Forum For The Future - News Feed

Time to press the panic button?

Jonathon Porritt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:44:39 +0000

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

If climate change didn’t exist, would we have to invent it?

Martin Wright — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:12:35 +0000

This mischievous thought occurred to me as I was wading through the latest sclerotic surge of climate scepticism – which is fast becoming the press’s default position on the issue. (If the mainstream media really is engaged in a mass conspiracy to boost ‘warmism’, as James Delingpole and his like insist, then it’s doing a pretty lousy job of it...)

In December, it was Climategate and the embarrassing farce that was Copenhagen. Last month we had Glaciergate: the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had managed to include in one of its reports the wildly unfounded claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt to nothing in the next 25 years.

Proof that climate science is all a wild exaggeration, as some claimed? Actually, no, it was just proof that the most august international bodies can make a complete prat of themselves along with the rest of us.

But next month you can bet there’ll be another shock exposé, as the hounds of scepticism scent blood on the lumbering tracks of the climate consensus, and the media, having decided that global warming is sooo last century, daahlings, cheer them on to the kill.

In practice, of course, the same boring old science which has welded that consensus together hasn’t changed one bit. The global temperature is rising rapidly, and there’s no plausible explanation for it other than greenhouse gases. We can’t say for sure what the effects might be, but since it appears to be on track to take us right out of the comfort zone in which human civilisation has evolved and flourished, then, on balance, we probably ought to do everything we can to cool things down.

And, er, that’s it. Very boring. Go back to your homes, nothing to see here.

Except, what if we’re wrong? What if somehow, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, climate change does indeed prove to be a myth?

Well then, we’d be mad to waste our money and effort on... what, exactly?

Renewable energy? Not such a waste in the light of peak oil and politically vulnerable gas supplies, though, is it?

Energy efficiency? Ditto, with bells on.

Forest conservation? Pretty essential if we’re to stem the crash in biodiversity and reduce floods and soil erosion.

A shift to electric cars, alongside more walking and cycling? Enjoy cleaner, quieter streets, a healthier populace, and reduced pressure on health service budgets...

Technology transfer to the developing world? Managed properly, it could be one of the most effective ways of lifting people out of poverty – not to mention boosting emerging economies.

And so on, and so forth...

Almost all the stuff we need to do to slow global warming is stuff we probably want – and eventually, will need – to do anyway. We might do it a little earlier than otherwise, but if we plan for it, and stick to those plans, we can make the transition that much smoother, and more cost-effective.

So what’s not to like?

Yes, I am being a bit simplistic. Without climate change, we wouldn’t spend billions on unproven technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, and we might pause before rushing into biofuels with quite such forest-felling abandon. But overall, the ‘co benefits’ of robust action to tackle climate change have been vastly understated.

It was neatly summed up by a cartoon doing the rounds at Copenhagen. It shows a climate sceptic pointing in horror at a flipchart listing all the positives of a low-carbon economy:

Unleashing brands as agents of transformative change

Sally Uren — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:03:50 +0000

Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.

A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.

Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low. So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.

But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands. Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level. The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).

And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent. We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon. In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.

So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life?

At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered. He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’. Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.

Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits. It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour.
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple. It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.

Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications. Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.

Two final tips for effective consumer communications. The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster. Make people feel good. Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change. You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.

Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers. Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.

We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing. But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff. Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.

For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward - we simply need to consume less stuff.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

Paint your business green with sustainable innovation

Chris Sherwin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:48:30 +0000

Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.

Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.

The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.

Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.

The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.

Here are a few of the innovations:

Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans.
Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.

We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.

Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.

A step closer to sustainable financial markets?

Alice Chapple — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:04:57 +0000

President Barack Obama has shaken up the banks with his plans for radical reform just as they seemed to be settling back into their cosy business-as-usual ways, but it’s just a small step in the right direction.

No doubt the banks will respond with warnings over the coming days, weeks and months that regulation of their activities or their remuneration policies would hurt us more than it does them - by damaging our pensions and the tax take. If we want the financial system to deliver a sustainable future, we should be prepared to pick those arguments apart.

Obama wants to see the banks where you and I put our money prohibited from engaging in certain risky activities, which can make a lot of money in the short term but which can put the their entire finances at risk over a longer time-frame. He singles out hedge funds, private equity and proprietary trading.

He is right to try (however difficult it may be) to distinguish between the ‘oil’ that makes the system run smoothly - basic banking services - and the speculative ‘cogs’ that put the system at risk and only create short-term returns for the finance sector itself.

But the principle could be taken further. The finance sector's short-term perspective on money-making stores up all sorts of other long-term risks for us as tax-payers and future pensioners, by overlooking factors which will have a major impact on our economies like climate change and the depletion of scarce resources like clean water, fertile soils and forests. Unless our financial system takes these risks into account, and begins to value these assets better, the system will collapse and our 'wealth' will collapse with it. This needs to be part of the conversation.

The discussions on financial reform provide an opportunity to shine a light on the sector's activities. Which parts deliver value for shareholders and the wider public in a stable and sustainable way and are required for the system to run smoothly? Which only serve to create short-term returns for the finance sector itself?

If we can have an open debate of this kind, we may emerge with a financial system that manages risk, values the things that matter and provides capital to the activities that can deliver a sustainable future.

Read more about Forum for the Future’s work to create a sustainable financial system.

Investigating the business case for sustainability: seven steps that could make you millions

David Bent — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:33:27 +0000

Good environmental management has saved telecoms group BT more than $700 million. It used clear-eyed analysis and fundamental financial tools to identify the business case for sustainability. Here are steps you can apply yourself.

Finding the business case is the ‘holy grail’ of sustainability professionals, a goal which sometimes seems impossibly hard, and yet there are actually many different business cases for sustainability projects, change programmes and initiatives.

In previous posts I gave Six Lessons on Finding the Business Case for Sustainability Initiatives and Four Tips on Getting Buy-In from Finance. This final post goes into the technical part – seven steps to investigate the business case.

I’ll illustrate with the work Forum for the Future did with BT, which helped the telecoms group save $720 million (£442 million) in operating costs over five years.

1. Identify what you’re investigating and why. Obvious, but you’ll be surprised how poorly people define boundaries. Are you looking at the sustainability drivers for the whole organisation or only a particular project or initiative? Are you looking at the worth of an entire change programme, or do you want to add sustainability-related criteria into a decision-making process like capital expenditure budgeting? Make sure you know your scope.

You should also be clear why you are investigating. How will you use the results? What is the change you’re trying to stimulate?

BT was interested in identifying the financial benefits of good environmental practice for reporting and marketing. Crucially, they narrowed that down further to some particulars: transport, energy and teleconference working practices.

2. Prioritise value drivers. Shareholder value – the value of the company to its owners – is driven by certain factors: turnover growth; margin growth; reduced capital expenditure; risk reduction; duration of competitive advantage; reduced tax rate; and reduced cost of capital. Identify which of these is key to your investigation.

For BT the value driver was clear: margin growth.

3. Identify the relevant business cases. Each value driver may have a number of different possible business cases - we’ve compiled a list of 17 pathways from sustainability to shareholder value (see here). Do get in touch if we’ve missed out any.

The crucial thing is to identify the causality: how does A lead to B lead to C, and so on to an ultimate financial impact? It is this assumed pathway that you will be testing.

BT found that each piece of environmental good practice creates a different causal chain creating value. For instance, increasing the number of home-workers has two key effects: firstly, less office use cuts office costs; secondly, home workers use some of the time they’re not travelling to do more work, effectively improving productivity. Both outcomes also reduced net greenhouse gas emissions.

4. Choose the financial technique. Each type of business case will need an appropriate financial technique (more on this at the end). The key is to find a technique that is credible to your internal audience, usually the finance function. Wherever possible, use the same method they do.

In the BT example, measuring cost savings is a management accounting question. The issue is how long can you claim them? We assumed changes five years previously had become normal practice, and so have a five-year rolling gap (i.e. effectively we compared the costs in 2008 with 2003).

5. Do the financial analysis. With luck you’ll get the finance function to do it for you. BT identified total savings of £442m ($720m) from the five years to 2009. You can see more here.

6. Use your findings in the business. You identified why you were investigating in step one. Now you have the results, use them.

BT has used its results in different ways. It has disclosed them, as part of communicating to stakeholders and shareholders the value of sustainability. It has used them to build awareness of the business case for sustainability across the business. Most importantly, they have been a powerful tool in marketing BT services such as teleworking. The results say: we do this ourselves, and this is how much we’ve saved.

7. Learn and embed. Finally, what have you learnt about investigating this business case? How will you do it differently next time? Do you need to set up an information management system to collect the data automatically? How can you embed the results in regular decision-making? What do the results mean for sustainability in the company more generally?

This is the last of three blogs which relate to the Forum’s work on Better Decisions, Real Value . We’ve nearly finished piloting various techniques with our partners. By the end of April we hope to have a tool which takes people through the steps above, including directing them to the appropriate financial technique. If you are interested in seeing a draft, or have suggestions please do get in touch with me on d.bent@forumforthefuture.org.

This article was originally published on GreenBiz.com.

This is the third of three blogs looking at the business case for sustainability. The other blogs are: How to Build a Business Case for Sustainability: Four Tips on Getting Buy-In from Finance and Six Key Lessons on Mapping Out a Business Case for Sustainability Initiatives

Messages from the future

James Goodman — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:50:14 +0000

What do new types of plastic, a recession-proof solar boom in California and resurgent UK regional accents have in common? Or high-street butchers, energy rationing and the emergence of a ‘recession generation’?

They could all be ‘weak signals’ from the future – signs of what may be to come. If you’re into sustainable development and planning for the future, then weak signals are important.

For example, a couple of years ago we noticed that the Australian Outback had been closed to protect tourists from the extreme heat. This struck us as something that could become more common in the future as the climate changes, and that could have a big impact on the tourism industry. So we built the idea into one of our Tourism 2023 scenarios which are helping the tourism industry plan for its future.

Some weak signals may be a harbinger of precisely nothing. Some may reappear years or even decades later. But others may grow progressively stronger, and even become part of a mainstream trend that plays a significant role in defining the future. They may hold implications for your organisation, your community – or even you personally.

We’ve been tracking weak signals for a couple of years, and now we’re making them public. Click here to have a look, or follow the beautifully designed ‘weak signals’ link on the right hand side of our home page.

You can learn about the obesity plateau in the USA, a 100% solar town in Uruguay, the phenomenon of bee-rustling, remote-control gardens and much more. Reading about these weak signals might just challenge some of your assumptions about what the future holds.

The blog is updated regularly so we hope you’ll find something new each time you check in. Please tell us what you think. Are we uncovering new trends? What could they mean for the prospects of a sustainable future?

By the way, you can read more about what weak signals are and how we use them, along with plenty of examples, in Hugh Knowles’s article for Green Futures.

How to build sustainability into a brand

Sally Uren — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:53:51 +0000

Mainstream brands are currently busy showing off their sustainability credentials. From Cadbury’s Dairy Milk - now 100% Fairtrade - to Persil’s Small and Mighty, using less packaging, less water, less energy - mainstream brands are having sustainability makeovers.

Is this just marketing gone mad? A fad? A cynical attempt to grab a new bit of market share? No, no, and sort of – in that order. The market share bit is partly true, but in most cases, from Cadbury to Unilever to M&S, there’s little cynicism involved – this is simply an evolution of their sustainability strategies. It’s not enough to have shiny policies; leadership today is pushing the sustainability promise into the brand.

And there are at least three reasons why using brands to visibly demonstrate sustainability commitments makes good business sense.

Firstly, as public awareness and interest in the sustainability agenda grows, there is the potential to cement existing consumer relationships, and build new ones, using social and environmental issues as communication channels (that’s the market share bit).

Secondly, by doing the work to understand the sustainability impacts of a product, ways of reducing those impacts - and often saving money - become apparent.

Then, thirdly, there’s the bit about securing future supplies of raw materials: doing the right thing in terms of sourcing isn’t simply about a fair wage, it’s also about ensuring long-term continuity of supply.

So what does an authentic voice on social and environmental issues look like? How can you tell if a brand is serious about sustainability?

Of critical importance is the need to demonstrate, visibly, that taking sustainability seriously doesn’t mean business as usual. There needs to be evidence that as a result of confronting sustainability head-on, some things have changed, such as taking some products - the sustainability villains - off the shelves. Both B&Q and John Lewis in the UK have stopped selling patio heaters – which lets face it, aren’t part of a sustainable future (a jumper will always be the low-carbon option).

Honesty is also important. Communicating the challenges and dilemmas associated with a journey to greater sustainability helps build credibility. Never believe the brand or business that claims overnight sustainability, it just isn’t possible. Businesses such as Exxon, which have had a more recent conversion to sustainability, need to be very honest about the huge challenges they face in switching from an inherently unsustainable business model (oil is running out, right?) to one with renewable technologies at its heart.

Finally, there need to be absolute targets for reductions in key impact areas, from water, to carbon, to waste. Normalised targets - units of carbon emitted per area occupied, for example - as the sole measure of a brand’s performance have had their day. These clever numbers all too easily communicate efficiency improvements, but can disguise an increase in the brand’s overall footprint. And the argument that ‘we’re a growing business’ doesn’t wash. That’s the whole point – we absolutely have to decouple economic growth from environmental impact if we are going to get close to the 80-90% reduction in carbon emissions the developed world needs to achieve by 2050.

We are currently in the middle of a market transformation, from niche and green to mainstream. That’s not to say the niche and the green are not important, they are, and their very existence has paved the way for the big players to engage with the sustainability agenda. But niche and green won’t deliver the scale of the change we need to see. Giving mainstream brands serious sustainability makeovers just might.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian’s Sustainable Business section.

Overdoing the eco-pragmatism

Peter Madden — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:14:12 +0000

I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.

For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.

His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.

I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.

His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.

Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.

While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?

Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)

Erosion: the dilemma of the decade

Anna Simpson — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:14:48 +0000

It was the sort of mud that seems intent on dragging you down, slurping up your ankles and slipping under your soles. But the view redeemed all seven miles of undignified tumbles and slides as I walked from Lyme Regis to Seaton on the UK’s Jurassic Coast. Sparse vegetation skidded down the exposed bones of the cliffs, irate waves clawing at them like wildcats. I got back to the B&B to find a lively discussion under way about huge boulders tumbling down to the sea on an almost daily basis – while heedless tourists fumble around for fossils below…

Ever since ten-year-old Mary Anning found a complete ichthyosaurus some 200 years ago, Lyme Regis has been a hub for fossil hunters. It’s all thanks to giant mudslides – the largest in Europe – that expose new rocks and leave Jurassic remains scattered across the beaches.

For geologists, this ongoing erosion makes the site a whole lot more interesting – but
rising sea levels and freak storms are changing the shape of coastlines around the world at a violent rate. Defences like jetties and marinas can keep the waves at bay – but they also stop coastal habitats and systems from responding to the changes in their own way. This can detract from the fossil-strewn appeal of beaches: not great for local economies dependent on tourism.

The question is, how to find the right balance between preserving towns like Lyme Regis and its surroundings for visitors – on the one hand – and protecting the natural life and geological interest of the coast, a World Heritage Site, on the other.

It’s a small case in point, but as the climate teeters, knowing when to interfere – and just how far to go – could be the dilemma of the decade.

Disruptive Innovation competition results

Liz Evers — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:11:14 +0000

Back in October the Forum launched a competition for sets of our Disruptive Innovation Cards. Entrants were asked to tell us how they would use the cards to disrupt for sustainability. We had a really positive response with entries from as far afield as New Zealand, the US and Brazil.

After serious consideration we managed to whittle the entrants down to five winners, they are:

Ed Kellow, LEAD International who will use the cards to train 150 LEAD Associates on sustainability, who in turn train people in 33 countries
Ron Mader, Planeta.org who wants to translate the cards into Spanish and create an iphone/online application for them
Michelle Thomasson who will use the cards with economic advisors and filming the process to disseminate online
André Winter, Brazil who is organising a series of events in parallel to COP15
Stuart Jones, PLATO: Sustain who will use the cards in work with 160 business leaders in South East England

All entrants will receive an electronic version of the cards too.

“We set up the competition as a little experiment to get ideas for developing and using the cards. We were delighted and surprised by the level of response and the range of ideas. Hopefully we will get valuable feedback from all those who entered and create a valuable tool” - Hugh Knowles, Principal Advisor

Innovation guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology or innovation, as “that which improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect”. The sustainable economy of the future depends on just such disruptions to move us away from current unsustainable technologies and business models at the pace we need.

At the Forum we’re always looking for innovative new ways to approach sustainability. The cards were developed to help innovators come up with game-changing, disruptive ideas - each one capturing a different method of thinking ‘outside the box’.

We’re keen to catalyse these disruptions for sustainability and we’re putting together plans for Disruptive Innovation in 2010 and beyond, and our set of 12 cards is a first step. We’ve started to use these internally, with our partners and for larger projects, and initial feedback suggests we’ve hit on something rather exciting!

Find out more about the Forum’s innovation work.

Corporate sustainability holds its value in the recession

David Bent — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:20:23 +0000

Despite what the Financial Times has called "the Great Recession" corporate sustainability is holding its own. The downturn has hit the UK harder than any since 1930s but companies are still finding sustainability is a source of cost savings, innovation, motivation and long-term advantage.

This time last year people were predicting the decline of corporate sustainability, saying the recession would force everyone to show their true colours: consumers would stop buying 'ethical' and companies would get rid of the PR fluff, including all this sustainability nonsense.

At Forum for the Future we were also concerned, so we created some scenarios that outlined lots of possibilities, from 'Chinese-American globalisation', through 'A quick return' to 'Into depression'. We focused our April Business Network event on the recession, with a set of scenarios and some techniques to keep sustainability relevant and fight off budget cuts.

Eight months on we know it has been a difficult time for pretty much all the organisations we work with in business and the public sector - "the worst year in my professional career" as one CEO put it to us.

But the vast majority of our partners have kept going on sustainability. There have been budget cuts, but mostly only in proportion to cuts around the rest of the business. The evidence so far is that corporate sustainability is holding its own in the recession. Why?

Back in April we proposed four ways a sustainable approach can help your business in a recession: it identifies direct cost savings; it helps innovate products and services which defend your revenue; it motivates your people; and it captures long-term advantage.

Other people have come up with very similar lists (see Andrew Winston's short book Green Recovery, The Economist's rather churlish article, and the excellent Sloan Review special report on The Business of Sustainability).

We don't know of any good quantitative research, but the anecdotal evidence is that sustainability does help companies in a recession. Some of our partners have pushed ahead with projects aimed at reducing energy use (which also helps prepare for the Carbon Reduction Commitment). One partner told us they'd seen five years' worth of innovation this year, especially in helping customers reduce their spending. We can see IBM trying to capture long-term advantage through all that “Smarter Planet” advertising.

On top of this, it's likely that companies would have retreated much more on sustainability three years ago. The resilience of corporate sustainability in the recession is evidence that increasingly they understand what it can do for them, and they are embedding and integrating it into their organisations.

But we're not out of the woods yet. Here at the Forum, we've been using our recession scenarios to track developments each month. The summary is that parts of the world have growth, but there is great uncertainty, with most predictions pointing to a long, slow climb at best. Commodity prices, like oil, are high for a struggling global economy, and this shows that the underlying infrastructure bottlenecks are still there (see our report on Acting Now for more). Households and banks are going to take a while to rebuild their balance sheets. Governments are walking a delicate tightrope; keeping spending going long-enough to maintain growth but proving they are serious about tackling deficits. There is a real risk of a ‘double-dip recession’.

The year ahead will still be difficult for companies, and we will all have to adjust to a world that is different from 2007. But the fundamental reasons why sustainability has risen up the corporate agenda remain: the real impacts of an unsustainable world are being felt, with the prospect of more to come. The challenges and opportunities of sustainability will still be important for companies in the years to come.

The empathy gap

Helen Clarkson — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:26:47 +0000

As I read this weekend’s papers and made my way through lists of things to make me a better person this year, one piece of wisdom stood out from the usual litany of drink less, exercise more, go to bed earlier - a call for us to be more empathetic.

Roman Krznaric’s suggestion, in The Observer, sounded more interesting than all of the others (though of course I’ll be giving those a shot too), so I duly looked at his blog: www.outrospection.org where, amongst other thoughts, he has a very interesting piece on empathy and climate change. There’s also a full article here.

Krznaric’s argument is that empathy is a powerful emotional tool that can be mobilised to create social change. He offers the historical example of the rise of the social movement that challenged slavery, which created an outpouring of empathy from the public, and quotes historian Adam Hochschild as saying “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy”.

We need that scale of empathetic response, he says, to deal with climate change, and to close the gap between knowledge and action.

He points to two types of empathetic response that we need – through time (to future generations) and across space (to people living now in developing countries). This is familiar territory to anyone who’s thought long and hard about sustainable development which has right at its heart the ideas of inter- and intra-generational justice, i.e. that we should develop in a way that allows others now and in the future to meet their needs.

The problem has been how to take the idea that we all have the same entitlement to meeting our needs, put this into practice and articulate it at a policy level. Krznaric is suggesting that empathy provides a way of bridging the gap, where political and economic arguments fail.

Empathy has definitely started moving up the agenda in recent years, particularly as it’s a topic which Barack Obama has talked so much about, referring often to what he calls the ‘empathy deficit’: “When those of us in comfort can’t look at a child in poverty and say ‘they’re just like my kid, they’re as special as mine’”.

Examples of the use of empathy in public policy can also be found with the success of movements such as that for Restorative Justice, which brings together the victims of crimes with their perpetrators. It has been shown to be beneficial for both, and to reduce re-offending rates. By putting themselves in the place of the other, both sides it seems have much to gain.

I spent some time last year wondering if we wouldn’t be doing better on climate change if we had more women leaders? It feels like there’s still a lot of belief in the macho-techno solution that is going to come from somewhere at some point and sort this out, without the need for behaviour change.

However, I’ve decided this isn’t to do with male versus female, but the sort of leaders we tend to go for. A year into office and Obama is already accused of not ‘doing’ enough. It seems people don’t want leaders who think, or empathise, they want people who (appear to) act: reflective types need not apply.

But I think Krznaric is right. We’re going to need a huge dose of empathy to sort this out, at every level. It’s a nice thought experiment to wonder how Obama would find running China for a week, and vice versa with Wen Jiabao. I don’t think we’ll persuade them to do it. But if we teach ourselves to empathise more with others, maybe we’ll learn to press our politicians for the right sort of solutions. We may also choose different politicians, and look for different characteristics in our leaders. I wonder how differently Copenhagen would have turned out with a bit more empathy?

Copenhagen flop means business must take a stand

Ben Tuxworth — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:19:40 +0000

As Copenhagen diminishes in the rear-view mirror, we must still do whatever we can to stop it also sinking beneath the waves.

What should organisations make of the Copenhagen Accord (or if you find accord just too challenging, ‘letter of intent’)? With its questionable traction, action-free plan to keep temperature rises under two degrees, vague suggestions about using the markets, technology and forests er…somehow, and unappealing invitation to all nations to record whatever voluntary commitments they’d like to make in a special register, it doesn’t exactly help you believe in Santa again. As China distances itself even from this weedy document, leaving no clear path to something more binding next year, it would be perfectly reasonable to find the whole thing pretty depressing.

Whether you blame Denmark, China, or the UN itself, organisations – particularly businesses - hoping that Copenhagen would bring some clarity on the carbon regime they should be planning for, will have to wait. With no clear shared targets, timetable, or approach to markets, the temptation to wait and see before making investments – and then pile into countries with weaker carbon regimes – will be hard to resist. Some companies are already making it clear that if governments were expecting them to make the big investments in the low-carbon transition, they have utterly failed to create the environment required.

It would be easy to throw our hands up in despair. But as with all such crises, of course, this is exactly when leadership has to stand up. As Ronan Dunne, CEO of Telefonica O2 pointed out at a recent Forum for the Future event, decisions where you can analyse the numbers for an answer don’t need leaders. Ditto moments when everyone knows what to do. It’s time to decide what you really think about it all, and take a stand.

But in the face of uncertainty about carbon, what’s the right leadership stance to adopt? Before COP 15 we had five arguments for action. One was that a future regulatory environment on carbon constituted a risk too potentially expensive to ignore. That one may be on hold. But the others – the arrival of peak oil; the fact that most of what you would do to decarbonise makes social and economic sense anyway; the lesson of history that responding to a constraint can drive game-changing innovation; and the awful truth that there are plenty of other, much less debatable environmental challenges already at the gate – all still stand. Now’s the time to make the most of them.

So the post-Copenhagen world means pushing on with pretty much all those things that made business sense at the end of November. And ultimately it means remembering that, somewhere out there in the darkness, climate change itself grinds on, indifferent to our hopes, fears and failed conferences, and still the greatest challenge facing humanity.

Merry Christmas!

Scaling the summit of sustainability

Steven Bland — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:11:11 +0000

I’ve debated with Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, surveyed 13,000 people at a national charity about their views on sustainability, and spent three exhausting days at the Leadership Trust in Ross-on-Wye, all in one action-packed first ‘term’ on Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development

I’ve written close to 20,000 words, felt useless and useful in equal measure, role-played being a local councillor, given a class on energy and climate change to a group of Year 9 schoolchildren, and immersed myself in the world of sustainability: from social capital, to the Natural Step, to carbon markets and green economics.

Staff at the Forum describe us as future ‘change agents’. It’s an alluring yet daunting phrase. In our first week we were presented with the image of a snow-capped mountain: ours to climb this year. This was the goal of our journey - a sustainability vantage point from which we could survey the state of the planet and its people and contribute to creating a world of increased social and environmental prosperity, a ‘good’ world, not just a less bad one.

My current vantage point is a long way off that sustainability mountain (I reckon there’s been a bit of altitude sickness, and there’s more to come). I’m currently well below the tree line… - in fact I’m selling trees. Are Christmas trees sustainable, I ask myself, as I wrap them in plastic netting which I fear could end up in the stomach of some unfortunate seabird.

Truly understanding the sustainability of the humble Christmas tree has less to do with netting and more about the systems with which the tree interacted and was a part. What effect did growing have on local ecological systems? Were the people who trimmed them into shape paid a living wage? And how did this impact on local societies? The Forum has instilled in me the importance of systems thinking which involves seeing the forest, in spite of the trees. Creating a more just and prosperous future will require us to change the way we think fundamentally.

In these first few months I’ve seen glimpses of a sustainable future. For example, district heating through Combined Heat and Power plants in Birmingham where efficiency is 85% compared to traditional power stations’ frankly pathetic 35%. I’ve seen the value of local strategic partnerships bringing businesses, politicians and community groups together to create shared visions of prosperous, low-carbon futures.

It’s been a personal journey too. At Birmingham City Council, as I sat wondering what I should be doing and puzzled over how to integrate into the team during my four-week placement, I was beset by a lack of imagination, inspiration and drive. I was better prepared to deal with this because of our seminars on the importance of self-reflection and self-learning.

The course’s focus on self-directed learning is vital, but challenging! It’s a far cry from university, and it leads to moments of self-doubt about whether I’m making the most of the opportunities being placed in front of me. The Forum leaves doors ajar - we have to push on the ones we want, and decide how to walk through them. Sometimes it’s not very clear or obvious how to do that!
Throughout it all, lecturers have stressed the importance of optimism.

The catastrophic and negative portrayals of the environmental movement have desensitised people to many environmental issues. The number of people who deny that human activity causes climate change is growing, not diminishing. How do we create a positive vision of the future, whilst convincing people of the scale and urgency of the problem at hand? This is a key question we’ve been battling with in the past few months on our first two of five placements this year: in the NGO sector and in local government.

What’s been the hardest? Bridging that gap between those of us who are climbing that mountain, and many others I meet who haven’t even heard of the mountain, never mind seen it. The reality is the core messages and realities of sustainable development are often lost in a sea of ‘greenwash’ and climate-change frenzy. “I’m doing a course in Leadership for Sustainable Development” I say, excitedly, yet with trepidation. The response? Blank faces, or an uncertain “Oh, that’s cool”, or the most terrifying: “What’s sustainable development?!” Explaining that one succinctly, whilst staying positive, has been more difficult than I expected!

There’s a lot more to come on this journey. I’m off to the Department for Energy and Climate Change next month and am both apprehensive and excited about a placement with big business, a corporation or bank after that. The attitude to take on this course is ‘no-holds-barred’ - seeing even difficult challenges as a welcome contribution to personal development and learning.

The course is a great melting point of young optimism, drive and differing opinions. My fellow students include scientists, philosophers, sociologists and vegans, people passionate about social media, sustainable fashion or activism, all united by one common aspiration: to get out there and do something that creates true ‘added value’ for people and the environment, and to ‘reverse the perverse’ in our economic and social systems.

The best thing so far? The fun. Twelve people trekking up that mountain together, exploring, learning, and creating, together with expert facilitators and lecturers.

Steven Bland is a student on Forum for the Future’s Masters course in Leadership for Sustainable Development