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)

From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days. Though there are now as many brave faces out there as after defeat in a general election, to bill the Copenhagen accord as anything other than a failure is simply dishonest.

Of course it matters that China, India and the United States have, for the first time, formally recognised the need for “deep cuts” in emissions of CO2. Of course it’s a good thing that rich-world countries have committed “to a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020” to help the poor world to cope with climate change. And of course it’s critical that the science underpinning these two commitments has been strongly reconfirmed.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, may well be right in claiming that “there is a danger of too much negativity”, but we have to be realistic about what did and didn’t happen in Copenhagen. The accord itself has no formal standing, and there are no firm figures in it regarding either the scale or urgency of the cuts required, even though many countries are already signed-up to such cuts. There are no details as to how the $100 billion will be raised. Worst of all, there is no commitment to move from this desperately inadequate accord to a legally binding treaty over the next year.

Paradoxically, the greatest cause for hope lies in the depth of that failure. Before Copenhagen, many campaigners had argued that no agreement would be better than a weak agreement. And in effect, that’s exactly what has happened.

The shock of this is only just beginning to sink in — as is the realisation that there is still all to play for before the next conference in Mexico in a year’s time. By that time Barack Obama should have done his deal with the Senate, China should have got used to its new responsibilities as a global climate player and the EU should have recovered sufficiently from the recession to play a more influential leadership role.

It is intriguing to speculate that it might be David Cameron supporting the EU in that role rather than Gordon Brown. In an election year, the domestic fallout from Copenhagen will be intense. And who knows how individual citizens will react to such a confusing scene?

For Gordon Brown, the failure of Copenhagen will be a deep disappointment. He has worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to help to broker a real deal. British embassies around the world (and particularly in China and India) have put climate diplomacy right at the top of their agenda. Mr Miliband has become the most effective member of Mr Brown’s Cabinet, and he personally played a hugely significant role in Copenhagen. Credit where credit is due: on the international stage, no Government has done more to get a legally binding deal on climate change than the UK’s.

However, the Prime Minister will not now be able to lay claim to some Copenhagen breakthrough. The UK’s unforgiving media will give him little slack in that regard. There is no reassuring “global deal” to provide cover for some of the more controversial and unpopular policies that the Government is now bringing forward — on air passenger duty, for instance, or zero-carbon housing. Peter Mandelson’s new-found enthusiasm for a “green industrial revolution” might just slip down that old fixer’s list of things that really matter in a pre-election period.

But there’s no political upside in any of that for David Cameron. Indeed, I suspect that the fallout will prove to be more problematic for Mr Cameron than for Mr Brown. It will give succour to that weird bunch of “grandees” (David Davis, Peter Lilley, Lord Lawson of Blaby et al) who have become increasingly critical of Mr Cameron’s intelligent leadership on climate change.

It will provide new ammunition for the out-and-out “contrarians” scattered through the UK media who remain unpersuaded by the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, and who do so much to reinforce people’s uncertainty and confusion.

Though I have no doubt that Mr Cameron will see off the Lawson brigade, he has a much tougher challenge on his hands with local Conservatives. Many of them do not share his enthusiasm for a low-carbon economy, do not want to sign up to the targets in the Climate Change Act, and continue to treat wind farms as if they were invading aliens from another planet. This is not just “a “generation thing”; some of the most vociferous critics of Mr Cameron’s blue-green politics are young thrusters for whom concern for the environment is seen as an ideological aberration.

All of which, I fear, will make it even harder to persuade individuals to play their small but still crucial part in addressing climate change. That feeling of disempowerment (“what difference can we make when China is single-handedly trashing the climate anyway?”) will be reinforced. Politicians will have to get even smarter in making the case — for improved energy efficiency in the home (saving you a lot of money), reduced car use (less congestion, healthier lifestyles), less waste and even more recycling (saving even more money), and more holidays at home rather than abroad (less hassle, good for the economy).

The fact that low-carbon lifestyles are both healthier and cheaper gives politicians plenty to work with. But the past two weeks in Copenhagen have not made that task any easier.

This article was originally printed in The Times, 21 December 2009

4N7CT8H9W6YR 

 

Do the email exchanges hacked from the University of East Anglia computers indicate skulduggery? I cannot comment. The proposed enquiry will surely settle that point. What I can say is that after six years as a ‘lay’ member of the Natural Environment Research Council board, I encountered only a determination amongst climate scientists to get the science as right as possible. 
 
Nevertheless, it should not be a surprise that there are those who dispute the science around climate change.  Search for an academic to back any outlandish point of view, and you will find one, with motivations ranging from the muddled to the malevolent.   The massive amount of money the fossil fuel industry pours into promoting the malevolent objective of climate denial helps it gain more ‘air time’ for its views than it deserves. As does the laziness of the media in giving equal coverage to for-and-against formats for arguments, regardless of the weighting of the evidence. (Remember the damage done by one doctor’s views about the MMR vaccine?)
 
A naturally disputatious species, the really extraordinary thing about climate scientists is that so many agree about so much!  The 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the output of 2500 expert reviewers, 800 authors, and 140 political leaders from over 130 countries.  It would take more than one bad apple in UEA or anywhere else to negate those overall conclusions, which are increasingly confirmed by the evidence of our own eyes.
 
As world experts and leaders gather in Copenhagen for the number- and word-crunching part of the process, lets wish them wisdom and luck, and hope they are not put off the biggest political leadership challenge ever - making decisions now about commitments which will have a pay-off period beyond their term of office.

Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).

These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible.  And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.

Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon.  It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.

But Australia provides an even more compelling story.  Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks.  Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C.  This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed.  The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002.  Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average.  As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline!  The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.

So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics?  The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change.  But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.

The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets.  It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.

Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.

You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference.  Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.

Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board.  And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.

That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago.  The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on. 

And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.

Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach.  That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.

I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part.  As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.

US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility.  They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now.  They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.

For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this.  It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.

Preparing for uncertain challenges

Last year 40 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies said the impact of a water shortage on their business would be “severe” or “catastrophic”- but only 17 per cent said they were prepared for such a crisis (Marsh Centre for Risk Insights)[i].

It appears many businesses – operating in areas with plentiful amounts of relatively cheap water – do not see water as much of an issue yet. But we all know that water is an environmental, a political, an economic and a social issue, and that makes it a business issue too. With rising populations and climate change, it’s an issue that will go up and up the business agenda in the coming months and years. Even areas that may be water rich today could prove to be challenging in the future.

As with many uncertain challenges, the better you understand the issues and prepare for multiple futures, the less disruption you are likely to experience as operating realities change. Only when a business understands its whole water footprint – direct and indirect impacts – will it know where the risk areas are and where the opportunities for process and product innovation are.

At our recent Forum Business Network event (‘Water Falling’), delegates voiced concerns about competition for water and the priority their businesses would be given by authorities if the communities in which they operate were to face a severe lack of clean fresh water. What is clear is that getting access to the right amount of the right type of water will become more difficult. An increase in water prices in many parts of the world is likely, but there may also be instances where water will be simply unavailable for industrial use. Thus security of supply of water will become one of the key drivers for business.

Getting to grips with water footprinting

Water footprinting - a term introduced by Hoekstra over five years ago[ii] - can be done at a variety of levels: individual, product, company or even country level. The most widely accepted definition of a water footprint for a business is “the total volume of freshwater that is used directly and indirectly to run and support a business”[iii].

Understanding where your business’s big water stresses are now – right along the value chain – is important. Preparing for how those water stresses might change in the future is doubly critical.

The value of water footprinting for business

The real value in water footprinting is that it helps a business analyse its water impacts and highlight the hotspots (or its water stressed spots) in its value chain. Companies can then focus their efforts on those areas of greatest impact and where they have greatest influence.

Based on Forum’s experiences with corporate carbon footprinting, the value of water footprinting is likely to be much more in the business response than in the consumer response. This is likely to be focussed on eco efficiency, but also increasingly around product innovation.

An evolving tool

It’s clear that water footprinting can be very helpful as a company starts getting to grips with its water consumption and associated risks. However, it is a relatively young concept and there are still some sticky issues with using it more widely. For companies to be able to benchmark their performance for example, boundaries need to be clearly defined and agreed. Definitions need to be universal, methodologies for measuring need to be standardised – pretty similar issues as with carbon footprinting, carbon labelling and carbon neutrality.

There are, however, some fundamental differences between water and carbon footprinting. Unlike carbon, water is geographically bound, and analysis and solutions must be applied on a watershed level.

The UK might be classified as a region with low or no water stress when analysed on a national level, but look closer and the Thames Valley region stands out as severely water stressed, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Water footprinting is not just about the amount of water – it also takes into account the type of water and, crucially, where it comes from.

Businesses need to be aware of their current footprint, but it is also vital that they think ahead. Companies also need to develop an understanding of how their water needs, and the watersheds in which they operate, might change over time.

Water footprinting isn’t for everyone

For some businesses the cost of detailed water footprinting will be a barrier, but many won’t need a detailed methodology to tell them the water stressed parts of their business. A simple risk mapping exercise, such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)’s Global Water tool[iv], might be a more viable alternative for some.

It’s not a panacea, but it can be a useful first step

Water footprinting is only the first step in a corporate water strategy. As with carbon, companies should start by measuring their direct (operational) footprint. They should then map out their supply chain water footprint. Once they understand their dryspots – and/or wetspots for that matter – businesses can then prioritise action. They can introduce water reduction plans at their facilities and also look at their raw materials that come from water-stressed areas.

Businesses need to think about how they can work with their key suppliers and the communities in which they operate to minimise their total water footprint. At our ‘Water Falling’ event in September, participants agreed that collaboration is key to finding the appropriate solutions. This suggests that there is a readiness and willingness to come together to find a way forward in tackling the water challenge.

Where to go for more information?

If you want to know more about how Forum for the Future can help you with future water scenarios, risk mapping or developing corporate water strategies, please contact Lena Staafgard or Dan Crossley.

Other resources

• WBCSD website for access to a free water assessment tool for global understanding of consumption for individual sites[iv]
• Waterwise (www.waterwise.org.uk)
• Water Footprint Network (www.waterfootprint.org)
• Forum for the Future’s ‘Water Falling’ event summary in the Partner Area of this website (available to members of the Forum Business Network)

Dan Crossley and Lena Staafgard

[i] http://global.marsh.com/news/press/PRMCRI092107.php
[ii] http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Report12.pdf
[iii] http://www.waterfootprint.org/index.php?page=files/BusinessWaterFootprints
[iv] http://www.wbcsd.org/templates/TemplateWBCSD5/layout.asp?type=p&MenuId=MTUxNQ&doOpen=1&ClickMenu=LeftMenu