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How would Sir Alex Ferguson implement your sustainability strategy?

Ben Kellard — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:34:01 +0100

Grappling with implementing a sustainability project or strategy? These four steps are what Sir Alex Ferguson might suggest, based on his experience of the ruthless competition that is the beautiful game.

All right, you may not eyeball your competition for 90 minutes every week like Manchester United. But your opponents will be just as determined to outperform you, and sustainability improvements are a key means to differentiate themselves.

So how can you move further and faster than your opponents?

1. Identify your key players

Assuming you have an agreed strategy or project, who are your Rooneys and Ferdinands? Who will make or break the performance and who do others look to for leadership? In organisations it’s often influential middle and senior managers who determine the success of a strategy. It’s therefore vital you know who yours are.

2. Agree on tactics

Are you playing a 4-4-2 long ball game or 4-2-4 possession football? Involve your key players in deciding the tactics you’ll use to deliver the strategy. By doing this, you benefit from their experience and insight, and ensure they are committed to the tactics.

Many organisations fall into the trap of jumping from strategic goals straight to implementing specific projects or initiatives without deciding on the best tactical approach. For example, you may have a strategic goal to become carbon neutral, but how will you do that? Will you focus on energy efficiency, renewable energy, offsetting or a combination of all three? Each of these is a tactical response. You need to decide on your tactics before you can move onto implementation – otherwise you risk creating confusion and frustration.

3. Keep the management on-side

So you’ve agreed with your key players what you are going to do – now you need to keep the management – or executive team on-side. Often this simply means updating them on your plan and giving them an opportunity to contribute before you put it into action. This will ensure the exec can see how your plan will support the organisation’s goals.

If your exec knows you have consulted their influential managers, they will be much more confident of success. Their permission will also give confidence to those implementing the plan.

4. Deliver, adapt and measure

Now you are ready to play the game. As you do, remember to have huddles to learn from how it’s going and make any necessary changes.

Sustainability is likely to challenge your organisation in new ways, so give yourself the opportunity to tackle this. Pick the right match statistics to know if you are on track and use them to review your progress.

This is also your chance to involve the broader team by giving them roles and the space to contribute. You can engage employees even more by celebrating success when you finally ruffle the net!

Exploring Sweden, in search of equality

Steven Bland — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:16:41 +0100

What do cycle touring, equality, film-making and wild camping have in common? At first glance, not very much. But from August 4th to September 16th, two young graduates are cycling across Sweden, filming their adventure and asking what it's like to live in a more equal society.

One is a graduate from Forum for the Future’s masters course in Leadership for sustainable development; the other a future solicitor. On the journey, we will be asking if there are things we can learn that can be applied to the UK's political and economic realities, and the ‘big society’.

These questions arose from reading a new book called The Spirit Level, which spells out in convincing and shocking detail the statistical relationship between a whole range of social ills (for example, crime, bad health, teenage pregnancies and lack of trust) and levels of income inequality within developed countries. The authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, argue that it is a lack of social democracy, not GDP, which appears to determine a countries ability to tackle the long-standing and fundamental social problems we face. The most unequal countries – the USA, UK, and Singapore – fare many times worse than the most equal: Sweden, Norway, Finland and Japan.

And so we have looked to Sweden: a country of low inequality and poverty, yet high economic growth, health, education, happiness and trust. We want to find out what it actually feels like to live in a more equal society. Are the prejudices many of us hold in the UK true? Are more equal societies boring, turgid, lacking in innovation and places in which it’s hard to be an individual or be ‘successful’? Most importantly, do the Swede’s already have the ‘big society’ many involved in sustainability might like to see? There’s a chance it conflicts with the big society plan the coalition government is calling for.

The exploration will take us over a thousand miles through the cities and lakes of Sweden, wild camping, staying with strangers, talking with both ordinary people and academics alike. We are recording our six week journey via video diary, photo-blog, interview and finally, documentary film.

At the 2010 graduation for Forum’s Master’s students, Ed Gillespie of Futerra Communications suggested we needed to ‘hijack the big society.’ I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do this yet. But I think it is the responsibility of those working in sustainability to use the arguments in The Spirit Level to push for a fairer society.

I hope by learning from the Swedish, we can spark a debate about what our own big society could actually look like in a way that puts us on a platform to tackle our linked social and environmental problems. Tune in at Exploring Equality's website and get involved in the debate.

Let’s get talking about the kind of society you want to live in.

You can follow Explore Equality on:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ExploreEquality
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Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exploringequality/
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/ExploringEquality

O2 Eco rating helps consumers choose a sustainable future

James Taplin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:43:10 +0100

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.

Opening up innovation for sustainability

Chris Sherwin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:24:20 +0100

In March this year, M&S launched its ‘Your Green Idea’ competition inviting customers to suggest new, positive, green actions the company could implement as part of its ever-expanding Plan A. The winner, voted for by the public, would receive £100,000 to donate to an organisation, charity or company of their choice.

These types of ‘open source’ projects can be a powerful way of tackling the challenges of sustainability, and hats off to M&S for being progressive and creative. But something went wrong and it announced earlier this summer:

“After much deliberation, our judges collectively agreed that we didn’t actually have three brand new brilliant ideas that would meet our criteria of fitting with what we do at M&S, having a sufficiently significant environmental benefit, and allowing our 21 million customers to take part.”

What happened and what can we learn about how you innovate for sustainability and structure these kind of projects?

Your Green Idea is only one example of a recent wave of ‘open innovation’ projects directed at companies’ big environmental and social challenges. Starbucks’ recent Betacup competition invited ideas and designs to reduce the number of non-recyclable cups thrown away by its consumers. Do take a peek at the winning Karma Cup, a behavioural initiative in which every customer bringing in a reusable cup marks a chalkboard by the till, with the 10th person getting a free coffee.

Similarly, Levi’s ‘Care to Air’ challenge invited novel ideas to encourage people to air dry their jeans. This tackled a growing US trend for people to use tumble driers, the energy from which accounts for 60% of the carbon footprint of a pair of jeans over its lifespan.

This year also saw the launch of dedicated open innovation platforms where the challenges or briefs are directed solely at solving social and environmental problems – notably myoocreate and OpenIDEO.

As a formal concept, ‘open innovation’ was coined by Henry Chesborough, Professor at UC Berkeley, as recently as 2003. Fuelled significantly by the internet, in essence it “assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”.

Companies have been quick to embrace this as a way to open a new dialogue directly with customers and as a way to get lots of brains from outside their business to throw in great, new, and commercially viable ideas. Through its Connect + Develop program, open innovation veterans P&G claim “50 percent of product initiatives involve significant collaboration with outside innovators”.

It’s understandable that open innovation would be quickly turned to sustainability goals. It allows companies to invite collaboration on many of those thorny social and environmental issues outside their direct, operational control. And if ’outsiders’ are involved in creating the solutions they may be more acceptable to that outside world too. Levi’s is a clear case in point with the invite around laundering jeans.

One reason why Your Green Idea may have stumbled where others succeeded is because it asked for ideas from its customers, whereas other initiatives targeted creatives, designers or innovators. Consumers often struggle to express their needs and desires in the abstract world of a sustainable future. But – as we’re finding in our work on sustainability in the UK creative industries – involving creatives in tackling sustainability challenges can lead to amazing ideas and imaginitive leaps: that’s what they do!

It’s surprising therefore that M&S should turn to its customers with the competition given that Stuart Rose, the former CEO and instigator of Plan A, often said that as a leader, M&S needed to be “half a step ahead of consumers”. Why ask them for ideas and innovations if that’s the case?

There’s also a world of difference between asking people to suggest an idea and asking people to solve a specific problem or challenge. Though problem solving alone can be limiting, the invitation to contribute a new idea on such a broad topic as sustainability or going green can be daunting. Little surprise then that M&S’s submissions were disappointing.

What lessons does this give us for open innovation for sustainability? It can be a powerful and engaging tool to help companies on their sustainability journey, but it needs to be used and designed properly. We’d suggest two important criteria are; getting the brief and challenge right, and targeting the right people to ‘open up’ to.

Testing the coalition's commitment to resourcing sustainable development

Jonathon Porritt — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:41:08 +0100

Forgive the extended blog the other day – a bit over the top. I want to reassure Mrs Spelman and Mr Huhne that they now have two weeks respite as I’m away on holiday.

Which also means that I’ve kept Test Number 4 just about as simple as possible.

On July 27th, in response to a Parliamentary Question from Green MP Caroline Lucas, junior DEFRA Minister Jim Paice made the following commitment: “DEFRA will establish an enhanced departmental capability and presence on sustainable development”.

To put that one to the test, all we have to do is compare DEFRA’s “SD capability” on May 5th 2010 with its capability on May 6th 2011.

In the interests of proper transparency, it would therefore be very helpful if Mrs Spelman could publish what DEFRA’s total resource looked like when they entered government. I’m sure her officials should be able to help her (and possibly me too!) in unearthing those baseline figures in terms of core staff resources and other financial commitments. Including the Sustainable Development Dialogues and so on.

If that sounds just a little bit too easy, don’t forget that we’re starting from a low baseline in terms of ministerial capability. In his answer to that Parliamentary Question, Mr Paice made the following statement: “While Government has made progress, we need to take more concerted action on the carbon agenda led by DECC, and also on the wider sustainability agenda including waste, water, biodiversity, resource efficiency and other areas which DEFRA leads on.”

Unfortunately, Mr Paice, that’s not the same thing as sustainable development. You seem to have omitted vast chunks of what falls within this territory, as you would probably have spotted had you had a chance as yet to look at ‘Securing the Future’. There’s no reference here to anything to do with health, education, economic policy, international development, social services, governance and so on. Oh dear!

In my last blog, I referred to the paper from Andrea Ross, and there’s a very helpful paragraph in there that I think will help you to understand why sustainable development is so much more than the sum of its constituent parts – including straight environmental issues and climate change.

“As a ‘whole systems’ concept, sustainable development must not be too closely linked to one particular concern, including environmental protection, human rights or climate change. Consequently, sustainable development cannot be an effective champion for any of its component parts on their own. These concerns need their own champions. Instead, sustainable development is most appropriately viewed as providing the forum or ‘table’ to which important and more concrete objectives and values can be brought. Used in this way, sustainable development can offer a framework for decision-making which ensures that these objectives and values have influence in the decision-making process.”

In other words, “whole systems” not disaggregated bits of greenery.

A toolkit to help companies make millions from sustainability

David Bent — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:46:24 +0100

Three years ago Marks & Spencer made a bold commitment to sustainability with the launch of Plan A. They thought it would cost them £200 million but it's already adding millions to their profits. We want to help other companies find how social and environmental responsibility can pay.

M&S launched Plan A in 2007, making 100 commitments to tackle key challenges on climate change, waste, sustainable raw materials, "fair partnership" and health over five years. They expected to invest £200 million to achieve these goals but Plan A broke even early and added £50 million to the bottom line in 2009/10, according to their latest "How We Do Business" report.

M&S isn't the only leading company to have found a business case for sustainability. General Electric has spent $5 billion on R&D in the first five years of ecomagination but the program to develop the clean technologies of the future has already generated revenues of $70 billion.

With such shining examples you might think companies would be falling over themselves to find new opportunities in social and environmental responsibility. But the reality is that many struggle. That's why we're launching a new toolkit to help companies find the business case for sustainability.

Our experience at Forum for the Future is that the complexity and uncertainty of sustainability creates major barriers to making a business case. First, the numbers are much "softer" than senior decision-makers are used to. Companies are often breaking new ground, which is difficult to model quantitatively, and are also anticipating future trends.

Second, companies get stuck in a vicious cycle: finance directors want to see a business case before giving permission to go ahead with a sustainability project, but often the information to build that business case can only be generated from the experience of going ahead.

Finally, many financial tools designed to deal with certainties are ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of how business succeeds in the face of sustainability challenges like climate change, peak oil and population growth.

So, we have developed a set of tools to help companies get over those barriers and make better decisions which generate real value. We've given it a cunning name – the Better Decisions, Real Value toolkit. It's designed to be used by sustainability practitioners and finance professionals in any organization to determine how sustainability can add value to their business.

The Foundations guide sets out the general business case for sustainability, equipping you with the arguments you need to start your case.

Entry points is a step-by-step guide to winning permission to go ahead with a sustainability-related initiative, so that you have the clarity of purpose you need, an understanding of the organizational context, a plan for a possible project, and a strategy to influence internal stakeholders.

The Pathways tool summarizes the different ways sustainability can create financial value, and gives guidance on how to collect evidence to make your business case.

The Ready Reckoner helps you assess which of these pathways to value are most important for your project and calculate good enough numbers to get the permission to start.

We developed the tools working with a number of Forum for the Future's closest corporate partners on their business case. I've discussed some of our thinking in previous posts about lessons on finding a business case, tips for getting buy-in from finance, and seven steps that could save you millions.

We're really keen for people to use the BDRV toolkit. We want to hear about your successes but we also want your feedback on how to improve the tools and what else you need. So, please download them here and then send your feedback to d.bent@forumforthefuture.org.

This blog post originally appeared here at GreenBiz.com on 13th August 2010

Coalition cuts could achieve much more with 3D leadership

Stephanie Draper — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:21:08 +0100

The first 100 days of the UK coalition government have made it clear that this government is going to cut, and cut in a big macho way, but is it really going to ‘cut it’ from a sustainability point of view?

I would suggest not. The sort of leadership that is going to take us towards a sustainable future looks further, engages widely and is authentic (connected to people’s core values) – the characteristics of 3D leadership, as we call it at Forum for the Future. And that is not the sort of leadership that we are seeing.

If the proposed higher cuts in Defra (the Department for Food and Rural Affairs) and the axing of the Sustainable Development Commission are anything to go by, it is difficult to see how the Tories’ promise of ‘vote blue, go green’ will ‘be authentic’. And if the rumours in The Times this week are true - that the Treasury is "planning to axe hundreds of millions of pounds from Britain's renewable energy and nuclear clean-up budgets" then we can ask serious questions about whether the coalition is ‘looking further’ or taking a shortsighted approach. But it is the lack of the systems thinking that underpins what we mean by ‘engaging widely’ that is the real missed opportunity.

The coalition promised a ‘root and branch’ review of what government is there to deliver and I was mildly hopeful. This was a chance to look at the whole system of public services, what we receive and how, and to find efficiencies by preventing problems rather than fixing them.

It hasn’t really panned out that way. Instead we have the Ministry of Justice proposing court closures one day and Defra talking about selling off nature reserves the next. You can’t look at the whole by asking each department to cut on its own. Prisons are being thought about separately from education; health separately from housing, education, nature... and so it goes on. Yet all these things are intrinsically linked. The ring-fencing of the NHS, although welcome, is symptomatic of this end-of-pipe approach. It shows that the government is not thinking about how to provide health – through good housing, fulfilling work, education and indeed a high quality natural environment - but how to deal with illness.

I fear that this reductionist approach is only going to lead to more end-of-pipe solutions with prevention continuing to be the poor relation of cure. We will have a smaller deficit, but we will have missed the chance to actually become more efficient. It is invariably more cost effective to prevent a problem than solve it – as the Stern review showed in relation to climate change. This is a big missed opportunity.

By engaging widely through a real root and branch approach we might spend less and get more, rather than spending less and getting less. This would mean that instead of asking people what they think we should cut and asking departments to find their percentage, you would ask them what they want delivered and rebuild public services on the basis of the things that society needs and wants. It would take a bit more time, but would certainly lead to a better outcome. That’s a big part of 3D leadership, and we will need more of it if we are going to get a good outcome from all these cuts.

Image used courtesy of Flickr under Creative Commons guidelines

Mainstreaming sustainable development

Jonathon Porritt — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:25:53 +0100

This year’s CEO Study 2010, ‘A New Era of Sustainability’, carried out by Accenture on behalf of the UN’s Global Compact initiative, came out with some fascinating insights into the state of mind of around a thousand CEOs all over the world. It’s actually hugely encouraging – especially at a time when our politicians are still all at sea on sustainability.

But one finding had me hooting with laughter: 81% of CEOs – compared to just 50% in 2007 – were of the opinion that sustainability was now “fully embedded into the strategy and operations of their company”. Really?!

Don’t get me wrong. Lots of companies are doing lots of things to address today’s most pressing sustainability challenges, and many of them are already making a real difference. But that’s not the same thing as “fully embedded”. Of all the companies that I have come into contact with over the last twenty years, through both Forum for the Future and The Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, I would say that less than 5% could make any sort of claim to sustainability being “fully embedded”.

That may sound like a low level, but it’s no mean feat “fully embedding” sustainability in any organisation. Which is why my incredulity went into overdrive on hearing Mrs Spelman (DEFRA Secretary of State) claim that one of her reasons for axing the Sustainable Development Commission was the fact that sustainable development was now “mainstreamed across the whole of Government”.

In case you feel left out at having missed such a momentous mainstreaming moment, let me reassure you that this is just a figment of Mrs Spelman’s virgin imagination – that’s her SD virginity of course.

In reality, there is not one single part of government – or the whole of the public sector, for that matter – anywhere in the UK where sustainable development has as yet been properly mainstreamed. And by properly mainstreamed, I suggest DEFRA continues to use the old Sustainable Development Commission definition as in “sustainable development becoming the central organising principle for everything that Government does”.

That judgement is powerfully reinforced in a very interesting new paper from Andrea Ross (Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee), with the compelling title: “It’s Time to Get Serious – Why Legislation is Needed to Make Sustainable Development a Reality in the UK”.

Whilst acknowledging that good progress has been made over the last few years (particularly in terms of the ‘architecture’ of SD and rigorous watchdog interventions), Andrea Ross argues that the current framework is still not delivering in three critical areas: “improving understanding, providing a comprehensive framework to integrate potential conflicting priorities, and proving an operational toolkit”. Her paper highlights better progress in Wales (where SD was statutorily ‘embedded’ in the Government of Wales Act 2006) and (to a lesser extent) in Scotland. But it reveals continuing inconsistencies across the whole of the UK in terms of both interpretation and the use of SD. She concludes:

“The UK is now at a stage where specific legislation is required to drive the implementation of sustainable development further forward. Legislation directed at the implementation of sustainable development could potentially address many of the current shortcomings by increasing the priority, support and protection afforded to sustainable development across government(s) as a long-term policy objective.”

That should go down well with Mrs Spelman and Mr Huhne!

I did consider, briefly, setting that as my third Spelman-Huhne Test to give them a chance to put their professed enthusiasm for sustainable development into practice. But that would be unfair given the total indifference of the rest of their Cabinet colleagues.

So let’s set the bar much, much lower from a mainstreaming point of view. The Government’s own sustainable development strategy (‘Securing the Future’) was produced in 2005 and is now ‘out of time’. So it’s now incumbent on Mrs Spelman (with Mr Huhne’s loyal support) to prepare a new strategy which will give them a chance to show what effective ‘mainstreaming’ looks like across the whole of government – without the Sustainable Development Commission to help them out.

And it would, I think, be entirely reasonable to set a deadline for a new strategy to appear before May 6th 2011.

Town halls to power new energy revolution

Zoe Le Grand — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:25:55 +0100

Town halls covered in glittering solar panels and majestic wind turbines could soon become a familiar sight as councils turn their public buildings into mini power stations which harness the power of nature to provide clean, green energy for themselves and their citizens. The government’s announcement that local authorities will be allowed to sell renewable energy to the national grid opens the door to a new revenue stream worth potentially £100million a year.It’s a rare piece of good news, when every newspaper I pick up these days is full of headlines announcing more and more public sector cuts. Extra income for cash-strapped councils and reduced carbon emissions – these are just the kind of solutions we need.The groundbreaking Climate Change Act committed the UK to reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. This is a massive challenge and sadly we are already falling well short of our renewable energy targets. So far, the pace of change simply hasn’t been fast enough. To achieve our targets we need to radically decarbonise our whole way of life. We need to rethink our relationship with energy and to do this effectively we’re going to need everyone’s help.At Forum for the Future we’re approaching this challenge from two different angles. Firstly we want to look at the energy system from a different perspective. Delivering and using energy in the same way that we do now will only achieve the same results. We’re launching an experimental project to help players from outside the energy industry gatecrash the sector and shake up its preconceived ideas. If you are passionate about delivering a radically different energy system then please get in touch. But this is not just about changing the energy system. The scale of change required to meet our emissions targets means completely reimagining how we meet the majority of human needs. The public sector, whatever its size, will have a vital role to play in enabling a low-carbon society but it will need to deliver services in a very different way. Local government buildings as power stations is just a start. What else can councils do to empower their citizens to live low-carbon lives?Our second project is exploring what councils can do now to help increase the resilience of their communities and show their citizens the opportunities to live happy, healthier and more prosperous lives in a low-carbon future. We’re working with the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT) to develop four scenarios, each painting a different picture of the role of the public sector in a low-carbon world and how local government might operate. If we’re going to hit our carbon reduction targets in this time of austerity (and we must) it’s clear that the way we use and produce energy must become more efficient. We can’t leave it to the existing system to deliver us from climate change. Everyone has to join the party and I for one would like to see local government take up the opportunity and lead the energy revolution. That, at the very least, would give the newspapers some good news to write about.

Coalition must preserve commitment to sustainable development in regions

Jonathon Porritt — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:14:44 +0100

“Dogma-driven iconoclasts” is just about the politest way of describing what the coalition government is up to on sustainable development. There’s a mixture of delight and spite in sweeping away anything that might once have informed policy-making under the old ‘regime’. It won’t necessarily have been everybody’s image of the week last week, but shots of the recycling bins outside the former offices of the South East England Regional Assembly stuffed to the gunwales with copies of its now redundant South East Plan were deeply depressing.

Coping with the problem of overheating in the South East is a compellingly complex problem. Juggling economic development with community cohesion, quality of life, biophysical sustainability and shortages in land, infrastructure, housing and water is a sophisticated business. The South East Plan was just that – a sophisticated, inclusive way of managing the all but unmanageable.

But regions – and all the institutional arrangements that went with them – are now no more. When it came to determining the fate of the Regional Development Agencies, for instance, the pro-RDA Business Secretary Vince Cable and a handful of stutteringly inadequate Lib Dems elsewhere in government were easily trumped by the Treasury and Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary.

There was no review; no assessment of the economic benefits which will be lost (with RDAs leveraging at least £4.50 for every £1 they laid out); and no attempt made to work out how best to transition the skills, networks and deep knowledge of the RDAs into alternative arrangements. Done with spite. Done with crass, precipitate indifference.

Civil servants across Whitehall are contemplating the carnage with growing ill-ease. It’s relatively easy to get rid of things you don’t like. It’s a damn sight harder to bring forward better solutions in their place.

Eric Pickles has announced that the Regional Development Agencies will be replaced with Local Enterprise Partnerships. These Partnerships will, apparently, be much more attuned to local needs. Much better able to leverage community resources. Much more business-friendly – not least because they will be chaired by business people. The reality, however, is that nobody knows how they’ll work, how they will handle public money (if there is any to be handled), and how they will be held to account.

Least of all, nobody knows how they will promote genuine sustainable development in their localities. One of the great strengths of the RDAs was the fact that they had a statutory duty “to contribute to sustainable development” in everything they did. Performance in delivering on that sustainable development duty was, of course, patchy, but they achieved far more in this area than they would ever have done without having such a duty imposed upon them.

So here’s my next test for Caroline Spelman as she starts living up to her claim to be the champion of sustainable development across the whole of Government: persuade Eric Pickles and Chancellor George Osborne to impose a similar (or even better) sustainable development duty on all Local Enterprise Partnerships, in whatever form they eventually emerge.

Don’t let them bully you with their predictable protestations that it should be up to each individual Local Enterprise Partnership to decide for itself: that’s not how sustainable development works – not yet, at any rate. Either you mandate them to put sustainable development and the low-carbon economy at the heart of what they do, or it simply won’t get done.

And if Mrs Spelman needs any help with how best to frame such a duty, there’s some very good guidance lying around somewhere in DEFRA’s Sustainable Development Unit – drafted with the help of the Sustainable Development Commission. Or at least there used to be.

Green deal for housing must put homeowners first

Ben Ross — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:48:39 +0100

The last couple of years have seen huge interest in tackling the energy use and carbon emissions of the UK’s existing housing stock, and it’s been a real pleasure to be a part of that movement. I’ve met some amazing people from the public, private and NGO sectors but few more inspirational than the homeowners who are leading the way.

Since 2009 we’ve been working with pioneers living in a variety of properties with a shared passion to reduce the energy and resource consumption of their homes. Refit West is part of Forum for the Future’s work to make Bristol and the West of England the most sustainable city-region in the UK [http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/sustainable-bristol-city-region], and we want to develop a practical model for ‘whole house’ energy efficiency refurbishment which can be rolled out across the country.

Our approach begins and ends with the homeowner: providing information on the most appropriate and cost-effective options for their property; designing solutions to meet their needs; ensuring suppliers give them quality and value for their money; and making capital finance available at terms that benefit them as owners. It’s all about empowering and supporting individuals as they make decisions and commission work on their homes. Never assume these are just houses we’re talking about – we are extremely emotionally attached to our housing stock.

The information currently available to homeowners is at best complex and at worst contradictory. The homeowners we are working with in Refit West, have committed their time to making sense of it and to take action that will disrupt their homes and lives for a period of time, but this is enough to put many off refurbishing their homes. We’ve helped these pioneers overcome many of the common barriers and it’s significant that, while some of the solutions and ‘whole house packages’ are becoming clearer, no two customer journeys have been the same. We need to learn from the experience of these few in order to stand a chance of building a scheme that delivers for the many. Our homes generate a quarter of the UK’s carbon footprint and making them more energy efficient is one of the most cost-effective ways to cut carbon. Our homeowners’ experience helps to explain why, despite numerous national and local initiatives, residential carbon emissions have only fallen by 6% since 1990. We desperately need to move from making 3% cuts each decade to 3% a year to meet our national carbon targets. The Committee on Climate Change wants the built environment to be near zero carbon by 2050.

Home energy efficiency is rightly seen as a political priority across all parties, and the forthcoming Energy Bill promises to provide the structures for long-term carbon reduction. But will it really deliver? Will it champion and support those pioneers and early adopters who are crucial in developing and building support for mass programmes that can refurbish a million homes a year? Or will it simply create another market opportunity for large commercial interests to cherry pick the easiest works at the expense of a long-term strategic approach?

The answer is being written in Whitehall right now. I believe achieving the carbon reductions required from our 27 million homes will take a cross-departmental approach to make your head spin...DECC, HCA, BIS, Defra, the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and significantly the Treasury. It’s great to see two parties working on this together but will we see the coalition work right across government to deliver on our national objectives and in our collective interest?

Sustainability leadership - a labour of love

Sara Parkin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:00:52 +0100

In my experience, pregnancy and child birth are quicker and less painful than writing a book, but the feeling when holding your new baby in your hands – whether it is your own flesh and blood or the product of sustainably managed forests – is remarkably similar. Both are a labour of love.

Next week sees the publication of my new book The Positive Deviant: Sustainability leadership in a perverse world. Born of my experience in setting up and developing the Forum’s Leadership in Sustainable Development masters, the book is largely in response to the very many people who have said ‘oh my, I wish I had the chance to do that course before I started work’.

The basic idea is that between the covers of the book, readers will find sufficient knowledge, ideas, and tools to build up their own sustainability-literate leadership personality and get started on Monday. For those already knowledgeable there are new angles, ideas, and ways of thinking that will help you be ever more confident in your leadership, but the main message is that none of us can know it all; we just need to know enough to ensure that more often than not we are deciding for rather than against sustainability.

The odd title of the book comes from my other major theme, that of leadership strategies for anyone with sustainability as an objective. As well as exploring the many byways and odd highway in leadership development over the last half century or so (and offering a robust critique of business schools and corporate responsibility on the way) I conclude that a new 21st century approach to leadership is needed if it – as all leadership must be from now on – is to be sustainability-driven. We can’t wait for the right international treaties or co-ordinated national government initiatives – all that looks further away than ever. So doing the right thing for sustainability despite the perversity of the world around us – the wrong institutions, policies, processes and legions of uncooperative people – has become the best strategy from now on.

Since floating the idea that sustainability-literate leadership will, almost by definition, have to operate positive deviant strategies I have been delighted to discover that there are lots of people who feel the same way. In their reflections on leadership, this year’s Forum students even found several when they were out on placement. There has been talk of striking a black and yellow badge (to match the cover of the book) with the letters PD, so positive deviants can identify each other and so collaborate on ways to clamber over or round the barriers to shifting to a more sustainable way of doing things.

Now the book is out the next labour of the author starts: selling the thing. If you are quick, you can still get the special 25% discount off the cover price of £24.99 up to noon on 28th July. You can order through the Forum website (see the promotion in the left hand column of our home page) or via the Earthscan website directly, using the FF25 voucher code. After the 28th you can still get a 20% discount using the code FF20.

I’m donating my royalties back to Forum for the Future so we can train up more positive deviants amongst our students and partners.

SARA PARKIN

Porritt condemns “dogmatic” decision to axe money-saving SDC

Jonathon Porritt — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:28:01 +0100

As the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision.

They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money

The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which comes from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government

Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra, make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the commission, no doubt because both countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication

This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective.

It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that.

And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body

It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of government ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of its own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone a properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the green agenda will fare under the coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.

Jonathon Porritt was chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009

Planning for uncertainty in a climate-changing world

Jemima Jewell — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:55:39 +0100

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.

BSF bites the dust

Lorna Pelly — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:04:11 +0100

Agreed: our national debt is horrendous, public spending has to be scaled back and we have to accept some significant changes. But was scrapping Building Schools for the Future a step too far?

BSF was a Labour government initiative set up to help finance the rebuild or revamp of schools. Only 180 projects have been completed and though 231 are due to start this year, these numbers are dwarfed by the 1,100 schools that had registered interest, or were engaged in a bid process, which have now been axed.

Much of the criticism of BSF centred on the over-bureaucratic bidding process that took too long and cost too much – but presumably that was a problem that could have been fixed. Thinking about the outcomes, I can’t remember ever hearing anyone criticise the intent of BSF. The eco-towns were strongly contested, plans for new housing are always controversial, and the Olympic site is under constant scrutiny, but giving children great schools to learn and play in is hard to argue against. A kid with a smart, new class-room will always be a happy customer. And in terms of seeing value for the investment, there were no risks about the property market or estimated occupancy rates, so those school improvements would all have been used to maximum effect.

To Marisa Popper, a technology teacher at Judgemeadow Community College in Leicester, one of the schools that were rebuilt in the first phase of BSF (http://www.partnershipsforschools.org.uk/), the advantages are obvious:

“The whole environment is wonderful. Being able to see and feel outdoors shining through to the corridors and classrooms really opens the space as well as the mind. It's lovely for the students to learn and grow up here. It's now calm and you can almost feel the students’ contentment. I enjoy every lesson I teach; the possibilities now seem endless”.

Now into its fifth year of delivery, BSF had developed a sense of maturity in recent months, with designers and contractors now far more experienced in working with the sector. As a public sector client, BSF’s expectations for sustainable design credentials were at the leading edge. And in terms of impacts, the connection that was being made between sustainable design and a better learning environment was critical. It will be interesting to see the educational performance results of those schools in a few years: if only we had a few more of them!

Of course the building sector is going to suffer from this decision, with many architect firms and contractors having bet heavily on the continuation of the BSF programme. But think also about the hundreds of school assemblies that have taken place in the last week where teachers have had to tell their pupils ‘sorry, you won’t be getting the new science block and playground we promised you’.

The social and community value that this programme was starting to deliver was in tune with the values of the new green deal that the coalition government has been selling so strongly, so it makes me wonder how much of a whole-life, full value assessment was made when they decided to scrap BSF. My hunch is that it was a purely financial decision. The way these improvements had begun to build social capital amongst teachers, children and parents seems to have been overlooked, which makes the decision all the more worrying.

The end of the BSF programme leaves a big question mark around the future of school improvements that Michael Gove really needs to address. To remove this programme entirely was a bold move, but it needs to be replaced by something – albeit at a reduced scale. To tell a child they are not getting a new class-room is one thing, but to then tell them the temporary Portakabin on the football pitch will now be their permanent classroom seems too unfair.