No.71 January 2009
Indias indias ’ green horizons Asia’s unlikely cleantech star
Plus: • Crunch time for a green new deal • Britain’s leading cities of light • Jonathon Porritt gets optimistic
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Contents
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Environmental concerns?
Together we will make a difference
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Join us at the 17th UKPHA Annual Public Health Forum HEALTH INEQUALITIESTURNING THE TIDE
Spotlight on Housing,Transport and Commissioning
The UK’s largest multi-disiplinary conference on public health
T Healthy Sustainable Neighbourhoods
The Brighton Centre 25th & 26th March 2009 www.ukphaconference.org.uk
“Underlying determinants of health inequity and environmental change overlap substantially; they are signs of an economic system predicated
T Climate Change T Transport & Health
on asymmetric growth and competition, shaped by market forces that mostly disregard health and environmental consequences rather than
T Housing & Health
by values of fairness and support.”
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Marmot et al, The Lancet, Volume 372 Issue 9650, November 2008
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Number 71 January 2009
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Briefings – the cutting edge of news and green innovation.
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From sewage to green power – Thames Water
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A thousand words – imagining London without clean water.
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Thrift just got smarter – Energy Saving Trust
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American Eye – Polly Ghazi looks for substance behind Barack’s smile.
42
A bailout for the planet – WWF
37
Forum Update – fresh thinking and acting from Forum for the Future.
46
Breaking the fuel poverty trap – Ashden Awards
41
Soapbox – Stephen Hale: why we need people power.
49
Why offset in a credit crunch? – Climate Care
43
The Knowledge – Cadbury’s Alex Cole on cows, cocoa and the corporate campaigner.
47
And another thing – Jonathon Porritt has the last word.
48
Letters – including the best of the blogs.
26 The future by degrees
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Universities should be at the forefront of the drive for sustainability. Amy Fetzer charts progress among the star performers. Photos: Suzlon Energy, Getty Images, Shutterstock, Getty/Emmanuel Dunand
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16 India’s green horizons
Martin Wright asks if smart intervention can lift us out of the downturn.
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Behind the smoke of terror and the clouds of recession, says Malini Mehra, the country is poised for a cleantech boom.
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33 Cities of light Roger East unveils the UK’s most sustainable cities – and what makes them so.
44 A desire named Streetcar Hannah Bullock profiles Andrew Valentine – the man behind Britain’s leading car club.
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Students switch on to sustainability, pp26-29
Green Futures January 2009 1
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Malini Mehra is one of India’s most outspoken advocates for a new approach to climate change: one which reframes it as “an agenda of growth and opportunity, not one of fear and entitlement.” As founder of the Centre for Social Markets, she’s argued that the country needs to wake up both to the threat of climate change, and the huge economic and social dividends which tackling it could bring.
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Editorial
I
n his excellent Ten Technologies to Save the World,
Chris Goodall writes tellingly about the ‘Second Glass Problem’. The second glass of wine, that is, drunk by the keynote speaker following a sustainability conference, as he or she winds down from their star turn. Typically, while on stage, they’ll have given a largely upbeat account of the potential for tackling climate change, talking bullishly of win-win scenarios and the low-carbon future. Accepting a well-deserved drink at the reception afterwards, they’ll stick to that line, assuring a surrounding cluster of admirers that, yes, there really are opportunities out there just waiting to be seized. Then comes the second glass, and as the crowd thins out, they admit to some doubts. “Have you seen the latest reports? The Indian drought, the melting permafrost…?” Another sip or three, and then, “You know, whatever we do now, I can’t help thinking it’s all just too little, too late… I mean electric cars are all very well, but…”. Cue collapse of stout party. Some would say that this magazine suffers from the opposite problem. We never get to the second glass stage. We’re relentlessly optimistic in the face of all the evidence. Our pages are awash with possibilities, with electric cars and all. So are we wilfully naïve? I don’t think so. At Forum for the Future, we certainly don’t underestimate the scale of the threat. But we’re equally sure that a depressed shrug at the inevitability of tough times isn’t exactly going to change the world. That’s why Green Futures, as the Forum’s magazine, focuses so strongly on the themes of ‘futures, leadership and innovation’. We need to see the future as something we can shape and create – not something to be scared of. And if ever there was a time to stick to those themes, it is now. The lighter-than-air model of capitalism which ‘sustained’ the bubbleboom of the last ten years has been so comprehensively discredited that, as Alice Chapple puts it (‘Crunch time for a green new deal’, pp21-23), “we know that business as usual isn’t going to happen”. In this respect, the dark clouds of recession really could have a silver lining – albeit one with a viciously sharp edge for the unlucky not-so-few who face losing their jobs or homes. It gives us, to quote Chapple again, “a once in a lifetime opportunity to really shift the landscape.” So will it happen? Will we really be able to re-engineer industrial policy to the extent required? Can we honestly expect a country as vast, ambitious and confusing as India to shift to a sustainable economy? And will simple innovations like car clubs or marine energy ever be able to achieve the scale needed to make a difference? It’s on questions like that – each of them explored in this issue – that the fate of sustainability hangs. Meanwhile, even Jonathon Porritt seems to be finding cause for optimism (‘And another thing’, p47). Which is as good an excuse as any for having that second glass – and staying relentlessly positive all the way down.
Stephen Hale (a former alumnus of Forum for the Future’s Leadership Masters) is director of Green Alliance. Its somewhat courageous aim is to persuade politicians of all hues to put environmental priorities – particularly climate change – at the heart of their decisions. Read his ‘Soapbox’ to hear a radical new proposal for achieving just that.
Amy Fetzer is particularly well qualified to report on the slow greening of the world’s universities, having seen their efforts from the inside while studying for postgraduate and master’s degrees on sustainable development. She’s currently completing a book on how companies can turn sustainability into a strategy for business success.
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2 Green Futures January October January2008 2008 2009
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Martin Wright martin@greenfutures.org.uk
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And finally… Jonathon Porritt, without doubt the UK’s leading environmentalist, is no stranger to the pages of Green Futures. But we’re delighted that this issue marks the first of his regular ‘And another thing’ columns, a slot he takes over from Martin Wright.
Green Futures January 2009 3
Briefings
Briefings
Briefings
Moving the Maldives?
Water in, power out
Sun’s up for rickshaws
Smart plugs, not spark plugs
Indian cycle taxis to run off solar power Unleashed in Delhi, they can either be pedalled or propelled by a battery that’s topped up every 30-45 miles from a solar-powered charging station. Prototypes include electric lights, radio and mobile phone charger. see page 12>
Mini adventure The electric Mini E, currently being test-driven in the US, is set to do 0-60mph in 8.5 seconds. On the outside it looks as conventional as its petrol relations – but, inside, the back seats have been removed to make way for a lithium-ion battery pack, which propels the car for 150 miles on an eight-hour charge. Here in the UK, the government is putting “up to £10 million” into a competition to get “up to 100” new electric cars out there around the country. see page 13>
A battery to catch the wind Offshore electricity to be ‘stored’ in energy island How can offshore wind generation still deliver on wind-free days? The answer, according to a group of Dutch businesses led by energy consulting firm KEMA, is a battery in the form of a man-made island close to four miles long and 2.5 miles across. Energy Island would be constructed between 15 and 20 miles off the Dutch coast and would form a sea wall ring holding water back from a centre that would be dug down to 40 metres below sea level. Water would be allowed to flow in to drive turbines, producing power. It could then be pumped out using wind energy once the wind turbines turned again. see page 10>
The next one will run on the sun
4 Green Futures January 2009
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The sweeping solar clad roofline of the Vatican’s papal audience hall, which was ‘switched on’ in November. The 2,400 panels, spanning 5,000 square metres, will produce 300MWh of electricity – enough to power the building and several others.
Meters which cut consumption to be rolled out “to every home” Every household in the UK is to have a ‘smart meter’ installed by 2018, after the government announced plans for a national rollout of the technology within ten years. see page 9>
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Photos: Tony Gentile/Reuters
The area of rainforest cleared to produce just one gramme of cocaine. It’s not only the coca plantations we should be worried about, but the indigenous tribes forced to flee their forests as drug pushers take refuge.
Smarter sparks Photos: iStock, GSK/Shutterstock, E.ON, KEMA
4.4m
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“After years of false starts, the electric [car] market is on the verge of triumphant maturity... It will be sad for us petrolheads to say goodbye to the vroom-vroom of the 120-year old technology. But then I am sure Clarkson and Co can just tweak the name of the show. Top Spark would do. Or Top Plug.” Mayor Boris gets sparky.
The power and the glory
2
Could the Maldives be looking to re-establish themselves elsewhere, out of harm’s reach of rising sea levels? The incoming vice-president of the low-lying archipelago said that he “would have to look for alternative places for Maldivians to live”, and aims to divert cash from tourism to buy land. The islands could be submerged within 100 years, and there are rumours that Maldivian officials are already buying plots in Sri Lanka for the future.
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Green Futures January 2009 5
Briefings
Briefings
What does cheap oil mean for renewables?
Sustainability drives value, say brand experts
Inside views from the green energy sector on oil price volatility
Economic downturn a key test of commitment
Act now on peak oil, say business leaders Peak oil poses a far more immediate risk to the UK economy than climate change – but decisive action now could help address both challenges, says a group of leading businesses. Their report, The Oil Crunch, warns that cheap, easily available oil production is likely to peak by 2013, sending the oil price soaring to levels well above this year’s $147 record. While some volatility may remain, high oil prices will be the dominant long-term trend. This will affect industries from energy and transport to agriculture and manufacturing, threatening a series of “macro-economic shocks”, including surges in inflation and the balance of payments deficit, and reductions in consumer demand.
6 Green Futures January 2009
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◆ A major feature on the business implications and opportunities around peak oil, featuring interviews with Brian Souter, Will Whitehorn, Moir Lockhead and Richard Brown, will follow in the next issue of Green Futures.
www.peakoiltaskforce.net
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journey of sustainability – and its core value to the business will be tested,” he told Green Futures. Solitaire Townsend, director of sustainability communications specialists Futerra, said companies like General Electric had benefited by putting planned integration on sustainability ahead of snappy straplines. “A brand is a promise,” she said. “And stakeholders are generally impressed by its fulfilment, rather than by the promise itself. Living up to sustainability pledges is not an easy job – they’re not a get-out-of-jail-free card,” she explained. – Chris Alden www.interbrand.com
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
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Law’n’ order
It’s not only environmentalists who raise an eyebrow when people concrete over their lawns. Planners are frowning on it too, now that it’s a legal requirement for homeowners to apply for permission to pave over front gardens. Simple acts like these remove natural systems, which slow and absorb heavy rains, and contributed to 2007’s £3 billion flooding damage bill, says the Environment Agency. Experts at environmental consultancy Entec echo the message in a new online forum designed to encourage debate on the future of flood risk, www.entecuk.com/frm. Can we really explain flooding as ‘too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time’ they ask – or ought we to scrutinise our own part in the story?
Sun sets on a century’s boom
oil, the taskforce insists it would also deliver substantial cuts in carbon emissions, which would drop by 47% by 2020. Oil use would fall by 5% per year during this period, and gas by 2% per year. “The renewables industry is confident that 100% renewable energy supply is possible in 20-40 years,” says the report, adding: “They should be given the opportunity to prove it.” – Martin Wright
from their commitment to sustainable practices throughout their business. Interbrand UK chief executive Rune Gustafson said committing to sustainability can help brands in many ways. Customers may choose their products in preference to rival brands; employees may be more willing to work for less money for a business they perceive to be sustainable; and stakeholders may be prepared to see a company in a more favourable light. However, brand values are often tested as financial realities bite. “In tough economic conditions, people have to make choices and sacrifices, depending on where they are on this
Obama? No – JFK, back in 1963.
£50 Photo: Herman Miller
Peak practice
These will hit the UK well before the full force of climate change is felt, says the taskforce. In response, it argues, the government should prioritise action on peak oil – reversing its current emphasis on tackling climate change and energy security as the most important issues in the sector. The taskforce comprises eight companies: Arup, FirstGroup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group, Virgin Group and Yahoo. Specifically, it calls for the Department of Energy and Climate Change to develop a national plan on peak oil, with four key themes: • Expanding exploration for and production of conventional oil (to help delay the ‘oil crunch’) • Setting aggressive targets on energy efficiency • Accelerating massive and immediate investment in renewables, including transport fuel • Addressing the “dangerous shortfall” in skills and manpower across the energy sector Although the plan’s goal would be to head off the economic disruption caused by peak
The current tough economic climate will be a key test of brands’ commitment to sustainability, according to Interbrand, the consultancy behind the annual Best Global Brands Report. The report, which measures the strength of global brands in the form of a league table, found that sustainability helped drive brand value across all sectors of global industry. Car makers such as Honda, ranked 20th, benefited from their commitment to introducing fuelefficient vehicles, while diversified companies like fourth-placed General Electric benefited
Photo: ownway/Shutterstock, iStock
Oil up at nearly $150 a barrel? Just half a year ago that was the new reality. It surely spelled death for the gas-guzzler – and a place in the sun for alternative energy supplies. Cleantech seemed set to ride out the credit crunch. Efficiency and the renewables industry were poster boys. Oil down at under $50 a barrel? All changed now? Green Futures has been taking soundings at the sharp end – asking leading figures in the UK renewables sector if the oil price dip is hurting them. Not necessarily us, says Jeremy Leggett, founder and chief exec of Buffeted by the oil price slump – but photovoltaics company wind could stabilise Solarcentury. He does, however, within a year see it as “an aberration driven by speculation”, and believes there’s a need to “restructure financial markets so they aren’t casinos capable of ruining us”. Fortunately, he says, in his own business “we’re not that short-term. We benefit from being much more long-term funded, with key drivers being trends in corporate responsibility and the climate change agenda.” If that sounds complacent, it shouldn’t. Leggett is a prominent voice in the ‘peak oil’ argument, warning of impending chaos when the oil market, blind to the fundamentals of declining supply and rising demand, suddenly realises that the world has less than half of the viable oil left. “It is terribly worrying and disruptive that the system is so severely broken, it cannot sustain an oil price consistently above the marginal costs of production.” He points out, however, that “if you draw a straight line through the wild fluctuations in the oil price, it still shows a pretty substantial increase
since 2004”. And wholesale prices for gas, for electricity, remain relatively high. So he sees it as “inevitable” that the oil price will go back up again. “I am as confident of this as one can be in these crazy times. And if you had to pick one business to be in, it would be cleantech.” Dale Vince, the ebullient head of wind power specialists Ecotricity, is blunter. “We’re impervious to the price of oil,” he says. “We’re putting up turbines flat out, and neither a high oil price scenario nor a low one makes any difference to that.” There’s even a silver lining. “It’s not as simple as ‘high oil good, low oil bad’.” When oil prices soared, along with those of other resources such as steel, there was a global capacity problem for wind turbines, Vince recalls. “Now, the drop in demand, and the falling cost of manufacturing them, means they may actually get cheaper this year.” Cheap oil at present might deter investment in wind by those who are purely financially driven, he concedes. But “because we are here for different reasons, it won’t make any difference to us, unless our business actually becomes uneconomic – and we’re a long way away from that.” At Good Energy, Juliet Davenport needs to source all the green electricity she can for her customers. Like Leggett, she worries about the oil price issue as a volatility problem – with the latest big dip affecting the investment behaviour of “people who can only understand a short-term view”. This does make some of the smallest renewables projects harder to get off the ground, she says – but most are still very viable. “In the longer term, where are you going to put your money? There’s a massive need to invest in the energy market. Risk is the main driver now, and it’s a very plausible proposition that stability is in renewables.” If she’s right, it’s quite a reflection on what a long way the sector has come. – Roger East
The money the average household ‘wastes’ each year by turning up the thermostat by just 1˚C. One in three women has admitted to secretly notching up the temperature when her partner’s back is turned.
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Sitting comfortably? Made from 95% recycled materials, the alluringly named ‘Embody’ is designed to make you feel better in the office, by doing clever things like distributing weight evenly and adapting to spinal curvature. Furniture specialists Herman Miller have also thought about its afterlife too: 42% of its components can be recycled.
Green Futures January 2009 7
Briefings
Briefings
Google’s green ambitions take to the waves
Climate initiatives set to disappoint?
Internet giant dips a toe into the world of wave power Mixed signals from London, Brussels, Poznan Welcome, to the statute book, the UK Climate Change Act. No major country has a more ambitious target – an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 compared with 1990. Future UK governments will be held accountable under the Act for successive five-yearly ‘carbon budgets’, starting with 2008-2012, and can be taken to judicial review if their policies don’t match up. Agreeing to raise the target from 60% to 80% was an auspicious beginning for Ed Miliband in the new role of secretary of state for energy and climate change. It’s “challenging but feasible”, with an estimated cost of 1-2% of GDP by 2050, says Adair Turner. He chairs the official advisory Committee on Climate Change, which recommends interim targets – and he has already proposed that emissions in 2020 should be cut back to 21% below 2005 levels. That’s an overall ceiling, including emissions from aviation and shipping (although there are no specific targets for those sectors). And Turner wants it done by decarbonising the UK itself, without counting emissions cuts achieved in other countries by UK-funded ‘carbon offset’ projects. But does this government have policies to match these targets? Not in chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report. Beyond the odd burst of rhetoric, he ducked the challenge of combating recession by boosting low-carbon behaviour, investment and jobs. Airline passenger duty will go up, on a sliding scale by length of journey. And there’ll be £100 million in new money for home insulation, some other
spending brought forward on energy efficiency, a bit for flood defences and more rail carriages – but no major shifts signalled. In global terms, Europe’s collective stance on climate change counts for more than the UK alone. Welcome, then, the EU heads of government agreement in Brussels, on the energy and climate package – the “20-20 by 2020” formula, to get 20% of energy from renewables and cut emissions by 20% by 2020. President Sarkozy of France, as current EU president, hailed this deal as “historic”, glossing over the concessions made to clinch it – to the Polish and German coal industries in particular. But the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) will now continue to allocate many of its allowances to polluters for free (rather than by auction) for much longer than previously planned. And member countries will be allowed to count carbon credits from projects outside the EU as up to half their emissions cuts. As for the Poznan meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, no-one could call that historic. Expectations, admittedly, were low. And achievements? Deciding a work programme between now and the crucial December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen, where the world must agree the essentials of any post-Kyoto global deal on emissions cuts. There was some initial discussion of a UK-backed initiative on creating funding mechanisms to combat deforestation, and the poorest countries won easier access to a UN adaptation fund. But rich countries resisted pressure to get more money into this fund by widening levies on emissions trading. – Roger East
Google has filed a patent for a water-based, wave-powered data centre. Set against the backdrop of a bigger push for renewables – Google has also been busy funding green energy start-ups – the floating data centre would consist of ‘crane-removable modules’ and also use seawater for cooling. The move comes at a time of growing concern over the amount of energy needed to power data centres [see GF70, pp42-45]. The EU recently published its Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency, noting the need to ensure carbon emissions and other impacts are mitigated. Google is unwilling to comment on if and when the idea may be realised: “We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with” said a spokesperson. “Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t.” But if it does go ahead, according to the patent, it would include Pelamis machines – wave energy converters that float, semi-submerged in the water, facing the direction of incoming waves [see GF70, p13]. Surf’s up for geeks – Google hopes to ride the waves
Feed-in gets in on the Act
8 Green Futures January 2009
“ showed promise – as long as the government “doesn’t go ‘off piste’ with its own schemes”, but instead works with existing practitioners to sort out straightforward and unbureaucratic rules. – Roger East ◆ Good Energy has launched an incentive scheme for households with solar water heating. Its ‘Hot ROCs’ initiative will estimate how much these panels are cutting their carbon emissions, and credit them accordingly against their bills on the company’s new dual fuel (gas and electric) tariff.
“We must not let the economic crisis become an excuse for inaction on climate change… or the opportunity to make the transition to a low-carbon economy will slip through our fingers.”
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Richard Lambert, directorgeneral of the Confederation of British Industry, on the importance of the EU energy and climate deal
www.berr.gov.uk www.goodenergy.co.uk
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Photos: Pelamis Wave Power Limited
Millions of UK homes could become green mini power stations, rather than emissionsheavy drains on the grid. But would it be worth it? Until now, enthusiasts for microgeneration in the UK have looked longingly across the Channel at countries with ‘feed-in tariffs’, specifying stable and attractive prices for renewable power sold into the grid. This approach, widely credited with driving Germany’s boom in photovoltaics, helps everyone down to the individual householder to predict the return on any ‘green’ power they generate beyond their own immediate needs. Now the UK government has endorsed the principle in the new Energy Act. Quite how – or when – the new deal will work here has not been spelled out. We do know it will be restricted to small-scale generation, and won’t replace the existing renewables obligation for industrial-scale players. Its eleventh hour inclusion in the Act, along with the promise of an incentive scheme for renewable heat, was generally welcomed by environmentalists. Juliet Davenport of renewable supplier Good Energy agreed it
It worked for Germany
Photo: Otmar Smit/Shutterstock
UK adopts incentive pricing to encourage microgen
Each machine can produce enough power to meet the annual average demand of about 500 households, “with a rating of about three-quarters of a megawatt”, explains Max Carcas, business development director at Pelamis Wave Power Ltd. Placed several miles out to sea to capture maximum wave energy, he describes them as having “very low visual impact” and, while studies are underway, says it’s hard to see how they’d have a huge impact on marine life. “We’re not producing waste products and haven’t got any fast moving equipment that would create a hazard.” Floating data centres may, however, not be entirely issue free. In terms of potential widespread use, Andrew Waterston, of the UK Council of Datacentre Operators, says it is important to differentiate between companies that use data centres to deliver services to global users, and those using them to provide a service to the company itself. “For the latter, the majority of data centres are in the same place as the IT departments because of the strong need for control,” says Waterston. “The centres also need to be placed in a low-risk location close to abundant power and communications. Floating data centres may offer wave power but they are certainly not low-risk – ships can sink after all.” The patent may, however, be part of a growing trend. Last January, start-up company International Data Security revealed its plan to build floating data centres on cargo ships. More recently, Atlantis Resources Corporation confirmed it is pushing ahead with a computer data centre in Scotland that could be powered by tidal energy. – Claire Baylis
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“The London opera houses have had more taxpayers’ money than the British marine power industry over the past few years, even though the UK has some of the best marine energy resources in the world.”
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Chris Goodall, columnist and author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet
Smarter sparks < contd from page 4
Installing ‘smart meters’ in every UK household could save 7.4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the Energy Saving Trust (EST) – and cut energy bills by £1.2 billion a year. Smart meters can give energy companies automated, real-time readings of electricity or gas consumption. This means that meters no longer have to be read manually, and customers can track the power they are consuming more easily. They offer the opportunity to view usage over set periods of time – allowing people to work out when consumption is highest, and to plan energy savings. EST says international trials show smart meters can help reduce energy bills by between 5% and 10%. Energy companies have been conducting independent trials of the technology for a while now, but without a mandate from government. Announcing the move, energy minister Lord Hunt said the case for smart meters was “a bit of a no-brainer” – but added that with 47 million meters in the UK, installing them would be a complex process requiring two years of planning. Other countries are ahead of the curve. In Ireland, trials have already begun as part of a u1 billion scheme to install smart electricity meters in every home and business by 2012. Yet some smart meters are more advanced than others. At Swansea University, a smart electricity meter is being developed that doesn’t only measure the energy use in your house; it measures the electricity use of every individual circuit, too – in kilowatts and cash. “Most smart meters don’t provide a real cost in cash – and not many people know what a kilowatt is,” said Richard Lewis, lead researcher of the university’s Smart Metering Team. With this model, “if the kids are upstairs and you’re constantly telling them to turn the lights off, you can say: ‘that’s costing me 2p or 3p an hour’.” – Chris Alden www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
No.1 The UK, which overtook Denmark in installed offshore wind capacity (597.8MW to the Danes’ 423MW). The completion in October of two wind farms near Skegness also broke the ‘3GW threshold’. UK wind turbines now generate enough electricity to power more than 1.5 million homes – though that still represents only about 2% of total consumption.
www.pelamiswave.com
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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100ppm That’s the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that man has emitted over all time. But it’s also how much we could remove from the atmosphere using a clever sequestration technique borrowed from Amazon Indians, according to Climate Care’s Mike Mason. If we put 3% charcoal (or ‘biochar’) in the top 30cm of all arable soils, he claims, we’d not only bury all that carbon, we’d also have wonderful fertiliser for the crops on top. Otherwise known as ‘terra preta’ (black earth), this nutrient-rich material made from charred plant waste (straw, husks and so on) could be the next big thing in carbon management... www.biochar-international.org
A battery to catch the wind < contd from page 4 Spokesman Rolf van Stenus says Energy Island could be a model for other wind-rich maritime nations like the UK. As well as producing energy, the island could also serve as a gas terminal, fish farm or holiday destination, he says. KEMA and its partner Lievense, an engineering consultancy, are now in discussion with the Dutch government and utilities about a full feasibility study, which would identify a North Sea location for the £2.5 billion island. – Julian Rollins
” No turning back
10 Green Futures January 2009
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At Ralegh’s Cross in Somerset, they’re building a two-storey semi out of straw bales. Of course they’ve heard the jibe (a thousand times) about the three little pigs whose flimsy house of straw got blown down by the big bad wolf. But the moral of this story is quite the opposite – that sturdy straw bale houses, pioneered in the mid-1800s in America’s corn belt, deserve serious attention as a sustainable option in the UK. Peter Rowan, owner of the Ralegh’s Cross Hotel perched up at 1,300 feet on Exmoor, wants his new extension to provide a cosy housing solution for two staff families – while at the same time hitting the spot both economically and environmentally. Straw bales are much cheaper than bricks both to buy and to build with, so overall costs come in broadly comparable with a timber-framed house. And the insulating qualities of straw bales make for energyefficient buildings, supporting
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
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Former Israeli diplomat Abba Eban
The National Trust is likewise on the case – not least with its massive light bulb switch. By substituting some 40,000 incandescents with low-energy bulbs, it aims to save 2,223 tonnes in annual emissions – and £430,000 in money. Part of that will come in the shape of lower electricity bills, and the rest in staff time released from the chore of frequent bulb replacement tours. – Roger East www.english-heritage.org.uk
£1billion >
Our historic buildings need not be unsustainable. What’s more, we can still learn a lot from their many examples of innovative technology. And there’s inspiration to be had from how country estates ran their affairs in the pre-industrial age – underpinned by the old wisdom of self-sufficiency. That’s the thrust of the latest report from English Heritage. Heritage Counts has a special focus on climate change, and is full of examples of old buildings being successfully re-used and ‘recycled’. Without destroying their distinctive character, it says, their energy efficiency can be much improved by appropriate insulation. And the carbon impact of the energy they do consume can be cut down too, whether by new renewables like solar photovoltaics [right], or something as simple as switching boilers back to burning coppiced willow after a century-long dalliance with oil. In one standout project, in the Yorkshire Dales national park, two Archimedes screws at the old hydroelectric power station on the River Wharfe near Grassington are being restored to working order. This time, though, they won’t be turned by handle to pump water upwards. Quite the reverse: the river water will flow down through them to spin them as turbines, providing enough power for the needs of a hundred local homes [see GF69, p8 for a similar example in Devon].
Fort Sunlight: PV panels, Dunster Castle
Two-storey semi a first for UK
The savings UK companies have made since 2001, by following the energy-saving advice of the Carbon Trust.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Vera Bogaerts/Shutterstock, Mark Yuill/Shutterstock
Heritage organisations look to lower-carbon future
Landmark for straw
www.kema.com
David Cameron
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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repenteth…
Photos: National Trust, KEMA
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“The market has a blind spot. The blind spot is the planet.”
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“Let’s put people back to work – retrofitting and repowering America.... You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive programme to weatherise every building and home in America.”
Building blocks of the future
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Rowan’s goal of a gradual move towards carbon neutrality. What’s more, using straw for construction is a great form of materials recycling; in theory we could build 250,000 homes a year from Britain’s current surplus of the stuff. The building expertise comes from Yorkshire-based Amazonails, an all-female building and roofing outfit. It’s evolved into a social enterprise with a USP in designing, implementing and teaching straw bale construction. Enthusiasts can learn the basics on short courses that involve them in the actual build. There were up to 40 on site for a burst of activity at Ralegh’s Cross in late October, when the weather smiled sufficiently to get the walls up to first floor level. Tarpaulins are now keeping it dry until early spring, when they’ll finish the walls and lower the roof into place, compressing the bales to create a strong, load-bearing structure. Meanwhile, Amazonails is touting straw bale construction as an ideal sustainable option for some of the facilities in London’s Olympic village – with the additional benefit of large-scale involvement of the local community, students and other volunteers. And it’s hoped this will feed into wider regeneration plans for east London and the Thames Gateway. – Roger East
Corridors of power
Turbines line a Dutch canal
Waterways to host £150 million green energy project Long left dormant since their heyday before the railway age, Britain’s canals are set to power our homes and cool our offices. British Waterways has begun a £150 million scheme to build 50 wind turbines and a handful of hydro-electric power projects along the 2,200 miles of canals, rivers, docks and weirs that it manages. Together, they’ll generate about 100MW of renewable electricity – more than ten times the whole canal system currently uses for pumping water, lighting and operating locks – and enough to power 45,000 homes. The scheme, which is being managed by Partnership for Renewables (PfR), a company jointly owned by the Carbon Trust and HSBC’s Environmental Infrastructure Fund, will use sites along the canal network to generate electricity either for the National Grid or directly for local consumers, such as bankside offices or warehouse buildings. PfR is already assessing possible sites along the network, and will soon be beginning consultations with local residents over issues such as noise, sightlines and the protection of birdlife. Many wind turbine sites in the UK have attracted strong local opposition but PfR says it is “taking its environmental responsibilities very seriously” and is involving local people from an early stage. The first turbine is expected to go into service in 2011 – following a trend set by the Netherlands [above]. Jonathan Ludford, a British Waterways spokesman, said the programme would generate about £1 million over five years for the company, which would feed back into the management and maintenance of the country’s canal system. “This is just one way of promoting Britain’s canals as a green resource that make a big contribution to the fight against climate change,” he said. Canal water is already used to cool and, to a lesser extent, heat large buildings along the network, through heat-pump exchanges. Clients in on the act include the University of Huddersfield, the BBC studios in Birmingham and GlaxoSmithKline. – David Baker www.britishwaterways.co.uk
12 million The number of jobs to be created by 2030 due to progress in alternative energy technologies, according to the UN’s Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World.
www.amazonails.org.uk www.raleghscross.co.uk
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Just plug ‘n’ go
parks, while for government buildings it will be made obligatory. The cars should start to proliferate in 2012. California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has put his weight behind it, but the mayors of San Francisco, San José and Oakland are prime movers in the plan. Also involved is locally based entrepreneur Shai Agassi’s company Better Place, which reckons on investing $1 billion. And the go-ahead Bay Area mayors should be well aware that they aren’t alone in the race. Agassi has already teamed up with the Renault-Nissan Alliance (whose CEO Carlos Ghosn says categorically that the future of the urban car is electric) on projects for cars running on swappable battery packs in Israel, Denmark and elsewhere [see GF69, p14]. Renault-Nissan is also working on ambitious plans for a nationwide electric car-charging network in France, where President Sarkozy is an enthusiastic supporter. Closer to home, it has infrastructure development partnerships with the state of Oregon and power company Portland General Electric, as well as projects with Sonoma County, in northern California, and with the state of Tennessee. – Roger East www.sfgov.org/site/mayor www.betterplace.com www.nissan-global.com
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“Sustainable development should be the central organising principle for government and the wider public sector in Wales.”
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A constitutional commitment to SD is probably the only thing that Wales has in common with Tasmania and Croatia. Now the Welsh Assembly Government is going further by enshrining the principle in its vision for the future, One Wales: One Planet, which is out for consultation until 4 February. www.wales.gov.uk
12 Green Futures January 2009
Fancy forming your own firsthand opinion of the “electric cars of the future”? You could get that chance in the UK before the end of 2009, as the government puts “up to £10 million” into a competition to get “up to 100” new electric cars out there around the country. It’s seeking feedback from “families and other motorists” on how the demonstration vehicles measure up to real-life requirements on Britain’s roads. Ultimately, of course, electric cars are only as green as their electricity supply – and if we all drove them, we’d need some pretty smart demand management so as not to overwhelm the grid. This is something the government has been looking into with the power industry, with a recent report expressing confidence that it can be done. The spec for the demonstration vehicles, which will be assessed by the governmentbacked Technology Strategy Board, allows for hybrids as well as pure plug-in battery cars,
Watch this space for the world’s first water filtering bicycle. Currently only a prototype, the Aquaduct draws water from an onboard tank, through a filter, into a chamber that can be taken off and stored at home. Designed for an ‘Innovate or Die’ competition, the concept bike aims to tackle both transportation and water problems in the developing world. http://theaquaduct.blogspot.com
provided they have a “substantial” electric-only range. Crucially, they must emit less than 50g/km – little over half the carbon impact of today’s cleanest petrol or diesel cars. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders welcomed the announcement, launched at a high-profile meeting of international experts in Whitehall as part of a £100 million five-year investment programme on electric vehicles. But will that kind of money be enough to make Britain a major global player on electric cars? That was the prospect evoked by transport minister Geoff Hoon. At the moment, however, this country’s would-be electric car drivers are pretty much limited to the little G-Wiz, available in London only – made by Indian company Reva in Bangalore [see p17 for more on the rise of Reva]. The UK does make electric vans, however. Over the last year or two, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and delivery company Ocado have been widening their experiments with British-made electric vehicles for fulfilling online orders, and Sainsbury’s has pledged to convert its whole 1,000-van online delivery fleet to electric by
www.dft.gov.uk www.innovateuk.org
Sun’s up for rickshaws
Cycle city
< contd from page 4 Cycle rickshaws have offered a cheap and eco-friendly transport for millions of Indians for years. Now they’ll harness the power of the sun to ease the burden on their drivers. The new Soleckshaw – short for Solar Electric Rickshaw – was unleashed on the streets of Delhi in October. Its aim is both to relieve the strain on the country’s estimated eight million cycle rickshaw pullers, and reduce the polluting impact of the growing number of autorickshaws. Developed by the state-run Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the prototype can either be pedalled or propelled by a battery that’s topped up every 30-45 miles from a solar-powered charging station. “Human energy is the least polluting machine – we’d be very foolish not to use it,” explains Dr Samir K Brahmachari, CSIR’s director general. “But it’s also inhuman to use people to power things. There’s the risk that one in four rickshaw wallahs could get tuberculosis because of overworking and poor nutrition. So we’ve gone for a dual approach.” The three-seater has electric lights, a top speed of 12.5km/h and extras including a radio and mobile phone chargers. Four have been tested in the capital’s historic Chandni Chowk district, with the aim of rolling them out for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. CSIR is now working with the Centre for Rural Development (CRD) to manufacture them nationwide. At 16,000-20,000 rupees, the Soleckshaw is twice as expensive as conventional cycle rickshaws, and CSIR wants pullers to buy rather than rent them. But Brahmachari points out that they could earn a third more by offering a battery-powered, faster service. One option, he says, is a loans system for the vehicles. He is also looking into getting carbon credits for the project. “With Soleckshaw,” says Brahmachari, “we want to not only reduce our country’s carbon footprint, but improve life for the rural poor.” – Hannah Bullock www.dft.gov.uk www.innovateuk.org
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Roues de Paris
London follows Paris into capital bike hire Can Boris Johnson find a match for Paris’s celebrated Paris Vélib bikes? Londoners have been promised a cycle-friendly city, and Mayor Johnson, who billed himself as a “pedlar of peddle power”, has now asked companies to come forward with their bids to run a bike hire scheme.
Photo: Alexey U/Shutterstock
Convulsions among the dinosaurs of the motor industry are so severe that it’s hard to pick likely survivors, let alone winners. But R&D on innovative lower-carbon models looks like money well spent. Without something like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt due to launch within two years, the likes of GM would have even less to justify their massive bail out. Good timing, then, for the San Francisco Bay Area to launch a nine-point plan to become the electric car capital of the world. A crucial hurdle is convincing people that there’ll be enough charging points around to keep their batteries topped up. So companies will get incentives for putting charging points in their car
Government-backed competition seeks public feedback and boost for industry
Photo: John Kropewnicki/Shutterstock
San Francisco bids for ‘electric car capital’ with recharging infrastructure
Mini adventure
Pedal-eau
Sparking a green revolution
2010. Now, in a £20 million initiative to encourage mass production, the department of transport has shortlisted ten companies, several of them UK specialist manufacturers, for a competition to supply vans to public bodies like the Metropolitan Police, along with several councils, starting with Liverpool, Newcastle, Gateshead, Coventry, Glasgow and Leeds. Low fuel and maintenance costs, and exemption from the London congestion charge, are the main economic attractions of electric vans, to set against the higher purchase price (the ones Sainsbury’s has been buying, from former milk float specialists Smiths of Tyne and Wear, cost almost three times as much as a diesel equivalent). The environmental case is a powerful one, with vans currently accounting for around 15% (and rising) of UK road transport emissions. And, to address one safety concern, Smiths has been working with the University of Durham on a device to generate artificial engine noise, audible only in front of the vans, to stop people stepping out in front of them unawares. – Roger East
“I hope a central London cycle hire scheme will inspire Londoners as a whole, and not just the adventurous few, to get on their bikes and give cycling a go,” said Johnson. “I have long held the view that a cyclised city is a civilised city. But if we are to get more Londoners onto two wheels rather than four, we need to provide the facilities to help them
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do so.” He believes that putting 6,000 hire bikes on the streets by May 2010, with 400 pick-up points across the city’s ‘zone one’ travel area, will generate 40,000 extra daily trips. It should all contribute to meeting the target of a fourfold increase (on 2000 figures) in London cycling by 2025. One company bidding for the contract is OYBike, which already runs a limited scheme based mainly in Hammersmith and Fulham. Its customers pay a registration fee of £10, allowing them free use of its bikes for up to half an hour, with a small charge for longer periods. Customers choose a bike in one of the ‘docks’ scattered around the area, and phone a central number to quote the code stamped on its lock. They are then given a pin to release it. When the session is over, the call centre will give them another code to deposit the cycle back in a dock.
Business development manager Andy Dawson said the London contract was an “exciting opportunity” for OYBike, which has already attracted more than 2,000 registered users with just 160 bikes so far (including a few in Cheltenham and Reading and on business parks in Cambridge and Farnborough). Supporters say initial problems with ensuring they were both secure and conveniently available have now been ironed out. But bike hire schemes are no substitute for making city cycling safer and easier, warns Mike Cavenett at the London Cycling Campaign. “There’s no point in dumping thousands more bikes on the streets unless those streets are made more user-friendly. Until that happens, nobody will use them.” – Louise Vennells www.london.gov.uk www.oybike.com
The number of city dwellers who suffer from ‘green place poverty’, according to The National Trust, which uses the term to mean having access to just two, or fewer, green spaces.
Green Futures January 2009 13
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Share the catch to save the fish
Organics “best for Africa’s poor” UN survey finds increases in yields – and income Organic farming can help reduce food insecurity in Africa, according to a major UN survey of organic farming initiatives – and is “ideally suited” to smallholders and marginalised farmers who are at risk of poverty. The survey for UNCTAD, the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development, studied 15 examples of organic and nearorganic agriculture in east Africa – and found that yields increased after conversion to sustainable farming in 12 of them, and farmers’ incomes increased in 13. It calls into question widely held assumptions about the supposed inferiority of organics in ensuring food security for the developing world. Sophia Twarog, the UNCTAD economist who oversaw the study, said: “Farmers might be in a low-productivity situation, but if they get some knowledge about how to build up soil fertility, they can increase productivity pretty quickly.” Organic techniques help soils retain water and become more fertile – and that allows farmers to grow crops even in marginal conditions, thus increasing food security, researchers said.
Cottoning on to premium prices
They concluded that organic and nearorganic agricultural methods and technologies are suited to poor, marginalised smallholder farmers in Africa, because they “require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce highquality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress”. The study covered 1.6 million farmers from seven countries, working on 1.4 million hectares of land. Researchers based at the Manor House Agricultural Centre at Kitale, Kenya, found that
Transferable quotas are the key to conserving stocks, study shows
some farmers’ yields doubled after they adopted composting and “double digging” – an organic method of improving deep soil – and used natural methods of pest control, such as planting sunflowers to attract the predators of crop pests. Demand for organic products in developed countries is an added incentive. Farmers of organic cotton in Uganda commanded a 20% premium on export prices, the research found. Overall, organic exports from Uganda have increased from $6 million in 2005 to an estimated $15 million for 2008, Twarog said. But one key area that remained, she added, was to help develop local markets for organic food, to reduce reliance on exports. While there is a small but growing organic market in east Africa, she said, the supply and the demand hadn’t found each other yet. “We need to get marketing people on board and [we need] to get them interested.” – Chris Alden
The risk of fish stocks collapsing can be cut by half if fishermen agree on a system of ‘catch shares’. That’s the conclusion of a major study led by Professor Christopher Costello of the University of California, which examined over 11,000 commercial A net profit that lasts fisheries around the world. It could be the key to reversing the potentially catastrophic decline in some of the world’s major fisheries, and help to promote sustainable fishing. Under catch shares systems, individual fishermen, communities, or co-operatives are allocated a percentage share of a total allowable catch within a particular fishery. Catch shares – effectively a form of individual transferable quotas (ITQ) – date back to the 1970s, but are still relatively rare. The study found just 121 in operation, mostly in the US, New Zealand, Canada and Iceland. They are almost unheard of in Europe and the UK, but where implemented they provide a vital “stewardship incentive” which motivates fishermen to conserve stocks, Costello says. Costello’s work was triggered by mounting concern over the speed and scale of fisheries decline. “One widely reported study has suggested we could see a global collapse of fish stocks by 2048. The question we asked ourselves was, ‘can we do anything about it?’.” “So we decided to look for lessons learned in management institutions around the world. This led us to a theory that has mostly
◆ The study lent support to Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva’s recent call for countries to respond to the financial crisis by rebuilding diverse agriculture at a local level. She said it was a mistake to rely on industrial farming to feed the world.
Catwalk the talk
Call in the CarrotMob
The ‘mob’ descends on Covent Garden
www.carrotmob.org
14 Green Futures January 2009
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: LCF, Shutterstock/Timur Kulgarin, PepsiCo
A convenience store in London’s Covent Garden was recently the site of a particularly benign type of environmental action – as the UK’s second ever CarrotMob event descended on Miranas Food & Wine for some environmentally minded shopping. CarrotMob, which originated in San Francisco, uses punter power to encourage businesses to make environmental improvements. The ‘carrot’ is the mob of extra customers it can mobilise for a particular day or evening at a chosen venue. In return for this massive boost to sales, the selected business agrees to spend a percentage of the takings on steps to cut its energy use and decrease its carbon footprint. CarrotMob canvasses likely businesses for about a month before each event and provides the successful “target” with an environmental audit so that it can see where the money can best be spent. Then it uses email lists, social networking sites and “plain old word of mouth” to spread the word. The first UK event saw more than 100 extra punters crowd into a bar in east London in October for an evening’s drinking, with the management committing to spending 20% of the night’s takings on improvements to the bar’s lighting and refrigeration systems. For the event at Miranas, the store’s owners pledged to spend 35% of the takings. “They plan to use it to improve old fridge units, shop lighting and the over-the-door heater,” says Jonathan Melhuish, one of the CarrotMob organisers. The group is hoping to evolve the model so that interested businesses can register themselves online, allowing customers to support them any time – even without a ‘mob’. Shoppers will carry a special card and businesses must promise to invest a percentage of the extra revenue in greening their premises. – David Baker
Photos: CarrotMob, iStock
New initiative brings mass patronage to ‘deserving’ businesses
Serious stuff at the London College of Fashion’s sustainable clothes show [above]. Students’ creations included everything from chainmail-style tops made of FSC-certified wood to carcinogen-free dresses. The RE:Fashion Awards followed hot on its heels, featuring eco-designs from the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes, modelled by such rock royalty offspring as Leah Weller and Pixie Geldof.
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been put forward by economists, but has been largely untested to date, with only anecdotal evidence to support it. The theory is, if you assign rights to individuals to some form of asset, they have an incentive [to safeguard it].” Based on the results, Costello concludes that just 9% of global fisheries would be in danger of collapse if they had implemented some form of catch shares system back in the 1970s. Current estimates suggest one-third are in danger. “Our projections show that if ITQs had been implemented at 100% of fisheries, they could wholly offset the current decline. That is the most striking result.” The study’s welcomed by Rupert Howes, CEO of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the international marine eco-labelling and certification programme for sustainable seafood. “Anything which gets the incentives right has to be a good thing. ITQs can do just this by ensuring fishers have a long-term interest in maintaining the health and productivity of the fishery upon which their livelihoods ultimately depend.” The MSC is calling for the forthcoming Marine Bill, announced in early December, to declare 30% of British seas as ‘no take’ marine reserves. – Mark Lupton www.universityofcalifornia.edu www.msc.org
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For every kilo of Dover sole on sale, another 6kg of sea creatures have been caught and discarded. WWF-Germany reports that one million tonnes of North Sea stock are tossed overboard as ‘bycatch’, either because the fish are too small to meet regulations, or because they are species for which fishermen have no use.
Shopping down the carbon BSI standard aims to make carbon footprint comparisons simple Shoppers are one step closer to being able to compare the carbon footprint of the products and services they purchase, now that the UK is unveiling a common standard approved and managed by BSI British Standards. Thanks to the new standard, known as PAS2050, carbon footprints of products can be assessed consistently in grammes of CO2 equivalent, said Graham Sinden, technical manager of the Carbon Trust, which co-sponsored the standard along with the government. Boots, Walkers [below], Innocent Drinks and Tesco are among the businesses to have trialled the standard so far, he said. It covers the whole lifecycle of products, from sourcing raw materials to disposing or recycling waste – and can be applied to offers as diverse as financial services and electrical goods. Sinden said the standard would help in two ways: first, by helping companies measure and reduce the carbon footprint of an individual product or service; and second, by allowing them to communicate that footprint on a customer label or in other marketing material. For that reason, the Carbon Trust has published a code of good practice on communicating the carbon footprint of a product. This stresses that it’s important for businesses to give people figures on the whole lifecycle, rather than a small part of it. “Consumers believe they want this information, but they don’t necessarily trust the maker of the product to be the arbiter of that information,” said Sinden. “So there is value in having a third-party standard that’s been consulted on and widely agreed.” – Chris Alden www.carbontrust.co.uk
Walkers’ footprint
Green Futures January 2009 15
Feature
W
hen India’s industrial
giant Tata launched its £1,000 Nano car in early 2008, it also kicked off a furious debate. For some, the Nano was a triumph of social enterprise, bringing safe, affordable motoring within reach of tens of millions of Indian families. For others, it was environmental irresponsibility writ large – speeding India down the highcarbon road to climate catastrophe. The debate rages still. But behind the headlines lies another story – with far greater ramifications not just for India, but the future of sustainable business itself. For the Nano isn’t just a car, but also a symbol of a wave of technological innovation sweeping the country, which is helping revitalise its business sector even as it struggles to navigate the rocky waters of a global downturn. And at the crest of that wave is clean technology. Even in the bearest of markets, and despite the credit squeeze which hits pioneering ventures harder than most (since they are more likely to require substantial debt financing), cleantech still holds promise for the courageous investor. In 2007, investment in the
global warming are already being felt all too fiercely in India – particularly in the agricultural sector on which so much of the country depends, where harvests are already being hit hard by shifting weather patterns. Spending on adaptation methods is consuming around 2.6% of annual GDP, and rising. Business, too, is increasingly aware of the climate threat. The Confederation of Indian Industry recently warned of the danger of a dramatic decline in crop yields, the desertion of 20,000 villages and the migration of one-fifth of the country’s huge coastal population due to rising sea levels. [For more details on the likely impact, see Green Futures Special Supplement, Monsoons and Miracles (2008).] In June last year, the government finally responded with its National Action Plan on Climate Change [GF70, p5], setting out a series of ‘themes’ on everything from solar energy and energy efficiency to ecosystem protection. Criticised as “too little, too late” by some, it nonetheless set the tone for a much more proactive approach to the issue. Two months later, prime minister Manmohan Singh used his annual Independence Day speech to signal a
o Car of controversy – but the Nano may yet go electric
Indias ’ gre en horizons
16 Green Futures January 2009
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Photos: Tata Motors
Photos: Hugh Sitton/zefa/Corbis
Behind the smoke of terror and the clouds of economic gloom, India is emerging as an unlikely frontrunner in a cleantech future, argues Malini Mehra.
sector grew by 60% worldwide. And in the last few years, India has emerged as a preferred destination for cleantech money. According to the Cleantech Group, venture capital (VC) and private equity investments in this area in India more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, from US$140 million to $290 million. And it’s continued to flow even as recession starts to bite. The third quarter of 2008 marked an all-time high for VC investments in Indian cleantech, and the country is now the second largest destination for such funds. It’s driven not only by domestic demand, but by the promise of an export market, too, one epitomised by the high-profile success of the Indian-made Reva electric car – the global top-seller in its class. Named after the manufacturer’s mother, this is sold in Europe as the ‘G-Wiz’. Redesigned to strengthen safety features since its infamous trashing on Top Gear, there are now over 600 on London’s streets. Its success has reportedly encouraged Tata to research electric and alternativefuel versions of the Nano. India’s cleantech sector extends well beyond cars, encompassing everything from water purification for rural villages, through revolutionary biodiesel projects to the world’s largest solar power station. It’s spurred by a government which, after years of denial, appears to be waking up to the twin threats of climate change and energy insecurity. Unlike Western countries, the effects of
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After years of denial, the government’s woken up to the threat of climate change
determination to pursue energy independence – through fast-track growth of renewables – primarily solar, wind, biomass and hydro. Crucially, he also announced his determination that, no matter how successful India’s economy, its per capita carbon emissions would remain below the average of the developed world. Initiatives are starting to flow thick and fast as a new generation of ‘pro-cleantech’ politicians such as Vilas Muttemwar, minister for new and renewable energy
A launch pad for renewables? India’s renewable energy sector currently comprises: • Grid-connected power: 13,000MW (approximately 8% of total installed grid capacity) • Off-grid / distributed power: 230MW • Solar PV lighting: 1.4 million systems (mostly in rural areas) • Solar collector area: 2.3 million square meters • Household biogas plants: 4.02 million
Green Futures January 2009 17
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(MNRE), flex their muscles. At the Cleantech India Forum in October, Muttemwar announced plans for a major expansion of solar power capacity by 2020, seeking to provide electricity to 20 million ‘off-grid’ rural households and build 20 million square metres of green buildings. The ministry is currently working on a draft renewable energy law that would stipulate that up to 25% of electricity must come from renewables by 2020 – so bringing India into line with, or even ahead of, European targets. The MNRE is also backing the creation of a dedicated Special Economic Zone for renewable energy manufacturing in the city of Nagpur. This would focus on strategically important input materials, process and test equipment, devices and systems components. The ministry is offering to facilitate joint ventures and technology transfers to achieve this as part of an overall package of incentivising investment in this sector. Other measures include rationalising the customs and excise duty structure, liberalising project import norms, and providing income tax concessions and concessional financing.
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Venture capital investments in Indian cleantech are at an all-time high
Leaving home? Climate change could force millions off the land, warn experts
Some state governments, too, are getting in on the act. The northern state of Haryana plans to spend $777 million to increase its renewable energy portfolio to 10%, in an attempt to meet the peak electricity demand shortfall of 15%. So far, so encouraging. In little more than a year, the government has moved from climate complacency to active engagement. But there’s no doubting the mountain which it will have to climb to make good its newfound ambitions for low-carbon growth. The country’s overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels to power its industrial emergence has made it the planet’s fourth largest emitter of carbon dioxide – despite the fact that more than 400 million of its people still lack access to basic electricity. India’s emissions worry the world. Although per capita these are just one-tenth those of the UK, the concern is what happens when its 350-million strong middle class adopts Western consumption patterns and its population expands. India is projected to overtake
China as the world’s most populous country by 2030. Sixty per cent of these people will live in urban centres, and at present rates the country’s energy demand will multiply three to four times by 2030. If India were to maintain its recent 8% GDP growth rate, it would need to add 500MW of power each week for the next 25 years. The International Energy Agency suggests that financing such a vast supply build-out would require US$1.25 trillion in energy infrastructure between 2006 and 2030. In practice, efficiency gains could offset some of this demand. India has made considerable progress in decoupling economic growth from energy consumption – and compares favourably with other countries, according to analysts at HSBC. In 2004, it emitted nearly 300 tonnes of CO2 for each million US dollars of GDP, compared with 610 tonnes in China and 701 tonnes in the US. (The world average stands at 492.) By 2030, the US Energy Information Administration expects India’s carbon intensity to fall to just 138 tonnes per million
Solar target practice: a solar lantern lights a fairground stall on Chennai beach
Asia’s largest wind farm, at the southern tip of Tamil Nadu
Indian cleantech investments will total around $150 billion over the next ten years, according to a new report by analysts at HSBC. They could potentially reduce carbon emissions by 18% over that period compared to businessas-usual projections. Echoing many of Malini Mehra’s arguments, it says that the country is well placed to capitalise on technologies which mitigate climate change. Among the sectors likely to benefit are: wind energy (in which India is already the world’s fourth largest market), hydro and solar power, biomass, biofuels, clean coal and energy efficiency. There are also major opportunities in fuel switching, principally from coal to natural gas. The report, Wide Spectrum of Choices, identifies companies in each sector which could be promising candidates for investment.
18 Green Futures January 2009
While the recession poses a short-term threat, HSBC’s analysts express confidence that “the political momentum behind action to boost clean energy, energy security and a lowcarbon economy remains strong” both in India and elsewhere. Nick Robins, head of HSBC’s Climate Change Centre of Excellence and one of the authors of the report, told Green Futures that the Indian government, like that of China, “recognises that it will be supremely affected by climate change”. He added that, while India was clearly unwilling to commit to a binding carbon reduction target, it had placed itself in a strong position to act by linking progress on climate change to ‘co-benefits’ in areas such as energy security and the improvement of air quality and health. The fact that “India is, relatively speaking, a low-carbon economy, and will remain so” also ensures it is well
placed to benefit from a global drive to address the problem, he said. Robins identifies two particular opportunities for Indian leadership, which, while at an early stage of development, could become increasingly important for India’s climate strategy. The first is concentrated solar power, “which is attracting a lot of industrial interest [and is triggering] something of a race between state governments to develop it”. The second is industrial energy efficiency, where the government is considering launching a system of tradable certificates, similar to emissions trading. Under the scheme, companies would be set minimum efficiency targets: those who met them would be able to ‘sell’ their ‘efficiency surplus’ to others who were less well advanced. – MW www.hsbc.com/sustainability
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Photos: Martin Wright
The $150 billion opportunity
Photos: Dinodia SOA/dpa/Corbis, Suzlon Energy, Martin Wright, David Cumming, Eye Ubiquitous/CORBIS
Feature
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Turning out the turbines at Suzlon, the world’s fourth biggest manufacturer
dollars, an annual improvement of some 2.9%, outstripping the global average of 2.1%. But none of this means India can afford to ease off the pressure for innovation. The country relies heavily on dirty coal-fired power for 70% of its electricity, and is dependent on imports for 75% of its oil supplies – projected to rise to 90% by 2030, in the absence of alternatives. With the import bill subject to volatile international markets, and the government paying out almost $60 billion in annual oil subsidies to keep consumers at bay, this is clearly a serious problem in search of a solution. Enter the cleantech entrepreneurs. The country may be rocked by recession, but the stellar growth of recent years, launched on the back of sweeping economic liberalisation, has given its business sector a rare confidence. Which is just as well, as the government’s growing ambitions for a cleantech revolution depends on private sector enthusiasm. Indeed in some sectors, this has triumphed despite, rather than because of, government policies. Suzlon, the wind energy giant which is now the fourth largest turbine maker in the world, with annual revenues of $850 million, was founded by Tulsi Tanti in response to the erratic cost of grid power for his textile factory. Reliance Solar
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Dhirubhai Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries Limited: spots “a clear market gap” which solar can fill
(part of RIL, the country’s largest industrial house), is building a massive photovoltaics manufacturing plant. When complete it will have a capacity of around 1GW – equivalent to one-third of the world’s current installed total. Its construction owes less to government policy than to Reliance’s identification of a clear market gap as energy supply fails to meet demand and the clamour for cleaner fuels grows. Meanwhile, Indian renewables are becoming increasingly attractive to external investors, too, as demonstrated by Moser Baer Photo Voltaic Corporation’s $100 million venture investment in solar thin film manufacturing early in 2008. At the other end of the scale, companies such as Cosmos Ignite, an Indian-led solar enterprise, are promoting a solar solution for the country’s poor. Amit Chugh, CEO, claims that his ‘Mighty Light’ can meet the domestic lighting needs of India’s rural households far more economically than the government’s current strategy, which relies on multi-million dollar subsidies for kerosene.
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India is, relatively speaking, a low-carbon economy – and will remain so
Solar hits the heights: the government has hugely ambitious plans for PV expansion
Reducing overall energy demand will be key – not least in India’s notoriously inefficient buildings. Rising from the outskirts of Hyderabad, the CII-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre has set a marker for others to follow. This solar-powered showcase consumes just half the average energy of similar buildings, with energy for lighting cut by nearly 90%. Built largely out of recycled or recyclable materials, it also avoids discharging any waste water into the sewers, treating it all biologically on site instead. In Gurgaon, a boomtown on the fringes of Delhi, ITC Ltd’s Green Centre headquarters is designed to capture all its water needs through rainwater harvesting, heat the water via solar panels and minimise energy use (mainly for air conditioning) thanks to high standards of insulation and ‘heat shades’. It won the prestigious platinum rating from the US Green Building Council – the largest building in the world to have done so. Cleantech breakthroughs are targeting the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ too – the 400 million mainly rural poor who survive on around a dollar a day. These include imaginative low-tech innovations such as Hindustan Lever’s PureIT water purifier, which consumes zero energy in use and provides clean drinking water much cheaper than the bottled variety; improved biogas plants which allow families with cattle to produce their own
Green Futures January 2009 19
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20 Green Futures January 2009
The country’s homegrown advantages may be more significant in the long term, though. For a start, there’s the talent pool. India produces the world’s largest number of English-speaking science and engineering graduates, and boasts a total of around 14 million recently qualified university graduates – twice that of the US, one and a half times that of China, and still growing, given India’s more youthful demographics. This has attracted hundreds of multinational companies to the country, drawn by the low-cost, high-skill talent on offer, which in turn has helped drive the skilling-up and professionalisation of a whole new generation of Indians. Some of this talent is now fuelling India’s own cleantech enterprises. Take CleanStar. Established by two 20-something foreign-trained engineers, Sagun Saxena and Shasank Verma, it has pioneered methods of growing jatropha plants as feedstock for biofuels on marginal land with minimum water and energy inputs [see ‘Ethical oilman’, GF68, 41]. Along with UK-based Regenatec, they are now developing a technology which allows diesel engines to run on pure plant oils.
Crunch time for a green new deal Green growth and cleantech could help lift us out of recession, says… well, just everybody. So, if we’re all agreed, asks Martin Wright, what’s stopping us?
The size of the sun The world’s biggest solar power station is being planned for the deserts of Gujarat. A joint initiative of the state government and the Clinton Foundation, it will have a capacity of 5GW – more than five times the capacity of a typical coal or nuclear plant. Described as an ‘integrated solar city’ (because all the equipment will be manufactured on site), it’s also over five times larger than the current biggest solar project, the Brightsource development in the Mojave Desert, with a planned capacity of 900MW [see GF69, p6]. – MW
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The 20-million strong Indian diaspora is playing a role, too, as they look increasingly for investment opportunities back home. Business leaders such as New Look’s Tom Singh and Cobra Beer’s Karan Bilimoria epitomise this emerging group of ‘foreign returns’: a ‘brain gain’, as opposed to the ‘brain drain’ which characterised the economy in pre-liberalisation days, when the likes of Hotmail’s Sameer Bhatia, Sun Microsystem’s Vinod Khosla and Vodafone’s Arun Sarin left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The government is responding by tightening intellectual property laws, which are markedly tougher than its rival, China, in an effort to attract ‘Indian IQ for Indian IP’. India could be many things in this coming century. Whether it can rise to the challenge of tackling climate change while providing decent standards of living for its one billion plus people will define its character for generations to come. But the surge in its clean technology sector holds out some hope that it could yet make a decisive break with the fossil fuel age, and shift from being a ‘nation of entrepreneurs’ to one of true ‘solarpreneurs’.
Malini Mehra is founder and CEO of the Centre for Social Markets, www.csmworld.org, based in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. Additional reporting by Martin Wright.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
F
rom the gleaming towers
of investment analysts to the scruffy poster-strewn offices of NGOs… From the sun-kissed laptops of Californian venture capitalists to gritty number crunchers in obscure thinktanks… Just about everyone thinking creatively about the economic future suddenly seems to be singing from the same hymn sheet. And the chorus goes like this: • If we want to tackle climate change before it’s too late, we need a crash programme of investment in clean technology and the green economy And… • If you want to know what will be the next boom area as we come out of the crunch, look no further than those sectors, poised as they are for stellar growth
Photo: Rich LaSalle/Getty
Small but perfectly fuelled: Reva’s electric G-Wiz, the first in a surge of Indian models
clean cooking gas rather than rely on expensive LPG or unsustainable wood fuel; and household-scale solar power which produces electric light for village homes while also connecting their inhabitants to the outside world via mobile phones. While lacking the sophisticated sparkle of some cleantech novelties, these not only provide essential services at an affordable price, but generate a substantial business opportunity for companies like Harish Hande’s SELCO, winner of a prestigious Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy (www.ashdenawards.org). For the millions of Indians for whom even the Tata Nano is out of reach, the rickshaw remains the transport of necessity, if not of choice. Considered a crushing human indignity by some, a cycle rickshaw is nonetheless a clean and relatively energy-efficient way to get around. Now a new version designed by the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy combines lightweight materials and sophisticated gearing to make the rickshaw much easier on the rider’s body. It’s caught on rapidly among rickshaw operators, with over 300,000 being sold in nine major cities. Riders of the modernised version report income increases of between 20% and 50%, thanks to being able to ride faster and for longer in relative comfort. There is even evidence that it’s persuading some motorised rickshaw drivers to switch to the humanpowered variety [see Briefings p4]. Boosting employment prospects at the grassroots is an oftenoverlooked aspect of the emerging green economy. In a country of chronic unemployment (and underemployment), this is no small issue. Unlike the IT sector which created wealth and value, but relatively few jobs, the shift towards the lowcarbon economy can bring both business and employment opportunities. From tourism and transport to agriculture and manufacturing, imaginative investment could trigger a boom in green livelihoods. We now have some figures for what the employment dividend might be. According to Nicholas Parker of the Cleantech Group, for every $100 million of VC investments in cleantech, 2,500 direct jobs are created. Add the economic multiplier resulting from the current venture investment cycle, and today’s 1.5 million cleantech jobs will lead to an estimated total of 7.5 million indirect ones. So apart from growing government support and concern over climate change and energy security, what other factors lie behind India’s emergence as such a promising haven for cleantech? The Clean Development Mechanism (which allows industrialised countries to achieve some of their greenhouse gas reduction targets through investments in emission cuts in developing economies) is far from perfect [see ‘Carbon markets: time to clean up’, GF68, pp42-44]. But it has helped spur projects in everything from factory clean-ups to solar lighting. India accounts for around one-third of registered CDM projects.
Photo: REVA Electric Car Company
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Indian IQ for Indian IP...
Feature
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This surge of global ecological Keynesianism should have Roosevelt smiling in his grave
So… • If governments want to spend their way out of recession without losing track of climate goals, what better recipient of their largesse? The last few months have seen everyone from Barack Obama to Merrill Lynch add their voices to the choir [see box overleaf, ‘All together now’]. It’s a surge of global ecological Keynesianism which should have Roosevelt smiling in his grave.
Rising wind: as we emerge from recession, renewables are set to soar
Green Futures January 2009 21
Feature
The chorus of calls for recession-busting green growth Back in July, the UK’s Green New Deal Group (a consortium of veteran environmentalists brought together by the New Economics Foundation) struck the first chords with its appeal for: • Massive investment in renewables and “wider environmental transformation” • The creation of thousands of new green collar jobs • Reining in “reckless aspects” of the finance sector – while making low-cost capital available to fund the green shift • A new alliance of environmentalists, industry, agriculture and unions to put “the interests of the real economy ahead of those of ‘footloose finance’” Three months later, the UN Environment Programme unveiled its Green Economy Initiative. An unusually political document for a UN agency, it covered much of the same ground as the Green New Deal. It urged governments to make a decisive shift away from short-term growth founded on the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources – which it blamed for everything from speeding global warming to causing a rapid rise in food prices for some of the world’s poorest. Instead, it argued for large-scale spending on restoring ‘natural services’ – from forests to watersheds – along with the customary calls for a surge in renewables and other cleantech. Forest futures: restoring natural services could be a major growth sector
22 Green Futures January 2009
For governments keen to be seen to be doing something about unemployment, cleantech should have particular appeal. According to Professor Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, renewable energy “generates three to five times more jobs per dollar invested than… fossil fuels”. Other green sectors perform even better: recycling creates ten times as many jobs as sending waste to landfill. A commitment to ‘green growth’ was one of the many ways in which Obama put clear blue water between himself and McCain in the closing days of the presidential election campaign – and there was no shortage of cheerleaders to back him up. Take the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. This may not sound very exciting, but with a little matter of $185.6 billion of assets under management, it’s not short of influence. It wants legislation to promote cleantech, allowing it to invest with confidence now in a sector which it’s convinced will bring excellent long-term returns. Then in November, five of America’s most iconic brands joined the party. Nike, Starbucks, Sun Microsystems, Timberland and Levi Strauss launched a new coalition, Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy. Its aim: to lobby for “swift and aggressive” climate change legislation. Specific demands included: • Setting a target to cut greenhouse emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 • Introducing an auction-only cap-and-trade system (no free allocations, in other words) • Doubling the historic rate of energy efficiency improvements All three would help spring a range of green technologies into economic viability. As the year ended, the chorus just carried on swelling. The Apollo Alliance (strapline: ‘Clean Energy, Good Jobs’) published its New Apollo Program. It claimed that five million new American jobs would be created by investing a total of $500 billion over the next ten years in cleantech and renewables. Such investment would enable the US to cut emissions by 30% by 2025, by which date a quarter of the country’s power needs would be met by renewables. Although some scented more than a whiff of protectionism in the proposals, the Program added some useful political weight to Obama’s ‘green growth’ mission. Because while the Alliance membership includes both NGOs and green sector companies (so there’s an element of ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’), it also features many of the US’s leading labour unions. Among them are the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, not exactly hotbeds of environmentalism – at least not until now. The UK’s Aldersgate Group also boasts an eclectic membership, ranging from Friends of the Earth and WWF to Tesco and BT, along with individuals such as rising Tory star Greg Barker, the shadow minister on energy and climate change. In December, the Group published Green Foundations 2009, a closely argued case for more and better environmental regulation to help drive the shift to a low-carbon economy. And it stated bluntly: “UK regulation can provide a competitive edge to domestic suppliers.”
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David Bent: governments should explore their new-found appetite for regulation
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The so-called ‘NICE’ decade had some pretty nasty consequences!
Alice Chapple: business as usual isn’t going to happen
If governments are going to rescue companies, whether GM and Chrysler or Northern Rock, says Bent, they have an opportunity to point them in a more sustainable direction. So far, the UK has shown precious little sign of doing so with the banking sector; it remains to be seen whether Obama will force Detroit to take the green road. Business, though, doesn’t need to wait for the heavy hand of government intervention. The title of a new report produced by Forum in association with Capgemini sums it up: Acting now for a positive 2018: preparing for radical change. The last decade has seen some pretty significant shifts in thinking around sustainable business, Bent says. “Ten years ago, companies used CSR to protect their reputation, but often left their core business untouched.” Now there’s growing awareness that sustainability encompasses a lot of gritty questions to keep CEOs awake at night. Questions like: ‘Will there be crippling constraints on the resources we need to survive? Will rising prices for raw materials wreck our business plans? Will climate change disrupt our markets beyond recognition?’ To help business leaders make sense of such questions, the report sets out four possible scenarios for the next decade. They have certain assumptions in common: that it will witness not only the end of cheap debt, but also of the days of cheap energy, food, labour and raw materials – along with the first symptoms of the breakdown of natural systems. The four scenarios sketch out a range of potential responses – from enlightened globalisation to rampant protectionism. But in each case, the report concludes, those businesses which have put sustainability at the heart of their operations will be best placed to weather the storm. When businesses are foundering and people are losing jobs, it can seem crass to start talking of silver linings. But, as Chapple puts it, in the wake of the financial meltdown, “we know that business as usual isn’t going to happen. And it’s that discontinuity which helps us change mindsets. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to really shift the landscape.” Martin Wright is Green Futures editor in chief.
Silver lining: recession gives us a rare chance to shift the landscape for good
Photos: Oliver Strewe/Getty
Renewable energy generates three to five times more jobs per dollar invested than fossil fuels
short-term subsidies, to nurture these nascent technologies and see them through to the sort of scale where they can stand on their own two feet. And there’s the rub. Like all new business opportunities, cleantech depends on debt financing to achieve lift off – and with its technologies still at a relatively early stage, it’s more dependent than most. Which gives it only slightly more than a cat in hell’s chance of winning really significant investment in the current climate. “Investors are buying the long-term story,” says Rob Lake, head of sustainability at pension fund manager APG Investments, “but with [the cleantech companies] caught in the credit crunch, they know their return will be much reduced. So they’re holding fire for now.” And that, says Bruce Jenkyn-Jones, managing director of cleantech specialists Impax Asset Management, means that a lot of promising but marginal projects, such as major new wind farms, are left in limbo. So how do we free them from the shackles of the crunch – and set the economy firmly on the path of long-term sustainability? There is a golden opportunity, says David Bent, head of business strategies at Forum for the Future, for governments to “explore their new appetite for regulation. They’re already keen to regulate financial markets so that we’re not exposed to systemic risk. So why not do it with other systems which are also at risk, and on which we completely rely – like a stable climate, like soil, and so on.” Alice Chapple, Forum’s director of sustainable financial markets, agrees. “We know that the financial sector’s risk management systems didn’t work. We know they didn’t include a whole tangle of factors, from subprime loans to misaligned incentives. So now we’re much more open to questioning the assumptions we make about other risks, too.” And not before time, says Bent. “We’ve had a period where we were effectively privatising profits and socialising risk. We’ve seen the consequences of that in the financial markets. Now we’re starting to see them in terms of climate change and the wider environment, too.” Liberal markets are all well and good, he adds, but not if they take us “to the edge of a precipice… The so-called ‘NICE’ decade had some pretty nasty consequences!”.
That’s certainly the view of the normally sober suits in Merrill Lynch, who call clean technology “the sixth industrial revolution”. ML’s cleantech strategist, Steven Milunovich, suggests that, by 2011, the economy would have recovered enough to allow investors to exploit some golden opportunities. Energy efficiency, electric cars, and wind- and solar-powered microgrids are among the lucrative fruit waiting to be plucked, he says, with geothermal energy and biofuels as “dark horses” which could yet come up on the inside track. And venture capitalists, accustomed to thinking way out of the box, would play a vital, disruptive role in making it all happen. Long-term, then, the future’s bright, the future’s green. But meanwhile, says Milunovich, there’s a case for
Photos: Shutterstock/Joe Gough
“ ” All together now
On the surface, it’s a no-brainer. As Nicholas Stern put it recently, when it comes to the scale of economic threat, “this recession will be big. But climate change will be bigger.” So if we can kill those two looming vultures with one stone, so much the better. Indeed, were it not for the crunch, green growth would surely be flavour of the month in its own right. First, there’s overwhelming consensus that a low-carbon economy is the only viable long-term sort on offer. Add in volatile resource prices and rising fears about peak petroleum. Then think about the yearning for a ‘flight to tangibles’ among investors stung by exposure to toxic loans. Put them together and you should have a bonanza.
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Green Futures January 2009 23
A thousand words
magine daily life without running water, washing machines, sewage treatment... This is one of a series of images commissioned by the Department for International Development. Its aim: to raise awareness that meeting the water needs of a growing population is going to be one of the greatest challenges of this century.
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Concept: Futerra; image: Squint/Opera; photography: Ciaran Oliver
Feature
The lab of life
Shining light: Suffolk’s campus is something of a beacon
The future by degrees
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Many low-carbon innovations started life in university labs
26 Green Futures January 2009
Kentucky, they don’t just provide housing for their students; they treat their Ecovillage as a ‘living laboratory’. The student accommodation and childcare centre encourages ‘learning by doing’ and its green design elements, such as solar and wind power, rainwater harvesting and composting toilets, are monitored to evaluate how low-impact systems work in practice. The idea is catching on: the University of Bradford is currently recruiting students for its planned ‘sustainable village’ campus. Elsewhere across the world’s campuses, solarpowered computers, swap shops, free bike hire and chip fat fuel are among a host of initiatives to reduce emissions, cut waste and find solutions to the climate challenge. Universities not only have massive scope to stimulate more sustainable lifestyles – they can also teach crucial sustainable skills, and act as invaluable centres of research. Many low-carbon innovations, for instance, started life in university labs. But are they teaching what we need to know? After all, with half the young people in Britain likely to be students at some stage, universities shape the workforce of the future. Forum for the Future founder director Sara Parkin puts it in a nutshell when she speaks of spreading
‘sustainability literacy’ across all academic disciplines. She sees it as a key role of higher education to ensure that everyone, not just a few specialists, emerges equipped to apply sustainability principles to their future at work and in the community. It’s a vision that many students seem keen to buy into. In Forum’s recent Future Leader’s Survey, covering all university applicants in 2007-08, nearly two-thirds of the respondents wanted to see more about sustainability in the curriculum and the prospectus. So, apparently, do the powers that be. Both the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills agree that a new strategy is required to make sustainability a core part of all campus life. A whistlestop tour of campuses up and down the country would certainly uncover quite a lot going on. More than two-thirds of England’s higher education establishments could point to at least some research and development under way in this area. But the trouble is that it’s emerging only slowly and patchily. Initiatives tend to be limited to particular departments, like environmental sciences – and all too often they’re dependent on individual efforts instead of co-ordinated leadership. So what needs to change – and how?
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Photos: Aston University
A
t Berea College in Kentucky
Photos: Faber Maunsell
From campus life to coursework content and innovative research, universities should be at the forefront of the drive for sustainability. But are they up to it? Amy Fetzer gives our academic institutions the third degree.
From Oxford’s oldest colleges to state-of-the-art architecture like Northumbria’s new law school [overleaf], there are many lessons to be learned from the way university buildings are designed, built, managed – and monitored. Some, like Bradford and Kentucky’s Berea, are trailblazers. But for many others, the key environmental feature of their campuses is a hefty carbon footprint. On energy alone, the Carbon Trust calculates that the total buildings estate of further and higher education colleges in England consumes 5,200 million kWh every year. And it emits the of CO2 equivalent of one million people flying to Miami and back: 3.2 million tonnes. The record on reducing it is decidedly patchy – so far. Hence the drive to get universities to adopt the overall UK goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050. The first results were declared in November, when five institutions – Manchester, Keele, King’s College London, Edinburgh and Central Lancashire – were awarded the Carbon Trust Standard mark for moving in the right direction, with an average cut of 6%. Energy efficiency strategies and building insulation programmes are the most obvious things for them to put in place, but there’s plenty of scope for wider innovation too – and that doesn’t just mean buying ‘green tariff’ electricity from the grid. Edinburgh’s Napier University, for instance, is using money from the Energy Saving Trust to install solar panels which will power up to 80 computers. Westminster is planning to install a range of onsite renewables, including solar panels, a wind turbine and a biomass boiler. Suffolk University’s new campus in Ipswich [left] is something of a beacon, incorporating a sedum roof, natural lighting and air con, and even recycled fibre carpets. Then there’s transport: another sizeable source of carbon emissions – and another opportunity to make major cuts. At St Andrews they’ve focused mainly on buses (working with the operators so that routes and timings match demand) and on bikes. The university now boasts 500 cycle storage spaces, plus cycle information, maps and maintenance classes, with a bike pool scheme promised soon to help staff travel between meetings. The University of East London already has its own pay-as-you-go cycles for staff, students and residents, with 30-minute journeys free – a kind of mini-version of Paris’s widely acclaimed Vélib scheme [see GF65, p15]. Taking a different tack, the University of Wales converts used cooking oil into biodiesel to power campus maintenance vehicles and machinery. The UK universities which have opened campuses overseas, from China to Dubai, might even be said to be doing their bit here. Instead of flying large numbers of students over to Britain, they fly far fewer lecturers overseas. Information and communications technology, of course, can cut emissions through distance learning. It can also help pull piecemeal, patchy progress together in a more coherent, cross-curricular approach to sustainability. Construction management
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Gloucestershire’s greener goals The University of Gloucestershire is something of a star on sustainability. Its strengths include:
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Solar-powered computers, swap shops, free bike hire, chip fat fuel...
• Commitment from the top: vice-chancellor Patricia Broadfoot, who also chairs the UniversitiesUK sustainable development task force, says that “the biggest single thing we do is to try to inspire students about issues of sustainability” • A strong track record in teaching on the subject: reinforced by the recent creation of a Sustainability Institute • High standards in environmental management: it was the first English university to achieve registration to ISO 14001 • Recognition from students: it came top in the 2008 Green League drawn up by student campaign group People & Planet • Sharing the learning: it recently published its own book on sustainability in universities, Greener by Degrees courses at Dundee and Birmingham City University, for instance, both use ‘wikis’ to build up web resources on sustainability in the built environment.
Making it count
A leap toward the light? Aston’s power ranger gets students to switch off (in a good way!)
Connecting academic work with the wider community looms large in ‘joining up’ sustainability. It can make a big difference if courses in subjects like engineering are flexible enough for students to take them ‘on the job’ – maximising the flow of knowledge between academia and business in both directions. On the one hand, students can try to apply what they’re learning about sustainability to practical issues in their workplace, via anything from implementing video conferencing to re-evaluating their company supply chain. Conversely, they can bring their ‘work’ experience into the classroom, as a reality check for the robustness of sustainability ‘solutions’ in the face of unforgiving budgets and sceptical colleagues. Business placements, too, can provide a rich seam of ‘real world’ material for incorporation into coursework. Yacob Mulugetta at the University of Surrey has been setting up a programme in which 260 students go into the local council, schools and businesses to help them cut carbon, manage their waste, improve transport and map their eco-footprint. But this kind of engagement is all too rare at present, says Jane Wilkinson, who leads the higher education work at Forum for the Future. Its own masters degree course, Leadership for Sustainable Development, combines lectures and study with six
Green Futures January 2009 27
Feature
Earthship exemplar Students at the University of Brighton have given a big boost to one of the city’s most prominent new landmarks. Their evaluation of the environmental performance of the Earthship, a local eco visitor centre built entirely from reused and recycled materials, and relying on rainwater and renewable energy, showed how well the prototype worked. As a result, Brighton and Hove City Council has now granted permission for 16 Earthship-style homes.
28 Green Futures January 2009
Getting wasted – differently Universities are also cottoning on to ways of reducing their own everyday ‘waste’ – and re-valuing it as a commodity which can be reused or sold. Some of their initiatives in this area are pretty downto-earth; more hands-on engagement than rarefied ‘learning’. One idea is to promote an hour a week of student green activity, preferably on something which will appeal to their lifestyle – such as organising ‘swishing’style clothes-swap parties. But however it is done, getting staff and students onboard is vital. With over 10,000 bins and 75,000 people on campus, the University of Leeds raised awareness by taking key staff to see the mountains of recyclable waste going to landfill, and showing students and staff the scale of the problem with photos, posters and talks. Recycling rates have now reached 40%, and appear on target to reach 70% by the end of 2009.
The London School of Economics has tackled its massive end-of-year waste peaks, when the average student dumps 10-12kg of reusable clobber, by implementing an impressively comprehensive reuse scheme. Unwanted items such as pots, posters, clothes and bedding can be easily sorted, swapped, sold or given to charity – and the amount binned has dropped dramatically. LSE is now sharing its learning with other universities, and forming regional reuse networks through another HEFCE-backed project: Sustainability in Universities – Moving Towards Zero-Waste. Incorporating sustainability principles pays off on so many fronts – saving money, inspiring the university community, attracting students and staff, and making an impression on green ‘league tables’ – that you have to wonder why it hasn’t totally swept the board. Part of the explanation is that it just hasn’t been at the top of the political or the academic agenda – though this may be changing. A year ago, John Denham, the secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills, hinted that future funding could hinge on cutting emissions. Now Green Futures has learnt that HEFCE is poised to amend the criteria so that grants are dependent on institutions having plans in place to reduce emissions by April 2011. Then there’s the recently launched environmental and corporate responsibility benchmark for higher education, ‘Universities that Count’. Rather like a businesses index, the scheme will rate the 64 participating higher education institutes on their performance in this area. If initiatives like these take off, could we see more colleges appointing sustainability experts at senior management level – as has been advocated forcefully by US expert Steven Lanou at MIT? More of them, too, might follow the lead of people like Nan Jenks-Jay. As dean of environmental affairs at Middlebury College in Vermont, she has helped make her institution a beacon of good green practice – not least by getting its academics, administrators, students and facilities managers to talk to each other and work together better.
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Bradford’s living lab: in its super-insulated ‘Ecoversity’ campus, students learn about efficiency – and even pay for their power
Instead of the kind of bizarre situation where students end up putting on the air con to cool overheated dormitories, Middlebury now has a joined-up strategy across the board. The aim is to make the whole college carbon neutral by 2016 – via a combination of energy efficiency measures, onsite renewables, technological innovation and educational programmes, with carbon offsetting strictly as a last resort.
The ripple effect
Photos: Low Carbon Trust; University of Bradford
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In some US colleges students bizarrely put on the air con to cool overheated dorms
separate month-long placements in business, government and NGOs. In another Forum-driven project in Bristol, postgraduate students at the University of the West of England are devising a range of environmental indicators to help the city tackle high priority problems like traffic congestion and pollution. And what could be further from that ivory tower cliché than spinning a sustainable business out of a breakthrough in academic research? There’s been a growing emphasis on developing an enterprise culture among universities for a while, of course. But now there are particular opportunities for cleantech innovators to spark the recession-busting start-ups we so evidently need. RawSolar is one example, marketing a revolutionary low-cost solar power system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Another is Carbon8, created to commercialise work by researchers at the University of Greenwich, who found a way to lock in carbon dioxide with contaminated soil or polluted waste, and so form tiny harmless pebbles which can be used as aggregate by the construction industry.
Birmingham City University’s Grand Design: students steal the show with their garden shed makeover
Photos: Faber Maunsell; Christ Webb Photography
It’s chilled up North: Northumbria’s new law school, built largely from recycled rubble, incorporates innovative ‘solar veil’ shading techniques
“Universities must lead by example,” says Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey. “If they don’t, they’re sending out inconsistent signals, and students won’t take sustainability seriously.” But if facilities for cycling (and recycling) are widely used on campus, and technologies like solar power become part of the ‘normal’ way of doing things, then graduates will more likely expect (and demand) them afterwards, in their jobs, homes and public buildings. So far, graduates with a strong academic background in sustainability are in a small minority. But already it’s possible to track their career paths into major public and private sector organisations, and each year their influence grows. You’ll find them in government departments, at the top accountancy and consultancy firms, and in initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and ClimateWise [see p37]. Former engineering student Andy Davey, who attributes his ‘sustainability mindset’ to what he learnt at the University of Surrey, says the doctorate has given him “the insight and tools to put sustainability principles into practice within the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency, and has informed the approach I have taken to all my policy jobs in Defra”. Alumni of the Forum masters course can be found in both the NHS and Defra too, as well as at the Treasury, the Olympic Delivery Authority, major companies such as BP, and organisations they’ve started themselves, including Beyond Green, Upstream and Futerra [see p38 for more on Forum’s alumni].
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If sustainability becomes normal at university, then graduates will expect – and demand – it in later life
“There are some aspects of sustainability we don’t understand yet,” says Jackson. What, for example, are the most effective policies for changing unsustainable behaviours? “Universities are one of the only places we can think creatively about these challenges.” Sara Parkin takes a somewhat different tack. For her, it’s not so much a lack of research that stands in the way of a society-wide switch to sustainability; it’s more a matter of finding effective ways to communicate the solutions that are emerging. Either way, however, Jackson’s and Parkin’s arguments both point to the same conclusion. It’s not enough for universities to offer ‘sustainability’ as a subject option or an afterthought. It has to be at the core of what and how they teach and research, of how they manage their estates, and how they provide for their students and staff to conduct their lives. As Ann Finlayson of the Sustainable Development Commission puts it: “The question universities should be asking themselves all the time is ‘Is that enough? Shouldn’t we be doing more?’.” For more information on Forum’s masters course, visit www.forumforthefuture.org/masters-course
Top tips for a green uni The would-be-sustainable university should: • Set a strategy – with targets and accountabilities • Install experts at management level – to co-ordinate both operational and academic initiatives • Be clear about the business case – emphasise savings from energy efficiency, better waste management and resource use, and eligibility for ‘green’ grants • Engage – take all stakeholder groups along • Talk straight – present problems and progress in simple and vivid ways
Green Futures January 2009 29
Comment
Comment
American Eye He’s been touted as America’s great green hope, but will he deliver? Polly Ghazi sets out the key tests facing an Obama administration.
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30 Green Futures January 2009
And, in November, Obama made an unexpected video appearance at a bipartisan climate summit of US state governors, convened by California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, at which he plainly stated his intent to turn the page on eight years of George Bush’s global warming denial. “My presidency will mark a new chapter in American leadership on climate change,” he said, pledging to “vigorously re-engage” in international climate negotiations, and to enact a US-wide greenhouse gas cap and trade system with annual emissions reduction targets. (And, although he didn’t go to December’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Poznan in person, he revealed that he would be asking members of Congress who did attend to report back to him.) But these are still pledges and matters of process, rather than policy substance. So once he takes office, what signs will point to where Obama ranks environment and climate issues on his pressing ‘to do list’? Here are some key issues to watch.
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My presidency will mark a new chapter in American leadership on climate change
How he frames the fiscal stimulus package: Rescuing the ailing economy is Obama’s number one priority. Depending on how he spends the hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal, it could also present a major opportunity to turn the US economic juggernaut in a new direction. “Obama is going to face multiple challenges… which can’t be addressed sequentially as there is limited time and budget,” says Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute. “The fiscal stimulus package represents an opportunity to tackle the economic crisis, energy security and climate change at the same time, through investments in clean energy.” Whether there is swift and separate climate legislation: In his videotaped speech to the governors’ climate summit, Obama renewed his commitment to a GHG cap and trade bill that would deliver an 80% reduction in 1990 emissions by 2050, prompting Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, to enthuse that he was “ready to roll up his sleeves and deliver the action needed to protect our climate, our economy and our national security”. Leading businesses, including Nike, Starbucks and Levi Strauss, have backed him up – calling for a carbon allowance auction system. But it will not be easy to get such legislation past conservative Democratic members of Congress, especially those from coal-producing states. Rather than pick such a fight, some influential members of Congress are reportedly urging Obama to limit his early actions on climate to packing the fiscal stimulus bill with clean energy investments and tax incentives. Such a watered-down approach, however, would send a disastrous signal to the world, and bode badly for agreement at Copenhagen in 2010 on a new global climate treaty.
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Will he still be all smiles in six months’ time?
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Early signs are encouraging
Photo: Getty/Emmanuel Dunand
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Rescuing the ailing economy is a perfect opportunity to tackle the credit crunch, energy security and climate change at the same time – through investments in clean energy
heaped upon the next president of the White House that Dickens’s novel might have been written for Barack Obama. Pressing problems he’s expected to solve range from a stricken economy and flawed healthcare system to the costly wars of attrition in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there’s the looming matter, as the president-elect himself characterises it, of “a planet in peril”. On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly emphasised his commitment to creating several million “green collar” jobs through massive investments in a “clean energy future”. He also widely advertised his intention of joining the dots between energy, climate, job creation and national security policies. But the real test – and the subject of fevered speculation among US environmentalists – will be whether he follows through once ensconced in the Oval Office. Will he put real flesh on the bones of his picture vision, and set the US on the path to a low-carbon economy? Or will he do what some of his advisers are urging; consolidate his position, seek small, incremental victories, and avoid confrontations with powerful interests such as the US coal and oil industries? The Obama administration’s first 100 days in office should provide some clues for tealeaf readers to divine. And the early signs are encouraging. Obama’s selection of a talented trio to implement his energy and environmental policies was an early Christmas present for America’s green community. Nobel prize-winning physicist, clean energy specialist and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Stephen Chu will become energy secretary. Carol Browner, an effective and regulation-minded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator under Bill Clinton, will head a new cross-cutting post as “energy, environmental and climate policy tzar”. And Lisa Jackson, a Browner protégé and current chief of staff to New Jersey’s governor, will head the EPA – a post which Obama has said he will elevate to Cabinet level.
Illustration: Andrew Baker
S
o great are the expectations
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How he deals with the auto industry bailout: With Congress dithering over whether to save General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, it looks increasingly likely that the fate of America’s car industry, and its 240,000 jobs, will fall into Obama’s lap. He has made it clear – telling President Bush to his face – that he wants a bailout to prevent the massive economic hardship the industry’s collapse would bring. But if he does not tie taxpayers’ investment to the building of a new generation of greener cars, he will rightfully raise environmentalists’ ire. “If a public bailout of the auto industry is to be justified, aggressive fuel efficiency standards and other conditions must be put in place to fundamentally transform the industry’s business model,” says Bapna. “Anything less will be a major missed opportunity.” Whether he reverses anti-environmental Bush administration decisions: Obama has publicly pledged to sign an executive order to reverse the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that California cannot regulate CO2 emissions from vehicle exhausts. Doing so would free Governor Schwarzenegger to require new vehicles to meet much improved fuelefficiency standards, and a dozen more states are expected to follow suit. President Bush also recently rescinded a decades-old executive order which banned drilling for oil off US waters. If Obama does not issue a new order, or Congress renew an expired moratorium, drilling could, in principle, soon be permitted as close to three miles from US shores.
How he deals with biofuels: As the senator for the Midwestern state of Illinois, Obama was very supportive of biofuels development on US farmland, despite mounting evidence of the negative impact the biofuels boom was having on global food prices. Of course, Obama can only realistically move as fast and as far as his public is willing to go. The good news here is that recent public opinion polls suggest that Americans are ready to embrace clean energy if it brings new jobs and bolsters national security as well as counters climate change. In an October poll by the Pew Research Center, 87% of interviewees said the US should be “more dependent on alternative energy” while 75% supported the “United States taking action on global warming”. Most of industry, too, is onboard. With more than half of US states now developing or implementing regional greenhouse gas cap and trade programmes, the utility and energy sectors want a federal system in place, with a single set of rules. Even the oil industry is bending to the winds of change. “We are not going to fix the economy over the long term without taking care of energy,” Red Cavaney, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, told Business Week a fortnight after election day. The expectations may be great, but the time is also ripe to see them fulfilled. Polly Ghazi is US correspondent for Green Futures and writer/editor for the World Resources Institute.
Green Futures January 2009 31
Partner viewpoint
Feature
Second life sludge
Cities of light
It’s potent stuff, sewage. And valuable too, if you turn it into fertiliser, green electricity and renewable heat.
32 Green Futures January 2009
Reading’s sludge digesters: Will all sewage plants look like this one day?
As Forum for the Future unveils its latest Sustainable Cities Index, Roger East asks just what makes a city sustainable – and how do we begin to achieve it in the here and now?
S
ustainability looks simple
sludge means less need to burn fossil fuels. The process is also useful where there’s a lack of farmland for recycling. But the future is not without its challenges. Increasingly stringent effluent quality standards mean the volume of material to be processed is on the up – something that’s compounded by population growth. Competition for agricultural land from other organic materials diverted from landfill further complicates the picture. Perhaps the biggest risk is public perception of agricultural recycling. “It’s a potential challenge despite the UK Government and EU regarding recycling to land as the best practicable environmental option in most circumstances,” states Hadlow. Thames is currently in negotiation about its plans to address these issues with the water regulator, Ofwat, as part of the industry’s 2010-15 price review. Its plans include increasing sludge processing capacity and investing in new ‘enhanced digestion technology’. This will minimise the volume
of sludge produced – by reducing its water content, for example, and thereby simplifying storage and cutting down on vehicle movements. “It also produces more biogas, which in turn can be used to generate renewable energy, and means there’s less potential for odour nuisance to our customers,” adds Hadlow. “Our customers rightly expect high standards when we’re managing sewage sludge,” sums up Hadlow. “The challenge is that this is a waste stream we can’t switch off, so safe and sustainable ways of managing it are critical. It may be a social and environmental challenge, but that’s where the solutions lie too.” – Darren Towers, sustainability strategy manager at Thames Water.
Thames Water is a Forum for the Future partner. www.thameswater.co.uk
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Photo: Foster+Partners, Paul Smith/Panos
sewage is treated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But what’s left over from this vital – and inevitably constant – process is a sludge by-product that has an interesting afterlife. Rich in nutrients and energy, thousands of tonnes of this organic material are already being used as fertiliser on fields and to produce green electricity. “Once you remove the water from sewage and treat the remaining material, you’re left with an organic matter,” explains Thames Water’s Sarah-Jane Hadlow. She’s a senior environmental advisor at the country’s largest water and wastewater services company, which produces around 250,000 tonnes of treated sewage sludge, or ‘biosolids’, a year. “These biosolids are nutrient-rich,” she explains. “So most are recycled to agricultural land where they return this benefit to the soil.” Of course that’s after a treatment that meets strict microbiological standards. Hadlow points out that these are among the most researched of all organic materials applied to land and their use is tightly regulated. In 2007/08, the company recycled around 60% of its biosolids across more than 28,000 hectares of farmland in southeast England. Thames believes farmers may find switching to biosolids as an alternative to chemical fertiliser a more sustainable choice in a tough economic climate. Unlike synthetic fertilisers, which are often imported from Europe or beyond, biosolids come from a local source, are less expensive and, needless to say, there’s a guaranteed supply. This agricultural use remains the cornerstone of Thames’s 25-year sludge strategy, but it’s only part of the picture. The company is increasingly using sludge to produce renewable energy. In 2007/08, it generated enough renewable energy to power around 90,000 homes. In total, 19 combined heat and power plants and two sludgepowered generators put out 437 gigawatthours – about two-thirds as heat and a third in the form of electricity. The process offers other environmental benefits too. During sewage sludge treatment, capturing methane (a greenhouse gas over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide) helps Thames cut its own emissions. Waste heat recovered from incineration of sewage
Illustration: Andrew Baker
B
eyond the U-bend
if you’re starting from scratch. Take Masdar – the oil-financed, solar-driven city rising from the sands of Abu Dhabi, designed from the outset as a modern urban oasis of low-carbon living. Or Dongtan, the visionary new community slated for the outskirts of Shanghai. Simple – but far from easy. Meeting the energy needs of a modern metropolis without fossil fuels requires innovation on an unprecedented scale. And that’s before you work out how to shrink the footprint of its food and water sourcing, let alone tackle materials consumption and waste disposal. Small wonder, perhaps, that some grandiose plans for urban sustainability – from Dongtan to the UK’s eco-towns – remain stuck on the drawing board. Half of humanity, however, already lives in cities which have evolved, organically and chaotically, for centuries. Here, the vital shift towards sustainability is less an issue of clean sheet planning, more a matter of real-world wrestling with manifest mess. And progress comes in (often modest) increments. So what would success look like, and where are the shining examples? Curitiba in Brazil is one, so often cited that you’d think it was Eldorado. Its streets aren’t actually paved with gold, but decades of visionary leadership has helped build the sense that they truly belong to their two million inhabitants. It started with one single pedestrian
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Portland’s mayor envisions a 20-minute city, with everything accessible inside that time
Above left to right: Masdar (Abu Dhabi): a work in progress; Curitiba (Brazil): busway to the future; Bogotá (Colombia): no car required
area in 1972 – a radical step for the age. Since then, it has progressively spawned a mass of people-friendly neighbourhood projects, linked up in a city-wide model of participatory planning. Also in Latin America, there’s the Colombian capital, Bogotá, where the now famous busway and bicycling network has been a driving force in transforming not just transport, but health and access to work and services too.
Slim City A city on the road to sustainability is one which is: • cutting carbon emissions • shifting to renewable energy • improving air and water quality • providing rapid, attractive public transport • growing more food locally • minimising materials consumption and waste • boosting green business • providing sufficient and efficient housing and decent, varied green space • protecting local species and wildlife habitat… And whose inhabitants enjoy: • decent local health and education services • the prospect of jobs in a viable, local economy • a real voice in the running of their communities and the wider city region.
Green Futures January 2009 33
Feature
UK’s top 20 sustainable cities Forum for the Future’s second annual Sustainable Cities Index tracks progress in Britain’s 20 largest cities. It ranks them in three areas – on environmental performance, quality of life, and ‘future-proofing’, covering issues from climate change and biodiversity to transport and recycling. Bristol has overtaken the 2007 leader, Brighton, to claim the top spot. Brighton still comes first for quality of life and future-proofing, but is dragged down by its comparatively poor performance on the environment indicators. That’s where Plymouth, in third place overall, really shines. Newcastle, rising up the table to fourth place, is the only northern city in the top five. To download a copy of the report, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
6 Edinburgh: Top marks for lowest unemployment
Sustainable Cities Index 2008 (2007 rankings in brackets)
The key indicators Environmental impact: air pollution by nitrogen oxides, river water quality, ecological footprint (resource use), household waste collected per head.
8 Leicester: ‘Visionary’ climate change strategy
=10 Nottingham: Tram-served city rates high on public transport
5 Cardiff: Highest environmental credentials of the three British capitals
Quality of life: Life expectancy from birth, resident satisfaction with green space, satisfaction with local bus services, unemployment, education (% of working age population with NVQ2 or equivalent). Future-proofing: Council’s commitment to preparing for climate change, number of local green businesses, percentage of land favouring biodiversity, level of household waste recycling and composting.
34 Green Futures January 2009
2 Brighton: ‘Best quality of life’ in the country
3 Plymouth: Smallest ‘ecological footprint’ per capita
1 Bristol: Best across the board: “...Big enough to be a city and small enough to bump into people you know”
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Photos: David Rose/Panos, Panoramic Images/Getty
Bristol (3) Brighton & Hove (1) Plymouth (4) Newcastle (8) Cardiff (6) Edinburgh (2) Sheffield (7) Leicester (14) London (10) Bradford (9) Nottingham (11) Sunderland (13) Leeds (5) Coventry (17) Manchester (12) Wolverhampton (16) Liverpool (20) Glasgow (15) Birmingham (19) Hull (18)
Scores high on ‘future-proofing’
Graphic: JacksonBone. Photos: Shutterstock, Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy, Graham Heywood/iStock, Samot/Shutterstock
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 =10 =10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
4 Newcastle upon Tyne:
Portland in Oregon would be on most ‘green city’ lists. It regularly tops the rankings of US cities produced by SustainLane, the ‘people-powered sustainability guide’. Localism, public transport and cycling are all big themes here too, in line with mayor Tom Potter’s vision of a ‘20-minute city’ with everything accessible inside that time. “Ever since the ‘70s, Portland has put sustainability at the heart of its development,” says SustainLane founder James Elsen. “That’s what has given it the jump on other US cities.” And it has also given Portland the cachet of being one of the most desirable places to live in all America. Western Europe has its own A-list of urban best practice. Take Sweden’s Växjö, a university city nestled amid its southern forests. Its claim to fame is biomass: wood waste heats the city to the extent that over 50% of all its energy needs are being met from renewable sources. That’s not a target; it’s a fact on the ground. Size matters, of course. Megacities face special challenges. Sustainable city exemplars tend to be more modest in size. Only Växjö, however, comes in under Aristotle’s ceiling for the well-governed polis – a maximum population of 100,000. Which, intriguingly, was the size envisaged for Dongtan… But what of Britain? While the idea of so-called ‘eco-town’ settlements flounders at the planning stage due to lack of support – not to mention credibility – its existing large cities scarcely register in terms of global green kudos. London alone emerges with some credit, and that principally for its efforts to stave off gridlock via congestion charging. In a bid to raise both their game and their profile, Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Cities Index [see box left] now ranks how the 20 largest cities are doing. Just published for the second year, the Index weighs the many different factors that cluster together within the ‘sustainability’ rubric. Bristol, Brighton and Plymouth come out at the top, while Glasgow, Birmingham and Hull bring up the rear. The Index won’t avoid controversy, not least for the way it highlights a striking north-south divide. But the point of it is not to praise or to chide, but to stimulate action – and help point out ways to make that action effective. Margaret Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association, says it has already started to drive real change, “by inspiring cities to adopt more ambitious sustainability strategies – and by providing a framework against which they can benchmark their efforts.” Helen Clarkson, head of the sustainable cities project at Forum, is a bit concerned about people looking too much to the Curitibas and the Portlands of this world.
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From top: Portland (Oregon): green spaces in a ‘20-minute city’; Växjö (Sweden): the city’s venerable older buildings are warmed by biomass [inset]
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We urgently need more shining examples in the UK
“We urgently need more shining examples in the UK,” she argues, “so we can inspire change much closer to home, and our cities can go on to create the new cutting edge themselves.” The more homegrown successes we have, she says, the better we can study and learn from “the inputs and processes that lead to those outcomes”. Leadership, she emphasises, is a crucial issue. Curitiba’s success owed much to the relentless passion of mayor Jaime Lerner. In their response to Forum’s Index researchers, Britain’s civic leaders were only too ready to acknowledge the power of inspirational personalities worldwide. Nelson Mandela’s name kept cropping up. “Leaders with passion and drive,” says Forum’s chief executive Peter Madden, “can create thriving cities which offer their people a high quality of life, respect their environment, and have the resilience to cope with the changes climate change will bring.” Ah yes, climate change. A key test of local leadership is active planning to cut carbon emissions. On this score, the top cities in the Index have no monopoly of virtue. London’s action plan aims to stabilise carbon dioxide output at 60% below its 1990 level by 2025. Bristol, Leeds and Manchester are aiming to “achieve low-carbon city status” by 2020. Manchester is setting the pace here, publishing key principles for action across all sectors. Clarkson thinks it’s helpful, too, to have a strong vision statement – and here Leicester is the leader. Its straightforward ‘One Leicester’ statement is refreshingly jargon-free. It scores highly for putting sustainability at its centre, for its commitment to inclusiveness, and for its explicit 25-year timeframe for meaningful change. Leicester prides itself on having been named Britain’s first Environment City back in 1990, by an alliance of environmental NGOs. It now shares the title with the somewhat surprising trio of Peterborough, Leeds and Middlesbrough. Peterborough, although too small to rate inclusion in the Forum’s Index, has announced its intention to make itself “the UK’s Environment Capital”. Its aspiration reflects an understanding of the value which green fame could bring, not least by attracting both money and future-proof green jobs to the region. Bristol is aiming to go one better: it is Britain’s lone entry (in a field of 35) for the EU’s European Green Capital. Just eight cities are now being shortlisted, and the top two will bear the title successively in 2010 and 2011. So Bristol may be top of the Forum’s Index, but won’t be resting on its laurels. It’s already the focus of a separate Forum initiative to bring together sustainability work throughout the city region. Sceptics may say they’ve heard all this before, and perhaps they have. Good people have been struggling to make sustainability more than a sideshow in local authorities since the days when Local Agenda 21 was a shiny new idea in the wake of the Rio Summit back in 1992. But in times of recession, when money counts more than ever, just think of the buying power that well networked green cities could exercise when it comes to procurement. Game-changing purchasing, for instance, of such things as solar roofs, low-carbon fleets, and green amenities at super-keen prices – the kind of thing councillors can point proudly at, come election time. Roger East is consulting editor of Green Futures.
Green Futures January 2009 35
Partner viewpoint
Forum update Innovation nation
When the bills bite Thrift’s big comeback is heating up the world of energy saving.
36 Green Futures January 2009
Throwing money out the window: thermal imaging and the credit crunch drive the message home
Global competition offers big bucks to climate innovators Forum for the Future is scouring the world for the most imaginative new business solutions that are responding to the urgent need to cut carbon emissions. The Forum has teamed up with the Financial Times and computer company HP to launch the Climate Change Challenge, a competition to connect innovators with entrepreneurs. The competition aims to give a shot in the arm to those brilliant ideas which have only just made it off the drawing board, by helping them reach the FT’s global business readership. An eminent panel of judges – including Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Virgin Group chairman Sir Richard Branson – will select a shortlist of five schemes. Then FT readers will use their business acumen to vote for the one that has the greatest potential to make a difference. Developing imaginative business solutions to global warming isn’t a pipe dream; there are already numerous examples of entrepreneurs finding climate-friendly ways of meeting the needs of the world’s poorest, as well as indulging more luxurious appetites. These include microfinance
Solar’s a safer bet, say insurers
there’s not much general awareness of the massive amount of energy invested in delivering clean water to our taps. Meanwhile, however, EST has some new strings to its bow for getting the message across. It is in consultation to gain access to the database of homes that have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), which every would-be seller must obtain for inclusion in the new Home Improvement Pack – and hopes soon to be to able contact anyone who’s bought a property with a poor energy efficiency rating. Winterbottom sees this as especially valuable because it will enable his advisors to suggest improvements, and signpost sources of finance, just when new owners are in the right frame of mind to make alterations. Simply by insulating the loft to a depth of 270mm, for instance, they can improve their property’s EPC rating at a stroke, and cut an average of £205 off annual heating bills. Also in the pipeline is the rollout of the Home Action Plan (HAP) scheme. Recently piloted with 40 households in the southeast,
this involves independent advisors carrying out energy audits, then making detailed recommendations for changes to both the home and its inhabitants’ lifestyle. EST estimates that implementing these will save households an average of £600 – and two tonnes of carbon – per year. While the upfront cost of £99 risks putting people off in tough economic times, Winterbottom believes the solution could lie in persuading local authorities, or even employers, to pay for a HAP on a householder’s behalf. As he says, new circumstances will require new thinking – but the revived interest in thrift is definitely an opportunity, a corner turned. “Now we can focus less on persuading people that the environment is important, and more on getting things done.” – Julian Rollins
The Energy Saving Trust is a Forum for the Future partner. www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/corporate
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Risky business Insurance sector holds key to green business
Photo: Paul Glendell, Tesla Motors
(EST) has long spread the good news of loft insulation and lowenergy light bulbs. But public interest in the message shot up last year when sharp hikes in energy bills hit home. By October, advice centre phones were buzzing with two, three times the volume of enquiries. “Somewhere along the way, some sort of consensus had come together about environment and economy,” says Fraser Winterbottom, the organisation’s director of delivery. The surge of interest coincides with a revamp both of the scope of EST’s advice, and how it’s delivered. A year on from the launch of environment secretary Hilary Benn’s plan for a nationwide ‘green homes service’, it has put a network of 21 advice centres in place to make that happen. The Trust has ventured beyond its comfort zone of energy efficiency advice into the wider world of sustainable living for the whole home. It has even taken its first steps on waste, in tandem with the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). “Between June and November we spoke to well over 10,000 people, in four regional pilot schemes, about waste reduction alongside energy and CO2 saving – proper, in-depth conversations,” says Winterbottom. Adding rubbish to the mix of topics covered in EST’s marketing material has generated more response to campaigns than the old energy-only approach, he says. But while people may have a sense of responsibility for their household contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, they hadn’t necessarily thought of the contents of their dustbins in that context. “Often people have been surprised to find out how much waste adds to their carbon footprint.” In fact, WRAP estimates that 20% of the UK’s emissions are associated with the distribution, production and storage of food – and a third of all the food we buy just gets binned. So, picking up on WRAP’s ‘Love food, hate waste’ campaign, EST advisors suggested ways in which planning meals, shopping thoughtfully and using up leftovers can reduce food waste – and save on both money and carbon. The next topic on EST’s expanding menu of advice is water. Winterbottom accepts that this may be more of a challenge. With only a minority on water meters, the power of the money-saving argument will be limited. It’s only in times of drought that we tend to think about using this precious resource carefully, and
Photo: Dr Arthur Tucker/Science Photo Library
T
he Energy Saving Trust
The insurance industry is both threatened by the potentially damaging consequences of climate change – and in a unique position to help mitigate it. It has $15 trillion of assets under its management, is at the forefront of risk analysis, and touches virtually every part of the economy. So any initiative that succeeds in persuading the sector to commit to take environment issues into account throughout its operations has the potential to bring about transformational change.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
That’s what the ClimateWise initiative set out to do a year ago. Membership has grown from 16 to 41 in that time, and it now works with companies representing 60% of the UK’s general insurance industry. Forum for the Future, as independent reviewer, has looked at how far the world-leading scheme has come in its first year and sets out where it needs to go next. The encouraging news is that individual companies are undertaking research, insuring new technologies and launching services that encourage both
When green entrepreneurs hit the road: the Tesla Roadstar
schemes allowing Bangladeshi villagers to buy rooftop solar panels, wind turbine developers here in the UK, and luxury low-carbon car manufacturers over in the States [above]. The winning combination in every case is creativity, green innovation and business verve – exactly the mix of characteristics the FT judges will be looking for. Apply by 30 January at: www.forumforthefuture.org/FT-climate-challenge
carbon reductions and climateresilience. For example, Lloyd’s of London, AIG, the Insurance Information Institute and Harvard Medical School have set up a forum to share information on catastrophe modelling to enable the industry to provide effective cover. Many companies offer cover for wind turbines and solar panels on homes or large-scale renewable energy projects. And leading insurers are developing tools to raise customer awareness of climate change. But this is only the start of the long journey. The sector must do a lot more to support the transition to the low-carbon economy in which it has strong vested interests. What are the next steps? Investments: The best companies are already taking into account the financial impacts of climate change in their holdings, but some are investing in clean technologies while not considering the risks of carbonintensive investments in the rest of their portfolios. Others simply refer to climate change as a ‘corporate responsibility’ issue rather than a critical driver of value.
Corporate liability: Carbonintensive companies and those that are poorly adapted to climate change could end up being liable for damages. So the availability and pricing of liability insurance can potentially send a powerful message to companies about their emerging responsibilities. Premiums: Insurers know that high levels of carbon emissions will create risk for the economy as a whole in the long term, but they haven’t yet come up with a way to build in higher premiums for carbon-intensive industries. Of course regulation must play a vital role in making these connections, and ClimateWise can help by being a powerful voice in public policy making. The majority of its members are already calling for policy to support stronger carbon reduction targets. But the insurance industry itself must be at the heart of this, says Alice Chapple, Forum’s director of sustainable financial markets, who wrote the report: “The sector can be a powerful force in driving companies throughout the economy to make more effective connections between climate change and their own operations.”
Green Futures January 2009 37
Forum for the Future’s Masters course, Leadership in Sustainable Development, is now in its 12th year. In the first of a new series, we track the careers of some Forum alumni.
James Wilsdon Class of: 1996-1997 Currently: Director of the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society
Decarbonate!
Why did you choose the MA? I campaigned on environment and development at university, though I actually studied Philosophy and Theology! Through that I heard about the creation of Forum for the Future – and the course itself.
Things my Masters taught me… It was a fantastic immersion in the sustainability debate, and I loved the placements: spending those short bursts of time in different organisations and sectors, asking the same questions about sustainability in very different surroundings. There’s nothing like it as a way of bringing you up to speed with how sectors are – or aren’t – evolving. We left with a sense that this was the coming wave, we were positioned at the crest of it, and now we were being sent out to ‘crash’ on other people’s shores. Career to date Researcher and then senior policy adviser at Forum for the Future, followed by six years as head of strategy at the thinktank, Demos. A lot of my work lay on the boundaries between sustainability, technology and science – and so I’ve ended up, a non-scientist, worming my way into the heart of the scientific establishment… So are you a leader for sustainable development? If you mean in the sense of selfidentified leaders of the agenda whose careers involve using the words ‘sustainable development’ day-in day-out… – no! A more realistic approach, perhaps, is to take the values, the vision, the ultimate destination of
Sparking innovation: West Midlands’ engineering expertise is heading offshore
38 Green Futures January 2009
sustainability, and play that through different institutions and sectors over a number of years. It’s a more diffuse process, but it has certainly worked for me.
Sasha Blackmore Class of: 2000-2001 Currently: Barrister, Landmark Chambers
Why did you choose the MA? I wanted to learn more about the theory and practice of sustainable development. Practitioners always need to push the boundaries in applying academic thinking, particularly in this discipline, which is a relatively new one. Things my Masters taught me… It was fascinating to see critical decisions made ‘on the inside’ at my placements, and to begin to understand the often conflicting factors that go into them. That gave me a valuable insight into the difficulties my clients face, particularly in the corporate sector.
West Midlands aims to be UK’s first low-carbon region Low-carbon goods and services will be worth more than £46 billion in the UK alone by 2015, according to the government. So it’s no wonder the West Midlands, home of some of the country’s leading engineering expertise, wants to be in on the act. Taking to heart Nicholas Stern’s message that economies need to diversify in order to survive, regional development agency Advantage West Midlands (AWM) has launched an ambitious plan to position the region as a low-carbon centre. Developed in partnership with Forum for the Future, the Low Carbon Economy Programme is the first such strategy for the UK. AWM aims to spend over £27.5 million to ‘decarbonise’ the region – and reap the rewards. Initiatives include:
Spending time at Belfast City Council has been useful in my work with the public sector, especially planning. Today, my work ranges from defending clients accused of breaching planning law, to advising individuals whose lives are blighted by noise or air quality. My placement helped me see that there is frequently a delicate balancing act involved in most planning decisions.
Homing in on Bristol
Career to date A year juggling work in the climate change team at law firm Baker & McKenzie and on international debt issues at the New Economics Foundation, followed by a stint at Harvard’s School of Government and a law conversion course back in the UK.
Susan Warren is head of sustainable cities at Forum for the Future
W
e didn’t set
So are you a leader for sustainable development? I’m acutely aware of how the legal system shapes the environment we live in and how important it is to apply sustainable thinking when law is put into practice in real-life situations. That’s why I helped develop the Landmark Chambers Centre for Environmental Law, which I hope will become a meeting point between lawyers and those who share common goals in the environmental community.
ourselves an easy task in 2007, when we announced that we’d support Bristol in becoming the ‘most sustainable city region in the UK’. Our objective is necessarily ambitious – because as urban populations grow, so do the sustainability challenges. We’ve picked five of these for our work in Bristol: local food, resource use and climate change, transport, sustainability literacy, and the built environment. Work on all themes has already started, and the built environment is proving an exciting early focus.
later once the energy-savings translate into financial savings. The system will effectively work as a revolving fund, with the repayments used to help other businesses in the region do the same.
• Helping industries secure low-carbon business opportunities: The agency wants to see more companies following in the footsteps of Rugby-based Converteam, which started off manufacturing products such as generators for offshore oil platforms, and is now the UK’s biggest exporter of technology to the wind industry. The company’s power conversion equipment is found in onshore and offshore turbines, both close to home in Liverpool Bay and as far afield as the Oresund Sound, which separates Denmark and Sweden. • Promoting energy efficiency: Many small businesses struggle to afford even modest sums for basic efficiency improvements. So AWM is working with the Carbon Trust to develop a regional reinvestment fund that allows SMEs to buy energy-efficient equipment. Under the scheme, businesses will be able to fund such purchases via an interest-free loan, repayable several years
www.greenfutures.org.uk
• Creating fertile conditions for growth: This initiative aims to develop sustainable transport networks and a low-carbon built environment. At its heart is a regional ‘sustainable development planning checklist’ for housing associations, private developers and local councils. In an effort to promote local sustainable energy, AWM has mapped the area’s potential for combined heat and power networks.
Photo: Shutterstock
Tomorrow’s leaders
• Upskilling the workforce and catalysing behaviour change: AWM is encouraging home business start-ups, along with the use of teleworking as an alternative to commuting to urban centres. It’s also promoting local car-sharing schemes.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Like many urban centres across the country, the Bristol city region is feeling the pressure of delivering new homes in line with national strategy – and grappling with how to put sustainability at the heart of planning, design and construction. But the cities of Bristol and Bath, famed for their Georgian architecture, must also concentrate on bringing their existing house stock up to scratch. It’s a task that needs attention now: twothirds of the homes we’ll be living in by 2050 have already been built. There are nearly 27 million houses in the UK. That means we need to be refurbishing over half a million of these a year to meet our national target of cutting domestic carbon emissions by 80%. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? ‘We have the technology.’ But, like The Six Million Dollar Man, can we ‘rebuild’ them? Well, we’re making a strong start here in Bristol, aiming to retrofit 1,000 privately owned homes by the end of next year. We plan to tackle the low-hanging fruit first, helping install draught proofing, loft and cavity wall insulation, and offering improvements in glazing and heating systems. Where appropriate, we’ll introduce solid wall insulation and microgen renewables, such as solar panels. A thousand homes might sound like a drop in the ocean, given the figures above. Our longer-term ambition is to scale up this
It won’t all be plain sailing, acknowledges AWM’s Tom Anderson. “In practice, sustainable business growth might increase carbon emissions in the area,” he says. “For example, we might see more companies taking up manufacturing of, say, turbines or biomass boilers.” To guard against things running out of control, the agency has introduced indicators to track progress in decoupling growth from emissions. One of the metrics that will define success is how many tonnes of carbon equivalent the region emits per £10,000 of value added to its economy. “This is an exciting first for the regions,” says Forum for the Future’s Gemma Adams. “The West Midlands redefined the means of production in the 1700s when it exported steam power to the world. Now 21st-century pioneers are finding new ways to create wealth that boosts the planet, rather than simply exploit it.”
scheme within the Bristol city region, and to take the learning and experience elsewhere in the UK. Through this pilot project we hope to really crack a few things that currently hamper a successful national refurb scheme. Firstly, the financing. While we need the public sector to kick-start the process with a significant injection of cash, it’s in privately owned homes that we need change the most, as these make up 81% of the existing housing stock. Secondly, we must get the marketing right. If we don’t successfully sell the idea to private homeowners, refurb will remain something that only eco-conscious individuals, councils and social landlords do. This is where Forum for the Future can really add value. We’re acting as a co-ordinating body that brings together experts in all these areas – finance, delivery and demand. This partnership model is key to the whole city project, in fact, as we work across the four local authorities that make up the city region and collaborate with the public, private, voluntary and community sectors. This is what should enable us to succeed where similar initiatives in Bristol have faltered in the past. And by doing so we can help to catalyse retrofit at a much faster rate, bringing quality of life to homeowners and CO2 reductions to help meet ever tougher government targets.
New partners
Since the last issue of Green Futures Atkins, Birmingham City Council, the BCME (Beverage Can Makers Europe), the Energy Saving Trust, the Highways Agency, the Marine Stewardship Council and TJX Europe have joined Forum for the Future as partners. www.forumforthefuture.org
> Green Futures January 2009 39
Comment
Forum for the Future works in partnership with around 120 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
ABN AMRO Lesley Holloway, 020 7678 8000
ConocoPhillips Inger Mette Staalesen, +47 52 02 1818
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 722 4314
Advantage West Midlands Simon Slater, 0121 380 3677
The Co-operative Group www.co-operative.coop
Kingfisher Christina Allen, 0207 644 1142
Skandia Jo Gilbey, 01703 334411
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695
Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633
Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101
Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766
Corus Stephen Blaylock, 01244 89 2713
Land Rover Jaguar Cars Julian Whithead, 01926 649646
Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614
Apetito Mark Lovett, 01225 753636
Crest Nicholson Paul Donnelly, 01932 264410
Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643
Arup John Turzynski, 020 7755 2580
Devon County Council Ian Hutchcroft, 01392 382245
London Borough of Croydon Kia Colbeck, 020 8726 6000
Asda Stores Julian Walker-Palin, www.asda-corporate.com
DTZ Peter Langley, 0203 214 7708
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) info@msc.org
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
Duchy Originals Susan Haddleton, 0208 831 6800
Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
Atkins Helene Vergereau, 0113 205 1242
Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111
Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054
Aviva Investors Tim Barker, 020 7809 6000
Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500
Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233
BAA Matthew Gorman, 020 7243 1264
EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978
Minoan Group www.minoangroup.com
Balfour Beatty Sally Brearly, 020 7216 6813
Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411
The National Trust Mike Collins, 01793 817708
BBC Yogesh Chauhan, yogesh.chauhan@bbc.co.uk
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128
The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00
BCME Bill Duncan, bill.duncan@advizors.eu
Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442
North West Regional Development Agency Mark Atherton, 01925 400283
Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 1111
Fife Council Neil Gateley, 08451 555555
OGC Buying Solutions Tristram Hardman, 01603 704522
BP Christine Dewey, 020 7496 4000
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
PepsiCo Steve John, 0118 903 2730
British Cement Association David Pocklington, 01276 608700
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435
Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481
BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403
FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888
Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568
Friends Provident Sandra Prida, 08452 683135
PRUPIM Siobhán Hewitt-Devine, 020 7548 6729
Cafédirect Zachary Dominitz, 020 7490 9631
Good Energy Penelope Chapple, 01249 766090
Pureprint Group Yvie Dear, 01825 768811
Calor Paul Blacklock, 01926 318 773
GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400
Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655
Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761
Guardian News and Media Jo Confino, jo.confino@guardian.co.uk
The Royal Academy of Engineering Ian Bowbrick, 020 7227 0504
Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916
Halcrow Group Andrew Kluth, 0207 6027282
Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798
Carillion Louise Rhydderch, 01902 316258
Highways Agency Lisa Scott, 020 7153 4749
Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681
CDC Group Innes Meek, 020 7484 7700
IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919
RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712
Cheltenham Borough Council Carol Rabbette, 01242 774928
Igloo Regeneration David Roberts, 07900 882990
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716
City of London Council Emma Bara, 020 7332 1431
InterfaceFLOR www.interfaceflor.com
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078
Climate Care Michael Buick, 01865 207000
John Laing plc David Micciche, 020 7901 3200
SC Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100
Commission for Rural Communities Paul Pennycook, 01242 534056 www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk
John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 0207 5924412
Scottish and Newcastle UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
Johnson Matthey Don Harrison, 020 7269 8400
Serco Group Simon Usher, 020 8843 2411
40 Green Futures January 2009
South East England Development Agency Simon Richardson, 01634 899900 South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234 Swindon City Council Lynne Forrester, 01793 463197 Tesco Ruth Girardet, 01992 644053 The Tetley Group Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590 Tetra Pak Richard Hands, 0870 442 6623 Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 Time Warner Katherine McQuaid, www.timewarner.com/corp TJX Europe www.tjx.com Transport for London Jeanette Baartman, 020 7126 3432 Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 Virgin Atlantic Airways Jill Brady, www.virgin-atlantic.com VisitBritain Jason Freezer, 0208 563 3180 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600 Welsh Assembly Government Georgina Haarhoff, 029 2082 1724 Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000 West Sussex County Council Karen Baker, 01243 756859 Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700 Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk Wrexham County Council Michael Cantwell, 01978 292255 WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 Yorkshire Forward Mike Smith, 0113 394 9741
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Soapbox “Only governments can save us from climate change. But they will only use their power to full effect if there’s a surge in demand to do so. Creating that demand is our central task.” Stephen Hale says it’s time for the third sector to stand up.
T
he debate over the science
of global warming is over. Yet even where there is relatively high awareness of what is at stake, as in the UK, progress in cutting carbon has been limited. We are sleepwalking into disaster. Only governments can save us from catastrophic climate change. Only they have the power to tax, regulate and incentivise businesses and individuals to act. But only a dramatic surge in the demand for political change will persuade them to use their power to full effect. Creating that demand is now the central task for anyone committed to success in this struggle. Politicians, businesses and public alike are locked into an approach that is not delivering – and blaming one another for their collective failure. Pressure groups blame politicians for not providing leadership; politicians excuse themselves by citing the lack of public support for policies to cut emissions; businesses quietly bemoan the inadequacy of both to justify their own timidity. Politicians have more power than they choose to acknowledge. But I know from my own time in government that there are deep structural reasons why governments do not deliver. The leadership we need from our politicians will not emerge spontaneously from within. Committed leadership from business could break the impasse. It would secure many of the policies needed to incentivise investments in low-carbon energy and transport solutions. Business pretty much universally accepts the science, and the need to act. All companies with longterm investment cycles have a strong interest in a successful transition to a low-carbon economy. There are countless examples of innovation and leadership in the area, as Forum for the Future’s work confirms. Yet, critically, most businesses continue to take a short-term, defensive approach to engagement with government. Consistent support for intervention is still too rare, and it is those who might lose out in the short term that remain the loudest voices in the political process. There are signs that this is changing, particularly in the investment and insurance industries. The Corporate Leaders Group in the UK is an influential advocate of progressive positions. At the most recent global climate change talks, a range of business coalitions supported specific government action. Green Alliance works with a number of such companies. But businesses respond
www.greenfutures.org.uk
above all to market signals – which means public attitudes are crucial. A step change in public concern could create a new wave of market opportunities for low-carbon leaders. The third sector holds the key to achieving this, and thus to success in the war against climate change. Individuals alone are neither willing nor able to take decisive action on an issue of this scale and complexity. But they will very often do so if they have opportunities to act in concert with others. Community groups, national membership organisations, trade unions, faith communities, social enterprises and co-operatives can provide the collective spaces for this. And there has been an explosion of action over the past two years among faith leaders, development groups, and grassroots initiatives such as Transition Towns. Their concern over climate change is well founded, given its dramatic potential impacts on international prosperity, security and social justice. Important new initiatives are under way to articulate these links, and bring them to public attention. We need to move on from a mode of primarily environmental advocacy to one of social mobilisation. The third sector can provide the surge of leadership we need to create a new politics of climate change, through action in four areas: • Leadership and commitment from groups concerned with issues from development and security to housing and health. • Community, local and regional leadership will enable people to come together to change their lifestyles and demand political action, through a dramatic rise in initiatives like Transition Towns and low-carbon villages. • A movement of people living low-carbon lifestyles, brought together by a voluntary personal carbon trading scheme, will set an example to others. • Mobilisation across borders will help persuade individual countries to act consistently and ambitiously, as cities combine to drive down the cost of deploying low-carbon technologies, and pressure groups make consistent and compelling demands for national action. Climate change is not a problem of science, technology, or economics. It is, above all, one of political imagination. Together, we can create the pressure needed to persuade governments to use their power to full effect.
“ ”
We need a new model for action – moving on from environmental advocacy to social mobilisation
Stephen Hale is the director of Green Alliance www.green-alliance.org.uk and author of its latest pamphlet, Climate change: why we are failing and how we will succeed. He was a special adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2002-06.
Green Futures January 2009 41
Partner viewpoint
Comment Photo: Shutterstock Wong Yu Liang
The Knowledge:
Alex Cole, Cadbury
“One of my team said ‘I just want to do my work – not all this green stuff as well’. I replied ‘You’re in the wrong place’.”
A bailout for the planet Governments have leapt to intervene in the economy – so isn’t it time they did the same for ecosystems, whose own recession will have a far greater impact, asks Dax Lovegrove.
W
e know all too well
that we’re entering an economic downturn. What’s less widely understood is that we’re also suffering from a serious ecological recession – whose consequences will dwarf any economic turmoil for decades to come. WWF’s most recent Living Planet Report highlights a loss of about one third of the world’s natural capital over the last 35 years. It warns that many countries have become ecological debtors, consuming far more of this capital than they can ever hope to replenish from their own resources. At the core of this toxic debt is climate change. Despite unprecedented levels of awareness, and increasingly harsh warnings from scientists, there is still stupefying inaction among high polluting countries and companies. A host of factors contribute to this: the blocking of climate change measures by the Bush administration, carbon-intensive oil production in Canada, the scramble for control of Arctic fossil fuel reserves and the reliance on oil revenues by much of the Middle East. Influential energy-intensive industries in Europe and elsewhere are kicking against stronger climate policies and tighter cap and trade schemes. They cite current financial pressures, the need to remain competitive and the danger of ‘carbon leakage’ (where polluting businesses move to regions with laxer controls) as reasons to block progressive moves to tackle climate change. It’s easy to be distracted by the economic downturn and so be lured into such ‘race to the bottom’ arguments. However, the credit crunch
42 Green Futures January 2009
could provide a real opportunity for governments to look at new rules for preventing future overstretching of both financial and natural capital. They could start by putting a real value on ecosystem services. A recent study led by Pavan Sukhdev at Deutsche Bank revealed that between £2 trillion and £5 trillion worth of irreplaceable natural capital is lost every year due to deforestation alone. Sukhdev is among those who point out that there’s not enough metal in the ground to manufacture laptops, televisions and vehicles to meet increasing demand from the emerging economies in the East – and that our climate couldn’t handle it if there were. We cannot go on draining the world’s natural capital in this way; we need to stop racking up this massive ecological debt. That means we need to completely rethink – and dematerialise – the way in which we provide light, heat, mobility and other services to consumers across the globe. And we need to face up to the fact that time is not on our side. But change may be in the air. This year provides us with an opportunity to set the environmental agenda for decades to come. In December, heads of government from across the world will gather in Copenhagen for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The importance of this conference cannot be overstated: its task is nothing less than to set the path for the successor to the Kyoto Protocol’s targets in 2012 – the new ‘global deal on climate change’. These negotiations will require real leadership, particularly from the UK and Europe, to break the deadlock of inaction. The Climate
Change Act, which provides for progress towards an 80% carbon reduction by 2050, gives Britain the chance to show world leadership – especially if it emphasises domestic action as the key means of reaching the target, rather than relying on accessing carbon credits overseas. While mining and manufacturing lobbyists are solely intent on protecting their industries, leading companies in other sectors are gearing up to dematerialise the goods and services they offer and embrace low-carbon business strategies. They include key players in information and communication technology, in ESCOs (energy services companies), in cleantech enterprises and all kinds of other service industries that are well placed to win in a low-carbon future. They can only benefit from the backing of sound post-Kyoto policies. Our future lies in what’s decided in the ‘global deal’ and in the extent of other interventions to protect vital ecosystem services. Allowing energy-intensive industry interests to drag down negotiations would threaten both our climate and our future prosperity and security. So we must all hope that the Copenhagen talks are based on the science, rather than such unenlightened, short-term agendas.
t has to make business sense…
I
Even in a values-driven company, whose founders were campaigning on pollution and slavery back in the 19th century, the shareholder is key. I started off in the CSR team, but even then I knew if I wanted to embed environmental ideas fully, I had to learn to negotiate in business terms. So that’s how we presented ‘Purple Goes Green’ [which holds Cadbury to stretch targets on water, packaging and energy, and to a commitment to ‘campaign for change’]. We shamelessly copied Al Gore and said, “Right, the ‘inconvenient truth’ for Cadbury is that cocoa can only be grown in a certain temperature range and requires humid conditions – which climate change is likely to impact – and that our factories have been flooded for the first time in their history...” Thanks to Purple Goes Green, we’ve identified amazing cost-savings in energy and water – and, as a businessperson, you have to wonder, ‘Why did we need the environmental agenda to see this?’
For some it’s the heart, for others the mind. For some, executive authority, for others the culture around them. But, for everyone, it has to be made real and tangible. We got our top 100 to do their personal carbon footprint, and the entire company to watch An Inconvenient Truth. Pretty much everyone had an opinion, though one woman in my team did say “I’m sorry, I just want to do my work – not all this green stuff as well.” I had to answer “You’re in the wrong place.” Attitudes are shaped by the cultural differences across our 60-country operation too. In India the agenda is very natural to them, because they’re less inclined to waste stuff – and are already feeling the effects of climate change. In Australia, water shortages have driven up the price of milk, and so they’re very in touch with this, too.
Thank you, Wal-Mart The fact that Lee Scott was already talking about these issues to consumers helped me sell the ideas internally. It’s funny that he and Al Gore, such contrasting figures, have been two of the biggest influences on my work – I wouldn’t have imagined that five years ago!
Don’t wait for the consumer We’re kidding ourselves if we think customers are going to drive change, or that they’re going to use carbon labels to compare products. Some clearly do recognise transport as a big part of their own carbon footprint, but they’re not going to consider confectionery in the same way. On packaging, too, we’re still figuring out how to engage them. There are groups of people at Cadbury now whose entire job is to reduce waste to landfill, but our Easter ‘eco-egg’ range, sold without a box, wasn’t an immediate success. It’s not easy, because you’re managing what the consumer wants – in this case, something big with a wow factor – versus what you want to give them.
What the cows taught me Thanks to our carbon footprinting exercise, we were surprised to learn that around 60% of our products’ emissions come from cows. So we went to visit a group of our dairy farmers in Wiltshire. It was a funny scene, with us coming up from London with our slightly strange ideas about cow ruminations and carbon footprints... but the farmers were very ready to engage, and together we’ve produced a guide to lowcarbon dairy farming. It just shows how complex sustainability can be – touching on everything from animal welfare to the rights of our suppliers.
I’m still a campaigner
Dax Lovegrove is head of business and industry relations at WWF-UK.
I never thought I’d be working for a multinational corporate. My background is in politics – campaigning is what drives me. But I’ve realised that every company is its own mini society, with mini activists and people who make things happen.
WWF-UK
Cole beneath the cocoa
is a Forum for the Future partner. www.wwf.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
People have different ‘triggers’
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Alex Cole, global corporate affairs director at Cadbury, was in conversation with Hannah Bullock.
Green Futures January 2009 43
Feature
Adesire named Streetcar Y
ou probably picture
a ‘sustainable entrepreneur’ as an idealist with bagfuls of ideas on how to save the world – who just needs the funding to do it. Not so Andrew Valentine, who set up Streetcar with Brett Akker simply because no one else had cashed in on the concept. “Brett and I decided at university that we’d start a business of some sort together,” says Valentine. They researched everything from organic food to alcoholic drinks, going through quite a “structured process”, but found nothing which fired their entrepreneurial zeal. “Then we read an article about a car share company abroad and thought, ‘Wow, this is the one!’.”
44 Green Futures January 2009
Streetcar’s USP is its relative cheapness and ease of use – at least compared to a conventional car hire firm. Its vehicles are scattered at thousands of locations across London, simply parked on the street or in car parks. Members can book online or by text, just minutes before they need the car, anytime day or night. It’s all automated, with access by swipecard and pincode [see right]. This helps keep costs down to less than £4 an hour for the smallest models, and, unlike normal rentals, the car can be hired for as little as 30 minutes at a time, so assuming one’s available (there’s roughly one car for every 40 members), it can make sense to use one simply for an impulsive dash to the supermarket or an emergency school run.
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Photo: Streetcar
Hannah Bullock talks to Andrew Valentine, the man who aims to “take the hassle out of driving” – while taking our cars off the roads.
Valentine’s adamant that it’s these aspects, rather than any green credentials, which have triggered the rapid rise in membership. Streetcar’s sold as a “money saving scheme”, he says, claiming that users who give up their car save up to £2,000 a year, once depreciation, MOT, insurance and parking permits are taken into account. Equally appealing, he believes, is the fact that they’re also getting rid of the “hassle factor” involved in sorting all that out. Sounds like a no-brainer – but that wasn’t the reaction of the 70 banks and specialist motor funders who turned them down flat. “They all said the same thing,” laughs Valentine. “‘Great idea guys – come back and let us know when it’s operating profitably and we’ll be delighted to support you.’ With hindsight it’s very amusing, but we didn’t find it funny at the time.” The breakthrough finally came when a broker in Aberdeen offered them the first eight cars, which helped persuade an investor down in Sussex to stump up the initial £100,000 needed. This step-by-step funding model has helped them grow by degrees, explains Valentine. “We were able to show that a certain number of cars will generate x amount of revenue within a certain period, and another chunk of cars will do the same... so slowly we got more and more banks to buy into us.” For a while it was a strictly two-man job: just Valentine and Akker, “cleaning cars, handing out flyers – the works”. But gradually the funding grew to scale. Last summer they secured £6.4 million from private equity firm Smedvig Capital, and have landed a £10 million funding line from Barclays – no mean feat in this climate. The company’s yet to show a profit, but is expected to come close to breaking even in 2008 – and there are now plans to take it public. Streetcar aren’t sole players in the car club game, but they’ve stolen a march over rivals Zipcar and City Car to take 75% of the market. Valentine identifies two factors behind its success: service levels and the proximity of locations – in other words, the fact that, thanks to the strategic scattering of Streetcars, there’s a good chance you’ll find one within reasonable walking distance – at least in inner London. With his silky-smooth accent and pink shirt, it’s easy to imagine Valentine would be just as happy selling loft conversions in Islington as running a green enterprise from a Wimbledon industrial estate. But he’s not oblivious to the environmental benefits. According to Transport for London, each of their 1,000 pay-as-you-go cars means 20 fewer privately owned ones on the streets (the company’s figures come out at 27). And Valentine says he’s delighted at surveys which suggest Streetcar members drive 65% fewer miles, on average, then they did before joining. Instead they walk, cycle or use public transport more. “If you have a car sitting outside, the marginal cost of using it is zero, because you’ve paid for everything already,” he explains. “Whereas, if you’re using Streetcar you’re paying only when you consume it.” He hopes to hardwire that type of thinking into young drivers across the country as the business expands into more university towns. Catch ’em young, and in several decades we might “start to see some pretty dramatic changes”. And of course, carless, cash-strapped students represent a perfect business opportunity... With the service so well suited to short hops across town, are we going to see an electric Streetcar, then? Not yet, says Valentine; there just aren’t enough charging points around. It’s a caution which extends to other types
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of alternative technology. Right at the start, he and Akker decided against the Toyota Prius because of its high cost and rapid depreciation rate, and went instead for the Volkswagen Golf and Polo. They’re gradually adding VW BlueMotions to the fleet, whose Polo version is one of the only three non-electric cars on sale in the UK that emit less than 100g/km of carbon dioxide. It even outdoes the Prius on that front, too (99g/km versus 104g/km). Sticking to petrol cars makes for easier expansion, says Valentine, particularly among business and the public sector – currently their fastest growing client base. Overall, the company’s set a target of 250,000 members across London by 2012. A new code for the highway?
“
The banks all said the same to start with: ‘Great idea guys – let us know when it makes a profit and then we’ll support you’
”
But isn’t it beyond the capital that we need car share schemes the most? That’s the argument of national car share charity Carplus: “The real test now is to make the benefits of car clubs accessible to all drivers in the country,” says director Antonia Roberts. “Significant effort needs to go into creating a national network of pay-asyou-go vehicles.” Valentine’s response shows his true entrepreneurial colours; Streetcar isn’t a public transport service, he says. “The countryside doesn’t tend to offer the density of population that would sustain it.” But new partnerships may change that. “If a rural development agency, for example, wanted people to give up cars in a village, that might support a couple of vehicles. It would need a combination of public and private money to make it work.” So is there one thing Valentine would have done differently if he could? The mask of confidence slips, but just for a second: “I wish I had known how successful it was going to be; it would have prevented a huge amount of worrying!”
Vital statistics Founded: 2004 Turnover: £12 million Employees: 150 Cities: London, Brighton, Southampton, Cambridge, Oxford, Maidstone, Guildford Cars: 1,000 Members: 43,000 Cost: £49.50 membership + from £3.95 per hour Competitors: City Car Club (350 cars); Zipcar (200 cars); Whizzgo (200 cars) USP: “The flexibility of car ownership without any of the costs or hassle”
Green Futures January 2009 45
Partner viewpoint
Comment
And another thing…
Warmer homes, cooler climate
“The government is in target heaven. Cynics might say this is the one area of climate action where the UK has an unrivalled lead. But I remain optimistic.”
As the government struggles to meet its target on fuel poverty, reports Juliet Heller, two pioneering councils show just what can be achieved. in Britain are officially classed as ‘fuel poor’ – meaning they have to spend over 10% of their annual income in order to heat their home. That is a much higher proportion than in many other countries – including ones with much harsher winters, such as Finland and Sweden. In a relatively prosperous nation like the UK, that’s a statistic which is crying out for action. The government’s committed itself to eradicating fuel poverty by 2010 – but despite the prospect of reductions in energy prices, there’s little sign they will achieve that.
A number of government-backed schemes, notably Warm Front, have been set up to do just that, principally through a system of grants targeted at poorer households. But these don’t always reach the most vulnerable, many of whom are elderly, and who struggle to make sense of the grants programme. So leading local authorities are taking the initiative. In Leeds, where one-in-four households are fuel poor, the city council’s Fuelsavers team uses a straightforward method of friendly door-to-door visits and phone calls to identify households at greatest risk, and then take remedial action. In the last
Sitting pretty: Mr Aitkin’s home is one of 20,000 that received a super-efficient boiler courtesy of Leeds City Council
The UK’s high level of fuel poverty is due largely to its ageing housing stock: many people live in homes that are draughty and poorly insulated, with old, inefficient heating systems. According to National Energy Action, around 75% of fuel-poor households occupy properties which are below minimum standards of energy efficiency. This not only means they have to consume excessive amounts of energy to keep warm – it also undermines efforts to reduce national carbon emissions, over a quarter of which are produced by housing. The good news is that it’s possible to tackle both problems simultaneously, by a committed drive to improve the energy efficiency of vulnerable homes – in particular, by installing decent insulation.
46 Green Futures January 2009
four years, it’s insulated over 37,000 homes and installed 20,000 super-efficient new boilers. These measures alone are saving over 88,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. The council aims to make improvements right across the housing stock – both social and private. “We can’t just rely on the government to deal with this,” says Fuelsavers’ head Alan Jones. Down in West Sussex, the much smaller Arun District Council has managed to insulate and double-glaze a remarkable 99% of its council housing stock, simply by putting energy efficiency at the heart of its 15-year rolling maintenance plan. Despite its relatively small budget, Arun keeps a close eye on fuel poverty, updating its strategy each year to meet changing circumstances, and fine-tuning
In the first of his regular columns for Green Futures, Jonathon Porritt sniffs change in the air.
schemes which provide insulation and heating system upgrades either free of charge or at discounted rates to vulnerable households. This ensures that, unlike some initiatives on this issue, they don’t get swamped by demand and end up unable to deliver. Its accumulated expertise has led it to taking on the role of ‘fuel poverty co-ordinator’ for the whole of West Sussex. But it’s not all plain sailing. The meteoric increase in fuel prices may have stalled, but there is little sign of really sweeping reductions on the horizon. Then there’s the state of the economy more generally. As Roger Wood, deputy head of environmental health at Arun District Council explains: “We’re concerned that in a worsening economic climate, sustainable energy will be sidelined and councils will fail to meet their CO2 reduction targets.” Others, like Kate Smith, a senior project officer at the Local Government Association, believe it could present an opportunity – since making homes energy-efficient can be a highly cost-effective way of simultaneously reducing poverty and carbon. As such, it should hold a strong appeal for a government committed to using public spending to defuse the recession. Arun and Leeds are two local authorities with the expertise and management capacity to drive this work, but many others are still at the starting line. Strong leadership on the issue, and government support to replicate these kinds of initiatives, would go a long way to encouraging others. After all, in the long run it is sure to pay off, economically, socially – and environmentally. Leeds City Council and Arun District Council were Local Authority Winners of the 2008 Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. They are also among over 300 councils which have signed the Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/nottingham, which aims to galvanise local authorities to adopt action plans on the issue.
The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is a Forum for the Future Partner www.ashdenawards.org
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T
Photo: Andy Aitchison/Ashden Awards
O
ver four million people
his government does
love its targets! Despite ritual protestations that it is now going easy on setting any new ones, most policy areas are still awash with them. To be fair, they are moving in the right direction. Targets for local government, for instance, have been reduced from more than 1,000 to fewer than 300! Policy making on climate change has always suffered from a particularly persistent version of ‘targetitis’ – to the extent that some cynics believe that target setting is the one area of climate action where the UK government now has an unrivalled international lead. In that regard, it’s crowning glory is of course the new Climate Change Act, which has targets built into it by the basinful – statutory targets, what’s more. Nobody is quite sure what it means for government ministers to be bound by statutory targets – rather than ones in a manifesto or a formal strategy. Say they fail to meet the targets for the first five-year budget period (20080-2012): everyone will get very cross, and Greenpeace (being the crossest of all) will feel obliged to haul them into the courts. The judge will then listen to their excuses, confirm their heinous failings, probably get a bit cross too, and then… well, nobody quite knows what happens next. But this is a bit churlish. The truth of it is that the UK government is the first to introduce such an Act, and the first to have agreed to a target of reducing greenhouse gases by at least 80% by 2050. What’s more, this whole approach has been endorsed by the main opposition parties, to a certain extent ‘proofing’ it against party political shenanigans in the future. And we are already seeing the fruits of that. One thing the Act does is to set up the Committee on Climate Change, which delivered its first official Report on 1 December. This is a Committee with serious clout (though that will inevitably be diminished now that its first Chair, the redoubtable Adair Turner, has moved onto that bed-of-nails from hell, the Financial Standards Authority). And it’s a Committee that does targets like no other committee has done before.
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It does targets for CO2 and non-CO2 gases. It does interim targets and final targets, short-term targets and long-term targets. It does emissions targets and offset targets. It does sectoral targets and technology targets. It does EU-wide and UK-specific targets. Its report is, in short, target heaven. The target-setting policy community will be bathed in the sheer glory of it all, and our clear lead in this territory will remain unrivalled for years to come. What happens next is interesting. Ed Miliband (who has made an extremely impressive start as secretary of state in the new Department of Energy and Climate Change), will deliberate on the Committee’s recommendations, will determine what the statutory targets should be for the first three fiveyear budget periods (2008-2012, 2013-2017, 20182022), and will then seek parliament’s approval. And that’s when the real work starts. It all comes down to the usual combination of money and political will. On money, there doesn’t seem to be much room for manoeuvre, now that the government has squandered more than £9 billion on a VAT giveaway in the forlorn hope of getting people out there shopping again. Anything less than £1 billion of absolutely new money will be seen as tokenism. Which brings us on to political will. With Mandelson now a born-again enthusiast for manufacturing and some kind of “green industrial revolution” (as well as the Post Office!), with the brothers Miliband on a low-carbon crusade all over the world, with Balls and Johnson dead set on decarbonising education and health, respectively, and Blears and Beckett sort of up-for-it in the muddled world of Communities and Local Government, exactly who in the Cabinet is not onboard? Not the chancellor, surely? Not the prime minister, even more surely? Which is why I remain quite optimistic – despite, not because of, all those wretched targets. www.jonathonporritt.com
Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. His book ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’ (Earthscan, 2007) is available from www.forumforthefuture.org
Green Futures January 2009 47
Partner viewpoint
Credit where it’s due Jonathon Porritt, eloquent as ever [‘Zero Hour’, GF70 p28], is on the right track linking the financial and ecological crunches. He, or someone else, could take just one more step and say out loud that the finance industry now richly deserves to be relieved of its selfappointed right to create credit. In future, credit should be created by a publicly controlled body, and by local economies seeking to run their own complementary currencies. Local and national money could then be spent into circulation, doing what needs doing to take care of people and planet. This would give money a genuine foundation of social purpose, and avoid further collapses of confidence and trust in the whole game. The finance industry would continue by borrowing and passing on this money rather than fabricating its own. I’m not convinced by the dusty old excuse of ‘failed political will’ for decades of persistent unsustainability. This responsibility must be shared by an environmental movement shy of intellectual heavy-lifting and fond of bludgeoning the faulty growth model without offering a growth-friendly alternative. Politicians don’t act, because environmentalists present patchy half-worked solutions that preach systemic thinking without practising it. James Greyson
Zero hour for a new capitalism
“ ”
There’s nothing too complicated about this. It can be done. It has to be done. All it lacks is political will
28 Green Futures October 2008
ack Welch, formerly of GE,
both products of the same kind of limits-defying, costexternalising, profit-maximising capitalism that has dominated people’s lives for the last three decades. A global economy built on debt-driven consumption and the liquidation of the natural capital assets on which all our lives still depend, was guaranteed to self-destruct. It was only a question of when. Now we know. So let’s stop skimming over the surface and look instead at fundamental causation. When federal reserve chairman and treasury secretary Paulson and Bernanke presented their ‘rescue package’ to Congress back in September, the problem was characterised purely in terms of the hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage loans to sub-prime borrowers in the US housing market, then bundled up into collateralised debt obligations and traded between banks in a web of increasingly opaque transactions. When the US housing bubble burst, these ‘toxic derivatives’ spread their poison throughout the entire system. But the whole credit crunch is just a symptom of a much more pernicious problem: the wholesale deregulation of financial capital markets back in the 1980s, and the lifting of controls over the amount of credit that banks can create. It amazes me how few people understand the massive con-trick that still lies at the heart of today’s financial system: the right granted to banks to conjure up credit more or less out of thin air – and then charge people interest on it. Emergency rescue packages, such as the controversial Paulson and Bernanke plan, are a painful but necessary starting point. But no solutions package is likely to have any lasting impact unless it includes an end to the structural inequities of credit creation. One person’s credit is another’s unmanageable debt. Indeed, indebtedness – in the shape of personal debt, corporate debt, farm debt, national debt and so on – is the single most important feature of today’s model of economic growth. To keep alive the illusion of prosperity, politicians of every persuasion have not just condoned the taking on of debt as sound economic practice, but have actively promoted it. And their electorates have dutifully gone out there and consumed on the back of those debts as if there would be no tomorrow and no final reckoning.
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Capital shift: from toxic trading…
Photos: Getty/Hiroya Minakuchi; REUTERS/Caetano Barreira
J
is the most celebrated chief executive of the last 30 years. It’s his variety of capitalism that is now dying in front of our eyes. Aggressive and ruthless, he was known to friend and foe alike as ‘Neutron Jack’ for his ability to hollow out companies by sacking a quota of employees every year (‘pour encourager les autres’) whilst keeping the business itself intact. He was also an environmental despoiler on a heroic scale. It’s not the legacy he himself lays claim to in his self-aggrandising autobiography, but he will be known for decades to come for his part in laying waste to the Hudson River near New York – through the calculated, persistent release of PCBs (one of those pollutants that accumulate in our bodies) – to help reduce costs and maximise profits. After years of delaying tactics, a clean up of sorts is now under way – and GE’s current shareholders will see billions of dollars from their should-be dividends deployed to pay for it. Neutron Jack was decommissioned in 2001, but if you fast-forward seven years you’ll see his like in the erstwhile ‘masters of the universe’ who caused the latest sudden and disastrous implosion of the financial system. Their legacy is, of course, a very different one: packages of toxic debt released with criminal irresponsibility into the US sub-prime market, just as Jack Welch released his barrels of PCBs into the Hudson River. A clean up, of sorts, will soon be under way. Just in case your fears about looming recession have temporarily blinded you to other concerns, it may be timely to point out that the accelerating build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, let alone the unceasing war we wage on the natural world, will be only marginally slowed by any downturn in the global economy. Given half a chance, a new cohort of equally macho chief executives will no doubt see it as their historic duty to undo the damage done, by setting out to do more damage of exactly the same kind. In all the coverage of the market meltdown, I have seen few, if any, connections made between these toxic time bombs – financial and ecological. You might think they were totally separate phenomena. In fact, they are
As our debts to the banks and others have built up, so have our debts to nature – in terms of the totally unsustainable depletion of natural resources, measured by the loss of topsoil, forests, fresh water and biodiversity. Everybody knows that liquidating capital assets to fuel current consumption is crazy, but nobody seems to know how to stop it. In the interests of economic growth, cost externalisation (as with Jack Welch’s wilful destruction of the Hudson River) is either officially licensed or very inadequately regulated. Politicians may laud the work of economists like Nick Stern, who famously characterised climate change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”. But when it comes to eliminating that market failure – internalising costs by putting a proper price on CO2 and other greenhouse gases – their pro-market zeal deserts them in round after round of mutual blame-laying. Our account with nature is now so overdrawn on so many fronts that many people believe it cannot be repaid. I still think that is a counsel of despair. Just as the world’s banks are now rushing to detoxify their portfolios and to rebuild their balance sheets (in part – and with no apparent sense of irony – through massive infusions of petrodollars earned from cooking the planet via the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the Middle East!), so the world’s governments must now hasten to rebuild the balance sheet of nature. There’s nothing too complicated about this. We know how to protect stocks of disappearing natural capital: look at the success of ‘no-fish zones’ as a way of restoring depleted fisheries. We’re getting more creative about incentivising ‘asset protection schemes’, such as those aimed at rewarding countries for keeping their forests intact. We know how to drive out waste and promote massive improvements in resource efficiency. We know it’s possible to replace climate-threatening fossil fuels with benign, increasingly effective sources of renewable energy – and to make money out of it, too: global investments in cleantech in 2007 soared to more than $140 billion. As a telling sign of the times, when Jeff Immelt took over at GE, one of his first acts was to set up a new business called Ecomagination to funnel huge new investments into renewable energy, desalination, waste and water management technologies and so on. He’ll still
…to asset protection
“
The collapse of the world’s banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena
”
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Where’s the hypocrisy? I couldn’t agree more with Martin Wright [‘And another thing’, GF70 p48]. We all complain that big companies don’t do enough to minimise the harm they do – but attacking them every time they try is unlikely to make things any better. As Abraham Lincoln said: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” Gemma Thompson A great article. As a businessman and business consultant, I agree entirely that corporations will respond best to sustainability if they have ‘a level playing field’. My experience is that businesses don’t usually demand or expect special status, but do become disheartened, frustrated and inactive when they are competing on an uneven playing field. The pig farming industry is one example. The UK government implemented a ban on keeping sows in stalls tied by the neck. The rest of the EU did not implement this ban. The result was that UK pig farmers had higher costs, and slowly but surely went out of business. Dr Des Rice
Plane insensible I was astonished by the Partner viewpoint articles on aviation by Entec [GF70 p30] and TUI [GF70 p40]. Neither of them mentioned that the real problem is the rapid increase in flights, which outstrips efficiency gains from new technology. We need to reduce the number of flights. I would expect responsible firms to be promoting holiday packages of at least two weeks – to reduce the frequent flyers’ habit of weekend breaks – and promoting rail trips for journeys under 500km. In this way existing airports could easily cope, and emissions would be reduced. Chris Lowe
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Feature
Jonathon Porritt looks behind the smoke of destruction for a more sustainable model, rising from the toxic ashes of bad debts and ravaged environments.
School kids in Uganda cluster round a new efficient cook stove
have to deal with the death of the Hudson River, but GE’s new balance sheet looks a lot smarter than Jack Welch’s. All this can be done. And has to be done. The missing ingredient is political will. Prevailing mindsets are still warped by the belief that such a strategy will be too costly, and that electorates won’t buy it. I wonder. If vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money can be conjured up to rectify the greed-errors of yesterday’s self-styled financial Titans, would it be so difficult to find a fraction of that to pump-prime the ‘green industrial revolution’ that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been banging on about for so long? The collapse of the world’s banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring human civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today. Jonathon Porritt is a programme director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. His book, ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’, is available from www.earthscan.co.uk, 020 7841 1930.
A Green New Deal Even if mainstream politicians can’t get their heads around dealing simultaneously with the credit crunch and the climate crunch, new ideas are pouring out from the NGOs. The most ambitious of these is A Green New Deal, put together by the New Economics Foundation and other groups to demonstrate how a 21st-century equivalent of President Roosevelt’s New Deal could mobilise a ‘Carbon Army’ to sort out energy efficiency in our homes and massively accelerate investment in lowcarbon technologies. www.neweconomics.org
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48 Green Futures January 2009
Tomorrow’s solution – today By featuring concentrating solar power (CSP) in the Sahara in an article focusing on what the world may be like in 2030 [‘New Year’s Day 2030’, GF70 p32], you risk giving the impression that we would need to wait that long to see its benefits. In fact, CSP is already feeding electricity into the European transmission grid from the new PS10 plant in Spain. CSP plants can be built quite quickly and capacity may be ramped up fast. And it is not necessary to wait for a new transmission grid to be built: countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa may start to benefit quite soon from CSP via the existing network. In many ways, a transmission grid is like a lake or pond. A litre of water may be added at one side of a lake, and another litre taken out at the other side, so that, in effect, the water has been transmitted from one side to the other – although the water that is taken out is not the same water that was put in. In a similar way, CSP electricity fed into one part of the transmission network is, in effect, available everywhere. Gerry Wolff
Give offsets some credit As companies seek to cut costs, why offset in a credit crunch? David Wellington makes the business case.
Home sweet home? I visited the Victorian Home of the Future [GF70 p6] on Open House Day. As much as I approve of the theory, I really hated the results. The whole place felt stuffy, the Victorian features inside had gone, and it had that nasty new anodyne smell. I felt like the place had been neutered. I left feeling that I’d rather put on a jumper and live in a less well insulated space. But I realise this is not a solution for millions of Victorian houses. Kate
A
Compost of the hearts and minds I disagree that ‘emotional composting’ is stretching the transition brief [‘The Futureproofers’, GF70 p26]. I would say it is fundamental. Self study, personal development, raising consciousness, all these cannot be separated from behaviour change. The transition brief is about reconnecting with what matters and with the impacts of our actions. Given that human behaviour got us in to this mess, it will be a change in human behaviour that gets us out – and that starts at home. Pedro
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Photo: Sue O’Connor
Letters
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Comment
s the dark shadow of the
credit crunch spreads across the world’s economies, it’s tempting to lay aside corporate commitments to tackle climate change. How can companies facing economic meltdown even justify maintaining their existing plans to reduce emissions, let alone offset them? It’s flawed logic, of course. Nicholas Stern recently restated his report’s clear warning that failure to act now would cost far more in the longer term. But because offsets are ultimately an external expense with no direct returns, bean counters may well see them as a noncore spend, along with expensive technological reductions and renewable energy. If so, energy efficiency may be the only carbon reduction option to survive the chop in 2009’s company budget planning process. That doesn’t bode well for a credible corporate commitment to tackle climate change. So is it inevitable? Far from it. Instead, there’s every reason in the current economic climate to start questioning the traditional ‘carbon hierarchy’ of measure – reduce – renew – offset. The common belief is that companies should make internal emissions reductions at any cost before they start offsetting. But there’s an argument to say that, in tough times, offsetting should take
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precedence – even if only for the short term. The climate needs us to reduce as many emissions as possible for every pound we have to spend – and offsetting is one of the best ways of achieving this. The credit crunch aside, it makes both economic and ethical sense for offsets to play a part in the climate change policy mix. Research suggests that 65% of the most costeffective opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions are in the developing world. That’s where we also have a moral responsibility to support both mitigation and adaptation – and well-designed carbon offsets do both of these. Apart from the environmental and moral imperatives, there are other business benefits to be had. Firstly, there’s the very practical point that offsets can kill two birds with one stone – fulfilling a company’s CSR and climate change aims with one expenditure line. Secondly, the market value of many companies still depends more on intangibles than assets – with brand reputation at the heart of this. Offsets offer a cost-effective and easily communicable means of positioning a company as green. The real-life experiences behind these carbon reduction schemes are an ideal way to engage stakeholders in a business’s efforts to tackle climate change. Examples range from smokeless stoves that
are cutting emissions and improving health in Uganda [above] to green electricity generated from sugar cane waste in Kenya. As well as providing content for marketing and PR campaigns, these stories can motivate employees to change their own behaviour, which is often one of the hardest areas to reach. For example, businesses might choose to use project visits as a prize for the best performing teams. Just keeping them up to date on how the projects are progressing provides positive reinforcement of the overall carbon strategy, and research shows that working for an organisation with sound environmental and social values improves retention. So while we all come to terms with the aftermath of the credit crunch, let’s not forget that the climate crunch hasn’t gone away. Now is not the time to stop doing all that is costeffective to tackle it. David Wellington is vice president of Climate Care.
Climate Care is a Forum for the Future partner. www.climatecare.org
Green Futures January 2009 49
Take pride in your tap water - it’s the clear choice
Thames Water and the Mayor of London are proud to announce the winning design in the London on Tap Design Competition The competition, launched in 2008, attracted 115 entries from London-based designers and craftspeople, all working to develop an iconic and sustainable carafe from which the capital’s tap water could be proudly served. Now, a panel including key figures from the worlds of design, hospitality, the water industry and the environment have selected ‘Tap Top’ by Neil Barron as the winning design. Neil’s award-winning design will go into production in early 2009 and will be available for London’s cafes, bars, restaurants and hotels to purchase from Spring 2009. Profits made from the sale of the carafe will go to leading charity WaterAid who provide vital water resources to some of the world’s poorest people. The message is simple: In the UK, tap water is the clear choice. Not only is it good for you, it makes economic and environmental sense. Pre-order the carafe at
www.londonontap.org