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Planning for uncertainty in a climate-changing world
Jemima Jewell, July 20th 2010, Climate change, Futures, International
If you were president of an African country with $1.2 billion dollars to spend and a host of challenges – poverty reduction, economic development, health and education – how would you spend it?
In his absorbing book ‘Poor Story’, Giles Bolton challenges the reader to do just this. As you answer the question in your head, Bolton gently probes your answers, unravelling your reasoning and demonstrating just how tough it is to make the ‘right’ decisions when you’re trying to act in the best interests of a country’s ‘development’.
Climate change makes it so much tougher – for governments, donors, aid workers, and businesses – to make the ‘right’ decisions for development, adding a huge dimension of uncertainty to our planet’s future. It’s not just the direct environmental impacts: climate change has the potential to transform the economic, political, social and psychological dimensions of the world we live in. New political alliances, shifting supply chain structures and resource-based conflict are just some of the changes we could see.
Amid such uncertainty, how can we ensure that development decisions taken today continue to deliver benefits in the future?
Our new report The future climate for development attempts to answer that question. It explores some of the radical changes we could see in the next 20 years as a result of climate change, and how low-income countries might respond. Supported by the UK’s Department for International Development, and informed by the insights of more than 100 development experts from around the world, it contains four scenarios – descriptions of different plausible futures – to provide a structured way of working through the uncertainties of a climate changing world.
The scenarios, which we’ve brought to life in four short animations, each highlight a different set of challenges and opportunities that low-income countries could face by the year 2030. ‘Reversal of Fortunes’ describes a world which is attempting to radically decarbonise its economy. Here, low-income countries that have followed the ‘traditional’ development pathway set by high-income countries get the rough end of the deal. They find that the new low-carbon global economy is an unforgiving one, uninterested in those trading partners unable to play the carbon-counting game. Fair?Certainly not, but possible? Surely – and therefore worth planning for.
Another scenario, ‘Age of Opportunity’, paints a more positive picture of 2030. Huge sums of development assistance have, in most countries, triggered a virtuous circle of investment, energy security, business opportunities and community empowerment. In ‘Coping Alone’ a world reeling from the shock of oil at $400 a barrel focuses on regional solutions. ‘The Greater Good’ finds climate change subsumed into a broader debate about resource use.
In these radically different worlds, a recurring theme emerges: the benefits of low-carbon development, be this investment in renewable energy, low-input agriculture or low-carbon cities. In an uncertain world, this is a consistently robust strategy.
Why? Low-carbon development sets up an economy that is fit for the future, shielded from the crushing oil price spikes of ‘Coping Alone’; it ensures a competitive position on a low-carbon world stage in ‘Reversal of Fortunes’; and it’s a vital component of the positive development cycle we see in ‘Age of Opportunity’. This is not a question of ‘limiting’ development by ‘limiting’ carbon emissions, but of focussing on the kind of smart strategies that deliver competitiveness, efficiency and healthier, wealthier communities. Climate change or no climate change, these are surely changes that every country wants to see.
Uncertainty is daunting, but it doesn’t have to be paralysing. By contemplating a variety of different possible futures, you can be better prepared for the unexpected. By testing – and modifying – your strategy in different scenarios, you can be sure that it will continue to deliver benefits. And by identifying initiatives – such as low-carbon development – that address climate change and development goals together, you can ensure that the short-term agenda is dominated by opportunity. All of which gives the best possible chance of each and every ‘development dollar’ being money well spent.
The full report, short films of the scenarios and supporting materials can be downloaded here.
For more information, please contact Jemima Jewell.
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!
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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Ethopia’s take on carbon tax funding might win in Copenhagen
Jonathon Porritt, December 16th 2009, Climate change, Finance, International, Leadership
Everyone but everyone out there in Copenhagen today agrees that a precondition of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is to ‘get a realistic price on every tonne of CO2 just as soon as possible’.
Nick Stern’s report on the Economics of Climate Change rammed home this point so effectively that some misguided economists would now have us believe that’s all we need to do. Not so.
But it’s true that nothing much will happen without it.
Listen to Jonathon's phonecast of this blog
Many people (including most EU Heads of State) still think the fastest route to getting a realistic price for CO2 is to create a global trading scheme – like the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, scaled-up, or the proposed ‘Cap-and-Trade’ scheme in the US.
But more and more people are now losing confidence in the trading route. Those with long memories recall that it was only included in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as a way of keeping the Americans on board, with most EU countries actually feeling very queasy about it at the time. Ironically, when the Americans subsequently pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU was left holding the trading baby! Twelve years on, it still looks like a pretty sick little baby.
Many economists have long been of the opinion that it would make a lot more sense to tax carbon, levying a charge on the carbon content of all energy sources upstream at the point where they enter the supply chain. And more and more business leaders are coming to that same conclusion – on the grounds that they would then know what the cost of carbon would be over time, ratcheting up from a low base line to ‘a realistic’ level (i.e. behaviour-changing and innovation-driving!). This would be brought forward as soon as economies could cope.
Such tax would simultaneously generate a shed load of revenue, some of which could then be used to provide the funding required for developing countries.
In that regard, we know one thing for sure: in the current economic crisis, rich world countries are not going to be able to find big enough sums to provide the poor world with what they now need. As the EU Summit on Funding so clearly demonstrated last week – the funds just aren’t there.
So we need some new sources of funding. The current favourite in Copenhagen, being advanced by Ethiopia (on behalf of African nations) and warmly supported by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, is a mixture of taxes on aviation, shipping and financial transactions (the so-called Tobin Tax) – “get the bloody banks to pay for dealing with climate change”, as the populists put it!
Forgive the pun, but this one could just fly! If Gordon’s on board (as a man who refused to countenance any discussion about the Tobin Tax over the last 12 years) then anything could happen. And the truth of it is that there isn’t any alternative anyway, so we might as well bite the bullet and get on with it.
Booze and bracket-bashing – inside the real Copenhagen ‘junket’
Jonathon Porritt, December 10th 2009, Forum founders, International
As you read the daily reports from Copenhagen, spare a thought for the hundreds of environmental and development activists out there, keeping the cause of ‘climate justice’ under the noses of government delegations, UN Officials and the media.
It always amuses me when I hear sarcastic journalists refer to these conferences as ‘junkets’ or ‘jamborees’.
In reality they are more like a descent into hell, with delegates surrounded on the one hand by the demons of utter mind-numbing tedium, and on the other by the gremlins of mischievous government delegations intent on emasculating any final agreement.
Listen to Jonathon's phonecast of this blog
The formal process is focussed on the draft text, which summarises that agreement with much of its text still in brackets. These brackets can only be removed via unanimous agreement between all government delegations.
It’s often the same ones (from Saudi Arabia onwards!) that stick to their oil-drenched arguments, yielding as little as they can possibly get away with short of total opprobrium descending upon them as other delegations get angrier and angrier.
That goes on for days, until the elected politicians bowl up next week, and it starts all over again.
The only escape for knackered greenies is alcohol, liver-numbing quantities of which are consumed every evening.
That’s what life is like for the poor sods that have to do the work in the formal conference. Far more stimulation is available for those attending the informal, largely NGO conference (the Klimaforum in Copenhagen), buzzing away on the margins of the government negotiations.
Every now and again positive messages flow out of the NGO forum to cause a bit of a stir inside the conference, but nothing like as often or as powerfully as the negative energy flowing in the other direction.
Which is exactly what happened on Tuesday, when a document leaked to the Guardian revealed a ‘secret text’ put together by a group of rich countries (including the UK and the US), which pretty much undermines every single aspect of the tortuous negotiations that have been going on over the last two years.
Inside the conference venue the bracket-bashing goes on uninterrupted. But when something like that happens, everything else goes pear-shaped. Anger, incredulity, rage, despair and dark, demonic humour take over until the alcohol kicks in.
More phonecasts available here
World leaders must see beyond emails
Sara Parkin, December 7th 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, International
Do the email exchanges hacked from the University of East Anglia computers indicate skulduggery? I cannot comment. The proposed enquiry will surely settle that point. What I can say is that after six years as a ‘lay’ member of the Natural Environment Research Council board, I encountered only a determination amongst climate scientists to get the science as right as possible.
Nevertheless, it should not be a surprise that there are those who dispute the science around climate change. Search for an academic to back any outlandish point of view, and you will find one, with motivations ranging from the muddled to the malevolent. The massive amount of money the fossil fuel industry pours into promoting the malevolent objective of climate denial helps it gain more ‘air time’ for its views than it deserves. As does the laziness of the media in giving equal coverage to for-and-against formats for arguments, regardless of the weighting of the evidence. (Remember the damage done by one doctor’s views about the MMR vaccine?)
A naturally disputatious species, the really extraordinary thing about climate scientists is that so many agree about so much! The 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the output of 2500 expert reviewers, 800 authors, and 140 political leaders from over 130 countries. It would take more than one bad apple in UEA or anywhere else to negate those overall conclusions, which are increasingly confirmed by the evidence of our own eyes.
As world experts and leaders gather in Copenhagen for the number- and word-crunching part of the process, lets wish them wisdom and luck, and hope they are not put off the biggest political leadership challenge ever - making decisions now about commitments which will have a pay-off period beyond their term of office.
Leaders must be shocked into climate action
Jonathon Porritt, October 31st 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, International
Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).
These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible. And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.
Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon. It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.
But Australia provides an even more compelling story. Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks. Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C. This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed. The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002. Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average. As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.
And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline! The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.
So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics? The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change. But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.
The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets. It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.
Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.
US position on Copenhagen may be treaty-wrecking
Jonathon Porritt, October 22nd 2009, Climate change, General, International
You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference. Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.
Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board. And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.
That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago. The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on.
And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.
Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach. That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.
I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part. As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.
US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility. They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now. They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.
For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this. It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.
Sarkozy launches crusade against obsession with growth
Jonathon Porritt, September 22nd 2009, International
I can’t help it, but I love seeing the Treasury discomfited. Through my nine years with the Sustainable Development Commission they set up so many barriers to promoting more sustainable economic growth, did so many foolish things, and missed so many opportunities, that I can’t help but feel a little bitter.
They were particularly obstructive in terms of the work the Commission did on economic growth, seeking to open up the debate about the completely irrational way in which the pursuit of GDP has come to dominate all economic policy debates.
The Commission’s report, ‘Prosperity Without Growth?’ was met with a combination of disdain and indifference that only the Treasury is capable of. The Commission was told, in no uncertain terms, that this just wasn’t the kind of advice that the UK Government needed.
So I had particularly good reason to celebrate the publication of a new report, authored by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on the ‘Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, commissioned personally by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, questioning the continued obsession of nations with conventionally measured economic growth.
“For years, statistics have registered an increasingly strong economic growth as a victory over shortage – until it emerged that this growth was destroying more than it was creating,” said Sarkozy, endorsing the report. “The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so”.
President Sarkozy has instructed France’s national statistics body to update its gathering and reporting of economic statistics in line with the report’s recommendations. Better yet, he will invite other world leaders to join his crusade against what the report describes as “GDP Fetishism”. “France will put this report on the agenda of all international meetings, including next week’s G20 Summit,” Sarkozy said.
I fear he’ll get very short shrift from Gordon Brown, who will see it as an irritatingly Gallic distraction from the serious business of getting the global economy back on track.
Inconveniently, that’s precisely the same track that has caused such devastating damage to the Earth’s life support systems that sustain us, has unleashed what could still prove to be irreversible climate change, has left between one and two billion people living in conditions of dire poverty, and has ruthlessly promoted private greed and avarice over social wellbeing and community cohesion.
In other words, exactly the kind of growth-based economics that “destroys more than it creates” – to paraphrase the French President.
NGOs, business and government
Jonathon Porritt, July 9th 2009, International, Leadership
I’ve just finished reading Oxfam’s new report on climate change and poverty, (“Suffering the Science”), prepared especially for the G8 meeting now underway in Italy. Gloomy, but hugely powerful stuff:
“Climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase in hunger. The countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk from climate change. Millions of farmers will have to give up traditional crops as they experience changes in the seasons that they and their ancestors have depended on. Climate-related hunger may become the defining human tragedy of this century”.
It’s not all doom and gloom. The report replays a lot of Oxfam’s excellent proposals on sustainable agriculture, with a new emphasis on adaptation to climate change. There’s just so much that could be happening right now.
Coming hot on the heels of the equally impactful report from the Global Humanitarian Forum (“The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis”), it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the development/poverty/equity end of the spectrum of NGOs involved in this area is playing a massive part in civil society’s efforts to spur politicians on.
And that brought to mind, yet again, my old friend Richard Sandbrook – a former Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, and Trustee of both Forum for the Future and The Eden Project for many years before his untimely death. He’s been in my thoughts a lot lately (having just given the second Richard Sandbrook Memorial Lecture a couple of weeks ago), wondering how he would be responding to the growing levels of activity in the run up to the Copenhagen Conference.
Although Richard was himself an NGO-man through and through, he spent a disproportionate amount of time giving them a very hard time for their negativity, territoriality and all-round lack of creativity in bringing forward new ideas to accelerate the solutions agenda – particularly as regards their inability to work properly with business.
Most NGOs took it all in good heart (“don’t worry, it’s just Richard off on another bout of NGO-bashing”), but others used to get quite grumpy about it, even accusing him of having ‘sold out’ to big corporates like Rio Tinto, big forestry companies and so on.
Forum for the Future gets more than its fair share of the ‘selling out’ critique, and we just put up with that as part and parcel of operating in this high risk area. But we too were a bit mystified at Richard’s anti-NGO tirades.
And I wonder if he would still be taking that line today? So many NGOs now work in one way or another with the private sector, including quite radical NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade. Even Oxfam is deepening its relationship with some of the biggest companies in the world.
And on a macro-scale, in terms of the balance between government, business and civil society, as agents of change in their respective spheres, I would also argue that the continuing failure of governments to drive a completely different model of wealth creation leaves even the most progressive companies struggling to do much more than mitigate the worst effects of business-as-usual economic growth.
Which means, logically, that the onus is even more on NGOs (as embodiments of civil society) to make it possible for governments to do what they are absolutely going to have to do – sooner or later.
So I ended up using my Memorial Lecture to suggest that Richard’s deep frustration with NGOs might, by now, have moved into a rather different place. But it would, no doubt, have been equally challenging!
Watch videos of the lecture:
Clip 1 - introduction to the lecture, includes some compelling thoughts on climate change.
Clip 2 - the case for optimism, contrasted against adopting a 'war footing' or James Lovelock fatalism in dealing with climate change and resource scarcity.
Clip 3 - anger and other psychological reactions to climate change. (less good quality - turn sound up or listen on headphones).
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