Five years on

In our regular critical review, we revisit stories we identified as interesting back in 2000 – and check where they’re going now.

Webcast masters

When the Local Government Association broadcast its 2001 rural conference via the internet to ‘virtual delegates’, Green Futures hailed ‘webcasting’ as a breakthrough in linking rural communities [‘ Only connect for rural conference’, GF25, p11]. Today, nearly a quarter of all local councils have it in their armoury.

“We’re selling the service on the strength of its democratic transparency and participation,” says Keith Young, chief executive of Public-i, which provides webcasting facilities to the public sector. It may seem a poor substitute for warm bodies in a room, but the cold hard stats seem to bear him out. Five years ago, councils could expect an average of just seven people at a routine meeting, but recent figures show that the turnout among ‘webwatchers’ averages over 300.

It makes sense, says Young: “Not many people will go to a meeting at 7pm on a Tuesday in December. But if they can just turn on their computer, they’re more likely to make the effort.” Virtual participants have the unprecedented luxury of watching only the bits that interest them, and the advantage of ‘speaking out’ anonymously via the webcast’s feedback facility.

Broadcasting via the net allows the public sector to make significant savings. It’s a low-cost way of accommodating an infinite number of virtual delegates without physically hosting big meetings. Then there’s the carbon saving when attendees don’t need to travel. Perhaps councils should get more PR mileage out of this benefit.

The private sector has been in on the act for some time. Among the FTSE 100 companies, 79 currently webcast a presentation of their end-of-year results, and a good few use the technology for product launches or internal communications too. One driver of this high take-up, explains Tom Roebuck of service providers World Television, is the principle of “fair disclosure” – which is mandatory now in the US. Broadcasting financial information simultaneously across the globe ensures that no one is at a competitive advantage. And the spin-off for the environment, he adds, is that there are far fewer men in suits needing to jet in for a quick briefing. – Hannah Bullock
Public-I, 0870 9070025, www.public-i.info
World Television Group,
020 7388 8555, www.world-television.com

Publish and be virtual

‘Paperless’ reporting has spread across the corporate world since we spotted it as an emerging trend five years ago [GF25, p10, ‘ Online reporting keeps the impact down’]. Among the FTSE 350 companies, no fewer than 69 (almost one in every five) went down the ‘dematerialisation’ route with their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports last year, publishing them solely on the web. Print plus web is also commonplace, while only four ‘dinosaurs’ still publish such reports solely in ‘hard copy’ format, according to a survey by CSR communications consultancy Context.

But its director, Peter Knight, warns that “we must be very wary of making assumptions that publishing on the web is better for the environment than traditional bulk printing. It depends on the context.” A life cycle analysis by Deutsche Telecom concludes that storing, transmitting and then printing a pdf file on an individual printer, as so many of us do, has a far higher environmental impact than getting it printed in bulk in the first place. Best to keep the virtual virtual. – Hannah Bullock
Context, 020 7251 0050, www.econtext.co.uk

Feeling the way

Joined-up vision on environmental issues and disability rights? Shouldn’t this be just the kind of thing ‘sustainability’ is meant to mean, albeit with the odd tricky dilemma to reconcile?

Five years ago we found more in the way of talk than action [see GF25  ‘Access all areas’ ].  But there was a sector that offered a green shoot of hope – public transport.

Brighton and Hove was the first local authority in the UK to produce textured bus maps to make local services accessible to blind people. Five years on, this clever idea is still far from common practice, but Glasgow and Coventry are among a growing number of councils that are using ‘tactile maps’. London Underground, too, is currently working with the RNIB’s National Centre for Tactile Diagrams on a project to produce textured layouts of its stations.

The key piece of legislation for championing the rights of disabled people, the Disability Discrimination Act, was updated this year to include public transport. By 2017, bus operators will have to ensure that everyone can access their services. Clearly, some minds are being focused by this change in the law – and by the fact that 10 million people in the UK are classified as having some form of disability, with a combined spending power of £50 billion a year.

Pedestrianisation, meanwhile, can be a double-edged sword, and not just in the urbane surrounds of Soho. In Kendal, on the edge of the Lake District National Park, an experiment with reclaiming the streets has been called illegal by local disability campaigners. The centre of this Cumbrian town, they say, will become a no-go area if they cannot park their cars outside the shops. – Mark Kinver
RNIB, 020 7388 1266, www.rnib.org.uk

Engineering change

Want to feel optimistic about the future? Then look at what engineers are up to these days. Yes, there are still worries about having enough good ones, sufficiently trained in such sustainability essentials as energy efficiency and renewable technologies. But of all the professions, engineers have done more than any to dismantle the dusty institutional barriers to transformative change. One of those barriers came down when the guardian of professional standards, the Engineering Council (UK), in partnership with the Engineer of the 21st Century (E21C) initiative [see GF25, p50, ‘21st century environeers’],  added ‘sustainability competencies’ to its requirement for registration.

From now on, every engineer signing up has to demonstrate that they understand what sustainable development means, and provide evidence of experience gained in both the classroom and the workplace.

What looks like a relatively small bureaucratic change has triggered a cascade of consequences that is transforming engineering courses in universities and colleges. Specialist institutions, such as those serving mechanical or civil engineers, are reviewing their own course accreditation and training programmes – and companies and organisations employing engineers are working out how to provide the essential experience their young recruits must have.

And the active ingredient? As Jamie Oliver might put it, add a good dollop of sustainability-passionate young engineers, to a sprinkling of supportive leaders too short of critical mass to drive change on their own. Stir carefully, and bingo!

This year, the E21C initiative moved into a full and pioneering partnership between Forum for the Future and the Royal Academy of Engineers – and the project is currently recruiting a second round of engineering employers to its Partnership for Change initiative. The focus is on:

• making it easier and cheaper for clients and contractors to select the sustainability option;
• training teachers and trainers about ways of getting sustainability into all courses;
• finding a shared (technical and sustain-ability) language for specifying materials and process (in contracts, for example);
• doing the same to get sustainability thinking and practice embedded into the culture of both engineering organisations and other professional groups with which engineers work (such as accountants, for example).

Partner companies can help influence the engineering profession at large, while at the same time taking new ideas and learning back into their own organisation, through short term secondments of one of their own young engineers to the project. – Sara Parkin
E21C, Heidi Parkes, 020 7324 3653, h.parkes@forumforthefuture.org.uk

11 November 2005

Hannah Bullock, Mark Kinver and Sara Parkin