O2 Eco rating helps consumers choose a sustainable future

James Taplin, August 25th 2010, Innovation, Metrics

Do you know how sustainable your mobile phone is? Not in general terms, but in comparison with the other handsets out there? Yesterday I’d be confident in putting money on the fact that you didn’t, but that is all set to change with the launch today of the new O2 Eco rating, which we’re proud to have helped develop.

Forum for the Future has been working in partnership with O2 for a while now to help them in their goal of being a leading sustainable business. The Eco rating, which can now be seen on O2 handsets online (and in-store from Friday), is one small part of that work.

O2’s Eco rating is a total sustainability assessment scheme which we’ve created together, in close collaboration with handset manufacturers, and it gives UK consumers the information they need to make an informed choice about the devices they use.
 
I’m not naïve enough to think that the sustainability of a handset is suddenly going to become the deciding factor when people are choosing a phone. But we do know that it is a significant issue for many, and a key concern for a growing few.

What’s more, it is information that UK customers have been asking for – and now they have it, for the very first time.
 
Sustainability involves an endless range of considerations – from carbon, to water, to biodiversity, to fair trade, to corporate policies, and so on. In the face of this conflicting complexity, it’s remarkably difficult to keep things easy, so we’ve spent much of the last year doing just that.

The result is that Eco rating is a sophisticated but simple assessment, which takes the full range of mobile phone sustainability impacts into account. And it does so in a way that allows all to be fairly assessed, and which communicates the results to customers in a clear and understandable way. In doing so, it also tackles one of the more fundamental challenges to a better world.

Sustainability can be paralysingly difficult to understand – and it doesn’t help that the messages are too often those of doom and gloom. Listen to the popular media, and it sounds as if the only alternatives open to us in the future are to be wiped out by packs of ravenous polar bears carried in on the tsunamis that wash across our burned and battle-scarred lands, or to revert to lives of shivering in caves huddled around earwax candles.
 
Now, I don’t know about you, but neither of these options are particularly appealing to me. And I don’t imagine they are of much interest to anyone else either, save perhaps big-game-hunting hermits (a woefully under-represented demographic group). Faced with these options, it’s little surprise if people either feel so daunted by the challenge that they need to retreat to bed and pull the covers over their head, or get on with consuming at an even greater rate.

After all, if the future is rubbish either way, the best thing to do is clearly to have as much fun now while you still can. The result of the apocalyptic message is that rational, intelligent and caring people do the opposite of what’s needed.
 
However, these nightmare future scenarios are only a tiny subset of the potential story – what is missing are the visions of how much better life could be in a sustainable future. And it will be. All the results of what is proposed in the name of ‘sustainability’ are also desirable in their own right: safer, more connected, communities; reduced fuel bills and dependence on expensive energy; a more diverse landscape producing more nutritious food; improved health for ourselves and our children; greater social justice and equality around the world; a better work–life balance...shall I go on?
 
This is the world I want, and because the future isn’t decided, it’s also the one we can have if we set our minds to it. Showing people how their future will be better and giving them clear steps to getting there offers something positive to work towards, and an incentive to do so.
 
Eco rating removes the incapacitating indecision of too much complexity and shows how desirable, cutting-edge technology has a place in a sustainable world. It gives the clear and positive message of a sustainable future that is needed to motivate people and which will, hopefully, prevent me having to brush up on my bear wrestling.

For more information, please visit the Eco ratings project page.

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Vorsprung durch Frauen

IlkaWeissbrod, June 17th 2010, General, Innovation, Metrics

It’s good to hear gender equality being talked about widely again, especially by people in my age group (30+). I’ve overheard many a discussion – and of course took part in them – and the central point is always the same: the higher you climb on the job ladder, the manlier the air. Organisations like the OECD and the ILO agree.

We at Forum for the Future are in a privileged position: four of the seven members of our senior management team are women. I know that I am incredibly lucky to have four different role models I can look up to and, believe me, my girlfriends envy me.

It’s very clear that this is quite unusual. For example, for two whole weeks I was the only woman present in all my external meetings. When I was a kid my dad said to my sister and me that we’d need to be better than men to go the same distance in the professions we chose. I always laughed and said women make up 50% of the population, when I grow up, surely, I won’t have to worry about gender issues anymore.  Well… I was wrong.

It’s not just a matter of equality, there’s also the content women bring. The humble, award-winning astrophysicist Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell aptly put it in the recent BBC documentary ‘Great Minds’: “Women simply bring a slightly different view of the world to the table”.

Some businesses do share this view. René Obermann, Chairman of Deutsche Telekom, said earlier this year: “We’ll simply be better with more women at the top.” This wasn’t just rhetoric. Since March 2010 Deutsche Telekom has set a target of at least 30% women in senior management. This is supported by a substantial HR implementation programme: university recruitment and selection processes, talent pools and internal high-potential development programmes are now all geared to reach this target. The business has also enhanced its policies on flexible working, parental leave (in Germany both parents share a chunk of ‘maternity’ leave), childcare.

Here in the UK, Kingfisher has started to report on the number of women in management positions. But the overall picture is bleak. Cranfield University reported in its annual FTSE Board report that in 2009 only six of the FTSE 100 companies had 30% or more women on their Boards. Sixty-three companies had one woman, or none, on their Boards.

I think that programmes like those at Deutsche Telekom will help women in my generation to overcome barriers to gender equality and, ultimately, bring more women into the boardrooms.

There are other gender-related postings on this Forum blog - for example from Sara Parkin. But, so far, we at the Forum haven’t systematically addressed gender issues in our work. Interestingly both Deutsche Telekom and Kingfisher report on gender through their sustainability programmes. So they see gender equality as a part of the sustainability picture.

Should we do the same and routinely encourage all our Partner organisations to work towards a quota of 30% of female Board members? Or even go beyond this number? Norway, for example, has a government quota of 40% for all public companies. Or should we at the Forum stay well clear of this debate? I’d like to hear your views.

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A common sense approach to knowing your impacts

IlkaWeissbrod, April 30th 2010, General, Metrics

We can only make good and right decisions if we know everything. We need detailed scientific measurement like life-cycle analysis data to know where the key sustainability impact areas are for any product, business or service. And only if we’re absolutely sure about all impacts can we make the best decision.

This accepted wisdom puts barriers in many great brains and blocks the development of new approaches everywhere, especially in product and service development.

Now, we at Forum for the Future are big advocates of all things measurable. They help pin down the difficult beast that is sustainability.  We have a workable definition for where we want to be ("meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”).  But how do we know when we get there? And how do we even know that we are heading in the right direction, and fast enough? Measurement helps people to set a course and answer these questions. It brings sustainability to life, makes it real, touchable and manageable.

So far so good.  So here it comes: we don’t think that all solutions and new developments have to be based on detailed measurement.

This is why many of our measurement solutions are based on the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. In essence, the Principle says that 20% of something is always responsible for 80% of a related result.  This means that any input into something doesn’t equal its output, that most things in life are not distributed evenly. And who hasn’t muttered “Life isn’t fair” at some point. The early 20th century original Pareto Principle focused on unequal wealth distribution; since then it has been established in other realms. This is probably due to the fact that many have realised the benefits of focusing on the 20% that really make a difference.

I often get asked what we at the Forum do in our metrics work. It is exactly that: we develop measurement systems that help people to understand and talk about what is important and, if used well, to speed up innovation. And yes, of course we base our measurements on detailed scientific analysis, including life-cycle data. We just trim this detailed information so people can use it to guide genuinely new approaches instead of getting bogged down in the detail.

And thank Pareto for that.

Find out more about our metrics approach and projects. 

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Sustainable Cities Index 2008 - update

Peter Madden, November 25th 2008, Cities, Metrics

Today we republish the rankings in our second annual Sustainable Cities Index. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of Forum for the Future for the clerical error which distorted our original tables.

We take the index very seriously. We have chosen our indicators because they measure things which councils can act on to improve the quality of their citizens' lives, the environment of their cities, and to future proof against a changing climate.

We know that councils benchmark their performance against this data and therefore it’s essential for it to be accurate. So when we were made aware of an error in our air quality figures we took the report off our website and launched a thorough review of all our data. We will be learning lessons to make sure this does not happen again.

What has changed as a result? Not much. The top eight cities are still in the same positions. Liverpool, Birmingham and Hull remain in the bottom four places. There have been minor moves: Liverpool is up two places; Coventry down two; London, Bradford, Sunderland and Leeds are all up one; Nottingham, Glasgow and Birmingham are down one.

The fact is that the revised index still paints much the same picture as the original one. Individual cities may have moved slightly in comparison with each other, but it still tells the same story about where each has been successful and what challenges they still face.

The index has received widespread coverage. We are now reviewing the media articles and where we feel the new figures fundamentally change the published story we will contact the newspaper, magazine or website concerned.

We will be releasing a revised report on our 2008 Sustainable Cities Index on our website in the next few days and we will send complementary copies to councils in all 20 cities. In the meantime, here are the correct 2008 rankings.

2008 rank (2007 rank)
1  (3)    Bristol
2  (1)    Brighton & Hove
3  (4)    Plymouth
4  (8)    Newcastle
5  (6)    Cardiff
6  (2)    Edinburgh
7  (7)    Sheffield
8  (14)   Leicester
9  (10)   London
10= (9)  Bradford
10= (11) Nottingham
12 (13)  Sunderland
13 (5)    Leeds
14 (17)  Coventry
15 (12)  Manchester
16 (16)  Wolverhampton
17 (20)  Liverpool
18 (15)  Glasgow
19 (19)  Birmingham
20 (18)  Hull

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Sustainable Cities Index 2008

Helen Clarkson, November 10th 2008, Cities, Metrics

Forum for the Future has published its 2nd annual Sustainable Cities Index. The easy headlines are that Bristol has leapfrogged Brighton and Hove to take first place, Newcastle has risen up the rankings to become the only northern city in the top five, and three of the bottom four places are still held by Birmingham, Liverpool and Hull.

It gets more interesting when you look behind the rankings. The exercise ranks the cities against one another and is designed to help city leaders benchmark themselves against meaningful indicators which they can do something about, like recycling rates and readiness for climate change.

But it doesn’t mean that Bristol is a genuinely sustainable city, it’s just faring better across the board than others in the UK.  Furthermore, Britain’s cities lag behind international rivals on sustainability and we lack the shining examples that others can come and learn from.

Looking at those international cities that are raising the bar on sustainability – such as Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, we can see that their success now is due to far-sighted policies in the 70s and 80s, which are coming to fruition now. 

Back in the 70s when the rest of the US was embracing shopping malls, Portland enacted strong land-use policies, which set the city boundary and encouraged housing density. This means that now it can aspire to be a “20 minute city” where citizens will spend no more than 20 minutes travelling to work, shop, or play.  They are currently in the process of updating the Portland Plan which aims to take the lead on “sustainable, equitable, and economically viable long-range planning”.

As part of the work for the Index, we interviewed nine UK city leaders (both elected Leaders and Chief Executives of the city councils) and got their views on leadership in cities.  They shared the view that good leaders will have a vision which they can articulate, be passionate about and motivate people to follow.  Looking at those international examples we think it needs to go further than this.  If a uniting vision isn’t sustainable in itself then trying to graft sustainability onto it results in a strategy full of compromises and trade-offs.  A strategy, like Portland’s, which is driven by questions such as “How can we design a city which thrives whilst minimizing carbon emissions?”, is more likely to lead to long-term success than one where sustainability is an after-thought.

We’ve seen a similar shift with companies.  As we noted in our Leader Business Strategies report back in January, companies we work with have moved from asking us "What should our sustainability strategy be for our business?", to "What should our business strategy be, in the light of sustainability?" Substitute the word ‘cities’ for ‘business’ and this is how we need our city leaders to be thinking.

Leicester City has recently released just such a plan “One Leicester", which includes ambitions such as “Planning for People Not Cars”.  We believe visions like this, which are driven by the principles of sustainability, will lead to real change for British cities, and we hope that increasingly city leaders look to sustainability for the answers to the pressing questions they are dealing with, rather than seeing it as one more agenda to addressed alongside all the others.

This blog entry has been amended to reflect revisions to the Index. City rankings have changed slightly after corrections to an error in the air quality data.

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The Green List 2007

Imogen Martineau, November 5th 2007, Business, Metrics

We like lists. And we like most things green. So the publication today of the The Guardian's Green List has been a great start to our week. The 32-page supplement shows the direct and indirect emissions of the FTSE 100 companies (where these are publicly available), the social costs of these emissions and whether or not the companies have a published carbon dioxide reduction policy.

We've been working with the Guardian in the last few months to collate this data, and have contributed our analysis of the 10 largest companies in the world.

Visit our projects page to find out more and see the results.

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The sustainable cities index

Peter Madden, October 20th 2007, Cities, Metrics

Brighton and Hove is the most sustainable city in Britain. That's the conclusion of our latest report, The Sustainable Cities Index.

The report comes at a time when the race to be a truly ‘sustainable city’ is increasingly competitive, with Manchester determined to become ‘the Greenest City in Britain by 2010’, Bristol wanting to become a ‘Green Capital’ and London aiming for nothing less than the status of ‘most sustainable city in the world’.

Aiming to cut through the rhetoric, the new report brings rigour to the debate by using current data to determine who’s sustainable and who’s not. In it, each of the UK’s 20 largest cities are analysed according to three criteria – their ‘environmental impact', ‘quality of life’ and ‘future proofing’ – and given an overall ranking which summarises the results.

The data reveals that Brighton and Hove is the most sustainable city followed by Edinburgh in second place and Bristol in third. Liverpool comes bottom of the list, after Hull in 18th place and Birmingham in 19th.

In the UK, around nine in ten people live in towns and cities. Globally, we are now a majority urban world. We have no choice but to learn to live together in sustainable ways in cities. This will mean providing a high quality of life for all residents. It will also mean reducing the wider environmental impact of cities. Forum for the Future chose three baskets of indicators against which to rank the cities.

• The Environmental Impact of the city – the impact of the city on the wider environment in terms of resource use and pollution

• The Quality of Life for residents – what the city is like to live in for all its citizens.

• Future Proofing – how well the city is preparing itself for a sustainable future.

Forum selected these index categories to reflect the sustainability of each city in a fair and balanced way. We used a total of 13 indicators, spread across the three baskets. The indicators use existing data on aspects of performance on which cities are already expected to make improvements. We intend to measure these indicators year-on-year.

Commenting on the findings of the research, Peter Madden CEO of Forum for the Future said:

“We are an increasingly urban world. Britain, with its strong civic tradition, should be leading the way in sustainable city-living. We hope this index will make our cities better places to live, with a lower overall impact on the environment. We also hope it will encourage some healthy competition amongst our big cities to see who is greenest.”

Commenting on the city’s position at the top of the rankings, Brighton and Hove City council leader Brian Oxley said:

"It's really good that council policy on this is actually translating into eco-friendly measures and that these have been recognised. These range from higher than average bus use to new the development near Brighton Station achieving the Ecohomes Excellent rating. Although we're only one city, we are a famous place and hopefully we're helping spread the message that acting locally could make the difference globally."

Click here to visit our projects page and download the report

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