Virtual Reality

Can computers really help us design better decisions? Stuart Bond  of WWF explores a cyber world that will have civil servants hooked.

David Miliband has inherited a huge task on climate change in his role as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs. The recent surge of political interest in the issue should certainly provide a mandate for him to steer the government back on track to achieve its pledge of a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2010. But has he got what it takes to push things further than that?

The government did hint in last year’s Strategy for Sustainable Development that it would consider measuring emissions not only from the UK’s own products and services, but from everything the country consumes. Acutely aware that most of our food, manufactured goods and raw materials are produced abroad, WWF has captured these ‘hidden carbon’ emissions in a new report. Counting Consumption, which lays out the impacts in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, material flows and ‘ecological footprints’ of 123 economic sectors and 54 socio-economic groups in the UK’s regions, is a significant step to understanding the impact of how we consume.

But while number crunching is a powerful way of helping people realise the scale of their impact, providing advice on how to manage those accounts is equally essential. If people are to change their behaviour - whether in government, in business or as consumers - what is needed is some kind of assurance that moving on from ‘business as usual’ will result in a better outcome. They need detailed knowledge of the risks and opportunities of potential scenarios.

Which is why the same environmental accounting experts behind the report (from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology) have teamed up with Cambridge Econometrics to design a software package that illustrates the real life ecological impact of decisions made in the corridors of power. The Resources and Energy Analysis Programme (REAP), as it’s known, might not sound that different from other sustainability ‘tools’, but its functional name belies the journeys it can take users on… Users in central government, for example, might choose to key in the target for a 60% reduction in CO2 by 2050, and assess - via the scenario function - how that target may be achieved.

They’d no doubt be shocked to learn that it would require a 75% reduction in resource use over the same period. Or a regional development agency might picture what would happen if one of the current government targets were actually met. If biofuels are to form 5% of transport fuel sales by the end of the decade, they could ask, how will that affect climate change targets and how much land will be covered by energy crops?

The tool could even see environmental advisers toying with the idea of transferring all the money we currently spend on road building in this country and investing it in public transport, for it would only be virtual reality… The programme’s architects envision a world in which each region and government department would have a REAP operative, using it to advise on the outcomes of specific policy decisions. A local council transport officer, for example, could explore what would happen if they did introduce that proposed road toll.

How big a reduction in road traffic would it bring, and what about the increase in bus and train travel? REAP has been designed so that users can add additional, localised information into the equation. The plan is to regularly update the national statistics as well, so that the programme can be used as a database of material flows, pollutants and ecological footprints - no simple task, they admit.

But by tracking the effects of interactions between consumer behaviour, government policy, industry and the environment, the REAP tool is one small step towards ‘unfreezing’ the country from unsustainable consumption patterns. Quantifying - and unravelling - the effect of our actions on the world around us, will make it much easier to make good decisions founded upon sound evidence.

Stuart Bond is WWF-UK’s footprint co-ordinator.

8 July 2006

Stuart Bond