice in the first instance on fire prevention, but then helping local residents think much more about all those things that exacerbate health inequalities (smoking, alcohol, drugs, poor quality housing, poor diets and so on), whilst simultaneously increasing fire risk – if only indirectly. His officers are now putting out 50% fewer fires than 10 years ago.
The Deputy Chief Fire Officer didn’t bring this out explicitly, but his presentation provided a powerful analogy for the whole day. Shift the effort (and the investment) upstream – into prevention and brilliant public service interventions in people’s lives – and the downstream costs can be progressively reduced. But if you don’t do that, there’ll be no reductions downstream.
The vast majority of health practitioners are well aware of that. But the truth of it is that after 30 years of talking about prioritising prevention and public health, practically nothing has been done about it. Just 4% of total health spending in the UK goes on prevention and public health.
The Marmot Review doesn’t make a particularly strong case on that score. But the truth of it is that all its recommendations may well make no more progress than the recommendations of its predecessors unless that imbalance is addressed.
A fair share
Helen Clarkson, February 15th 2010, General, Leadership, Public Sector
Peter Mandelson’s famous statement that Labour is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” has come back to haunt the party and will no doubt be wheeled out again in the coming election campaign.
A new report notes that 13 years of Labour rule have done little to reverse the huge growth in the gap between rich and poor that developed under Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in the 1980s.
The National Equality Panel (commissioned by Harriet Harman MP) published its report 'An Anatomy of Economic Equality in the UK' in January. It contains some worrying facts and figures about the distribution of wealth in the UK, with the panel finding “deep-seated and systematic differences in economic outcomes” between and within social groups.
The report contains startling statistics about the growing gaps in earning and income inequality and their scale compared with other developed nations. It also shows a persistent gender gap, with women being on the whole better qualified than men up to the age of 44, but with a median hourly pay of 21% less than men. It points to continuing ethnic inequalities, finding that Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim men and Black African Christian men are paid 13-21% lower than White British Christian men with the same job and qualifications. And it reveals that the richest 10% of UK population has more than 100 times the total household wealth of the poorest 10%.
Why does all this matter? Mandelson qualified his statement by saying Labour was relaxed about the rich “as long as they pay their taxes”. But the figures in the NEP report debunk the myth of ‘trickle-down economics’: the idea that if those at the top of the pile become ‘filthy rich’ those further down will also reap the benefits. Instead what it shows is that as the rich become richer, the wealth remains largely at the top and the rungs on the social ladder move further apart.
This has important consequences for society. In their 2009 book The Spirit Level (out this month in paperback) authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have made a compelling case that more equal societies fare better than more unequal ones. Across a wide variety of indicators of social wellbeing including physical and mental health, obesity, violent crime rates and teenage births, they show that, once a country has reached the level of GDP which lifts it out of poverty, what matters is not how much wealth there is in that country but how it is distributed.
There is a clear parallel with the depletion of our environmental resources. Just as in the UK we see wealth concentrated in a small section of society, so on a global level the rich use far more than their fair share of available environmental resources such as carbon, water, and food. We are only beginning to start thinking – largely through the climate debate – what the long-term implications of that unfair distribution might be, and how that will impact on all of us.
At Copenhagen this theme was taken up by the G77 nations. But once again we saw world leaders seemingly ‘intensely relaxed’ about attaching more importance to protecting their national economies than the global need to reduce carbon emissions dramatically, for the benefit of all.
If we are to start thinking about truly sustainable development, where the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, then we need to start taking these issues of distribution more seriously. We need to let the idea of trickle-down economics go for good. That requires a level of bravery and leadership that we haven’t seen in our politicians for many decades. And more importantly support from an enlightened public. Redistribution has fallen out of favour in recent decades - the question is how we’re going to bring it back?
Lessons from Kraft’s Cadbury takeover
Jonathon Porritt, February 12th 2010, Business, Finance, Forum founders, General
So the first blow has fallen on Cadbury’s from its new owners, Kraft.
The Keynsham plant near Bristol (pictured) will close, despite the fact that Kraft promised to keep it open (that was actually a bit weird, as Cadbury itself had announced that Keynsham would be closed at some stage in the future).
And the fear, of course, as much in the mind of Peter Mandelson as in the minds of all Cadbury’s workers, is that this is just the first of many cuts that will be brought forward during the next few years.
I haven’t written about this since the takeover. Apart from the odd sardonic chuckle as the process unfolded (with that arch-globaliser Mandelson shedding a few crocodile tears at another ‘great British company’ being gobbled up by ‘predators’ like Kraft – or Warren Buffet (who owns about 9% of Kraft) complaining that it’s a really bad deal for Kraft shareholders, however good a deal it might be for Cadbury shareholders), it’s been too bloody miserable.
The optimists would have curmudgeons like me cheer up a little. They point to the pledges made by Kraft to stick by Cadbury’s ethical and Fairtrade commitments. Just before the Cadbury’s Board accepted the bid it announced that Green & Black’s would be moving its entire range to Fairtrade by the end of 2011, which elicited the following emollient words from Kraft:
“We strongly support certification as a way to improve sustainability in cocoa farming, so we welcome this step by Green & Black’s. Cadbury and Green & Black’s have proud histories in ethical sourcing, and if our offer is successful, we look forward to maintaining this heritage.”
Just so long as you ignore the unmistakable sound of grinding teeth behind the reassuring words, perhaps that really is something to be optimistic about.
But it is still a wretched outcome. And surely a complete failure on the part of Cadbury’s shareholders to tell the difference between ‘a good price’ and ‘lasting value’.
Roger Carr, who has just stepped down as Chairman from Cadbury, having felt ‘obliged’ to recommend to shareholders the offer of £11.7 billion (up from the opening bid of £9.8 billion in September last year) has now weighed in with some ‘radical ideas’ to ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again. He has suggested raising the ‘victory margin’ from 50% plus one share to 60% plus one share, and that simultaneously there should be a rule that those who bought shares during the course of any takeover battle would not be permitted to vote until the battle was over.
Useful ideas. But the lack of any genuinely radical ideas during the takeover battle was very noticeable. “This is just the way it is with markets”, as one commentator put it. Indeed! Which is why we go through the same nightmarish process with every single takeover proposal.
Why don’t we, for instance, have more John Lewis look-a-likes in the UK? The John Lewis Partnership is hugely admired even by people in the City – even if they don’t really approve of its ‘bizarre’ employee benefit Trust. But this example has been followed by very few companies over the years. As is the case with Scott Bader (a successful chemicals company), and Tullis Russell (a successful paper company in Scotland).
But there is still Royal Mail, which currently has only one shareholder (the Government), which would make it easier to think of some kind of employee ownership basis. Allan Leighton, Royal Mail’s Chairman, has indeed hinted at the possibility of some kind of employee share-ownership.
The interesting thing is that employee-owned companies regularly outperform those in the FTSE All-Share Index. Over the last 17 years, employee-owned companies have outperformed FTSE All-Share companies each year by an average of 10%. In the third quarter of 2009, for instance, employee-owned companies’ share prices were up 27.6% compared to FTSE All-Share companies share prices, which were up 21.3% over the quarter.
But we are still so stuck in our wretchedly unsustainable ways when it comes to ownership structures within the capitalist economy.
Our health depends on a sustainable future
Ben Tuxworth, February 11th 2010, General, Public Sector
If you live in the London borough of Kensington you can expect to live 17 years longer than people just seven miles away in Tottenham Green. This shocking statistic is revealed in a government-ordered review of health inequalities in England, published today. It’s forthright about their social, environmental and economic causes – but will it help us prepare better for a very uncertain future?
The review, published today, is called Fair society, healthy lives but the title might equally well have been ‘it’s bleedin’ obvious, but now we’ve proved it!’ Reducing health inequalities, says its author, Professor Tony Marmot, requires us to give people a good start in life, a decent education, a meaningful job, a healthy environment and supportive community, and then do stuff that stops them getting ill. Of course, doing all this at the same time and for everyone is the trick, and the review also points out the need for the agencies of government, both national and local, to join up to achieve these improved outcomes.
And yet they don’t. Marmot proves once again how our society generally fails to pursue apparently complementary objectives in a complementary way – and in the case of addressing the causes of health inequality, has actually got steadily worse in the last decade or so. The consequences of this failure to join up are depressingly familiar to the environment and development specialists who invented the concept of sustainable development back in the 1980s.
Twenty years on from its entry into the debate, that concept has proved itself the only useful frame in which to understand and address the patchy nature of our social and economic progress, and its perverse outcomes. Sustainable development puts in context what public health specialists have known for generations: that health is not created by medical intervention, and that socio-economic inequality correlates relentlessly with health inequality. Marmot shows how our failure to understand this has serious enough consequences now. But given what we now know about environmental change, we need to understand the bigger picture if we are to stop things getting much worse – its consequences in the future will be far worse.
Marmot doesn’t speculate much about what might be at stake or achievable in the long term, or indeed how changes in the global environment might impact on the effectiveness of the many policies it he proposes to address health inequality. But if we are serious about creating health in a world of growing population and diminishing resource, it’s clear we are going to have to rethink the fundamentals, such as the roots of our GDP fetish, the way we treat our ecosystem, and what we understand by our responsibilities – to each other and to future generations.
Some of this ‘bigger picture’ comes out in the review. It was conducted through a collection of working groups, and Forum for the Future was commissioned to develop a vision for a sustainable healthcare system as a contribution to the working group on sustainable development, which we have published separately here. While the review was underway we also worked with the NHS to imagine how environmental constraints might affect healthcare provision by 2030, and published Fit for the Future, now being sent to all NHS organisations in England.
As we conducted those pieces of work it became clear that the model of creating health through ever more sophisticated and costly medical interventions is essentially ‘broken’ already, and will be impossible to sustain in any plausible future scenario. The sooner we think about the ultimate sources of health in the environment – clean air, safe and sufficient food and water – and reorganise ourselves differently to protect them, the better our chance of avoiding a very nasty surprise.
Fair society, healthy lives is certainly alive to the need to address climate change and health inequality at the same time, via simple measures like home insulation and active travel. And it asks government "to put sustainability and well-being before economic growth", a bold demand which sadly both Tories and Labour seem unlikely to meet any time soon.
Where we would have gone further is in placing these calls in the context of trends in global unsustainability and its impacts on our health in the future. How will we achieve health equality on one tonne of carbon a year each? What will collapsing food supply chains mean for our poorest communities?
Without a more explicit framing of this sort, and a more compelling vision of what the future might hold, the risk is that Marmot’s call to address the causes of health inequality will remain in political terms a ‘nice to have’, rather than a central part of preparing us for the much bigger shocks that lie ahead. Perhaps the language of sustainable development is not flavour of the month, but sometimes, it really is the only way to understand our current predicament and what needs to be done.
Erosion: the dilemma of the decade
Anna Simpson, January 15th 2010, Climate change, General, Travel and tourism
It was the sort of mud that seems intent on dragging you down, slurping up your ankles and slipping under your soles. But the view redeemed all seven miles of undignified tumbles and slides as I walked from Lyme Regis to Seaton on the UK’s Jurassic Coast. Sparse vegetation skidded down the exposed bones of the cliffs, irate waves clawing at them like wildcats. I got back to the B&B to find a lively discussion under way about huge boulders tumbling down to the sea on an almost daily basis – while heedless tourists fumble around for fossils below…
Ever since ten-year-old Mary Anning found a complete ichthyosaurus some 200 years ago, Lyme Regis has been a hub for fossil hunters. It’s all thanks to giant mudslides – the largest in Europe – that expose new rocks and leave Jurassic remains scattered across the beaches.
For geologists, this ongoing erosion makes the site a whole lot more interesting – but
rising sea levels and freak storms are changing the shape of coastlines around the world at a violent rate. Defences like jetties and marinas can keep the waves at bay – but they also stop coastal habitats and systems from responding to the changes in their own way. This can detract from the fossil-strewn appeal of beaches: not great for local economies dependent on tourism.
The question is, how to find the right balance between preserving towns like Lyme Regis and its surroundings for visitors – on the one hand – and protecting the natural life and geological interest of the coast, a World Heritage Site, on the other.
It’s a small case in point, but as the climate teeters, knowing when to interfere – and just how far to go – could be the dilemma of the decade.
The empathy gap
Helen Clarkson, January 5th 2010, Climate change, General
As I read this weekend’s papers and made my way through lists of things to make me a better person this year, one piece of wisdom stood out from the usual litany of drink less, exercise more, go to bed earlier - a call for us to be more empathetic.
Roman Krznaric’s suggestion, in The Observer, sounded more interesting than all of the others (though of course I’ll be giving those a shot too), so I duly looked at his blog: www.outrospection.org where, amongst other thoughts, he has a very interesting piece on empathy and climate change. There’s also a full article here.
Krznaric’s argument is that empathy is a powerful emotional tool that can be mobilised to create social change. He offers the historical example of the rise of the social movement that challenged slavery, which created an outpouring of empathy from the public, and quotes historian Adam Hochschild as saying “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy”.
We need that scale of empathetic response, he says, to deal with climate change, and to close the gap between knowledge and action.
He points to two types of empathetic response that we need – through time (to future generations) and across space (to people living now in developing countries). This is familiar territory to anyone who’s thought long and hard about sustainable development which has right at its heart the ideas of inter- and intra-generational justice, i.e. that we should develop in a way that allows others now and in the future to meet their needs.
The problem has been how to take the idea that we all have the same entitlement to meeting our needs, put this into practice and articulate it at a policy level. Krznaric is suggesting that empathy provides a way of bridging the gap, where political and economic arguments fail.
Empathy has definitely started moving up the agenda in recent years, particularly as it’s a topic which Barack Obama has talked so much about, referring often to what he calls the ‘empathy deficit’: “When those of us in comfort can’t look at a child in poverty and say ‘they’re just like my kid, they’re as special as mine’”.
Examples of the use of empathy in public policy can also be found with the success of movements such as that for Restorative Justice, which brings together the victims of crimes with their perpetrators. It has been shown to be beneficial for both, and to reduce re-offending rates. By putting themselves in the place of the other, both sides it seems have much to gain.
I spent some time last year wondering if we wouldn’t be doing better on climate change if we had more women leaders? It feels like there’s still a lot of belief in the macho-techno solution that is going to come from somewhere at some point and sort this out, without the need for behaviour change.
However, I’ve decided this isn’t to do with male versus female, but the sort of leaders we tend to go for. A year into office and Obama is already accused of not ‘doing’ enough. It seems people don’t want leaders who think, or empathise, they want people who (appear to) act: reflective types need not apply.
But I think Krznaric is right. We’re going to need a huge dose of empathy to sort this out, at every level. It’s a nice thought experiment to wonder how Obama would find running China for a week, and vice versa with Wen Jiabao. I don’t think we’ll persuade them to do it. But if we teach ourselves to empathise more with others, maybe we’ll learn to press our politicians for the right sort of solutions. We may also choose different politicians, and look for different characteristics in our leaders. I wonder how differently Copenhagen would have turned out with a bit more empathy?
Copenhagen flop means business must take a stand
Ben Tuxworth, December 22nd 2009, Business, Climate change, General, International
As Copenhagen diminishes in the rear-view mirror, we must still do whatever we can to stop it also sinking beneath the waves.
What should organisations make of the Copenhagen Accord (or if you find accord just too challenging, ‘letter of intent’)? With its questionable traction, action-free plan to keep temperature rises under two degrees, vague suggestions about using the markets, technology and forests er…somehow, and unappealing invitation to all nations to record whatever voluntary commitments they’d like to make in a special register, it doesn’t exactly help you believe in Santa again. As China distances itself even from this weedy document, leaving no clear path to something more binding next year, it would be perfectly reasonable to find the whole thing pretty depressing.
Whether you blame Denmark, China, or the UN itself, organisations – particularly businesses - hoping that Copenhagen would bring some clarity on the carbon regime they should be planning for, will have to wait. With no clear shared targets, timetable, or approach to markets, the temptation to wait and see before making investments – and then pile into countries with weaker carbon regimes – will be hard to resist. Some companies are already making it clear that if governments were expecting them to make the big investments in the low-carbon transition, they have utterly failed to create the environment required.
It would be easy to throw our hands up in despair. But as with all such crises, of course, this is exactly when leadership has to stand up. As Ronan Dunne, CEO of Telefonica O2 pointed out at a recent Forum for the Future event, decisions where you can analyse the numbers for an answer don’t need leaders. Ditto moments when everyone knows what to do. It’s time to decide what you really think about it all, and take a stand.
But in the face of uncertainty about carbon, what’s the right leadership stance to adopt? Before COP 15 we had five arguments for action. One was that a future regulatory environment on carbon constituted a risk too potentially expensive to ignore. That one may be on hold. But the others – the arrival of peak oil; the fact that most of what you would do to decarbonise makes social and economic sense anyway; the lesson of history that responding to a constraint can drive game-changing innovation; and the awful truth that there are plenty of other, much less debatable environmental challenges already at the gate – all still stand. Now’s the time to make the most of them.
So the post-Copenhagen world means pushing on with pretty much all those things that made business sense at the end of November. And ultimately it means remembering that, somewhere out there in the darkness, climate change itself grinds on, indifferent to our hopes, fears and failed conferences, and still the greatest challenge facing humanity.
Merry Christmas!
Scaling the summit of sustainability
Steven Bland, December 21st 2009, General, Leadership
I’ve debated with Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, surveyed 13,000 people at a national charity about their views on sustainability, and spent three exhausting days at the Leadership Trust in Ross-on-Wye, all in one action-packed first ‘term’ on Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development
I’ve written close to 20,000 words, felt useless and useful in equal measure, role-played being a local councillor, given a class on energy and climate change to a group of Year 9 schoolchildren, and immersed myself in the world of sustainability: from social capital, to the Natural Step, to carbon markets and green economics.
Staff at the Forum describe us as future ‘change agents’. It’s an alluring yet daunting phrase. In our first week we were presented with the image of a snow-capped mountain: ours to climb this year. This was the goal of our journey - a sustainability vantage point from which we could survey the state of the planet and its people and contribute to creating a world of increased social and environmental prosperity, a ‘good’ world, not just a less bad one.
My current vantage point is a long way off that sustainability mountain (I reckon there’s been a bit of altitude sickness, and there’s more to come). I’m currently well below the tree line… - in fact I’m selling trees. Are Christmas trees sustainable, I ask myself, as I wrap them in plastic netting which I fear could end up in the stomach of some unfortunate seabird.
Truly understanding the sustainability of the humble Christmas tree has less to do with netting and more about the systems with which the tree interacted and was a part. What effect did growing have on local ecological systems? Were the people who trimmed them into shape paid a living wage? And how did this impact on local societies? The Forum has instilled in me the importance of systems thinking which involves seeing the forest, in spite of the trees. Creating a more just and prosperous future will require us to change the way we think fundamentally.
In these first few months I’ve seen glimpses of a sustainable future. For example, district heating through Combined Heat and Power plants in Birmingham where efficiency is 85% compared to traditional power stations’ frankly pathetic 35%. I’ve seen the value of local strategic partnerships bringing businesses, politicians and community groups together to create shared visions of prosperous, low-carbon futures.
It’s been a personal journey too. At Birmingham City Council, as I sat wondering what I should be doing and puzzled over how to integrate into the team during my four-week placement, I was beset by a lack of imagination, inspiration and drive. I was better prepared to deal with this because of our seminars on the importance of self-reflection and self-learning.
The course’s focus on self-directed learning is vital, but challenging! It’s a far cry from university, and it leads to moments of self-doubt about whether I’m making the most of the opportunities being placed in front of me. The Forum leaves doors ajar - we have to push on the ones we want, and decide how to walk through them. Sometimes it’s not very clear or obvious how to do that!
Throughout it all, lecturers have stressed the importance of optimism.
The catastrophic and negative portrayals of the environmental movement have desensitised people to many environmental issues. The number of people who deny that human activity causes climate change is growing, not diminishing. How do we create a positive vision of the future, whilst convincing people of the scale and urgency of the problem at hand? This is a key question we’ve been battling with in the past few months on our first two of five placements this year: in the NGO sector and in local government.
What’s been the hardest? Bridging that gap between those of us who are climbing that mountain, and many others I meet who haven’t even heard of the mountain, never mind seen it. The reality is the core messages and realities of sustainable development are often lost in a sea of ‘greenwash’ and climate-change frenzy. “I’m doing a course in Leadership for Sustainable Development” I say, excitedly, yet with trepidation. The response? Blank faces, or an uncertain “Oh, that’s cool”, or the most terrifying: “What’s sustainable development?!” Explaining that one succinctly, whilst staying positive, has been more difficult than I expected!
There’s a lot more to come on this journey. I’m off to the Department for Energy and Climate Change next month and am both apprehensive and excited about a placement with big business, a corporation or bank after that. The attitude to take on this course is ‘no-holds-barred’ - seeing even difficult challenges as a welcome contribution to personal development and learning.
The course is a great melting point of young optimism, drive and differing opinions. My fellow students include scientists, philosophers, sociologists and vegans, people passionate about social media, sustainable fashion or activism, all united by one common aspiration: to get out there and do something that creates true ‘added value’ for people and the environment, and to ‘reverse the perverse’ in our economic and social systems.
The best thing so far? The fun. Twelve people trekking up that mountain together, exploring, learning, and creating, together with expert facilitators and lecturers.
Steven Bland is a student on Forum for the Future’s Masters course in Leadership for Sustainable Development
Selling a low-carbon life just got harder
Jonathon Porritt, December 21st 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, International
From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days. Though there are now as many brave faces out there as after defeat in a general election, to bill the Copenhagen accord as anything other than a failure is simply dishonest.
Of course it matters that China, India and the United States have, for the first time, formally recognised the need for “deep cuts” in emissions of CO2. Of course it’s a good thing that rich-world countries have committed “to a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020” to help the poor world to cope with climate change. And of course it’s critical that the science underpinning these two commitments has been strongly reconfirmed.
Unfortunately, that’s about it. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, may well be right in claiming that “there is a danger of too much negativity”, but we have to be realistic about what did and didn’t happen in Copenhagen. The accord itself has no formal standing, and there are no firm figures in it regarding either the scale or urgency of the cuts required, even though many countries are already signed-up to such cuts. There are no details as to how the $100 billion will be raised. Worst of all, there is no commitment to move from this desperately inadequate accord to a legally binding treaty over the next year.
Paradoxically, the greatest cause for hope lies in the depth of that failure. Before Copenhagen, many campaigners had argued that no agreement would be better than a weak agreement. And in effect, that’s exactly what has happened.
The shock of this is only just beginning to sink in — as is the realisation that there is still all to play for before the next conference in Mexico in a year’s time. By that time Barack Obama should have done his deal with the Senate, China should have got used to its new responsibilities as a global climate player and the EU should have recovered sufficiently from the recession to play a more influential leadership role.
It is intriguing to speculate that it might be David Cameron supporting the EU in that role rather than Gordon Brown. In an election year, the domestic fallout from Copenhagen will be intense. And who knows how individual citizens will react to such a confusing scene?
For Gordon Brown, the failure of Copenhagen will be a deep disappointment. He has worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to help to broker a real deal. British embassies around the world (and particularly in China and India) have put climate diplomacy right at the top of their agenda. Mr Miliband has become the most effective member of Mr Brown’s Cabinet, and he personally played a hugely significant role in Copenhagen. Credit where credit is due: on the international stage, no Government has done more to get a legally binding deal on climate change than the UK’s.
However, the Prime Minister will not now be able to lay claim to some Copenhagen breakthrough. The UK’s unforgiving media will give him little slack in that regard. There is no reassuring “global deal” to provide cover for some of the more controversial and unpopular policies that the Government is now bringing forward — on air passenger duty, for instance, or zero-carbon housing. Peter Mandelson’s new-found enthusiasm for a “green industrial revolution” might just slip down that old fixer’s list of things that really matter in a pre-election period.
But there’s no political upside in any of that for David Cameron. Indeed, I suspect that the fallout will prove to be more problematic for Mr Cameron than for Mr Brown. It will give succour to that weird bunch of “grandees” (David Davis, Peter Lilley, Lord Lawson of Blaby et al) who have become increasingly critical of Mr Cameron’s intelligent leadership on climate change.
It will provide new ammunition for the out-and-out “contrarians” scattered through the UK media who remain unpersuaded by the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, and who do so much to reinforce people’s uncertainty and confusion.
Though I have no doubt that Mr Cameron will see off the Lawson brigade, he has a much tougher challenge on his hands with local Conservatives. Many of them do not share his enthusiasm for a low-carbon economy, do not want to sign up to the targets in the Climate Change Act, and continue to treat wind farms as if they were invading aliens from another planet. This is not just “a “generation thing”; some of the most vociferous critics of Mr Cameron’s blue-green politics are young thrusters for whom concern for the environment is seen as an ideological aberration.
All of which, I fear, will make it even harder to persuade individuals to play their small but still crucial part in addressing climate change. That feeling of disempowerment (“what difference can we make when China is single-handedly trashing the climate anyway?”) will be reinforced. Politicians will have to get even smarter in making the case — for improved energy efficiency in the home (saving you a lot of money), reduced car use (less congestion, healthier lifestyles), less waste and even more recycling (saving even more money), and more holidays at home rather than abroad (less hassle, good for the economy).
The fact that low-carbon lifestyles are both healthier and cheaper gives politicians plenty to work with. But the past two weeks in Copenhagen have not made that task any easier.
This article was originally printed in The Times, 21 December 2009
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