greenfutures No.89 July 2013
Global land plan
Can industry and agriculture learn to share?
Silicon Africa: a network for entrepreneurs A global conversation over a cup of tea Can universities keep up with technology?
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My most unnerving moment in recent weeks came during the interview with Ruby McGregor-Smith. She had been talking about the importance of pushing yourself beyond your professional comfort zones, and I had provoked things by asking what lies outside her own (p26). She was well-prepared, firing back at me a fairly safe and suitable answer. Then, she returned my own question, only slightly rephrased: “What scares you professionally, Anna?” I was thrown, to the extent that the question still haunts me. One thing I keep coming back to is the fear of taking my eye off the ball, particularly in my new role as Editor. I don’t mean just in a day-to-day way, by failing to return a call or meet a deadline. Then again, I’m aware that the many little things we do, the decisions we make without a second thought, in the end add up. And so, if we’re not careful, they can add up to something we didn’t want. Caroline Taylor, VP of Marketing at IBM, made a similar observation in May at the Sustainability Communications Forum, chaired by Sally Uren, Acting Chief Executive of Forum for the Future. Taylor used the words of Abraham Lincoln: “Character is like a tree, and reputation like a shadow.” So, character drives what we do, and how others perceive us is a result of that. This applies to organisations as much as to individuals. Taylor was talking about corporate behaviour, in particular: a company led by its values and purpose will project a very different shadow to one that simply hangs corporate responsibility on a few select branches. This is what I mean by not ‘taking my eye off the ball’. For all of us, defining our goal is one challenge. Keeping it in mind while we go about daily life is another. The one ‘ball’ we all have in common is the planet, and the recent milestone of 400 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide should sharpen our focus on its health. Finding ways to make our systems resilient in such a world has to be a shared goal: no person or company will be able to fix their own future without helping to solve the challenges facing other things on which they depend, such as energy and food. Many industries still need to agree on a common strategy to avoid being knocked off their rocker by a climate-related supply crisis or a sudden shift in consumer demand. Global tea markets are waking up to this need (p20), and other food sectors must do the same (p40). It means looking beyond our immediate context to the big picture, asking how we can plan for the future of crucial resources like water and land. This is what our cover feature (p16) is all about. As Ben Goldfarb asks, what if global land use looked like a chess board, with each piece playing a role in a strategic whole? Such a goal may be very ambitious indeed. But what is scarier than trying to reach it is the thought that, if we don’t pay attention, our many daily deeds might add up to something we really didn’t want.
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Green Futures July 2013
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Contents
Number 89, July 2013
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16
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45 Features
Briefings
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
24 A thousand words Reimagining pigeons as a resource
40 Whatever the weather Ensuring sustainable food supply Food and Drink Federation
43 Upside fund Private finance transforms lives Triodos
41 Decoding the catch DNA checks show fish origins Marine Stewardship Council
44 Clothes loop Mending holes in buying patterns Marks and Spencer
42 Material goals Aesthetics, ocean plastic and the 4x4 of laundry Ecover
45 Fix it yourself It’s time for net positive disruption WWF-UK
16 G lobal land plan With pressure growing on productive land, can industry, agriculture and nature learn to share this finite resource? Ben Goldfarb investigates.
28 D are to share Big data could help solve many problems, but can we really trust the organisations putting it to use? Tom Blass and Duncan Jefferies report.
The latest in green innovation, including:
20 C hai challenge Change is brewing for the tea industry. Heather Connon asks whether the key players can reach a consensus on the best way forward.
30 L essons for life New technologies are revolutionising higher education, says Kyla Mandel, prompting students to collaborate on solutions to pressing issues.
5 Plant power Extracting hydrogen from biomass
22 S ilicon Africa A new network of technology incubators could put Africa on a fast-track to a sustainable future, the Director of AfriLabs tells Adam Oxford.
32 C ooked up in Congo It’s 12 years since the Ashden Awards were founded: how has the scale and reach of sustainable energy changed? Martin Wright reports from Goma.
8 Nairobi’s new riders Kenyan commuters opt for pedal power
5 Scavenging energy Sensors use ‘waste’ electromagnetic energy
7 Algae-powered apartments Building with bioreactor façade opens
12 A nyone for crickets? Insects infiltrate Western menus 14 Smart phone with values Start-up makes ethical mobile
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26 T he Green Futures interview Ruby McGregor-Smith, Chief Executive of MITIE Group 35 Forum update Jonathon Porritt introduces his new book; can protected cropping meet our fresh food needs; and Sally Uren shares her five steps to sustainable value loops 46 Feedback Readers respond online and in print 48 Jonathon Porritt Social justice for all depends on us dealing with the carbon bubble at the heart of the global economy
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Briefings
Plant power New method for extracting hydrogen from biomass announced A team of US scientists has developed a way to extract hydrogen from any kind of plant matter. The discovery represents an important breakthrough which could pave the way for hydrogen to become a low-cost, mainstream fuel of the future. Currently, the most common method for manufacturing hydrogen involves ‘steam reforming’ natural gas/methane (CH4) in the reaction: CH4 + 2H2O = CO2 + 4H2. However, the process needs high temperatures, and releases carbon dioxide. Another method is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. Although there are no resultant carbon emissions, this process still requires a considerable amount of energy. The commercial production of hydrogen gas from biomass was previously hampered by the high cost of the processes used and the relatively low quality of the end product. The team at Virginia Tech University has been
High factor IBM solar system captures 75% of the sun’s energy IBM researchers in Switzerland have designed a high concentration photovoltaic thermal system (HCPVT) that concentrates solar radiation by a factor of 2,000, and converts 75% into usable energy. A parabolic reflector tracks the sun and focuses its rays onto an array of triple-junction photovoltaic chips. To prevent them melting, the array uses microchannel water-cooling, a technique also used in high-performance computers, which circulates the coolant to within a few tens of micrometres of the chips. The array holds hundreds of 1cm2 standard commercial chips, each generating 50W of electricity – a 30% solar energy conversion rate. (Without concentrated sunlight, each chip would generate just 25 milliwatts.) The system’s energy conversion rate is boosted to
over 75% by using the coolant’s waste heat to power desalination or air-cooling units. Currently, the best conversion rate for concentration photovoltaic systems is around 60%. Dr Bruno Michel of IBM Research in Zurich expects their 100m2 dish prototype system to be ready in three years. “Our design, which uses concrete and pressurised metal foil instead of steel and glass, reduces the reflector’s costs by about two-thirds”, he says, “and we estimate the system will produce electricity for roughly $0.1/kWh over the plant’s lifetime – similar to the cost of electricity produced by coal fired plants.” A prototype is currently being tested at IBM Research in Zurich, and the concrete structures and high-tech components for two more will also be built in Switzerland.
Sun salutation at scale
IBM is collaborating on the project with Airlight Energy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the NTB Interstate University of Applied Sciences. The Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation has awarded the project a three-year $2.4 million grant. “This cogeneration solar project is challenging and ambitious”, says Dr Andreas Bett of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany. “It promises practical, highly efficient solar radiation conversion systems in the foreseeable future.” – John Fencer
‘Waste’ man-made electromagnetic energy is everywhere, coming from sources like power cables, radio transmitters and televisions. Harvesting that energy has long been regarded as impractical. However, two recent advances have changed that thinking: highly efficient collectors and devices that run on tiny electric currents. Manos Tentzeris and Rushi Vyas, researchers at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, have invented wireless sensor devices that exploit ambient energy from transmission towers. The single unit incorporates energy-collecting antennae and the electronics that draw on it, printed onto
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paper or flexible polymer. The researchers use a special ‘ink’ that contains silver nanoparticles, which allows them to produce radio-frequency components, circuits and other sensing devices. These inexpensive sensors have numerous potential uses, including remote chemical, biological, moisture and stress monitoring. For agriculture, the team has invented smart irrigation sensors powered by ambient energy. These constantly monitor soil moisture, and wirelessly instruct intelligent irrigation equipment precisely where and when to water. The system greatly reduces water and pumping costs, and the maintenance-free Electromagnetic harvest
Photos: Virginia Tech; Georgia Tech
as part of pre-license application studies. Kim Hatfield, a biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in Washington DC, says: “Key concerns are salmon and also sea turtles. We are constrained to ensure that technology does not harm endangered species, but there is also a lack of product- or technology-specific data on how ocean life responds.” Research can be costly. By making existing studies readily available, it is hoped Tethys will, in some cases, reduce or even eliminate the need for new studies. In others, key issues may be identified earlier enough to alter a project proposal, or even a device design. Tethys also points to other knowledge bases serving specific regions. One example is the recently launched Wave and Tidal Knowledge Network, developed by AMEC for the UK Crown Estate. AMEC has been working with Tethys to ensure each will signpost to the other, where practical. – Sara Ver Bruggen
Photos: IBM; Renewable UK
The marine and hydrokinetic energy (MKE) industry is still in its infancy, and the potential impact that generators, installation processes and power transmission cables may have on marine ecosystems is largely unknown. Now, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has launched a knowledge base, Tethys, to help developers understand and avoid the risks. It has been created in partnership with the International Energy
Virginia Tech’s custom cocktail
New wireless sensors use ‘waste’ electromagnetic energy
Database mitigates habitat risks of marine energy Agency’s Ocean Energy Systems, whose member nations include Canada, Ireland, Spain and South Korea. Tethys can be navigated via an interactive map that shows MKE and offshore wind energy project sites around the world. It can be combed by country, device type and keywords, to pinpoint relevant research. Factors under scrutiny include the impact on marine life of electromagnetic frequency fields from cabling, the physical presence of infrastructure, and noise. “As larger-scale offshore renewable energy projects are deployed in the coming years, the DoE wanted to be ahead of some of the environmental issues concerning marine-based energy technologies”, explains Dr Andrea Copping at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Marine Sciences Laboratory, who coordinated efforts on the database over four years. In the US, marine energy pilots are coupled with environmental monitoring. Regulatory agencies can use the database
consumed hydrogen”, says Ross Gazey of the Pure Energy Centre in Shetland, which developed Britain’s first road-licensed hydrogen car. The Virginia Tech researchers hope that extracting hydrogen from xylose will become commercially viable within three years. – Paul Miles
Scavenging energy
Easing into the ocean A gentle giant?
researching new enzyme combinations, and engineering enzymes with desirable properties, for seven years. They have now succeeded in harnessing hydrogen from xylose, the most abundant simple sugar found in plants. The energy stored in xylose splits water molecules, yielding high-purity hydrogen that can be used by proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Even more appealing, this reaction – using a customised cocktail of 13 enzymes, xylose, a polyphosphate and water – occurs at low temperatures (50°C), generating hydrogen with embodied energy that is greater than the chemical energy stored in xylose and the polyphosphate. The heat energy could be from waste heat, thereby further improving efficiency. “If it can be done cheaply, this may develop into a very interesting alternative to the reformed hydrocarbons that make up the bulk of commercially produced and
sensors and antennae degrade harmlessly into the soil at the end of their useful life. The State of Georgia’s Centers of Innovation for Energy and Agribusiness are now working with the researchers to test and deploy the technology in real-life conditions. “We are very excited to assist with the implementation of this groundbreaking technology”, says Costas Simoglou, the Center’s Director. The Georgia Tech team is also working with Assistant Professor Yoshihiro Kawahara of the University of Tokyo on a system of autonomous, maintenancefree, ambient energy-powered sensors for structural stress monitoring. These devices would flag strain changes in buildings and bridges that might indicate structural weakening, helping to avert catastrophic failure. As Kawahara adds, “This is particularly important in earthquake-prone Japan.” ‘Scavenger’ sensors could even hit the market sooner rather than later, according to Tentzeris. “Devices based on our technology should be commercially available within two years, and cost about a 10th of the price of those used today”, he claims. – John Fencer
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Weather forecast
Rusty catalyst
Better predictions to boost renewables
Iron oxide beats crystals for cheap hydrogen
When you’re running an electricity grid, the more renewable power you have in your mix, the more you fear unexpected ‘wind ramp events’. Tornadoes, ice storms or other extreme weather events can interrupt the spin of wind turbines, so that you have to ramp up baseload generation to meet demand. Highly-tuned next-day probabilistic forecasts for each precise location would let you integrate wind power more aggressively into your supplyside balancing act. Which is just what US utility Xcel Energy will be getting from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Under a new two-year programme, a variational Doppler radar analysis system will combine radar data with computer simulations to forecast the weather conditions for individual wind farms. Xcel’s regional control centres can integrate these forecasts with a growing body of data on
past output performance, for a much better indication of how much power the grid can count on from a source. A further boost to NCAR’s capabilities for predicting sunshine will indicate the likely impact of all those solar panels on the supply and demand equation. Grid managers will be able to tell when customers with rooftop photovoltaics will meet their own demand, when will they’ll be contributing excess electricity to the grid, and when they’ll need to pull power from utility sources. Britain needs accurate forecasting for renewables just as much. Even if it’s less affected by extreme events, says Forum for the Future’s energy analyst Iain Watt, better mapping of the impact of the country’s notoriously complex weather patterns is critical in managing intermittency as the proportion of renewable power in the mix continues to rise. On a windy day,
Scientists in Canada have discovered a potential cost-effective method for producing hydrogen by electrolysis of water. It could be the key to large-scale hydrogen storage for renewable energy on demand. To date, the expense of catalysts from rare crystalline metals has proved a barrier to the development of water electrolysis for energy storage. But in a recent Science paper, Simon Trudel and Curtis Berlinguette of the University of Calgary detailed a novel method for making effective catalysts from metals as cheap, non-toxic and plentiful as iron oxide, aka rust. These, they claimed, perform just as well as existing alternatives, but for a 1,000th of the cost. Currently, oxides of rare noble metals such as platinum and iridium (which are resistant to corrosion and oxidisation in moist air) are used as catalysts for this energy-hungry reaction. This means the process is expensive: pure iridium, for
Energy, come wind or shine
grid-connected wind farms may already be supplying 10% of the electricity the country’s using at a particular moment. Simultanously, the yield from solar panels is going up and down. And minute by minute, grid controllers are matching fluctuating demand against the sources they have available at that moment. “Forecasts of intermittent generation are becoming increasingly critical to planning and operation of our transmission system”, says Isobel Rowley of the UK’s National Grid, “as the proportion of renewables increases.” – Roger East
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off-grid locations. The same principle could also be applied to car roofs. “Thermal engineering and control with nanostructures is a relatively new but growing frontier”, says Geoff Smith, a professor of applied physics at the University of Technology, Sydney, who was not involved in this study. “The practicalities, durability, manufacture and costs of such structures over large areas are hard to judge at this stage, but the science is very good as far as it goes.” – Ian Randall
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Photos: Marie-Helene Thibeault, University of Calgary; Johannes Arlt/IBA Hamburg GmbH
same size. So, a one-storey house with only a 10th of its roof covered with cooling panels could offset 35% of previous air conditioning costs during the hottest hours of the summer, the team says. Such cooling panels could therefore prove a viable alternative to existing solar panel/air conditioning combinations. Moreover, the brilliance of this new solution lies in its passive nature. With no moving parts to maintain and no energy requirements, it would have very low operating costs, and could be used in
claims that an electrolyser the size of a beer fridge could store enough renewable power for a whole house. Shannon Boettcher, a University of Oregon chemistry professor, believes that, with technological advances and economies of scale in manufacture, water electrolysis has the potential to provide “economically viable storage of intermittent renewable energy at a massive scale”. – Paul Miles and Ian Randall
World’s first building with a bioreactor façade opens its doors in Hamburg
Don’t cool it down, just send it back
Photos: iStockphoto/Thinkstock; iStockphoto/Thinkstock
A novel solar cooling panel could keep buildings cool in bright sunlight by radiating heat out to space, cutting the need for energy-intensive air conditioning. Designed by researchers at Stanford University, the panel uses nanotechnology to selectively radiate unwanted heat out to space, achieving a net cooling effect in the warmth of sunlight. It is made of nanostructured quartz and silicon carbide, which are capable of enhancing and suppressing the radiation of heat for certain wavelengths. At most wavelengths, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reflect thermal radiation back down to Earth; however, this panel emits heat at the specific wavelength at which radiation can cut through the atmosphere. By sending more energy into space than is reflected back to the panel, the device is able to achieve an overall loss of heat. Of course, it’s important that the panel itself doesn’t heat up in the sun. Researcher Shanghai Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, explains that, to avoid this, it has been designed as a broadband mirror, also reflecting the majority of the sunlight. The panel can generate a net cooling of over 100W per square meter, equivalent to the power generated by a solar panel of the
example, costs nearly £4,000 per 100g. The Calgary duo have demonstrated a low-temperature, photo-chemical technique that uses an organic nanoscaffold to bind metals, which prevents them from adopting a crystalline form. A mixed-metal oxide of iron, cobalt and nickel produced in this way had “catalytic properties similar to noble metal oxides”, according to the report. It’s the disordered structure of these amorphous materials that makes them so reactive, explains chemistry professor Berlinguette. “There is no precedent for making amorphous phases of these types of catalysts containing more than one metal. That is the breakthrough.” The team’s spin-off company, FireWater Fuel Corp., plans to have a commercial electrolyser on the market by 2014, with a smaller home model ready for testing the year after. Berlinguette
Algae-powered apartments
Beyond the air con Sending heat back to space
Budget battery
An innovative building in Hamburg, Germany, is generating heat and electricity from algae in its exterior walls. The two south-facing façades are covered in a shell of bioreactors, clear containers that create a controlled environment for an algae farm. Exposed to sunlight, the algae photosynthesise, absorbing CO2 as they grow. Nutrients and CO2 are circulated through the bioreactors to encourage growth. Periodically, the algae are collected and fermented in a nearby biomass plant, then burned to produce electricity. The Bio Intelligence Quotient (BIQ) house [pictured], contains 15 apartments, and opened its doors in April. Its main source of energy is heat recovery, capturing energy not used in photosynthesis from the bioreactor solution. The façade also acts as a natural thermostat: thick algae growth in the summer keeps the sunlight out. Energy production from algal photosynthesis isn’t new of course. But the project is the world’s first full-scale bioreactive façade. The technology was created by Strategic Science Consult, which developed the building in collaboration with Arup, a design, engineering and consultancy firm; Colt International, a project management company; and Otto Wulff, a Hamburg construction firm.
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Subject to further tests, SSC claims a conversion efficiency (the amount of light hitting the façade converted to energy) of 10% for biogas and 38% for heat – almost 50% in total. That compares to a typical efficiency of about 15% for photovoltaic solar. The heat and power from the bioreactors are also supplemented by rooftop solar panels and an underground heat storage system. The building’s creators claim it can meet 100% of its energy needs. The main barrier to further adoption of the technology is price. Of the €5 million invested in the project by the German Government and IBA Hamburg, an international building
exhibition, over €1.3 million financed the bioreactors. However, Martin Kerner, Managing Director of SSC, is confident the technology can become competitive. “We need standardisation of hardware production to reduce costs”, he says. Demonstrating the efficiency of the algae building could not only prove a source of sustainable energy production, it could also shape future cities, according to Jan Wurm, Europe Research Leader for Arup. “If we can demonstrate microalgae façades, we can transform the urban environment [and provide] architects with a new source of inspiration.” – Fionán O’Muircheartaigh
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Not just a pretty façade
Changing planes
Dye solar cells start to flex their commercial muscle
Aviation’s new interest in electrical power phenomenon
The new Swiss Tech Convention Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) will open in 2014 with the first major architectural application of dye solar cells (DSC). The translucent, coloured cells will form a 300m2 façade, resembling a stained-glass window [pictured]. EPFL is cautious as to the performance of the cells, a nascent technology compared with silicon photovoltaic cells. They anticipate 8,000kWh of electricity a year, a tiny portion of the Center’s total energy consumption. However, they will also prevent the huge atrium from turning into an unbearable suntrap. The cells are being developed by local firm Solaronix at a rate of around 30 modules a day, and looking for further investment to increase production capacity. That won’t be easy, as Professor Michael Grätzel, who made initial DSC discoveries at the EPFL over 20 years ago, explains: “Falling subsidies, overcapacity and resulting bankruptcies witnessed by the conventional silicon photovoltaic (PV) industry has made it challenging for DSC developers to get the funding they need.” Meanwhile, improvements in efficiencies, lifetimes and stability – by the EPFL and others globally – continue to increase the suitability of DSC for realworld applications. Also known as ‘Grätzel
Nairobi’s new riders
cells’, they have some advantages over silicon PV. One is the ability to generate electricity at low irradiance: indoors, under fluorescent tube lamps, they have achieved 26% efficiencies, compared with 9% for silicon. They also require less resource and energy-intensive production processes, and payback for a 7% efficiency DSC module is roughly three months, compared to two years for silicon. Efforts to commercialise DSCs are building. Welsh manufacturer G24I Power began supplying flexible DSC modules to Swiss company Logitech in late 2011 for integration into a self-powered iPad keyboard accessory. Swedish DSC developer Exeger has its sights on three market opportunities for DSC: consumer electronics, indoor applications and building-integrated PV (BIPV). The company recently secured $20 million in funding to make transparent DSCs in a range of colours on flexible and glass substrates using screen-printing techniques. Exeger CEO and founder Giovanni Fili expects to see DSCs take off in consumer electronics before they reach scale in construction. “They are great for meeting growing demand for wireless power”, he explains, “because they do not obscure, change or dilute the value of product design.” – Sara Ver Bruggen
Flight powered by ionic wind: a notion from the wilder shores of UFO spotting? Or an idea whose time has come? If new aviation-related research at MIT really can bring this arcane phenomenon into play, the ultimate prospect could be planes with no fuel on board. Ned Allen, Chief Scientist at Lockheed Martin, speaks of its “nearly miraculous potential”. We’ve known since the 1950s about ionic wind – more properly known as electro-hydrodynamic thrust. Using highvoltage electricity, air molecules are ionised and repelled from a thin electrode, and simultaneously attracted towards a thicker collector (such as an aluminium tube). They push on the surrounding neutral air molecules, whose displacement generates the thrust. Some Soviet satellites relied on this for propulsion, once in space. What’s new is the remarkably high efficiency achieved in the MIT experiments. This convinces Steven Barrett, Director of MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, that ionic wind is “definitely worth investigating further”. By increasing the distance between the electrode and the collector, his research team found that total thrust per kilowatt was maximised at low velocity over a large area – and reached 110 newtons, or 50 times more than a modern jet engine. The energy density of aviation fuel has hitherto put it in a class of its own for propelling planes – but at great environmental cost. So, ionic wind is exciting if sustainable flight is your dream. But don’t hold your breath. The challenges for aircraft design are massive, to say the
In the fast lane
Ionic wind takes flight
least. Getting a big enough gap between the electrode and the collector to achieve the high efficiency rates seen in MIT’s lab might mean encompassing the whole plane within the thruster. Moreover, you’d need lightweight portable power, perhaps from solar or fuel cells, to produce enormous voltages to get the whole caboodle off the ground. You might not want to be sitting inside. And, once up, efficiency decreases at speed.
If this ever does take off, its first application may be in unmanned drones for military surveillance, with the big bonus that their motorless flight would be noiseless and have no infrared-detectable heat signature. Then again, there could be other uses for ionic wind. An Apple patent application published last year, for instance, would harness it to keep laptops cool – silently. Now that would be nice. – Roger East
Commuters opt for pedal power in Kenya’s capital
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pedestrian paths were built, the major considerations were avoiding accidents and minimising congestion”, says Mugo Kibati, current Director General of the Vision 2030 Secretariat. However, he is quick to recognise the environmental benefits too: “Studies show that greenhouse gas emissions have been decreasing as a result”. Kenya’s carbon dioxide emissions were just 0.3 tonne per person in 2012, compared with an average of 8.6 tonnes across the EU. – Gitonga Njeru
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6,700 The number of wind turbines added to the US grid in 2012, boosting wind capacity by 28%, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Photo: NASA
A new cycle lane network is being developed as part of Kenya’s Vision 2030. This national programme, launched in 2008, outlines plans to build a “just and cohesive society, enjoying equitable social development in a clean and secure environment”. Improving infrastructure has been identified as a key enabler. Over $300 million has already been invested in the Thika Road Super Highway, which opened in December 2012, with over 25km of bike lanes and pedestrian paths. The need to improve road safety is another important factor. According to the Ministry of Transport, more than half of road fatalities in Nairobi are vulnerable road users: pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. “Originally, when the highways were being constructed and the bike lanes and
Photos: Solaronix; Michael S. Lewis/Corbis
Car owners in Nairobi, Kenya, are choosing to cycle rather than face the capital’s congested roads. Over 200,000 cyclists per day are using the bike lanes and leaving their cars at home, the Government claims. Convenience is the most important factor driving the trend, says Germano Mwabu, Professor of Economics at the University of Nairobi: “There is a very big increase in the use of bicycles in Nairobi for many reasons. They are cheap, costing about 1,200 shillings ($15) for a bike. [However] the main reason is that motorists want to escape the large volumes of traffic jams in the city.” As one commuter, Rofancio Ochieng, explains: “By bike I can get to my workplace in less time than when I use my car. It takes me just 25 minutes by bike, but by car I stay in traffic for more than two hours, making me wake up early and miss my good sleep.”
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Tackling two-wheelers
Super grass
Vietnam seeks to reduce road congestion
New hybrid grass could help prevent flooding in the UK
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Researchers have been cultivating hybrid grasses for years, primarily to increase growth and tolerance to extreme weather. But only recently have they considered developing a grass that specifically aims to reduce water run-off – the rapid movement of rainfall from grasslands to rivers that can cause flooding. A large team of UK soil and plant scientists sought to combine a hybrid species of grass called perennial ryegrass, commonly used for grazing in the UK, with meadow fescue, a hardy strain that
The percentage of global clean energy investment that Brazil, South Africa, India and China attracted in 2012, worth US $94 billion. This is up from 27% in 2011.
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Association, which advises the public on flood risk mitigation, argues that “adaptation is the only way forward”, when it comes to dealing with the UK’s wet weather. “I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the use of festulolium as part of a toolkit to reduce flood risk”, she adds. Siraj Tahir, Flood Specialist and Research Engineer at Arup, also believes the innovation has the potential to reduce both the intensity and severity of floods. But he warns that reducing the volume of water in rivers could worsen the impacts of drought and have knock-on effects on the ecosystem. He cautions that use of the grass will require careful management, stating that, “the benefits of flood reductions will need to be balanced against the impacts that may be caused by low flows”. – Fionán O’Muircheartaigh
Copenhagen takes delivery of hydrogen fuel cell cars Hyundai has delivered the first assemblyline-produced hydrogen fuel cell cars to Copenhagen, Demark. During the opening ceremony of Denmark’s first hydrogen refuelling station, 15 of the vehicles were handed over by Hyundai Motor Europe’s President, Mr Byung Kwon Rhim. The Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell produces water vapour, rather than tailpipe emissions, making it much less damaging to the environment. The vehicles will be used in the city’s municipal fleet. Some might argue that this milestone in the history of hydrogen fuel cells is long overdue. The technology has existed in principle since 1839, but never became mainstream due to the popularity of the internal combustion engine.
“We’re trying to buy time for the world to wake up” – Jeremy Grantham, Co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist of the Boston-based asset management firm GMO
can thrive in a cool climate. They hoped to amalgamate the rapid growth rate of the ryegrass with the expansive root systems of the meadow fescue, believing this would increase the ability of the plant to hold water, thereby delaying water run-off. It worked: the team discovered that the new hybrid grass, festulolium, reduced run-off by up to 43% compared with meadow fescue and by 51% compared with the more common perennial ryegrass. An additional advantage of the new grass is its durability in the face of a changing climate, making it doubly useful for farmers. “It provides resilient pasture for food production”, says Kit Macleod, Catchment Scientist at the James Hutton Institute, one of the research organisations responsible for the breakthrough. Mary Dhonau, Chair of the Flood Protection
New set of wheels
One in a thousand by 2015 Photos: Kit Macleod/James Hutton Institute; Hyundai
Vietnam’s traffic congestion problems are mirrored in other Asian countries, due to rapid population growth in major cities, urban sprawl, and rising car and motorbike ownership. In Beijing, a five-year plan for reducing congestion includes an extension to the subway system and reduced fares, a quota system for license plates to regulate the number of private cars, and restrictions that only allow drivers to use their cars on alternate days. Parking fees have been increased too, and restrictions on official vehicles introduced. Plans to introduce a congestion charge were also recently announced. In India, the Government is attempting to boost manufacturing and sales of electric bikes and cars through the exemption of customs duties on components for the machines. While in Indonesia, state-owned companies are planning to build a 54km monorail to ease Jakarta’s traffic problems, hopefully saving 573,000 litres of fuel a day. Smarter urban planning, intelligent traffic light systems and cycling initiatives are also being trialed across Asia to reduce congestion. But for now, in Vietnam and other rapidly developing nations, the motorbike remains as popular as ever. – Duncan Forgan
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Photo: udeyismail/Shutterstock
Can rail lighten the road load?
The motorbike is king in Vietnam. Around 80% of road users in Hanoi ride one, and there are an estimated four million in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) alone. In a bid to tackle the congestion and pollution caused by these bikes, the Vietnamese Government is introducing a range of measures to make the country’s transport sector more efficient. As of 2017, all newly manufactured or imported motorbikes will be required to conform to strict Euro III standards on emissions. In the meantime, stricter penalties will be imposed upon motorbikes that fail to meet existing Euro II standards. And hundreds of new emission testing facilities are planned for Hanoi and HCMC. Both cities are developing new urban rail networks to ease road congestion. Eight metro lines are planned for Hanoi, and six for HCMC. Three other lines, either light rail or monorail, will also be built in HCMC. The city has invested in buses running on compressed natural gas too. “Vietnam’s plans for clean public transport and cleaner motorised vehicles are ambitious and will be difficult to enforce”, says Koos Neefjes, Policy Advisor on Climate Change for the United Nations Development Programme. “But they are very important for keeping the cities livable.”
Watering the grass
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Now, with carbon emissions high on the agenda, Hyundai has gone beyond the prototype stage. The company began developing hydrogen fuel cells in 1998, and claims to be two years ahead of rival manufacturers, having simplified and modularised its production. The first fuel cell version of a Hyundai ix35 left the company’s South Korean factory in February. Hyundai aims to have 1,000 of the diesel-alternative vehicles on the road by the end of 2015. The company’s proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is capable of producing 100kW. Carbon dioxide emissions for hydrogen (derived from renewable energy sources) would be zero, compared to 139g/km for diesel,
according to Hyundai’s estimates. However, PEM fuel cells are presently expensive: the ix35 costs in the region of £130,000, that’s 10 times the price of the standard diesel version. Nevertheless, the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association claims improvements in technology and economies of scale mean “the costs of fuel cell systems for vehicles are expected to decrease by 90% by 2020”. That still leaves the issue of infrastructure, though: 208 hydrogen fuelling stations are currently in operation worldwide, according to the website H2stations.org. However, the number will likely increase once hydrogen fuel cell cars become more commercially viable. The ix35 Fuel Cell can reach a maximum speed of 100 mph, and is able to travel a total of 369 miles on a single fuelling, which takes just a few minutes. Asked about the return on investment for Hyundai’s R&D work on the car, Ian Tonkin, Product & Corporate PR Manager, Hyundai, says, “The mass production of ix35 Fuel Cell is, at this stage, the very first step towards commercialisation of hydrogen fuel cell tech. The volumes need to increase first (causing the unit cost to drop through economies of scale) before we can put any concrete figure against predicted returns for the car.” – Paul Miles
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GMO: climate hero?
Closer to the catch
Modified microorganism captures and converts carbon
A new sea-to-plate service for consumers
In the search for solutions to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide, scientists at the University of Georgia’s Bioenergy Systems Research Institute think they could have a winner. A genetically modified microorganism in their lab not only captures CO2, but processes it directly to make a valuable chemical. A further tweak may even get it to make fuel. Pyrococcus furiosus normally likes it hot. This microbe lives in volcanic mud or around deep-sea geothermal vents, and feeds like fury at 95ºC, fermenting carbohydrates
and growing fast. But Michael Adams and his team in Georgia changed all that. Their genetic manipulations engineered a strain that will feed at somewhat lower temperatures: around 73ºC. When exposed to hydrogen, this modified organism gives up its rapid growth habit. Instead, it devotes itself to taking up atmospheric CO2 which it wouldn’t normally do, and reacting it with the hydrogen. The result is an acid, 3-HPA, with many industrial uses, notably as a feedstock for
Microbe moves from volcanic mud to a home fit for a hero
Anyone for crickets?
making acrylics. As Meredith Lloyd-Evans of Cambridge-based consultants Biobridge points out, “the starting materials for conventional production of 3-HPA can be toxic, so a biological route is very positive”. With more genetic manipulations, Adams and his colleagues believe they can get versions of P. furiosus to perform other chemical reactions, including the direct production of useable fuel. They’d be doing a similar job to the biocatalysts pioneered by California-based Carbon Sciences Inc. (see ‘Air supply’, GF76, p32) but with air-captured CO2 rather than power station emissions (see also ‘Better than trees?’, GF83, p9). Adams believes his route could prove both efficient and cost-effective. When plants or algae fix CO2 by photosynthesis, he points out, they store the energy as sugars, and further processing is needed to unlock this energy as ethanol fuel. He hopes to show a viable way to “remove plants as the middleman”. And what of the wider consequences of unleashing such organisms from the confines of the lab? Lloyd-Evans is fairly sanguine. The (still relatively) high temperature needed for optimum growth makes it unlikely that either the modified strain would develop outside lab conditions, he says. – Roger East
Tracing seafood is a murky issue. Fish is often mislabelled, meaning that what’s in the packet may not be as described (see ‘Decoding the catch’, p41). Now, social enterprise I Love Blue Sea (ILBS) has created the first online platform enabling consumers in the US to buy fresh, sustainably caught seafood directly from producers. The San Francisco-based start-up offers a virtual fish counter of 110 products, from shellfish and wild fish to ready-made dishes. The new service, whereby orders are shared immediately with producers and delivered to customers within 24-48 hours, is funded by a 10% fee taken from each sale. Selling their catch directly to consumers means the fisheries can earn up to three times more than they would by dealing with retailers, claims ILBS founder Martin Reed. Importantly, producers are required to observe the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch’s sustainable fishing guidelines, which aim to protect fish stocks and minimise harm to local ecosystems and marine habitats. Customers can check their credentials of each supplier online. ILBS is also one of 200 conservation outreach partners for Seafood Watch, a science-based, notfor-profit initiative that advises businesses across the US on best practice in sourcing sustainable seafood. “American fisheries are currently encouraged to catch bigger volumes of fish
Radical ready meal
to cover the rising cost of fuel and permits”, says Reed. “We help them to earn more by taking fewer fish from the ocean.” Early sales suggest consumers are willing to pay a little more for sustainable, traceable fish, claims Reed. However, he adds, it can actually be cheaper to buy from ILBS if the product is being delivered locally, or if products are ordered in bulk. “We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of connecting people with their food”, asserts Daniel Crossley, Executive Director, Food Ethics Council.
“Buying fish directly from producers means people are more likely to understand the impacts of what they’re eating and value their food more.” Further ‘sea-to-plate’ innovations include the community-owned fisheries Siren Fish Co. and Cape Ann Fresh Catch in the US, and Catchbox in the UK. These cooperatives ask members to pay an agreed fee over a fixed period to support local fisheries, in return for a regular catch of the day. – Katharine Earley
Insects to infiltrate Western menus
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has just won a $100,000 prize from the UN-backed African Innovation Foundation. For something more seductive, try Ento Box. Inspired by the marketing of sushi, graduates from London’s Royal College of Art and Imperial College are combining elegant presentation and cookery skills to give insects an image makeover. They are catering initially for supper clubs and festivals, and aim to open a restaurant in due course. Their ready meals are still in prototype, but they’re hopeful we could see them in supermarkets by 2020. – Roger East
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£772 million Photo: I Love Blue Sea
as good as any meat or fish; crickets are almost as protein-rich; while the Mexican chapuline grasshopper can be as much as 48% protein. And because they are coldblooded, insects are very efficient feed converters: crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, and four times less than sheep, to produce the same amount of protein. Should we be eating bugs instead of beef (see GF87, p20)? Yes, says Mark Driscoll, who heads up Forum for the Future’s work on food. “Insects could play an important role in providing alternative protein sources, if we can overcome current prejudices. Western diets do have to change if we are to feed an increasing global population within an increasingly resource-constrained world.” A shift from gathering to farming could spawn sizeable enterprises, like the South African fly factory which grows insects on animal waste and turns them into feed. It
Photos: iStockphoto/Thinkstock; Ento
Insect-eating, though familiar enough to two billion people, is largely confined to Asia, Africa and Latin America. Most Westerners see it as survivalist bravado in the ‘bush tucker trials’ of reality TV, where C-list celebrities gag on witchetty grubs. But are they losing sight of a valuable protein source? The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report, ‘Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security’, seeks to put that right. Besides adding them to the pot, it points to “potential new uses of insects for direct human consumption [and] farming them for food and feed”. Why not, for instance, use insect protein in fortified blended foods (FBFs) to target malnutrition, instead of imported soya, wheat and corn? The arguments are backed by an impressive weight of information on nutritional value. Locusts and termites can be as much as 28% protein by weight,
The total annual cost saving British pubs and restaurants could make by offering smaller portion sizes, thereby cutting food waste, according to the government agency WRAP.
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Net benefit
LEADING THE WAY TO A FLOURISHING FUTURE
Fishing for more days at sea whilst the prawns and the remaining flat fish move along the bottom and into the back of the trawl. The Flip-Flap and Cod Avoidance Panel designs can be fitted to existing nets, reducing the wastage of old nets, and cost around £80 and £300 per device, respectively. Aside from the economic benefits of claiming back days at sea, the adoption of highly selective fishing gear demonstrates commitment to sustainability and to reducing discards of fish. It
can be an important factor in a fishery gaining Marine Stewardship Council certification, as was the case for the North Sea Haddock Fishery, certified in 2010. It also demonstrates a bottom-up approach to fisheries management. As Bertie Armstrong, Chief Executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, puts it: “We produce the ideas and the innovation for the European Commission to accept, rather than the other way round.” – Thomas Rossiter
HOME FOR COURAGEOUS OPTIMISTS
Scottish fisheries get selective
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Fancy finding out how community energy could benefit your local area? Then join us at Community Energy Fortnight! The Community Energy Fortnight runs from 24th August – 8th September right across the UK. From tours of hydro plants or wind turbine sites, to community heat workshops, there’s bound to be an event that suits your interests. There will also be advice on the technicalities of making your community energy vision a reality. Photos: John A Cameron/Shutterstock; Fairphone
through the rest.” Forum for the Future’s digital expert James Taplin suggests that the first model would score highly on the Eco Rating system for mobile phones that he developed in conjunction with O2. “It would probably be very near the top of the pack. It has a solid performance in terms of direct impacts.” Taplin is less sure though whether it will be anything more than a niche brand. “To break into the mass market is very difficult and many big players have failed. But Fairphone has a shot.” – Will Simpson
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essential. He is looking for €5-10 million, but expects the enterprise will attract bank loans and social impact investors, rather than “your average venture capitalist”. He adds, “We will only work with equity investments if they are strategically aligned with our next steps, so they can add to our mission.” Casper Jorna, Terminals Sustainability Manager at Vodafone, is impressed. “Fairphone is addressing supply chain models in a way which most manufacturers cannot yet do because of existing commercial agreements. They are open that it is not completely sustainable on the first run they are addressing the most critical issues first and then working their way
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Start-up raises the bar for mobiles
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Smart phone with values It purports to be the world’s first ethically traded and sustainably sourced mobile handset. But can the Fairphone gain a foothold in a market where such concerns are not a priority? A Netherlands-based initiative, Fairphone was set up in 2010 with the stated aim of producing an Android smartphone with a completely transparent supply chain. It uses tin, cobalt and tantalum from Congo DR which are guaranteed ‘conflict-free’, and whilst it is assembled in China, Fairphone insists that its suppliers are committed to improving workers’ social conditions. The handset is easily recycled, and Fairphone has also promised to donate €3 for every model sold to electronic recycling projects in Ghana. It’s a largely crowd-sourced venture, which went into production in June following pre-orders from 5,000 customers, who each committed €325. But founder Bas Van Abel admits that, to take the project to scale, new investment is
ENGAGE.
MMUNIT CO
Scottish prawn fisheries have developed new nets designed to reduce by-catch of cod, haddock, whiting and saithe. As well as safeguarding future stocks, there’s an immediate business incentive: more days on the water. Days at sea have been reduced annually under the Cod Recovery Plan, in order to preserve cod stocks. The Conservation Credit Scheme, controlled in Scotland by the Fisheries Management and Conservation Group, awards extra days in return for the adoption of certain types of highly selective fishing gear which have been proven to reduce by-catch. The Flip-Flap net, developed by Gamrie Bay Prawn Trawls, and the Cod Avoidance Panel net, developed by Faithlie Trawl, are two of the designs now being used by the 300 or so vessels of the Scottish prawn fleet. Trials of both net designs have shown an average reduction in the amount of cod caught by 60%, and haddock by 67%. The studies have shown that there is no discernible difference in the amount of prawns being caught by these nets. Both designs incorporate variations of flexible, internal panels which aim to direct cod, other round fish, and some flat fish, up and out of the escape hole at the top,
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including its social and environmental aspects.” The Natural Capital Project, a California-based collaboration between NGOs and universities, is one of the organisations reforming the calculus of land planning. Among the project’s innovations is InVEST, an open-source software package that calculates how proposed development and conservation plans influence the value of ecosystem services, such as timber production, crop pollination and carbon sequestration. Since its inception in 2007, InVEST has been applied to over 20 scenarios, from helping Hawaiian landowners develop sustainable agriculture to evaluating how coastal wetlands protect Dow Chemical’s facilities from storm surge. According to Mary Ruckelshaus, Director of the Natural Capital Project, one of the most effective ways to derive multiple benefits from land is actually to focus on water. InVEST has guided the creation of numerous water funds, in which private industry voluntarily pays to protect watersheds; in the Andes Mountains, such partnerships have conserved nearly two million hectares and helped improve water supply both to cities and to businesses such as sugar cane growers and bottling companies. “Companies have learned to prioritise where within the watershed they should put their investment, and what activities to invest in, whether it’s better fencing, changes in logging practices, or riparian protection”, says Ruckelshaus. Such an approach, she adds, can double or even quadruple companies’ return on their investment. But while InVEST is limited to analysing regional initiatives like water funds, the consequences of land use decisions can be national, and even international,
Global land plan
in scope. The Amazon Rainforest, for example, has received more attention from conservation groups than perhaps any ecosystem worldwide, and to good effect: rates of deforestation have fallen almost 75% since 2004, and nearly half the rainforest is now protected. Thwarted by conservation, the agricultural industry that once threatened to raze the jungle has turned its attention to the Cerrado, the grassland that sprawls across over two million square kilometres of eastern Brazil. As a result, the Cerrado is today the site of an agricultural explosion that The Economist has called “nothing short of miraculous”. In just a few decades, Brazil has transformed itself into the world’s largest supplier of beef, poultry, sugar cane and, soon, soya. Yet while Brazil’s grasslands don’t garner as much attention as its forests, the Cerrado is a biodiversity hotspot in its own right, home to jaguars, anteaters, and giant armadillos. In recent years, over 60% of this unique ecosystem has been converted to farmland and pasture. What’s more, savannas around the world may soon be subject to Cerrado-style cultivation. “Those Brazilian companies will begin to move into Africa, particularly Angola and Mozambique”, says Pearce. “They’ll be trying to take over land there to do what they’re not allowed to do in Brazil anymore.” Such global land conversion is often spurred on by misguided governmental policies, biofuels providing a case in point. In the US, for example, the Renewable Fuel Standard mandates the escalating use of corn ethanol in gasoline; in 2012, despite droughts and food price spikes, up to half the nation’s corn crop was fed to cars. Thanks in part to the
Ecosystem services and human health aren’t integrated into the equation
Left: International industries vie for space in South Sudan Below: Water funds free up more land in the Andes
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land; the Egyptian firm plans to irrigate its newly acquired farmland via a massive canal that would drain wetlands and destroy pastures. But is this patchwork paradigm, in which disparate land uses compete for dwindling space and biodiversity suffers, the only option? Instead of battling to control scraps of earth, could different sectors, from agriculture to energy to conservation, come together to figure out what goes where? What if global land use less resembled toppling dominoes and looked more like a chess board, with each piece playing a role in a strategic, integrated whole? The first step towards using land more wisely, says Mark Gough, Director of Sustainability at The Crown Estate – one of the largest land owners in the UK – is better understanding the diverse benefits the ground can provide. Too often, says Gough, land use decisions are based on the bluntest of instruments: projected profits. Meanwhile, less easily quantified forms of wealth, like ecosystem services and human health, aren’t integrated into the equation. “Because we don’t value human and natural capital correctly, they’re still seen as trade-offs”, Gough says. “You have to value the total contribution of land to society,
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Photo: Hemera/Thinkstock
Compared to other limited resources, from fossil fuels to fresh water, we don’t pay much attention to the stuff we’re standing on. But as the human population climbs beyond seven billion and living standards improve, productive land is increasingly put-upon. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, nearly 20 million hectares of arable land, an area the size of Cambodia, are sacrificed to urbanisation annually, and another 12 million are lost to desertification, a process that will only accelerate as climate change intensifies. As productive terrain vanishes, rival land uses may come into competition for limited space. “Both the tea industry and the grain industry are looking to expand into the same areas in Africa, but there’s a finite amount of land available”, says Ann-Marie Brouder, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future. As journalist Fred Pearce documents in his book ‘The Land Grabbers’, when industrial sectors rush to claim available land, ecosystems and rural livelihoods are often collateral damage. In South Sudan, for instance, diverse industries, from South African brewing to Norwegian forestry to Egyptian private equity, are trying to get their hands on arable
Photo: MarkNim/iStockphoto
Humans have always fought over land. With growing pressure on this finite resource, can industry, agriculture and nature learn to share? Ben Goldfarb charts new territory.
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Photo: FernandoPodolski/iStockphoto
Photos: xxxxx
Brazil’s grasslands: home to anteaters, armadillos – and now beef, poultry and sugar
Even palm oil might not be so disastrous under the right circumstances. According to researchers at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), situating palm plantations on already degraded land can provide strong yields to growers and prevent further deforestation. However, the definition of degraded land remains a hotly contested topic: new research suggests that previously logged forests may contain a surprising amount of biodiversity. The chief arbiter of such questions is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a certifying body that grants approval to palm growers that adhere to best practices. But while the RSPO is fine as far as it goes, it addresses only a single commodity, not an entire landscape. “Certification is good if you’re only looking at impacts within your certified region,” says Watt. “But it doesn’t offer much help in terms of substitution and indirect impacts. You can’t call the palm oil industry sustainable unless it fits within broader forest governance that protects standing rainforest across Southeast Asia.” Could a form of certification exist for a vast, integrated landscape? The Forests Dialogue, a partnership between groups including the WWF and the World Bank, is currently developing a set of principles that would seek to achieve that goal. While the guidelines are still under construction, they may steer both producers and consumers towards well-managed landscapes in which the ‘4Fs’ – food, fuel, fibre and forests – sustainably coexist. “If these
Photo: Edsongrandisoli/iStockphoto
Even a suboptimal energy crop can increase a farmer’s resilience
EU’s own biofuels mandate, palm oil plantations have infamously supplanted forests and peat lands throughout Southeast Asia, exacerbating the climate change that the policies were designed to mitigate, and, claims Oxfam, contributing to global hunger by driving up food prices. Any large-scale efforts at land planning will likely have to address these farflung impacts. A recent analysis by Chatham House suggests that biofuel policy reform could include stipulations to bar biofuels from land recently used for food production, or allow governments to relax their biofuels mandates during run-ups in food prices. Another solution, says Iain Watt, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, is to integrate biofuels into multi-use landscapes, rather than growing them in monocultures. “Even a suboptimal energy crop can increase a farmer’s resilience if it’s incorporated in a good rotation”, says Watt. “You might have a piece of land that over a five year period can provide a bit of food, a bit of energy, and a biodiversity benefit as well.” The recent conversion of a number of coal-fired power plants to biofuel suggests that farmers may soon be able to bank on biomass feedstock such as elephant grass, along with waste from crops and forestry. “I see a lot of potential for cellulose-based ethanol [produced from crop waste],” says Mark Driscoll, Head of Food at Forum for the Future. “Farmers already look at it as a potential source of diversification and additional income.”
principles are adopted by a broad group, let’s say the Consumer Goods Forum, you affect the entire supply chain,” says Gary Dunning, Director of The Forests Dialogue. “This is an opportunity to look at the landscape as a whole, to go beyond the forest and prioritise land-use decision-making.” While certification programmes rely on voluntary compliance from companies, the private sector may need a push to adopt holistic land management. “We’d like to see governments be more coordinated in their approach, and give common incentives to all farmers to take a landscape perspective”, says Dunning. In countries like Costa Rica such incentives have included payments for ecosystem services, which provide landowners subsidies for conserving water, carbon and biodiversity. At the same time, adds Watt, excessive governmental involvement – say, strictly designated production areas – could be “unpleasant and draconian”. How can governments and concerned NGOs encourage integrated land planning without compromising local autonomy? Simply bringing stakeholders together to share strategies, exchange knowledge, and discuss opportunities, says Brouder, may get us partway there. Xiaoting Hou of The Forests Dialogue describes an orchestrated meeting between three Brazilian farmers, including one who practiced diverse, multi-use plantings and frequent crop rotations and one who intensively cultivated a huge soya bean monoculture. “The large farmer had thought he was a sustainable producer, but after he saw these other examples he wanted to try out their methods,” reports Hou. “Whether or not he’ll actually do it, he’s been exposed to a different land use approach.” But while such knowledge transfer is an encouraging step toward holistic management, the parable of the Cerrado illustrates that humanity has a long way to go before it can forecast, let alone control, the consequences of its land use decisions. To borrow a metaphor from climate crusader Bill McKibben, the problem of integrated land management calls not for a silver bullet, but for silver buckshot: an array of potential solutions, refined through rigorous trial and error. To that end, software packages like InVEST may grow larger scale in their predictive abilities; land management techniques like watershed protection may help humans derive more value from individual parcels, and reforming perverse incentives such as biofuel mandates may help prevent policies implemented on one continent from destroying ecosystems on another. Devising certification programmes that reward not single commodities but holistic landscape management will drive producers to consider the full impacts of their activities. And creating forums for different sectors to coordinate activities and share best practices will help industry more wisely steward the land in its care. Most important, says Mark Driscoll, is ensuring that smallholders, the people whose lives are most touched by land-use decisions, retain control over their own resources. Jim Elizondo is one example of how autonomous landowners can spark dramatic innovation. In 1982, Elizondo pioneered a silvopasture system on his ranch in Mexico in which cattle grazed not in treeless pastures but among groves of edible, nitrogen-fixing Leucaena trees. The results, says
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Elizondo, were stunning: his new techniques conserved soil, cut water use in half, and created habitat for pest-eating birds. And most important, at least from a rancher’s perspective, beef cows yielded more meat, milk cows produced more milk, and the rejuvenated land was able to hold up to three times as many cattle. These days, Elizondo manages a ranch in Florida and teaches courses to landowners interested in adopting silvopasture. “Generally, people don’t want to change”, says Elizondo. “If you tell ranchers that the trees create a microclimate that’s 15 degrees cooler and holds more water, they don’t believe it. But if you give them a handheld thermometer and show them, they’re convinced.” At all scales, from individual landowners interested in holistic management to governments and corporations trying to integrate land uses in a global system, experimentation will birth solutions. “You can’t change a ranch in a year,” says Elizondo. “You start by planting a few acres.”
It’s an opportunity to look at the landscape as a whole
Ben Goldfarb is a reader in forestry at Yale, and Editor of Sage Magazine.
Wanted: cows? Cows are villains in many environmental dramas: they guzzle food and water, dominate 60% of global agricultural land, and together with other ruminant livestock contribute 80 million tonnes of methane to the atmosphere annually. To protect the planet, goes conventional thinking, humanity must eat less beef. But what if the problem isn’t how many cows we eat, but how they’re raised? According to the Savory Institute, a nonprofit devoted to grasslands restoration, smarter grazing could transform cattle from the climate’s foe into its ally. Soils, and the plants and microbes that inhabit them, evolved in the presence of grazers – and just as large mammals need land, claims Allen Savory, the institute’s founder, the land needs large mammals. Cattle hooves, Savory explained in a recent TED talk, trample dying grasses into the soil and so help the grasses decay naturally, allowing the soil to store more carbon and water. By mimicking the grazing habits of natural herds, ranchers may be able to create healthy soils whose carbon storage more than makes up for the methane emissions of livestock. While some scientists remain sceptical of Savory’s methods – several studies have failed to verify the benefits he claims – his strategies are nonetheless catching on. According to Judith Schwartz, author of ‘Cows Save the Planet’, holistic grazing has been adopted by over 10,000 ranchers, who are producing meat, recharging aquifers and sequestering carbon on 40 million acres and counting. “From the steppe in Central Asia, to the Pampas in South America, to the savannah in Africa,” Schwartz says, “these lands are most functional with animals.”
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Sarah Roberts, ETP’s Chief Executive, believes the plantation model is “hard to sustain” in the long term. Scale is a factor: encouraging smallholding should enable more of the value in tea to be retained locally. But there can also be significant challenges for smallholders, she adds, as they need to invest in maintaining and improving the crop, in the environment, marketing and labour. Currently, their returns are only half as much as plantations achieve. Jordy van Honk, Senior Project Manager for tea at IDH, the Sustainable Trade Initiative, thinks that helping smallholders improve is crucial to the future of the tea industry. “Without action we will certainly see many smallholder producers living in poverty”, he says. “In general they have very limited access to extension services and inputs such as fertiliser and finance. At the same time these producers have become more important to secure tea supply for the future.” Kenya, which accounts for just under 9% of global production, has already provided one model of how smallholders can prosper. They are organised into an extremely effective group, the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), which represents almost 500,000 small-scale farmers, producing over 60% of Kenya’s tea. The agency manages more than 60 tea factories, and also invests prudently to secure its members’ financial future. In fact the KTDA model has proved so successful that Rwanda has sought the organisation’s help to convert some of its own state-owned plantations into smallholdings. And what of climate change? Is the industry preparing to adapt? According to Roberts, “Producers are thinking ahead, looking for more droughtresistant plants, managing water more effectively and considering where tea is grown.” Indeed, some producers are moving production to higher levels, where drought is less of an issue. But Michael Pennant-Jones, Group Sustainability Manager at tea producer Finlays, says issues like soil erosion and the distribution of rainfall still pose a significant threat to production. “The question is, can we mitigate the effects and adapt our operations to it?”
Chai challenge
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accounting for between one half and three-quarters of total costs. Although wages remain low (in many tea-producing areas, workers are starting to shun tea estates in favour of jobs elsewhere) a large proportion of tea is still grown on big plantations, set up in colonial times. The owners are required to provide facilities like hospitals and schools for their workers, costly services which limit their ability to increase wage levels. All stages of the tea production process are also energy intensive – in some cases it can use three times the energy of producing the same weight of steel. And as energy costs rise, so does the financial pressure on tea producers. As Dan Crossley, Executive Director of the Food Ethics Council, warns: “If the tea industry does not wake up to the serious issues hitting it, it will face severe supply shortages, cost increases and competition from other drinks.” The industry is already addressing many of these challenges. It is now six years since Unilever, one of the world’s biggest tea companies, said it would source all its tea using the sustainability standards of the Rainforest Alliance, under which farmers must commit to improvements in worker welfare, farm management and environmental protection; and more than 25 years since the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) was established by a number of large tea companies to monitor their supply chains. Since then, the ETP has engaged in a wide range of projects, from helping Kenyan farmers adapt to climate change to promoting the interests of women, who form the majority of tea workers. It also offers training programmes to help producers with key problems, such as factory health and safety, use of agrochemicals, and environmental management, including biodiversity.
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Photo: Hadynyah/iStockphoto
One 10th of Sri Lanka’s tea land has been converted to rubber, palm oil and fruit
A nice cup of tea is the usual prescription for everything from severe shock to a tiring day. But the industry behind the restorative cuppa is facing some challenges of its own, which, if not addressed, could have a dramatic impact on the supply chain behind the world’s favourite drink. Climate change, urbanisation, the growing affluence of emerging economies and the attractions of alternative crops like biofuels are having an effect on the viability and costs of all types of agriculture and industry. Other issues – like the dynamics of the plantation system under which a large proportion of tea is produced, and changing consumption patterns in its core markets – are specific to tea. In combination, they pose a significant challenge to all three parts of the supply chain: growers, packagers and retailers. In 2009 a drought in Kenya, the world’s third largest tea producer, caused a 30% drop in production in the Rift Valley. Modelling of possible climate change impacts, commissioned by the Ethical Tea Partnership, indicates that large swathes of the country’s tea-growing areas could become marginal by 2030. Other models predict that Darjeeling production could fall by between 40-80% over the same period. And if the global temperature continues to rise, tea production in Uganda will be restricted to mountains and hillsides. In addition, crops seen as more lucrative are increasingly replacing tea in some of its core areas. In Sri Lanka, for example, 13,000 hectares – close to a 10th of the total used for tea cultivation – was converted to crops like rubber, palm oil and fruit in the five years to 2010. There are issues with the overheads too. Labour is the main expense for the tea industry, typically
Photo: Finlays
Change is brewing for the tea industry. Can key players reach a consensus on the best way forward? Heather Connon reads the leaves.
Tea remains a very fragmented industry, making it hard for its key players to present a ‘cohesive voice’ on sustainability issues. Recognising the need for one, Pennant-Jones joined a new consortium convened by Forum for the Future, Tea 2030. It explores what a sustainable tea sector could look like in future, and brings together two of the world’s biggest tea buyers, Tata and Unilever – owners of Tetley and PG Tips respectively – as well as Finlays, ETP, Fairtrade and IDH. Pennant-Jones makes the point that although there are some big tea companies, no single organisation has more than a 10% market share, and growers, packers and retailers all having different interests to pursue – adding to the case for Tea 2030. “Finlays can clearly have an impact on the local environment and on our immediate business”, he says. “But to have a big impact [on the industry] you need to work with others. For example, if we change to a revolutionary packaging system on our own, it probably won’t work. We alone do not have the leverage to introduce it across the industry, so retailers may not be interested in supporting the changes.” So far, this influential group has identified 19 key issues, from the fact that China is reducing its exports as domestic consumption increases to the use of pesticides and other chemicals. Ann-Marie Brouder, Principal Sustainability Adviser at Forum for the Future, says one goal of the project is to define guiding principles which will help the tea industry address sustainability and long-term planning challenges. “We want producers to look at the guidelines and be able to say, ‘This is the expected scenario for my industry and this is how I can deal with it.’” Opinions on the best way of selling tea also vary across the industry. Unlike coffee, grains and other agricultural products, trading of tea is still largely done at regular auctions rather than through the market. Specifying prices, quality and quantities in advance would ensure retailers have the quantity and quality of tea they require. A move to that system has been under discussion for decades, and seriously considered twice but, so far, no changes have been made. Some tea experts believe that, as China and India export less, and supplies from elsewhere are restricted by climate change and competition from other crops, tea will have to move towards long-term supply contracts. These would also give producers certainty about the price and volumes of tea they could potentially sell, which should in turn encourage them to make longer-term investments. However, speculation by market traders has made the prices of other commodities traded on the market more volatile. The tea industry could also emulate coffee in another way, by producing more upmarket, speciality teas to encourage consumption by younger, more affluent consumers. Although there are some bespoke tea shops, Forum for the Future’s Brouder points out, there are as yet no chains to rival the likes of Starbucks or Costa Coffee – another possible avenue for the tea industry to explore. Clearly, to make the most of these opportunities and minimise the risks, there needs to be some sort of consensus on the future of the industry, and this is the goal Tea 2030 means to reach.
Smallholders are crucial to the future supply of tea
Heather Connon is a freelance journalist specialising in finance and investment. For more information, visit www.tea2030.tumblr.com
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Silicon Africa
information is turned into a resource exchange list which is shared with all the attendees. ActivSpaces, another AfriLabs member, has helped to produce Agro-Hub, a farmers’ cooperative established to combat poverty among rural farmers in Cameroon. The cooperative provides local growers with price information and agricultural advice via SMS. In March 2013, Agro-Hub also established the Agro-Mart farmers’ supermarket to help growers make more money from their efforts in the field. Agro-Mart now supplies hotels, restaurants and other retailers and exporters, and has plans for franchises, potentially restructuring the food chain across the country. In many hubs, projects catering for the lifestyle aspirations of the local community – from shopping to entertainment – sit alongside solutions for energy, water and food. Take the Ugandan hub, Hive Colab. It’s home to projects like Bet OTM, a sports betting service for mobile phones, but also holds meetings on climate change issues, and helped develop WASH Reporter: a tool that enables members of the public to report crises related to water sanitation and health. The work of the hubs has caught the attention of international investors. Microsoft recently announced a $75 million CSR fund called 4Afrika, part of which is earmarked for start-up incubation in AfriLabs members iHub and m:lab. Other tech multinationals have made similar investments: unsurprising when you consider that Africa is home to six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the last decade (according to McKinsey). The ability of the African tech sector to attract high-profile investment is partly due to improvements to the continent’s IT infrastructure. Until 2009, startups were held back by a chronic lack of connectivity. A single connection around the west coast, with a maximum capacity of 340Gbps (gigabits per second), meant more than half a billion people were sharing the same amount of bandwidth as the population of the Netherlands. Over the last three and a half years, that capacity has increased more than a hundredfold, to 35,000Gbps. It’s predicted to treble again by the end of next year. The increase in capacity has in turn fuelled the hub movement. Akinyemi is now working through
Show up in St Louis and a hub will help you find the resources you need
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According to Akinyemi, AfriLabs is “essentially an expression of the personal vision of the five co-founders [Bart Lacroix of the 1% Club, Bill White of VC4Africa, Erik Hershman of iHub, ActivSpace’s Bill Zimmerman and Kampala’s Hive Colab founder Jon Gosier]. Each of them had already started hubs on the continent. They noticed they had similar interests and that there was a trend of hubs popping up elsewhere.” When the co-founders realised the organisation needed more than part-time attention, they turned to Akinyemi. An entrepreneur enthusiast, she began her career at Catalyst, a New York-based non-profit that helps business to build inclusive environments and expand opportunities for women. Four years later, she accepted a Princeton in Africa fellowship, which develops young leaders committed to Africa’s advancement through a year-long fellowship with organisations on the African continent. The hope is that this experience will translate into a lifelong commitment to African affairs and service. That certainly seems to be the case with Akinyemi. Her time working with an international NGO in Abuja, Nigeria, sparked her interest in business and economic development, which culminated in an MBA in Sustainable Global Enterprise. Since then she has focused on understanding how businesses are built and developed, working with businesses in Africa, the US and Latin America. Her community-inclusive business strategy for a sugarcane ethanol venture in Mozambique was one major success: her efforts helped it to marry positive social impact with a sound commercial case, a goal shared by many of the start-ups emerging from Africa’s tech hubs. Akinyemi’s main aim in her new role is to help start-ups quickly find partners to help them grow. “Start-ups emerge because they are embedded in communities that facilitate people and investment coming together”, she says. “I see AfriLabs as a way to aggregate and distribute resources. So, if you’re an investor or entrepreneur showing up in St Louis, Senegal, when you get to the airport it may not be obvious who you go to if you’re looking for a partner or a supplier. But when you have a hub it makes it easier to find the resources you need.” One AfriLab hub is already helping its members to identify what resources they can exchange on a national level. Nairobi’s iHub, which accelerated the development of Ushahidi, hosts a weekly Green Breakfast Club for local businesses. Events include keynote speeches from sustainability leaders, followed by a resource exchange where each attendee presents their company, their ‘gives’ and their ‘asks’. The
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What gives AfriLabs an edge is its support for aspiring youngsters
Adam Oxford is a technology journalist based in Johannesburg. Additional material by Duncan Jefferies. For more information, visit www.afrilabs.com
Team building: constructing a solar water heater at an Icecairo hackathon
Photo: Icecairo
A sharp eye for opportunity: Tayo Akinyemi of AfriLabs
Africa’s tech scene is surging. Across the continent, new hubs, labs and co-working environments are giving rise to oases of innovation. These meeting places act as a bridge between technology start-ups, investors and academics, nurturing collaborations. Entrepreneurs experiment together and learn from one another, supported by the hubs’ ICT infrastructure and mentoring programmes. The results – from the ‘crowdmapping’ tool Ushahidi to homebrew solar heaters to a farmers’ cooperative – are strengthening community-led food and energy systems, and could bring new resilience to local economies. In February 2012, the Zambian hub Bongohive used Ushahidi to produce a map of all the tech hubs across Africa, discovering 29 organisations in total. Today that same map (africahubs.crowdmap.com) lists 91 hubs, innovation centres, hacker spaces and business incubators. Many of them need external support to grow and prosper – and that’s exactly what a new pan-African ‘hub of hubs’, called AfriLabs, provides. Set up by some of the biggest names in African IT, and backed by funding from the NGO Hivos, AfriLabs seeks to identify common goals across national boundaries, and help hubs pool their efforts to achieve them. Since its conception in 2011, 19 hubs have signed up, eager to network, learn from each other, and benefit from shared resources. Together, these hubs will stand a better chance of creating technological solutions for some of the biggest issues facing the continent. This is the considerable ambition of AfriLabs. It will take some coordination – a challenge that excites Tayo Akinyemi, AfriLabs’ newly appointed Director. An American born to Nigerian parents, Akinyemi is a strong believer in the potential for entrepreneurs to change the African economic landscape. “Tackling resource scarcity, the potential effects of climate change, lack of energy, food security and agriculture: for our members, these are real business opportunities”, she says.
Photo: Jonathan Marks
Will a new network of technology incubators put Africa on a fast-track to a sustainable future? Adam Oxford meets Tayo Akinyemi, Director of AfriLabs.
a backlog of AfriLabs membership applications. To become a member at the most basic level, labs must provide an open innovation space with access to broadband, meeting areas and a work area for up to 10 members. Above this level, labs are evaluated on their member base, track record of hosting events, staff and organisational capacity, management team and other factors. The goal is for AfriLabs to be open and non-restrictive, while encouraging labs to graduate to higher tiers of membership by improving the resources they offer. What really gives AfriLabs an edge, compared to traditional ‘IT for development’ services, is the level of support given to aspirational youngsters. Akinyemi’s understanding of their needs was a key factor in the founders’ decision to appoint her as Director. “Africa is young”, she says, “And it’s young in a way that the creation of formal, full-time jobs is not keeping pace with the need. It’s important for entrepreneurship to emerge so that young people feel as though they can create their own opportunities.” Some commentators are wary that too great a focus on quick-fix entrepreneurial ventures may discourage young developers from taking on the kind of systemic problems that require patience and long-term thinking to fix. “The average tech entrepreneur in the US is 42-years-old. The 22-year-old Zuckerbergs make up a 100th of a percent”, says Roy Singham, Founder of Thoughtworks, a multinational software company with offices in Johannesburg. “We need to be building much more a sense of competencies across social capital, management capital and business opportunities.” And yet, by supplying the infrastructure and social capital that will turn today’s entrepreneurs into tomorrow’s success stories, an overarching sense of opportunity – with skills to match – may be just what AfriLabs achieves.
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In the 16th century, Persians living under the Safavid dynasty built beautiful towers to house thousands of pigeons. They would harvest their droppings to fertilise fields of melons and cucumbers. Now, an artist and researcher based in Amsterdam wants to revive the concept, in the heart of modern cities. Arne Hendriks of the Next Nature department at the Technical University in Eindhoven envisions a pigeon tower made from recycled paper bricks – reimagining the bird many consider a nuisance as a rich resource for urban farms.
Photos: xxxxx
Photos: xxxxx
Pigeon potential
Photo: Erwin Bolwidt
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Fighting talk Ruby McGregor-Smith, CEO of MITIE, tells Anna Simpson why courage is today’s most valuable asset. of openness: one which welcomes in fresh thinking and challenges each individual to venture beyond their comfort zone. She sees this as the only way for businesses to win in a slow-growth economy and a resource-constrained world: innovation is the way forward, and fear its nemesis. She remembers her own terror at the prospect of public speaking. “When I first trained as an accountant we were filmed presenting and I had to stop half way through and sit down – I couldn’t do it. But you learn. I just made myself do more and more”, she says. It’s not defiance for the sake of it, she insists. “As terrified as you may be, you’ll come out a different person. And then at least you know you can change something”, she explains. She’s serious about the need for business leaders to get over their fears. As Chair of the Women’s Business Council, a member of the Presidents Board for the Confederation of British Industry, and a Member of the Board of Trustee Directors for Business in the Community, McGregor-Smith is more aware than some of the opportunities missed through lack of courage. “Senior managers need to be capable of change all the time”, she argues. “We’re all too tick-box.” One of her bugbears is recruitment. Success depends on getting the right talent in the pipeline,
Photos: MITIE GROUP PLC; iStockphoto/Thinkstock
There’s a danger when you think you’re big
Over the last 10 years, Ruby McGregor-Smith has amassed 15 awards recognising her influence as a role model, high achiever and pioneer. Most recently, she received a CBE – the UK’s highest royal accolade – for her contribution to business and the wide impact of her work. I can’t imagine there’s a cabinet to display the trophies, though: for her, impact is the goal, and self-importance the hurdle. On her first day as Chief Executive of the outsourcing services company MITIE, McGregor-Smith took down the glass divides that offered her not just an office but the traditional trappings of leadership – status, exclusivity, distance. “Let’s not start pretending we’ve done well. We’re only as good as tomorrow”, she warns. This isn’t modesty speaking. It’s ambition. MITIE, McGregorSmith insists, is a small business: “There’s a danger when you think you’re big: you stop growing.” Her words apply as much to personal development as they do to the growth of business, and it’s a distinction she is happy to blur. For her, businesses only grow through people – which explains her passion for outsourcing: “Bringing in expertise to support your business strategy is very important.” What McGregor-Smith aims to establish at MITIE, and advocates in other organisations, is a culture
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McGregor insists but, again, fear often gets in the way: “You need to find fantastic talent. You might not like what you get: everyone in the world has a bias when they recruit people.” She has herself taken diversity training to become more aware of any bias, and would advise every recruiter to do the same. “It would be wrong for MITIE to have 72,000 employees in my image. You have to ask, do you look for the broadest experiences? Do you look for talent that is actually better than you are? The best management teams are those that have the best experience, collectively – not all wrapped up in a top dog. Businesses will get better when they crack that.” But lack of diversity in the boardroom can’t just be blamed on selection processes: many bright young minds don’t get that far, held back through a combination of poor careers advice and low selfesteem. It’s one of the things she is most keen to see young people overcome: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell a group of 15-year-olds in school that they needn’t worry about half the things on their minds? If you could only convince them that it’s alright to be a bit different! Most of them just follow what they think is expected of them, instead of putting their efforts into something they have a passion for. I think quite often people don’t realise how much that energy can drive others.” To prove her point, she tells me that she would never have been made a partner at the accountancy firm where she trained. “They weren’t particularly excited by me, and I wasn’t excited by the work.” It’s hard to believe, but a helpful reminder that a great attitude to work isn’t just something people are born with: it comes with a conviction that what you’re doing is worth it. “If you could get kids to focus on what they love, we’d be in a better place. It’s about raising aspirations.” I ask her whether young people know what they want to do: are they asking themselves this sort of question? “No”, she replies, bemoaning the absence of a joined-up careers service, that would bring together businesses, colleges and universities together to tell 14-16-year-olds what the opportunities are, and help them find their path. That said, nurturing talent in a business isn’t just about letting more youngsters get a foot in the door, McGregor-Smith insists. We must also learn to listen to them: “You need them to come in without a care in the world and ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you need to promote them to very senior levels very quickly. Hierarchy will hold you back.” This shift towards a culture which values diverse insights and collective wisdom, over the monopoly of a few leading figures, is mirrored across our increasingly connected world, from social media to decentralised energy. Embracing it, McGregor-Smith says, is “a huge opportunity”, and one that depends on human capital. Take the cost savings businesses could enjoy by generating their own power supply. “If the people at the heart of your company know how your buildings and facilities work and understand it, then you can see what decentralised energy would do for you.” And the same goes for energy-saving solutions, she adds. “Energy is quite misunderstood: few managers know what they spend on energy and
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what’s driving the cost up. Think about what power you use in each room, throughout the day. Do you realise how much you spend just by switching the kettle on? You might change your behaviour just because you know the consequences.” I ask for an example, and she gives the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, which examined its energy use and how it correlated to peak tariffs, and actually changed its rehearsal times as a result. It all comes down to awareness, she insists: “I think the Government should launch a big campaign on it. It’s not on top of the agenda for many industries, but it needs to be. We need the sort of high-profile campaign for energysaving that you see for health issues.” An interesting proposition, and no idle comparison. Awareness of the correlation between energy supply and public health is growing. It becomes obvious when you’re suffering from a chill in a poorly insulated house, or struggling to breathe in an urban pollution hot-spot. Of course, the less an economy has to spend on energy, the more it can spend on improving health. Take the UK’s National Health Service. “A lot of its structures are old, in many cases Victorian. To upgrade it is expensive, but the savings could be put back into health services”, says McGregor-Smith. “That means more doctors and nurses, shorter waiting lists for operations, better care.” It’s something the NHS is addressing, with a new energy innovation centre for Cambridge University Hospitals with £36 million funding from Aviva and the UK Green Investment Bank. The centre, which will house a combined heat and power unit, biomass boiler and efficient dual fuel boilers, and recover heat from medical incineration, is expected to save the NHS £20 million in energy costs and 25,000 tonnes of CO2 over the 25-year contract term. It will be developed and operated by MITIE. I congratulate McGregor-Smith on winning the bid, but there’s no self-satisfaction in her response: her eye is already on the next project, and the obstacles in her path. Let’s not start pretending we’ve done well… “That took us 18 months, once we’d been identified as the preferred bidder. It’s taken too long to happen. We can only do one: I would love to do 10 of them, but not at this cost.” She wants to see decisions made more rapidly by more people in more places. That means deregulation: the courage to let go of the reins. “There should be hundreds of Green Bank projects across the UK. If you gave people the data showing why we need to do these things, they would happen as a matter of course.”
McGregor-Smith: taking down the glass walls, and the ceiling
Letting talent in isn’t enough: we must learn to listen
Anna Simpson is Editor, Green Futures.
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Dare to share
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other sources. But it seems people are beginning to realise that it might not always be a good idea to turn off their internal privacy settings. In October 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported that popular Facebook apps like Farmville had transmitted user identities to internet tracking companies. Six European data protection agencies are currently contemplating legal action against Google due to changes to its privacy policies. And WhatsApp, a popular messaging service, was recently found guilty of breaching international privacy laws: users are forced to grant the app access to their entire address book, including details of non-users of the service. Perhaps partly as a result of these and other high-profile privacy cases, which highlight how little control internet users really have over their data, Ovum’s latest ‘Consumer Insights Survey’ showed that only 14% of people now trust that personal data placed online will not be exploited. In addition, 68% of the internet population in 11 different countries would select a ‘do not track’ (DNT) feature if easily available. The World Wide Web Consortium is working to establish a global DNT standard, but talks have proved inconclusive. As things stand, there is no requirement for sites to honour DNT requests. Nevertheless, all the major web browsers have added a DNT feature, which signals the user’s preference to any sites they visit. But the option to turn it on is often buried deep in the browser settings, with few details of what it actually does. By March this year only 11% of the 450 million users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser had turned the setting on, two years after it first became available (and it’s one of the more clearly worded examples). Internet Explorer 10, the latest version of Microsoft’s browser, recently
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Photo: MikkelWilliam/iStockphoto
Big data is sometimes called the ‘nervous system’ of the planet. Through analysis of huge datasets, governments and organisations can glean new insights into the causes of disease, poverty, energy usage and environmental damage, and spot ways to develop more effective solutions. “From a very basic perspective, smarter use of data simply reduces waste and increases efficiency”, says Francine Bennett, CEO of Mastodon C, which enables companies to minimise their carbon emissions while running big data operations. These efficiency gains also stretch to highly targeted communications campaigns. By applying predictive analytics to customer data, businesses can send out their messages with unprecedented accuracy. Ambitious companies are not only using data to communicate more wisely but to rethink everything they do. Liz Coll, Senior Policy Advocate at the consumer rights group Consumer Focus, describes big data as the new oil: “a commodity which will drive innovation and transform business models”. But to get the most out of big data, organisations need another valuable commodity: trust. “We are the data” – in the words of an Intel Labs-sponsored website, wethedata.org, which aims to raise people’s awareness of data ownership issues. If large numbers of concerned citizens refuse to share their information with organisations, then datasets will soon start to develop big holes, and the insights gained from them will lose their accuracy. Until recently, the trust issue hasn’t been a major problem for most organisations. During the early years of Web 2.0 everyone seemed only too happy to share a huge amount of information about themselves through tweets, Facebook updates, geo-location data and
Photo: Scanrail/iStockphoto
Big data could help solve many problems, but only if we’re able to trust the organisations putting it to use. Tom Blass and Duncan Jefferies report.
took things a step further by turning the feature on by default. Brendon Lynch, Microsoft’s Chief Privacy Officer, wrote in a blog post that the decision represented an important step in the process of “establishing privacy by default, putting consumers in control and building trust online”. A new book called ‘Big Data: A revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think’ warns that the data being collected on people could even be used against them in future – perhaps to deny them a life-saving heart operation based on a prediction that they will take up smoking. Exploring the limits of data usage is part of the mandate of the Open Data Institute, a think-tank that seeks to catalyse an open data culture that has economic, environmental and social benefits. “For example, we believe, first and foremost, that personal data is not open data”, says Garvin Starks, CEO of the Open Data Institute. He feels some of the most interesting projects in the data sector turn the traditional relationship between the data generator (individual) and collector (provider of goods or services) on its head, feeding back to those individuals information about their own consumption, preferences or buying habits. Starks was also a founding member (and remains a director of) the UK Department of Business Innovation and Skills’ Midata project – an initiative which aims to encourage private sector companies to release personal data to consumers, assist them in accessing that data safely, and get businesses to develop innovative services and applications that will help consumers to find better deals, or tell them interesting things about their spending habits. Parts of the Midata agenda have now became statutory under the UK’s Enterprise and Regulator Reform Bill, which received assent in April. Starks is still involved in one aspect of it: in advance of any statutory obligation to do so, a number of energy companies plan to provide consumers with their energy consumption data in a machine readable format (a similar initiative called Green Button was launched in the US in 2011). This will allow people to not only shop around for better prices, but also take steps to improve their energy efficiency. “There is a huge amount of value in this information”, says Starks, who believes access to data of this kind could also spark more interest in micro generation. “The challenge lies in convincing customers that it is in their interests to understand it, and in building the tools to unlock it.” Energy companies that participate now could reap long-term rewards from confidence-building dialogue with their customers. All organisations could also foster greatest trust in the way they use people’s data by creating clear privacy policies. Currently, the dense, legalese-heavy documents people are asked to sign when joining a new site or social network tend, if anything, to obfuscate the company’s data-sharing policing rather than clarify it, building fear not trust. A site called Terms of Service; Didn’t Read aims to tackle this issue, rating and explaining website terms and privacy policies. But even once you’ve signed up to a site, there’s often no easy way to adjust your privacy settings – a common complaint directed at Facebook. If organisations don’t take steps to give people greater control over their data, then governments
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might do so instead. In fact, they already are. The draft European Data Protection Regulation aims to unify data protection within the EU with a single law, enhancing the consumer’s right to know about the data companies hold on them, and also bestowing ‘the right to be forgotten’ – that is, to ensure that their personal data is deleted when, for example, they transfer their custom to another supplier. The law is expected to be adopted by 2014, though discussions about the content are still ongoing. The US Congress, Federal Trade Commission and Department of Commerce are also considering regulations of their own. The Australian Privacy Act has already been amended so that, from March 2014, organisations need to ensure they manage people’s data in an open and transparent manner. Lobbyists for big technology companies claim these regulations could stifle innovation, robbing us of some of the valuable insights and services big data provides (several thousand amendments to the EU Data Protection Regulation have already been put forward, angering consumer rights groups). One answer could lie in a new mathematical technique called differential privacy, which allows researchers to draw information from data repositories, but ‘blurs’ any details that could be used to identify an individual. A world Economic Form report called ‘Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage’ even envisions a future where all collected data is tagged with a software code that states an individual’s preference for how it is used. By one estimate there will be 44 times more data produced in 2020 than there was in 2009. And before long, data from biometric monitors, nanobots and other micro-sensors that document our health and activities in minute detail will be added to the mix – a revolution that will put an even deeper spin on the phrase ‘we are the data’. Hopefully, by then, companies will have learned to be more open about how they use personal information, and individuals will be even more aware of its value. Tom Blass is a freelance journalist specialising in law and security issues, and Editor of World Export Controls Review. Duncan Jefferies is a freelance journalist specialising in technology and digital innovation, and Assistant Editor at Green Futures.
Only 14% of consumers trust that online data won’t be exploited
Does she know she is the data? And does she mind...?
Green Futures July 2013
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Lessons for life More than five million people around the world have taken a MOOC
Can lecturers keep up with the Digital Natives?
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Green Futures
“Be the hero! You have the ability to change the world.” It sounds like a line from a summer blockbuster, perhaps said by Albert the butler to Batman. But it’s actually taken from a recent lecture delivered to students in a Global Social Problems class at St. Edwards University, Texas. Their mission? Research large-scale global social problems and act upon them at a local level, demonstrating truly ‘heroic’ characteristics such as perspective, empathy and cooperation. The lecturer’s goal, according to a published brief, was to encourage students to “adopt a broader perspective: that of a hero who has the ability to change the world by how you think, what you say, and how you act”. The course drew upon gamification techniques, such as competition and against-the-clock challenges, to encourage problem-solving and group participation. Students earned superhero badges for improving their understanding of issues such as poverty, gender inequality, consumerism and water security, and imagining potential solutions to these problems. Social media participation was deemed an “essential” part of students’ research. Using Facebook’s non-profit pages, Twitter, Digg and Slideshare, they instigated debates on their chosen issue. Offline, they engaged in hands-on intervention with organisations such as Invisible Children, or attended demonstrations like Occupy Austin. In their final blog entries for the course, many explained how they were challenged to view the world differently and change their preconceptions of a ‘global problem’. This is just one example of how universities are embracing new approaches to shape the minds of
their students. It taps into two major trends that could influence a student’s higher education choices in future. One is the demand for meaningful careers: Net Impact’s 2012 ‘Talent Report’ found that “the potential to contribute to society” and “a job that will make the world a better place” are very important to two-thirds (65%) of workers and students, with around one in four deeming these essential. The second trend is the way technology is transforming how people of all ages prefer to learn. A global network of learners is now sharing, updating and creating information, rapidly expanding technology’s ability to educate. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have recently tapped into this trend in a big way, opening up higher education to those previously unable to access it due to socioeconomic or geographic reasons. Students learn through videos, interactive quizzes that provide instant feedback and user forums. Each MOOC has the potential to host tens of thousands of students, meaning anyone with the internet can freely access Ivy-league-quality teaching. More than five million people around the world have taken a MOOC. An MIT introduction to circuits, the first course delivered by Harvard and MIT’s joint MOOC platform, edX, attracted over 155,000 students between May 2012 and January 2013. No wonder The New York Times dubbed 2012 the ‘Year of the MOOC’. Some commentators have even suggested this is higher education’s MP3 moment: with such a wealth of information available for free online, will students want to pay the fees for a traditional university course? Rachel Armstrong, Senior TED Fellow and Co-Director of Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research at the University of Greenwich, believes universities still have much to contribute as curators of information and community builders, even as online learning gains in popularity. She sees the task of the modern university as teaching the skills to find meaning within the ever-expanding sea of information. “We have a lot of data but not a lot of meaning”, she says. “It’s actually the meaning that I think is really at stake here, because meaning leads to action. Otherwise you simply have an idea.” In the learning landscape of the future, universities will need to focus on their primary role: fostering communities where there is mentorship and guidance, thus allowing students to mature and learn how to critically analyse data. In fact, as education continues to evolve with technology, active learning will become increasingly important, argues Anna Birney, Head of System Innovation Lab at Forum for the Future. She believes that striking a balance between it and online education will allow students to “learn and innovate so we can start to create a different future”.
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Photo: wavebreakmedia/shutterstock
Technology is revolutionising higher education, offering students a crucial set of skills, says Kyla Mandel.
The ability to forge a unique educational path for themselves is a valuable tool for this generation of students, whether they are selecting courses, learning models or simply satisfying their personal curiosity. As Birney says, technological innovations such as MOOCs and gamification “offer opportunities to people to become much more self-directed learners”. These digital natives face an unstable job market when they leave university. There is also widespread recognition that our banks, high streets, health, and food systems are in crisis. Kerren Dempsey, Director of Marketing at Udacity, Stanford University’s MOOC platform, says the solutions to these challenges come from “knowing how to ask the right questions, and pulling in resources available to you”. Udacity’s mission is to “bridge the gap between realworld skills, relevant education and employment, reinvent[ing] education for the 21st century”. Can this aim be combined with more effective learning? David A Sousa, an international consultant in educational neuroscience and author of ‘How the Brain Learns’ suggests we’re good at absorbing information through methods that engage all the senses and tap the emotional side of the brain, such as humour, storytelling, group activities and games; using only the rational side of the brain doesn’t produce powerful memories. In addition, our ability to learn and recall new information is strengthened by how frequently we access it. The more we do so, the easier it becomes for our brain to pull it from our working memory. This process, called fluency, is what Udacity aims to recreate. Quizzes and exercises interspersed with short videos actively engage the senses, allowing for greater retention of information, and encouraging students to learn, think and do. Crucial to this are creative thinking and teamwork skills, argues Farnaz Ronaghi, co-founder and director of engineering at NovoEd, a new Standford MOOC platform. “As humans, [we] are not so smart alone”, he says. “We reach our full potential when we work with others to solve problems.” However, MOOCs are often criticised for providing very little personal interaction between student and teacher, or student-to-student collaboration – a fact that might contribute to the high drop-out rate (only 10% of students complete their course). NovoEd aims to address this issue. Unlike other MOOC platforms, it focuses on group projects, which demand collaboration. Greater interaction among peers may also increase students’ commitment to the course: NovoEd’s completion rates are 3% higher than other comparable online courses. A MOOC can also add an international dimension to problem-solving and group work. Economic barriers such as plane tickets are removed in these online arenas, allowing students with similar goals from across the world to work together to create solutions to pressing issues. Coursera and Udacity are also crowdsourcing lecture subtitles to improve their accessibility, while Udacity plans to subtitle 5,000 of its videos in over 100 languages. International online collaboration also provides new ways to access local knowledge and tie it into course material and discussions. As Parviz from Tajikistan, a student of Coursera’s Introduction
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Education for resilience The system which governs learning and skills, designed to match labour market supply with the demands of economic growth, is bust. Backwards-looking assumptions about growth by policy makers join unimaginative sector forecasts of labour markets, to ensure the supply and demand side of skills are increasingly out of kilter. The world is changing rapidly, but the system isn’t. Proof: from universities to schools, the education system was behind the curve for IT and low-carbon skills. Some simple interventions could turn the circle virtuous. If the goal became economic resilience, and education’s purpose to develop a person to contribute to that as fully as is possible, the system could generate a workforce (and citizenry) more entrepreneurial and better able to respond to unpredictable changes. Even if a return to conventional economic growth is possible (which I doubt), the natural environment is under stress, and social inequality on the rise. Policy-makers and skills-providers, at all levels, need to adopt a risk management strategy with these priorities for a resilient future: • resource productivity and ecosystem restoration and protection • human and social capital building, including lifelong learning skills, relationships, governance and enterprise • ecological refurbishment of the built environment • financial innovation, to serve the above. With worldwide fair trade and socially responsible investment markets topping $6.5 billion and $14 trillion, respectively, that future – chock full of innovation and jobs – is arguably underway already. Can universities accelerate the trend? Now that the National Union of Students has a £5 million Green Fund to push them, any UK institutions that don’t will lose both reputation and customers. Sara Parkin is Founder Director, Forum for the Future.
to Sustainability MOOC, wrote on its Facebook page: “The topics helped me [rethink] many issues. I hope that such efforts supported by millions of individuals around the world will lead to a future where traditional values and modern technologies will go hand in hand.” Parviz and millions of other learners are clearly benefiting from MOOCs, but online courses are unlikely to spell the end of physical universities anytime soon. Unlike undergraduate degrees, they don’t generally lead to formal qualifications. And despite being a “fantastic addition” to the classroom experience, says Jane Wilkinson, Course Director for Forum for the Future’s Masters in Sustainable Leadership, the “reflection, discussion and support elements of learning still need to happen face-to-face”. Whatever form education takes in future, adapting and updating the way we learn will always be essential for developing the skills needed to tackle pressing social problems. “Students are not simply future workers but persons and global citizens who need to acquire certain intellectual habits, a cultural breadth and a predisposition to learn throughout life”, writes John Blewitt in ‘The Sustainable University: Progress and Prospects’. Or as Henry Ford, no stranger to innovation himself, put it: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” Kyla Mandel is a freelance journalist specialising in sustainability issues.
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Cooked up in Congo
Goma’s residents saved over $6 million in 2012
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At first glance, you could easily mistake Lake Kivu for one of the world’s tourist treasures. Its turquoise shimmer sets off the vivid green of the surrounding hills – one side in Rwanda, the other in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To the north loom the Virunga Mountains, still partly covered in forest, home to the fabled ‘gorillas in the mist’. One day, perhaps, all this will indeed be a holiday hotspot. Today, it’s a hotspot of a different sort: a sporadic but vicious war raging between a tangle of rival militias. It’s fuelled by a combination of long-running communal strife, mainly between Hutus and Tutsis, and a 21st-century battle for control of the region’s rich resources: timber, diamonds, coltan and more. The gorillas have survived, so far: rebel groups find they are more valuable alive than dead, raking in money from a trickle of wildlife-loving visitors. But their future is precarious, as their habitat is cleared by illegal charcoal burners. Nearly half a million people in Goma, a rapidly growing city in the East of DRC, depend on charcoal as cooking fuel. And 80% of this comes from the forests which are, at least nominally, in protected areas. Now, a small WWF team inspired by local activist Consolee Kavira has come up with a partial solution: a simple cookstove design, produced by local artisans, which cuts charcoal consumption
Green Futures July 2013
by over half. Looking a little like a clay flowerpot wrapped in a thin metal sleeve, it’s great at drawing in air to keep the heat concentrated on the cooking pot. The charcoal burns cleanly, and at just the right temperature. It’s a big improvement on the open hearth-style stoves which were previously commonplace in Goma. As one user, Helene Batachoka, told me: “The old stove would cook too fiercely, so the food ended up tasting of smoke. This one is so much better.” The stoves sell for $5-$10, and pay for themselves in as little as two weeks. In 2012 alone, this meant Goma’s residents saved over $6 million. Total production amounts to over 43,000 stoves, and now WWF – DRC is working with local farmers to plant fast-growing stands of trees, especially selected for charcoal making. With 4,000 hectares already planted, this holds out the prospect that an increasing amount of Goma’s cooking fuel needs could, within a few years, be met from a sustainable source, winning WWF – DRC a 2013 Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy. It also shows just how much has changed since the Ashden Awards, which celebrate practical, local energy solutions that cut carbon, protect the environment and improve people’s lives, were founded back in 2001. The first prize winner was over
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Photos: Martin Wright
The scale and reach of sustainable energy has changed dramatically since the Ashden Awards were founded, 12 years ago. Martin Wright reports from Goma.
the border in Rwanda, where the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology had developed a woodsaving bread oven. At the time of winning barely 100 had been distributed. Since then, sustainable energy has gone to scale – as epitomised by another of this year’s winners, SolarAid, which has sold a cool 400,000 PV lanterns since 2010 alone. Finding new ways of making sustainable energy affordable has been key to its rapid spread. Micro credit plays a part, but other financial mechanisms have a role too, including carbon finance. Impact Carbon, another 2013 winner, uses it to help stove and water filter entrepreneurs expand at an impressive rate. Uganda’s Ugastove company, for example, has seen its sales rise from 200 a month in 2007 to over 10,000 this year. If Impact Carbon is one example of meeting an age-old human need with 21st-century finance, Azuri is another. This UK-based start-up uses scratchcards to help Kenya’s poorer households afford a solar home system, providing electric light and mobile charging. It’s a novel way of allowing people to ‘pay as you go’ for solar. Each system has a controller with a keypad to activate it. It can only be done via a code which the customer receives by texting Azuri with a number hidden on the scratchcard. It owes its success to the quickfire spread of mobile phones – another feature of the last 12 years. For Ashden winners like Azuri and Solar Aid, it’s a double win: mobiles need little power to charge, and even simple solar lanterns now include a chargepoint, so increasing their appeal. And in turn, mobiles offer new ways of promoting – and paying for – sustainable energy. Technological innovations like these mean that a watt generated in 2013 now packs a much bigger punch than when the Awards began. It’s a similar story with light. Bright, powerful LEDs are increasingly taking over from compact fluorescents, providing ample illumination for less than half the power. Innovation is playing an increasing role in the UK, too, spurred by growing concerns over rising energy bills. Monodraught, another 2013 Ashden Award winner, is pioneering a new cooling system which uses the latest phase-change material technologies to save up to 90% of the power used by conventional air conditioning. One common theme running through both the international and UK Awards from the start has been that of energy security. While apocalyptic visions of resource wars which were common in the wake of 9/11 have faded a little, uncertainty over reliability and price of supplies remains a live issue. As 2013 Cornish winners, WREN, ask: “Where would you prefer your energy to come from? Your own rooftops, local farmers and businesses? Or Russia and Qatar?” Energy security is particularly important for island communities, who are often dependent on costly imports of diesel. In response, Ashden has partnered with the World Bank to set up a new Small Island Developing States Award. This year’s winners include Cape Verde’s Cabeólica, which is replacing diesel with one abundant local resource in no danger of running out: wind. Meanwhile, the simplest response to an energy shortfall is not to use it at all. UK Award winner National Energy Action has trained over 16,000
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people to become energy efficiency experts, adept at cutting costs as well as carbon. And one of this year’s (European) Travel Award winners, Sustrans, is tempting people away from cars, an energy-intensive form of transport, onto bicycles, by linking long distance cycle routes with schools, hospitals and town centres. As such, it’s an excellent example of sustainable energy brought home. As Ashden’s Founder Director, Sarah Butler-Sloss, puts it: “Some say sustainable energy is a luxury we can’t afford. But in truth, it’s a huge opportunity. From Cornwall to Cape Verde, our 2013 finalists are showing that what’s good for the planet is also good for people, good for business, and good for economies, too.”
Consolee Kavira with WWF – DRC’s cookstove
Martin Wright is Founding Editor of Green Futures and a Visiting Judge for the Ashden Awards. Ashden is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ashden.org
Ashden Award winners, 2013 International Azuri Technologies Impact Carbon SolarAid WWF – DRC
Small Island Developing States Cabeólica D&E Green Enterprises
UK Monodraught National Energy Action Sustainable Energy Academy/United House Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network
Travel Sustrans De Lijn
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Forumupdate 2050 retrospective
Photo: P4P, The Energy, Water and Food security company™ (p4penergy.com), ©P4P Energy LLC 2013
Jonathon Porritt introduces his new book, ‘The World We Made’.
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Green Futures July 2013
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Every time I finished a book in the past, I promised myself not to write another – it’s such a painful process! But ‘The World We Made’ is a book I’ve been thinking about for more than 20 years, since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when I first realised just how difficult it is to get people to think positively about sustainability. My conviction – then, now and as I wrote ‘The World We Made’ – is very simple. Instead of portraying the future Planet Earth as a polluted, over-populated hell hole, we must show it as a place where we’d all love to live: exciting, aspirational, high-tech, fair and hopeful. ‘The World We Made’ is told through the words of Alex McKay, a history teacher looking back from 2050, trying to understand how we got from the status quo of 2013 to a much more compelling vision of a world in which: • 9 0% of energy comes from renewable sources, and 30% of electricity from solar power • s tandard IT devices are computing at the rate of the human brain, and everyone loves their robots • n anotechnology, 3D printing and biomimicry have transformed manufacturing • p ersonal genomics allow everyone to manage their own health, live longer and healthier lives, and to die when they decide • t here are still rich and poor, but the rich are poorer and happier, and the poor are richer in so many ways.
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It’s being published by Phaidon, one of the world’s leading fine art publishers, whose mission is to produce visually stunning books. I wanted readers to be able to see what this world might look like, as well as to read about it. It has also been designed to work as well on online platforms as it does in a conventional book format. It will be marketed in many different ways to reach very different audiences – from business people to school kids, and from technology-loving futurists to ethical investors. I aim to create a ‘Sustainability Showcase’ for all the astonishing new ideas, organisations and technologies that are already out there, primed to help accelerate a very complex and difficult 40-year journey towards a more sustainable world. To make that kind of impact, I will be looking for all kinds of support from partners and members of Forum for the Future with a direct interest in seeing the case for sustainability made in a much more upbeat way. All the royalties will be channelled into supporting the work of Forum for the Future, and particularly Green Futures, which has pioneered precisely this kind of approach since its very first issue in 1996. Jonathon Porritt is Founder-Director of Forum for the Future. ‘The World We Made’ is available to order from Phaidon: uk.phaidon.com/store
New to the Forum Network Since the last issue of Green Futures, C&A, GlaxoSmithKline, Colep, Cultura Technologies, Green Ink, GrowUp, University College London and The CarbonNeutral Company all joined as Members. Twinings joined as Partners and are working on the Tea 2030 project; PHS Group, SC Johnson, United Coffee also joined as Partners. Crest Nicholson became a Partner, and Ecover became a Pioneer Partner.
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Tomorrow’s leaders
SallyUren
Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development combines theory with practical work placements across a range of sectors. It has shaped the career of some of the most ambitious and influential people working for a desirable future. You’ll find them working across many disciplines in non-profits, consultancies, global corporations and governments. In this regular interview, they tell Katie Shaw about the choices they made, and their thoughts for the future. www.forumforthefuture.org/masters
Jacqueline Dixon Class of: 2005 – 2006 Currently: Group CSR & Sustainability Manager, Pacific Andes Group My lightbulb moment at Forum My placement at the European Commission in Brussels was an exciting part of the course. I was fortunate to be working with a visionary leader who was establishing links between the Commission and the business community to tackle climate change issues. Almost a decade later, I find myself engaging in a private-public partnership through Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation; we are dealing with food security issues, but the dynamics are very similar. Key turning points in my career I grew up in South Africa and did my Environmental Science degree at the University of Cape Town. While there, I established a group called Masifundisane, which means ‘Let us work together’. The aim was to encourage university students to go out into informal settlements and
work on environmental and permaculture projects. I had to mobilise lots of volunteers and engage with hugely deprived communities who had none of the comforts I’d had growing up. Understanding what it’s like to live in such communities – with myriad challenges relating to water, food, health services, electricity, education – made me realise that you cannot separate the social from the environmental. It was a wake-up call for me. My long term ambitions for change I think business can be a significant force for good and has a huge role to play in bringing about the social change that is needed. Access to finance and the ability to set up enterprises is perhaps the most sustainable way of ensuring people can move into a position where they have more power and choice. This is when whole communities can transcend the social stigmas and boundaries that they’ve grown up with. How I hope to shape the future I see endless possibilities. Right now, I’m building a robust sustainability strategy
‘Value networks’, not ‘supply chains’
for Pacific Andes, continuing on the excellent foundations already in place. My vision is for the Group to bring significant positive change to the industry and to the communities in which we operate.
First, why value, not supply? Because the route from production, to manufacture, to use, to disposal should create value for both the environment and society. Transactions, monetary or otherwise, should be driven by a desire to meet social and environmental objectives, as well as economic ones. And networks? Because nothing is truly linear: the pathway from production to disposal should be seen as a loop, where someone’s waste is someone else’s raw material input. But these loops don’t exist in isolation: they interlink in networks. Sustainable value networks are still a pipedream for most locally and globally sourced commodities. Based on my own insights from initiating and running projects to build value into supply for a range of commodities, such as dairy, tea and grain, I’d like to offer five steps for anyone in a position to influence their immediate loop or wider network. These aren’t sequential: picking one will nudge us closer to sustainable value. 1. R eframe your view. Think value, think networks. Immediately you’ll see new opportunities to integrate sustainability into processes and products.
The leader I most admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been a great inspiration to me. Her work bringing to light the plight of women facing wide-scale injustice in developing countries is phenomenal. We need strong female figureheads like her to wake the world up to the reality of what’s going on. My thought for tomorrow The future of sustainability will be led by the emerging markets. Africa has some of the fastest growing economies in the world and they have the beauty of learning from others’ mistakes. Here in Asia, China is booming with clean tech solutions. I don’t think it will be long before these continents start showing the world how to do business.
How can investors identify ‘stranded’ assets?
Green Futures July 2013
If you would like to be involved please contact Simon Billing: s.billing@forumforthefuture.org
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Photos: Nick Woodford/Forum for the Future; ChristopherRobbins/Thinkstock
cropping increasingly moves south to take advantage of warmer growing conditions and lower labour costs, water constraints grow tighter. Simon Billing, who leads the Forum’s Future of Protected Cropping project, says: “This is a sector at the forefront in innovation and technology – from sensors for precision cropping to LEDs. Forum for the Future has partnered with Certis Europe, an expert in crop protection, to devise four scenarios to work out what a long-term strategy should be. Get in touch if you’d like to work with us on meeting the food needs of the world’s population with innovative solutions.”
Photo: Jacqueline Dixon; istockphoto/Thinkstock
Can protected cropping meet our fresh food needs?
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Sally Uren is Acting Chief Executive at Forum for the Future. @sallyuren
Pruning risk
Guarding the future’s food How do we manage competing demands for fresh nutritious produce that’s locally grown and available all year round? To ensure a secure supply, any solution also needs to reduce our energy and water use and mitigate the effect of extreme weather events. Protected cropping – growing plants under glass, plastic or indoors – seems like the logical answer. It creates stable growing conditions, controlling a range of inputs from nutrients to pesticides, while also reducing waste. However, it often relies on inputs like low-paid labour, water and energy: the greenhouse sector is said to consume the same amount of energy as the total energy consumption of Sweden. And, as protected
2. Turn the smouldering platform into a burning one. Despite huge volatility in global markets, constant interruptions in the supply of everyday products from potatoes to bread, and heart-breaking disasters in the garment factories of Bangladesh, many individuals with the power to transform global and local value networks are, sadly, asleep on the job. Time to take them to the future, spelling out the inevitable consequences of a failure to act today. 3. Create long-term partnerships. Too many procurement teams still think the solution to commodity scarcity in one area is to source it from another. But what happens in the future when there is nowhere to switch to? As the ‘switch not stay’ brigade use short-term contracts to secure short-term security of supply, opportunities to help the production regions of the world adapt to a changing climate, for example, are lost. That will ultimately mean only one thing: price hikes that place the end product out of most people’s reach. Long-term partnerships offer an alternative approach, benefitting both producer and buyer and ultimately securing long-term supply. 4. Build in flexibility. The days of massive, fixed production facilities, used by just one business, are numbered. The supply systems of the future will feature fixed assets that are shared (already some businesses are sharing distribution hubs) and greater, local vertical integration of production, manufacture and supply. 5. Integrate your brand strategy with your supply strategy. In a hyper-connected world, it is unlikely that the majority of end-consumers will remain a disconnected entity at the end of a supply chain. We’re seeing the emergence of a connected consumer, who may also be a producer, and who wants more assurances around product origin and production processes. (Horsemeat anyone…?)
People are becoming familiar with the idea that sustainability challenges may undercut the value of existing assets; regulatory or social changes could see them become ‘stranded’ (obsolete or unprofitable). We are already seeing the impact of climate change, resource shortages and biodiversity loss. In particular, the future of food is being called into question in ways that none of us could have anticipated 50 years ago. As knowledge grows about the harmful effects of products laden with large quantities of fat, salt and added sugar, some foods may be perceived by governments and consumers as threatening public well-being. This could lead to tighter
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government controls, or billion pound market share losses for brands. Forum for the Future has partnered with the Generation Foundation to produce a report on the potential value at stake and what can be done to mitigate the risks. Aimed at investors and companies, it identifies the key questions that fund managers should be asking companies
while making investment decisions, leading to a more sustainable financial environment. Are you prepared for an uncertain future? If you are interested in partnering with Forum to examine stranded assets in the food manufacturing sector and the potential impacts on your business, contact Mark Driscoll: m.driscoll@forumforthefuture.org
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Business doesn’t have to cost the earth
Forum for the Future’s Network is a global community of leaders, united by their ambition and capacity to create real and lasting change. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
ABN AMRO www.abnamro.com
Colep UK Limited www.colep.com Grant Coupland, grant.coupland@colep.com, +44 (0)1427 858491
Aimia www.aimia.com
Crest Nicholson Plc Dr Elizabeth Ness, +44 (0)1932 580 555 www.crestnicholson.com
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, +44 (0)1928 511 695
Cultura Technologies Ltd. www.culturatech.com
Alliance Boots Ltd Richard Ellis, Richard.Ellis@allianceboots.com
Delhaize Group Megan Hellstedt, mhellstedt@delhaizegroup.com www.delhaizegroup.com
AMEC Francesco Corsi, +44 (0)1912 726 128 Arjowiggins Graphic Shannan Hodgson, shannan.hodgson@arjowiggins.com ARMOR SA Sean Loftus, UK New Business Development Manager Sean.LOFTUS@armor-group.com Ashden Jane Howarth, +44 (0)20 7410 7023 Aviva Investors Steve Waygood, +44 (0)20 7809 6000 Azaria International priyanka.kripalani@azaria.in +91 22 2285 6161 www.azaria.in Bank of America Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, +44 (0)20 7996 2054 Barclays Bank Plc Lauren Iannarone, www.barclays.com BASF Geoff Mackey, geoff.mackey@basf.com www.basf.com Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, +44 (0)1458 444 010 BP Shipping www.bp.com/shipping BSkyB Daniella Vega, daniella.vega@bskyb.com BT Plc Eric Anderson, +44 (0)7730 426 189 Eric.Anderson@bt.com
Delphis Eco Mark Jankovich, +44 (0)20 3397 0096 www.delphisworld.com DNV www.dnv.co.uk
Innovia Films Lucy Cowton, +44 (0)1697 342 281
Skanska Jennifer Clark, +44 (0)1923 776 666
Interface Europe Ltd Ramon Arratia, +44 (0)20 7490 3960
Small World Henry Rawson, +852 2799 3998 www.interiorsourcing.com
Jaguar Land Rover Fran Leedham, fleedham@jaguarlandrover.com John Lewis Partnership Moira Thomas, +44 (0)20 7592 4413
Swire – China Navigation Co www.cnco.com.hk
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, +44 (0)20 7269 8400
Target www.target.com
Kingfisher Becky Coffin, becky.coffin@kingfisher.com
Tata Global Beverages www.tataglobalbeverages.com/
Kyocera Document Solutions Tracey Rawling- Church, Tracey.Rawling.Church@KyoceraMita.co.uk
Taylors of Harrogate Simon.Hotchkin@bettysandtaylors.co.uk
DSME www.dsme.co.kr/epub/main/index.do
Lafarge Tarmac Emma Hines www.lafargetarmac.com
eBay Inc Lorin May, lmay@ebay.com
Levi Strauss & Co www.levistrauss.com/
Ecology Building Society www.ecology.co.uk Anna Laycock, alaycock@ecology.co.uk +44 (0)1535 650 773
Lloyd’s Register www.lr.org
Ecover Philip Malmberg, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com EDF Energy Darren Towers, +44 (0)7875 110 289, darren.towers@edfenergy.com
L’Oréal USA Pamela Alabaster, www.lorealusa.com Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, +44 (0)20 7811 3315 Marks & Spencer Plc Rowland Hill, PlanA@marksandspencer.com
Ella’s Kitchen Sarah Bright, sarah@ellaskitchen.co.uk
Maersk Line www.maersk.com
EnergyDeck Benjamin Kott, www.energydeck.com
Mondelez www.mondelezinternational.com
Energy Saving Trust +44 (0)20 7227 0398 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, +44 (0)20 7802 3239 Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227 802 435 FirstGroup Plc Katie Smart, katie.smart@firstgroup.com
Namura http://www.namura.co.jp/en/index.html Nike Inc Sarah Severn, sarah.severn@nike.com OgilvyEarth Kathleen Enright, +44 (0)20 7309 1226 kathleen.enright@ogilvy.com
Burberry Limited Jocelyn Wilkinson, +44 (0)20 3367 3100
Gearbulk www.gearbulk.com
Pret A Manger Ltd Nicki Fisher, +44 (0)20 7827 8888
C&A Philip Chamberlain, philip.chamberlain@retail-sc.com
GlaxoSmithKline Clare Griffin clare.h.griffin@gsk.com
Pureprint Group Richard Owers, +44 (0)1825 768 811
Cafédirect Whitney Kakos , +44 (0)20 7033 6022
Green Ink www.greenink.co.uk Simon Chater, s.chater@greenink.co.uk
Carnival www.carnival.com Certis Europe www.certiseurope.co.uk Chi Group www.chigroup.co City of London Simon Mills, +44 (0)20 7332 1431 ClimateCare +44 (0)1865 591 000, business@climatecare.org www.climatecare.org
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The CarbonNeutral Company www.carbonneutral.com The Coca-Cola Company April Crow, www.coca-colacompany.com The Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock, www.co-operative.coop
Quintain Estates and Development Plc Louise Ellison, +44 (0)20 7478 3430 lellison@quintain.co.uk Rail Safety and Standards Board Shamit Gaiger, +44 (0)20 3142 5380 Rexam Plc John Reeves, John.Revess@rexam.com, www.rexam.com Rio Tinto www.marine.riotinto.com
Hammerson www.hammerson.com
Royal Dutch Shell Plc Elfrida Hughes, +31 610 974 798
Heineken UK Richard Heathcote, +44 (0)1432 345 277
RSA Insurance Group Plc Peter Collins, www.rsagroup.com
HSH Group Natalie Chan www.hshgroup.com
RWE npower Anita Longley, +44 (0)1793 892 716
IGD Dr James Northen, +44 (0)1923 851 919
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd Stuart Wright, stuart.wright@sainsburys.co.uk
Ingersoll Rand www.ingersollrand.com
Shell Foundation www.shellfoundation.org
“Larkin’s three guiding principles for 21st century commerce are required reading for anyone invested in a thriving business landscape as well as a healthy environment.”
The Converging World Wendy Stephenson, wendystephenson@theconvergingworld.org The Crown Estate Sustainability@thecrownestate.co.uk www.thecrownestate.co.uk The Jordans & Ryvita Company Ltd David Webster, +44 (0)1767 319 415 Triodos Bank William Ferguson, +44 (0)117 980 9770
Twin Jessica Frank, jessicafrank@twin.org.uk www.twin.org.uk
PHS Group emmawood@phs.co.uk www.phs.co.uk
Carillion Plc Louise Perry, +44 (0)1902 316 258
Tetra Pak Ltd Gavin Landeg, +44 (0)1978 834 018
TUI Travel Plc Jane Ashton, +44 (0)1293 645 911
FoodTrade (formerly Sustaination) Ed Dowding, ed@foodtrade.com
GSH Group David Whiteley, +44 (0)20 7015 0350 david.whiteley@gshgroup.com www.gshgroup.com
Technology Will Save Us www.technologywillsaveus.org
PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Slight, Andrew.Slight@pepsico.com
Bupa Andrew Smith, +44 (0)20 7656 2343
Cargill Fiona Cubitt, +44 (0)1932 861 916
Tesco Plc Helen Fleming, +44 (0)1992 806 790
Tsakos www.tsakos.net
Food and Drink Federation Nicki Hunt, +44 (0)20 7420 7132
GrowUp www.growup.org.uk Kate Hoffman, +44 (0)7862 259 566
Telefónica UK Simon Davis, simon.davis@O2.com
Panasonic UK Ltd Simon Eves, +44 (0)1344 853 325
Bunge www.bunge.com
Capgemini Ltd James Robey, +44 (0)870 904 5761
Sony Europe www.sony-europe.com
– Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace International
Twinings Maxine Shields, www.twinings.co.ukU-Ming www.uming.com.tw/ Unilever Plc Karen Hamilton, Karen.Hamilton@unilever.com +44 (0)20 7822 5917 United Biscuits Alice Cadman, Alice_Cadman@unitedbiscuits.com United Coffee www.unitedcoffee.com Beth Langley, Hazel@unitedcoffeeuk.com University College London Stephanie Chesters, s.chesters@ucl.ac.uk
An award-winning environmental activist and entrepreneur explores how conservation is imperative to economic success
Veja Aurélie Dumont, aurelie@veja.fr Volac Andy Richardson, +44 (0)1223 208 021 Wärtsilä www.wartsila.com Willmott Dixon Ltd Rob Lambe, +44 (0)7814 003 046 WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, +44 (0)1483 412 395
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Photos: xxxxx
3M Pip Frankish, www.3m.com
Available now in hardback and ebook www.greenfutures.org.uk
www.palgrave.com Green Futures July 2013 39
Decoding the catch
Whatever the weather The food industry should expect the unexpected, says Andrew Kuyk.
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Andrew Kuyk is Director of Sustainability at the Food and Drink Federation. Food and Drink Federation is a Forum for the Future partner. www.fdf.org.uk
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Photo: Hemera/Thinkstock
of philanthropy which inspired many founders of household brands. Addressing the availability of raw materials is, however, only one side of the equation. Manufacturers are also looking to innovate in products and production processes, exploring new tastes and ingredients, reducing further waste and making scarce resources go further. Getting smarter with science in order to produce more from less, and with less environmental impact, has never been more important. That is why the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) is putting the need to build skills and expertise for a resilient industry at the heart of our 20/20 Vision to deliver sustainable growth of 20% by 2020. We have quadrupled the number of apprenticeships in the industry in the last two years and launched the UK’s first accredited engineering master’s degree dedicated to the needs of our sector. We have an active Taste Success careers programme aimed at attracting new entrants at all levels. In addition, we are raising our game around research and innovation in the context of the Government’s Industrial Strategy, which has identified agri-food as a priority area, not least in the context of improving export performance. Finally, our new best practice guide, ‘Sustainable Sourcing: Five Steps Towards Managing Supply Chain Risk’, encourages companies to ask questions such as who supplies their suppliers, in order to provide a complete map of what they need, from where, and threats to future availability. None of us really knows what tomorrow’s weather will be. But we can all do more to prepare ourselves for what it might bring. Photo: iStockphoto/Thinkstock
A world without chocolate or cappucinos would be different indeed
Talking about the weather used to be a polite way of starting a conversation – harmless, undemanding, and safer than religion or politics. Talk about the weather today, especially to anyone involved in food production, and you quickly enter a world of near-biblical disasters: droughts alternating with floods, extremes of heat and cold, and seasons which no longer seem to make sense. Add a few wildfires and tropical storms, and you begin to see why commodity prices can double in a year. Food security is fast becoming a global political issue. We’re already experiencing changes on a scale and frequency no one can remember. In the short term, this inevitably impacts on price, as supply and demand try to rebalance in ever more volatile markets and to meet the needs of a growing world population. But, in the longer term, we may be looking at much more substantial adjustments to what we eat and where it comes from, as traditional sources are no longer viable. The University of East Anglia is the latest in a series of scientific commentators to say that crops like cocoa and coffee may disappear from sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Central and South America by 2080. A world without chocolate or cappuccinos would be different indeed. Even fruit and vegetables may be difficult to grow in much of Southern Europe, with radical implications for Mediterranean diets. Sustainable sourcing policies are fast becoming an essential risk management tool for food companies. Nestlé’s Cocoa Plan, for example, is working to improve the lives of its farmers and the quality of their crops. Last year it provided training for 27,000 of them and distributed 1.1 million plants bred for better yields and more resistance. Through Coffee Made Happy, Mondelez aims to invest $200 million to empower one million coffee farming entrepreneurs by 2020, making farming more sustainable and profitable, as well as equipping them with business skills which can benefit the communities in which they live. Unilever has similar programmes for tea, and Associated British Foods (ABF) is investing in energy efficiency projects for sugar in Swaziland and China. Within the UK, companies such as PepsiCo are working with their farmers to produce crops better suited to manufacturing processes and which use less fertiliser or fewer pesticides. Whatever the strategy, at home or abroad, investing in supply chains is evolving into standard business practice rather than the kind
DNA testing keeps marine stewardship up to the mark. The fingerprints of fish in their DNA are powerful tools for tracing them to source. In a world rife with food fraud, consumers who choose fish from sustainable sources will be reassured to know that the certification process is standing up well to this scientific scrutiny. Successive years of DNA testing carried out by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) since 2009 have found less than 1% of mislabelled fish in hundreds of samples bearing the organisation’s logo. That’s not to say there’s nothing fishy on the seafood scene: far from it. Overexploitation has caused the collapse of one in four of some 1,500 wild capture fisheries worldwide in the last 50 years, and put many of the rest under intolerable pressure, though the MSC’s expanding global programme has seen 200 certified as sustainably managed. Once-plentiful species are under threat, and it’s not easy to deflect consumer demand from those that are most prized. With many modern fishing fleets doing much of their processing out at sea, the substitution of less valuable varieties could easily go undetected. In how much of what you can buy today, from frozen meals to fish fingers or fancier restaurant dishes, could you confidently claim to recognise what you are eating? It’s a situation ripe for fraud – even within regulated fisheries. Meanwhile, the global value of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is estimated at €10-20 billion a year. Small wonder, then, that some shocking scandals surfaced with the advent of DNA testing. What’s tended to grab the headlines is the passing off of something cheaper as cod – or haddock, hake, tuna, sea bass and so on. There’s a special problem, though, if fraud disguises the exploitation of fish stocks under particular pressure, where North Sea cod is sold as Arctic cod, for instance. That’s why the MSC, in its Traceability and Assurance in the Supply Chain (TASC) programme, is helping to develop DNA checks that can even determine a fish’s population of origin. Nearly all the tests use fish cell DNA from the mitochondria rather than from the cell’s nucleus, as Alison Roel, the MSC’s product integrity manager, explains. It’s more plentiful, its form (in closed rings rather than open threads) means it better endures the
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rigours of cooking and freezing, and its lineage is easier to decode because it’s entirely inherited through the female line. Comparing a gene sequence against samples in a growing worldwide bank of barcodes of different species will tell you definitively what species you’re looking at. Establishing which fishery it comes from, however – and so knowing whether it merits the MSC’s ‘sustainably sourced’ logo – depends on looking for the markers of point mutations in the gene sequence. Each fishery has developed over time its characteristic pattern of these mutations, known in the jargon as ‘snips’. Gary Carvalho, professor of molecular ecology at Bangor University, says snip tests now provide a cost-effective way of tracing fish from ocean to fork that’s “reliable enough to provide robust forensic validation and evidence in a court of law”. The MSC tests sample products without forewarning the producer, acting as both a check and a deterrent in the MSC’s wider traceability programme. A viable DNA snip test can also help a fishery meet MSC criteria, if its certification is conditional on effective traceability, as is the case for South Georgia toothfish (‘Chilean sea bass’), the only regional stock that’s sustainably managed. Even the ‘negatives’ (three out of 381 in the most recent round, which included the first ‘region of origin’ testing for Atlantic cod) can help strengthen the chain of custody. They’re referred back to the certifier for investigation, with the right to follow the document trail, and can show where procedures need tightening up. And so far, the MSC has found no worrying patterns of anomalies, nor has it had to revoke a trader’s right to use its logo. Transparency, in fact, is proving positive all round. – Roger East
Could you confidently claim to recognise what you’re eating?
Marine Stewardship Council is a Forum for the Future partner. www.msc.org
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Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method, on aesthetics, ocean plastic, and the 4x4 of laundry.
Private finance on track to transform lives.
What if we could take plastic from the ocean and put it on shelves?
Sacrifice doesn’t make for success I used to be a climate scientist. I spent four years at the Carnegie Institution, and learned two things. First, that we were preaching to the converted. In the late 90s, the only people listening were already concerned about climate change. And second, that every ‘sustainable’ brand I bought asked me to make a sacrifice. The earth is dying and you need to save it, they’d say, so buy this inferior product that smells bad, is brown, doesn’t work and is too expensive… I couldn’t think of a consumer brand in history that had been successful based on sacrifice!
they shut it down and turned instead to virgin plastic from sugar cane. When we set out to design a bottle from 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, we were told it was impossible – especially if we wanted clear, high quality bottles in vibrant colours. True, when we first started looking into it, we could only get brown, dingy ones. We had to go right back to the plastics kerbside collection systems and push for the contaminants turning it brown to be removed, and then help to refine the recycling process, to get the right grade of resin to make bottles that are 100% PCR, and yet as clear as the virgin plastic ones.
We went for the ugliest and most toxic product Before Carnegie, I’d worked in the business sector as a product designer, and my core belief was that people shouldn’t have to choose between their environmental values and their aesthetics. I wanted to set up a business that everyone could interact with: not luxury items, but everyday products for everyday people. So, when my friend and Method’s Co-Founder Eric Ryan noticed that the ugliest and most toxic products in the grocery store were in the cleaning category, we made changing that our goal.
Everyone gets overwhelmed by ocean waste That’s not a very compelling story for consumers, though, which is why I started thinking about ocean plastic. Everyone who learns about this issue gets overwhelmed by it: these tiny bits of micro-plastic that gather in huge islands and get swallowed by birds and fish, then enter our food chain… What if we could take some of it out of the ocean and put it on the shelves of a national retailer? That would be a good come-back to any excuses: if Method can turn something that’s been floating in the ocean for a decade into a useable bottle, then PCR packaging isn’t impossible. So, in many ways, when we made a bottle out of ocean plastic, it was a device to get the conversation started. We don’t plan to make every bottle from it: that would not be the most sustainable thing to do.
PCR packaging is impossible, they said Packaging is crying out for radical change. When it comes to plastic, there are billions of tonnes of it already in circulation, but other brands reject postconsumer waste as a material. For one thing, the consumer doesn’t care enough about it, and it’s also hard to source. Coca-Cola used to have the world’s largest plastics recycling plant in South Carolina, but
Jugs are the 4x4s of consumer products Laundry detergents are sold in big wasteful jugs, which I call the 4x4s of the consumer products industry: they’re very wasteful, and extremely profitable. If you look at the cap on laundry jugs, you’ll notice the dosage line is only a small fraction of the total volume of the cap – that’s not accidental. Their makers want you to overdose on soap, and most people do. But if you could have a perfectly sustainable laundry detergent, it wouldn’t even be our highest concentrate. It’s more likely a system where a single load of detergent lives in your washing machine, and is separated from the dirty water after each cycle to go round again. The water gets recycled too, and the dirt is collected for compost… Ultimately, we’d love our business to be getting peoples’ clothes clean, not selling liquid detergent in packaging of any kind. Adam Lowry was in conversation with Anna Simpson, Editor of Green Futures. Ecover is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ecover.com www.methodhome.com
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Photo: Mungos
Upside fund
Photo: ‘Trashberg’ by NL Architects
Material goals
The journey into a home, employment and good health is frequently long and tortuous for the growing number of people living on Britain’s streets. An innovative financing mechanism, which rewards positive outcomes for individuals, could make a difference. The London-based homelessness charity St Mungo’s is among the first UK organisations to raise external social investment to deliver positive outcomes commissioned by a public body. Its Street Impact programme, which aims to help over 400 homeless people rebuild their lives, has been granted a three-year ‘payment-by-results’ contract. It was commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA), with its upfront costs financed through £650,000 of external investment arranged by Triodos Bank. The arrangement is possible thanks to a new type of contract called a social impact bond (SIB). These are novel because they require the use of private finance to tackle social issues on the government’s behalf. The borrower, who provides the service, is paid according to the success of its interventions. As such, payment by results contracts change the focus from what is done to what is achieved. Government bodies hope they will bring new impetus to solve intractable problems. The first social impact bond was launched in the UK in 2010, and the form is still evolving. Triodos Bank and CAF Venturesome, a social investment fund which invested in the St Mungo’s SIB, are both helping the UK Government to draft template contracts; similar work is underway in the US and Australia. Instead of working to blanket targets, St Mungo’s will track the progress of 415 named individuals. The objectives are exacting. One is to help them find work: a tough task given that nearly half of its service users are ex-offenders or have been in prison, and two-thirds or more have substance abuse and mental health problems. The data produced could also help to shed light on the causes of homelessness and the difficulties of reintegration into social structures. “We are getting new insights. No one was pulling them together before”, says Adam Rees, the project manager at St Mungo’s. If the charity hits all its targets it will receive £2.4 million from the GLA. From this, it would recoup its delivery costs and repay the £650,000 of external social investment plus interest, and hopefully retain a small profit for the charity, an added attraction when social protection funding is shrinking, says David Evans, its Finance Director. Annual returns for social investors who supported the St Mungo’s SIB are 6.5%. Given the risks, commissioners “have to be prepared to pay for the upside. SIB projects can’t just be about cost-savings”, says Holly Piper, Investment Manager at CAF Venturesome.
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For investors, prospective yields need to be appropriately risk-adjusted. We can’t simply rely on financiers to have philanthropic motives, says Dan Hird, Head of Corporate Finance at Triodos Bank. SIBs have no track record: the first, to help ex-offenders, has yet to run its course. The St Mungo’s deal is structured to ensure that outcome risks are shared between the charity and external social investors; St Mungo’s has also invested £250,000 of first loss equity in the Street Impact project, which can be drawn on if things go wrong. For external investors, this was an essential sign of St Mungo’s commitment and confidence in its delivery of the programme. Early results are promising. Six months in, all but 60 of the 415 rough sleepers could be accounted for: usually about a third would have drifted away by this stage, says Rees. Previously, the charity focused on helping homeless people into housing; now it has the means and mandate to motivate them to stay there longer, fight addictions, find work, and keep out of A&E. As to what lies ahead, Hird at Triodos Bank says SIBs would take off more quickly if risks were shared more equally between commissioners, delivery providers and investors. One way of doing this is to ensure projects combine a ‘fee for service’ element with a ‘payment by results’ element, so that service providers can be sure of covering some of their costs. The UK Government wants to scale up payment by results schemes, which will inevitably involve larger private sector service providers. But there are also dangers to this approach, including potential for cherry-picking to achieve outcomes and crowding out non-profit organisations, Hird warns. Driven by returns, private companies are likely to negotiate hard and may steer clear of the most challenging projects or individuals. If this happens, those with the longest journeys could get left on the road. – Virginia Marsh
St Mungo’s will track the progress of 415 named individuals
Triodos is a Forum for the Future partner. www.triodos.co.uk
Green Futures July 2013
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Clothes loop
Fix it yourself
More retailers are asking consumers to bring unwanted items back, but buying patterns still need a radical fix.
Marks and Spencer is a Forum for the Future partner. Help your company Shwop at Work by contacting plana@marks-and-spencer.com or visit www.marksandspencer.com/shwop
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Photo: iStockphoto/Thinkstock
consumption and not mindlessly drive it”, says Sarah Farquhar, Oxfam’s Head of Retail Brand. Bent agrees: “If incremental innovation was going to create a sustainable world, we’d be there already.” For Bent, truly sustainable business models need to be part of a circular economy, one where commercial success is based on delivering real social and environmental value. Through the Sustainable Business Model Group (SBMG) he identifies three requirements for transformative change. A business model must have a balanced portfolio of innovation, embed innovation in its culture, and set up management structures that spot and nurture breakthroughs. “We constantly look to improve what we do. There isn’t a big bang launch that solves everything, it’s a journey”, says Adam Elman, Head of Delivery for Plan A, M&S’s 180-point plan to operate more sustainably. Now in its sixth year, Plan A has proven its worth, delivering a net benefit of £185 million to the retailer’s bottom-line through efficiency savings and new business opportunities, such as M&S Energy. Every action in Plan A is evaluated using normal business processes and reporting. “It would be forgotten and fall by the wayside otherwise”, says Elman. While making it work for the retailer’s hard-nosed goals is essential, it’s just as important to make it work for consumers. “They want to be green, do the right thing, but they need it to be easy”, Elman observes. Putting a well-known and loved face to a campaign helps, as television star Joanna Lumley has demonstrated in her role as ethical ambassador for M&S, or ‘Queen of the Shwop’. Convenience helps too. ‘Shwop at Work’, a dedicated service placing clothing recycling boxes in offices across the UK had a take up of 50 companies in three months, reaching 94,000 people. “You need to keep things fluid so you can try new things”, says Jo Daniels who masterminds this commercial service. “If it works, do it more; if it doesn’t, change it.” Finding new ways forward means collaborating with competitors in the fiercely competitive retail market to drive standards in the supply chain, for instance. Bent believes that the leaders of sustainability could go further and faster if more companies would step up to the challenge. H&M and Puma have now launched their own ‘bring it back’ models, helping retailers and consumers edge a step closer to a model of exchange. – Lizzie Rivera
Photo: Marks and Spencer
Finding new homes for old clothes: Mark Sumner and Joanna Lumley
It’s a year since Marks and Spencer (M&S) launched ‘shwopping’ – an initiative that encourages customers to bring old items of clothing into the store. The goal is to reduce the one billion items of clothing sent to UK landfill each year by creating a clothes loop where all garments are reused and recycled – currently through a partnership with the global poverty campaign Oxfam. Within six months of launch, the first M&S coat made from recycled wool brought back from Oxfam was on sale in the shops. It illustrates the potential for closed-loop textiles. Mark Sumner, M&S’s sustainable raw materials specialist, hopes it will inspire innovation throughout the supply chain to find solutions for other material blends. For a high street retailer, this is a disruptive model of exchange, ultimately asking consumers to reassess their ‘buy and chuck’ culture. But it’s a necessary one. Forum for the Future’s Deputy Director of Sustainable Business, David Bent, believes global businesses only have to look 10 years ahead to realise their current models are unmaintainable. With profits at risk from increasingly limited resources and volatile markets, their green motivations stem from what he calls “enlightened self-interest”. Shwopping brought in a total of 3.8 million garments last year, raising £2.3 million for Oxfam. While that’s no small feat, M&S sells 350 million garments a year and is not encouraging customers to buy any fewer. “We need to change patterns of
It’s time for net positive disruption, says Dax Lovegrove.
With 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, there’s new pressure to build a more positive economy. At the same time, two trends – the combination of digital natives directing new models of consumption and the do-it-yourself revolution – offer the perfect opportunity to disrupt and repair broken systems. Let’s start with broken energy, which has played a big part in taking us to the 400ppm landmark. The larger utilities are now struggling in an increasing number of markets to deal with the deployment of climate policies and the widening availability of DIY energy. We’re seeing an explosion of new micro-renewables providers and community-owned or crowd-funded clean energy schemes, often enabled by digital channels. People are more able to arrange and invest in their own access to heat and power for their home than ever before. In Australia, for example, on top of the carbon tax, we are seeing what is reported to be the ‘unstoppable’ roll out of rooftop solar. This has created tension between the utilities, which are lobbying against increasing home installations, and consumer groups, one of whom has set up a ‘Solar Citizens’ campaign to protect the interests of solar owners. A similar battleground in the UK is on the horizon. B&Q intends to pinch customers from British Gas and other utilities. It is expanding its DIY offering to provide micro-renewables as part of the firm’s Net Positive plan, and is also reaching out to customers via new digital platforms. Alongside this, there are now over 40 community-owned energy schemes in the UK, and crowd-funding schemes are taking off. Abundance Generation and the Trillion Fund recently gained approval from the Financial Services Authority to link individual investors and renewable energy projects. Our current system of congested and polluting mobility is also set to change. Younger online users, aka ‘digital natives’, have new and different aspirations: instead of owning their vehicle of choice, they just want to use it. So, as car sales reach a plateau in the west, we see the rise of Zipcar, which provides prompt
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online access to car sharing. It has transformed the car rental market, leading to its acquisition by Avis. Hertz now also provides on-demand car-sharing services. Car sharers tend to walk, ride bikes and take public transport more often than they drive, and the combined impact of this is the equivalent of taking up to 14 cars off the roads. Buzzcar is another emerging venture set to accelerate peer-to-peer car sharing services. Even established car manufacturers, such as BMW, are looking beyond car sales towards new kinds of mobility solutions, one of which is a car-sharing service – DriveNow. The same trends are starting to impact manufacturing. Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine and author of ‘Makers, the New Industrial Revolution’, describes a future of makers at home and in the community, taking on the design and production of goods. He thinks it will change the face of manufacturing to the extent that the internet revolutionised the flow of information. Among the examples he cites is the success of TechShop in the US. TechShop provides ‘maker spaces’ – workshops where people can pay a membership fee of just $125 a month and train to use any kind of manufacturing equipment from welding machinery to 3D printers. This used to be the domain of big business, but now entrepreneurs can develop their own ideas, prototypes and projects. Financial backing is also more widely available, through crowd-funding digital sites such as Kickstarter. One start-up that received strong support through Kickstarter was B-Square, for a modular, solarpowered electronics system that can be built up into a mini power plant for the home. The investment enabled B-Square to take the venture forward, and also to adopt an open hardware approach that means customers can tailor the product to their needs. This is a glimpse into the future of people-powered manufacturing. Disruptive innovation will transform whole industries and systems: that is inevitable. But we have to seize the opportunity to ensure such innovation repairs what’s broken and brings all-round positive benefits to society. WWF continues to support the increasing Net Positive movement within the private sector, where businesses are moving beyond damage control to playing a role in enhancing society’s natural assets. As part of this, we encourage firms to make disruptive innovation a part of their Net Positive plans so that they are better prepared for the future, while also steering innovation in the right direction.
Makers at home will change the face of manufacture
Dax Lovegrove is Head of Business Sustainability & Innovation at WWF-UK. WWF-UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.wwf-uk.org
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approved for cultivation, and makes up about 26% of maize grown in Spain (in 2011). Its approval is valid till 2020, so I assume that 2012-13 numbers won’t be very different. – Philippa
GM on the table? Good article showing the spread of issues [see ‘GM: solution or distraction?’, GF88, p20]. It’s frustrating feeling that to be an environmentalist you have to see things in black and white. Hannah Nordhaus, a US environmentalist, also calls for more engagement with complexity rather than simplification and emotive side-taking. I would like to correct one thing, though: “Although the European Commission’s attitude to GM seems to be softening, public attitudes in most European countries remain staunchly anti-GM, or deeply sceptical. As a result, no GM crops are grown in Europe.” Actually, GM maize (Bt11) is currently
Green Futures replies: Glad you enjoyed the article, Philippa, and thank you for pointing out this error. Two GM crops are currently approved for cultivation in the EU. However, these are Monsanto’s MON810 (as Pete Riley points out in the online comments) and BASF’s Amflora starch potato, not Bt11. BASF ceased GM crop production for the European market in January 2012, citing widespread opposition to the technology. MON810 is mainly grown in Spain (and in smaller quantities in five other European countries) but renewal of the licence, which was granted in 1998 for 10 years, has stalled due to the European Commission’s freeze on the approval process for GM crops until 2014. However, member states can continue to cultivate it until a decision is taken by the Commission. One important point not addressed in the article is the lack of confidence in the testing and approval of GM products and techniques. Approval is determined solely by short-term industry-conducted studies, which are limited to show the strong points of the industry. Unanticipated problems
GM: solution or distraction?
The more nuanced aspects of this debate are beginning to find voice
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What is a person with a conscience to think about the fraught and complex issue of genetic modification (GM)? Picking sides used to be easy: if you were green, you were against GM because it was unnatural and industrial. It was a weapon of the same corporate behemoths who brought us the Green Revolution and its ensuing ecological devastation; who were using the patent system to force farmers to buy new GM seed every year – and who were exploiting their control of world commodity markets to impose “Frankenstein foods” on unsuspecting citizens. If these were the developers and guarantors of genetic engineering, then their safety assurances were not to be trusted. If you were green, you preferred organic, low-input, agro-ecological methods of breeding and food production that maintained traditional landscapes and socio-economic structures, provided safe, tasty and nutritious food, combated climate change and protected wildlife. If you were a green activist, you risked prison to rip up GM crops. On the other side were the free market capitalists and biological engineers, optimistic about GM, unfazed by its presence in the food chain, and in favour of field trials. For the big seed companies and their biotech partners, the business opportunities were breathtaking: a huge potential market; a range of products that had to be bought and used together, and could be protected by patent; and a political climate that favoured big agribusiness over small-scale, mixed farms. The products themselves addressed issues related to industrial agriculture only: the lack of natural predators to control pests, and the fact that industrial herbicides can also be toxic to the crops themselves. Now, though, the more nuanced aspects of this debate are beginning to find voice. Leading environmentalists, including two of the UK’s highest profile ones, Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, say that their minds are not closed as to the future of GM. Former anti-GMO activist, Mark Lynas, shocked delegates at the latest Oxford Farming Conference by saying: “For the record, … I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I … assisted in demonising an important technological option which [sic] can be used to benefit the environment.” Although a group of leading environmentalists – including Porritt and Juniper –
criticised Lynas for overstating his role in the anti-GM movement, many now believe that GM may be part of the solution. “We are trying to question the scourge of either/or-ism”, says Porritt. “The condition of the world is so powerless now, and the additional pressure of feeding a potential population of nine billion so great, that we have to optimise every available resource.” These environmentalists, however, do not advocate GM as we have known it until now, with its concentration on pest resistance and herbicide tolerance in intensive monoculture. The claimed benefits of GM crops have been used, they say, to fuel the expansion of industrial agricultural techniques, which have contributed to a host of environmental and social problems, including declining soil fertility, water pollution, climate change and ecological devastation. Extinctions are running at between 100 and 1,000 times their natural rate. Agricultural bird populations in the UK have almost halved in the last 25 years. In the last 40 years, tropical biodiversity has dropped by 60%. The world’s richest savannah, the Cerrado, which covers 21% of Brazil’s land mass and is home to a staggering 5% of all known species, is being cleared faster than the Amazon rainforest to make way for soya, 80% of which is fed to livestock. Such alarming consequences are associated more with the industrialisation of agriculture and the global food system than with genetic modification per se. Gary Hirshberg, founder of the leading US organic dairy brand, StonyField Farm, says: “I’m not biased against genetic engineering. The potential is there for nutritional and other benefits to citizens; but there haven’t been any yet, and many of the promises have been disproven or have not come to pass. For example, despite predictions to the contrary by the patent holders, GM has led to substantial increases in herbicide and pesticide use. Consequently, weeds and pests develop resistance and farmers have had to move to ever stronger chemicals, in ever higher quantities. The US Geological Survey reports that citizens in rural communities are now routinely breathing herbicides and finding them in the groundwater. We don’t know what the consequences will be for human health of these higher concentrations of environmental toxins, and we need to find out. At the very least, citizens need to know whether or not they
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Photo: Science Photo Library
Anthony Kleanthous asks whether genetic modification is the future, the past, or a red herring in the race for sustainable agriculture.
are purchasing and eating these foods. Since there is no requirement to label products that contain GM, most Americans are unaware.” The answer, he says, is compulsory labelling. Dan Crossley, Director of the Food Ethics Council, agrees: “Most people do not want to eat GM food, so when labelling is introduced, demand collapses. When producers in the US were forced to label GM milk that had been produced with the aid of a genetically modified growth hormone called bST, sales plummeted and Monsanto was forced to sell the subsidiary that produced it. The horsemeat scandal [in which horsemeat has been found in many European products that are marketed as 100% beef] will force multiple retailers to be honest about where their meat and dairy products come from.” Although the European Commission’s attitude to GM seems to be softening, public attitudes in most European countries remain staunchly anti-GM, or deeply sceptical. As a result, no GM crops are grown in Europe. However, around 50% of grain imported to Europe for animal feed is genetically modified, and campaigners are calling for that, too, to be labelled. If GM has let us down so badly to date, how might it contribute more positively in the future? For a start, Jonathon Porritt cites the potential ability of nonleguminous crops to fix nitrogen. Fossil-based nitrogen fertilisers are a major cause of climate change and water pollution, so the potential ability of commodity crops to fix nitrogen without the use of artificial fertilisers could bring great benefits. Unfortunately, it is likely to be 20 or 30 years before they succeed, if they succeed at all, and plants cannot live on nitrogen alone; they also need phosphorous and potassium, so if they are to be grown in monoculture, or even in three-year rotation, they still risk exhausting soils. The second advance might come in GM’s ability to improve resistance to environmental stresses, such as drought. The first such crop – a droughtresistant variety of GM maize – was launched last year by Monsanto and, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been distributed to an estimated two million farmers in 13 African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria. According to the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, a research partnership dedicated to agricultural development, these farmers have obtained higher yields, improved food security, and increased incomes. According to Porritt, the expansion and improved productivity of small African farms is far more important than whether or not the crops they use are genetically modified. While Porritt and some of his fellow environmentalists are open to the potential benefits of GM crops, they consider genetic modification itself to be something of a red herring. Far more important is whether or not a new crop variety brings additional benefits for humans and the planet. If GM crops can prove themselves safe, effective, nutritious, ecoefficient and profitable, there is no reason why they should not be used. Food manufacturers are also agnostic. “We don’t have a view on whether GM is a good or a bad thing in itself”, says Andrew Kuyk of the UK’s Food and Drink Federation. “We want raw materials at competitive prices that we can turn into products for our consumers. GM comes into that debate if we’re priced out of the market by it. There’s a risk of that happening
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Drought-resistant GM maize has been distributed to two million farmers in Africa
in the UK and other European countries if we’re not more supportive of some of these new technologies, subject to objective scientific assessment and appropriate controls on use.” However, Mike Childs, Head of Science, Policy and Research at Friends of the Earth, believes that the most promising solutions are not technological in nature. Childs’ top seven “hits” for a sustainable and secure food system are: eating less (and better) meat; restoring wild fisheries; cutting waste; growing a greater variety of crops (including ‘orphan crops’); replacing monoculture with agro-ecology; empowering women; and reducing poverty. WWF-UK also considers GM to be a red herring, too fraught with emotion and political posturing, and prefers to talk of solutions such as ‘less but better meat’, and waste reduction. Eating healthily, WWF-UK points out in its recent ‘Livewell’ report, means eating more sustainably, too. One thing on which everyone seems to agree is that GM is not the only technology worth developing. Perhaps the most promising alternative is Marker Assisted Selection (MAS). This is a non-GM bioengineering technique, made possible by our ability to map entire genomes. Once you have the genome of a crop fully described, you can use that information to identify traits that you want to import to the target crop from a related species. This might be a less popular commercial variety, a wild relative, or a so-called “orphan species” – an old variety that was abandoned by breeders looking for other traits. After marking the genes that express the desired traits, scientists can use conventional breeding techniques to transfer those characteristics into high yielding varieties of the same species, relatively quickly. If technologies such as MAS can be used to promote the proliferation and improvement of organic, mixed, agro-ecological and other traditional or alternative farming systems, then there may come a day when the arguments over GM have lost their relevance, as they have for the development of medicines. For now, GM remains a highly emotive issue for those on both sides of the debate, and those left in the middle still struggle to be heard. Anthony Kleanthous is an independent expert on food sustainability and a Trustee of Sustain.
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with new allergies or additional effects resulting from gene cluster transfer are often not apparent with short-term studies. There are also Monsanto representatives in positions on regulatory agencies. So it is not just the products themselves but also the corrupt approval process that causes public outcry. And when consumers cannot rely on government agencies to ensure public health, boycotts are the only alternative method of protecting it. – aligatorhardt
More investors are coming forward with ‘socially responsible’ funds, but their impact is equivocal. Could a new form of investment make a difference? Heather Connon reports.
There’s increased pressure for cultural change at financial institutions
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There can rarely have been a better time for proponents of sustainable investment to make their case. This year started with the scandal of horsemeat being passed off as beef, exposing fraud and a lack of rigour in the (often tortuously complex) food supply chain; in the last two years, environmental catastrophes – including hurricanes Irene and Sandy, the prolonged US drought, and flooding in Australia and the Americas – have added to evidence of global warming; and the financial crash has exposed flaws in the banking system so substantial that they threaten the existence of the global economic system. Awareness of the need for new ways of investing is growing, and there are some tentative signs that it is having some impact on investor behaviour. EIRIS, the environmental consultancy, calculates that British investors had almost £11 billion invested in ethical funds in 2012, a 10-fold increase since June 1996, and a survey by the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association in 2011 found “early signs of a step change in the number of … corporate pension funds that are responding to the case for responsible ownership and investment”. Across the world, investment institutions now have $13.6 trillion of assets incorporating environmental, social and governance concerns into their strategies, according to the latest report from the Global Sustainable Ethical Alliance, accounting for more than a fifth of total assets under management. Investment managers responsible for $6.5 trillion of foreign capital investment have signed up to the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, launched in 2006. Many initiatives fall under the umbrella term ‘socially responsible investment’ (SRI), used to describe everything from strategies based around negative screening (‘no guns, no gambling’) to those which positively select sectors, such as renewable energy generation. Nick Robins, a veteran of the SRI movement and head of the climate change centre at HSBC, thinks momentum on this particular approach is gathering: “The financial crisis has shown that financial markets can exhibit huge systemic risk. That puts the question of SRI into a bigger arena”, Robins told Green Futures. He believes SRI has moved beyond being a niche area of investment, and is now “about asking what sustainability means for the resilience of the whole financial system”. For Simon Howard, Head of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, this is indeed the question we need to ask. “SRI is a welcome step in the right direction, acknowledging the need for smarter
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investment, but it isn’t enough”, he warns. “Forum for the Future wants to see investors taking into account more than just short-term monetary returns, through new models in which financial gain is considered along with the investment’s contribution to environmental and social sustainability.” Even those who do profess to consider SRI issues in their investment strategies often pay little more than lip service to it. The FTSE4Good ethical index, for example, which institutions can use to screen their investment, has only limited exclusions, and allows oil and mining companies. Jamie Hartzell, Managing Director of the recently launched ethical investment exchange Ethex, points to research showing that, in 2011, the biggest holdings in many retail ethical funds included companies like gas producer BG Group, and HSBC, which has been fined for breaches of money-laundering regulations in the Americas. Howard would like to see mainstream capital markets embrace the principles of SRI, but within their core operations. “There is a business case, but the stock market rewards need to be more widely recognised. Leading companies, such as M&S with Plan A, are working to demonstrate the benefits of sustainability to investors.” But this is easier said than done. Seb Beloe, Head of Sustainability Research at WHEB Asset Management, points out that the average holding time for shares is now just seven months; in the 1970s, it was five to six years. “If you are holding a share for five or six months, you don’t look at [SRI] stuff, and why should you? It is not relevant to that kind of time horizon.” While there is a growing recognition that controlling the costs of energy, waste management and water provision makes sound business sense, there is not yet a clear and widely recognised stock market reward for those companies which manifest optimal behaviour on such things. That said, shareholder engagement does seem to be increasing. The ‘Shareholder Spring’, as increasing activism at company annual meetings has been dubbed, has seen executives ousted, pay packages blocked, and increased pressure for cultural change at some financial institutions. There has also been an increase in specific campaigns, such as that in the US to persuade university pension funds to pull out of investment in fossil fuels, or campaigns by groups of investors against labour market exploitation or extracting oil from shale (fracking). It may be easier to engage pension funds in this kind of activism; after all, their role is to manage people’s finances for the long
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I am tired of people claiming the regulatory framework used to approve GM products is flawed, out of date, fraught with industry cronies, or too rapid. It takes 10 years to bring a new GM product to market, and at each step it is evaluated for its effect on human health and the environment. GM plants are studied more than any other food on the planet and are done so by countless regulatory agencies from many different countries. – Russell Williams
GM offers us (by which I mean farmers and consumers) nothing except higher seed prices and higher input costs which will probably be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in an industry with very tight margins. The rapid adoption of GM in the US was mainly due to massive subsidies and lower seed prices initially, along with the removal of non-GM varieties from sale. This went hand in hand with promises of easier weed and pest control and lower pesticide use, so of course uptake rates were excellent. Unfortunately, none of this stayed true for long. Seed prices have risen by up to 325% for some crops, resistant weeds and pests are driving up pesticide use, and margins have become tighter. However, the threat of patent infringement from accidental contamination means that for many farmers it’s easier to stay on the treadmill than get off it. I certainly don’t want that to happen to me, or any of my fellow British farmers. Whether you like the EU or not, thankfully, it has saved us from going down the GM path. – Dale Walters
Really excellent overview of the highly nuanced GM debate, which often stagnates because it is oversimplified to pro vs anti GM. – Stephen
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Trustee funds
A little more on this issue needs to be said from the charity trustees’ perspective [see ‘Future stakes’, GF88, p22]. Relevant to this is the recent UK study ‘Charities and Social Investment: A Research Report from the Charity Commission’. The Commission felt it appropriate to emphasise the point that charity trustees, when making a programme-related investment, must ensure that it directly furthers the charity’s aims. Moreover, trustees must carefully consider any private benefit arising from a charitable investment. They must also remember that there are strict rules for the payment of interest on share capital, and that charities cannot distribute profits. And lastly, “it is important to remember that the core characteristics of charitable status must not be overlooked when it comes to investment – social or otherwise”. – Edward Harkins
High-tech home care Thank you for this article! It is refreshing to see healthcare as part of the focus in social responsibility [see ‘Health at hand’, GF88, p28]. I was a part of a meeting regarding the vision of a patient-centered medical home in 2007, and it was not new then, just new to me. That was six years ago, and if aligned to in-home advancements, it could take another 17 years to realise a conservative vision of change and innovation. I can’t help but wonder: do all industries accept such a stretch of years to achieve the required change? What sort of real innovation will take healthcare out of the hospital before 2030? A shift in education of our youngest kids to managing their health as a priority? A more integrated work and home life demanded
term – as many as 50 years ahead, when many of the environmental consequences (of, for instance, fracking) may have crystallised. However, as Beloe points out, the vast majority of investors are still more focused on short-term financial performance, rather than the wider long-term needs of pension holders. Moreover, fund managers consider it their legal (fiduciary) responsibility to asset owners to maximise short-term gains – though Freshfields, a leading London law firm, and The UNEP Finance Initiative have jointly challenged this narrow interpretation, saying that it can incorporate social and environmental considerations. Now, the financial crisis, and disillusionment with the financial system, is increasing interest in positive investing – as opposed to negative screening. Will Dawson, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, defines sustainable investment as “the allocation of capital into activities which are needed to create a sustainable economy”. Such activities range from companies whose products and services have a positive impact (in, say, water conservation) to local initiatives, such as community-owned renewable energy projects. Dawson is seeing more interest from mainstream fund managers in these kinds of projects. James Vaccaro, Head of Market and Corporate Development at Triodos Bank, one of the leading funders of renewable, microfinance and other impact investments, says there is increasing interest in this area from institutions, too. For example, the Dutch pension fund service company PGGM and Ampere Equity Fund have a stake in the UK’s largest wind farm, Walney, off the Cumbrian coast. Of course, it’s difficult to judge whether their motivation is environmental or financial, or both. The parallels between the energy, food and finance systems are striking. Ask yourself where your food and power really come from, and then try and name three companies your pension is invested in. Most of us can’t answer. This wouldn’t be a problem if we had full trust in those managing the systems for us and the rules that guide them, but crises of late show that would be naive. Among the Forum’s initiatives is an investigation with Barclays into the potential of ‘impact investment’, in which investors are motivated primarily by the positive impact that the companies they invest in create, rather than by financial returns. “This concept of ‘impact investment’ is catching on fast”, says Dawson. Pension funds and banks are now starting to tentatively enter this sector, embracing the opportunity to lower their overall risks by investing in new areas of the world and sectors of the economy. “The prospect of this ‘big money’ entering impact investment is exciting”, says Dawson, pointing to the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation as one of the pioneers: “They see that investing a relatively small amount of their capital into innovative new schemes can shift the market in the future, simply by proving alternative concepts.” The returns on such investment may be smaller, potentially reducing the capacity of their grant programme, but the effect of their programme in the round, including the social benefits of the impact investing, is arguably increased. This new trend in impact-focused investment takes a number of forms. Esmee Fairbairn invested in the world’s first Social Impact Bond: a new concept
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which pays returns to investors based on the impact they have, rather than the income they generate. One example is Prison Bonds, piloted in the UK and the US, which reward investors depending on the reduction in re-offending rates by released convicts. For example, in Peterborough, £5 million was raised from 17 social investors to fund work with 3,000 male, short-sentence prisoners following their release. If the Social Impact Bond delivers a drop in re-offending beyond 7.5%, investors will receive an increasing return capped at a maximum of 13% per year over an eight-year period. The return is paid by the authorities out of the savings they make by not having to deal with the current, high re-offending rate. For example, a 10% reduction in reoffending would result in a 7.5% annualised return. Energy generation projects are a key growth area for sustainable investment, not only by large funds but also by local communities. In Germany, 25% of renewable energy projects and 40% of wind ones, are community owned. Abundance Generation is one of the companies striving to increase local ownership of renewables in the UK by asking individuals to subscribe to projects with a minimum investment of just £5. Abundance now has 2,000 members, and 500 investors who have already backed two projects: a solar project in the South Downs, which raised £500,000 with a capacity of 266kW, and a 0.5MW wind project in the Forest of Dean, which raised £1.4 million. Details of the third will be revealed shortly. Louise Wilson, Managing Director of Abundance, believes projects of this kind should also appeal to those who want a financial, not just a social, return, given the growing disillusion with banks and fund managers. She points out that these institutions are charging high fees, yet failing to provide returns. The good news is that investment models with an eye to positive change are emerging, and pioneers are coming forward to prove them. But scale remains a challenge. Will ‘big’ investors be able to embrace them, without repeating the mistakes of the past? The growing number of financial and governance scandals in recent years have underlined the fact that irresponsible behaviour cannot be divorced from financial returns. Investors have a golden opportunity to demonstrate that they can not only offer attractive financial returns but social and environmental benefits. Heather Connon is a freelance journalist specialising in finance and investment.
A 10% reduction in re-offending would result in a 7.5% annualised return
Solar wars As interest in social impact grows, will more investors look to the long-term needs of pension holders?
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I agree with Jonathon Porritt’s piece [in which he argues for a rapid shift to a renewable energy system: see GF88, p48]. I also read the article by Jeremy Leggett in the Financial Times on 15 May 2013: ‘Call a truce in the no-winners trade war over solar’. If something is not done about this trade war, soon all your predictions will be dust! – David Stanners
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by our young generation as a mitigation to stress? A meditational mindful approach to management that shifts the way we approach human capital? I hope all of these. – Steph Sharma
Wet paper
When it comes to paper use, one of the most overlooked factors is the amount of water needed. Water consumption measures the amount of process and cooling water that is consumed or degraded throughout the life cycle of the paper product. The largest components of water consumption come from the production of purchased electricity, and the use of process and cooling water at pulp and paper mills: a single sheet of A4 paper requires 10 litres of water. The answer to this problem is to avoid using paper in the first place. If you look at the exhibition and conference market around the globe, it is one of the most wasteful and polluting industries when it comes to paper: 80% of handouts and brochures end up in the bin. I recently conducted an environmental impact assessment for a 4-day exhibition, where 3,000 exhibitors handed out literature to 30,000 attendees. In total, 4,000 tonnes of paper was used. That is a lot of trees and an awful lot of water. – Andy Flavell Green Futures replies: The water footprint of paper is certainly an important consideration, and one we take into account when buying our paper. Recycled paper is much less water intensive than paper from virgin stocks, and so we print Green Futures on Cocoon Silk 100% recycled paper, supplied by Arjowiggins Graphic. This saves over 40,000 litres of water per print run.
Innovative India
I just wanted to write to congratulate you on the Special Edition ‘Innovation Nation’. I read it from front to back yesterday – couldn’t put it down. It is fantastically put together, and such an inspiring and thought-provoking collection of pieces. I really do hope that more Indian content is in the pipeline for Green Futures, as there is much need for it. I look forward to supporting such work in any way I can. – Anna da Costa
A rich publication with hope for the future that captures all the complexity of India’s past and present. Congratulations. – Loy Rego
a greenfutures Special Edition
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INDIA: INNOVATION NATION
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JonathonPorritt
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Unfortunately, as Carbon Tracker’s ‘Unburnable Carbon’ report demonstrates, were those expectations to be met, with the assets realised and the dividends duly paid out, the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from that production would push us way beyond the politicians’ comforting 2°C threshold – the upper limit for an average temperature increase before the end of the century if we are to have any chance of preventing runaway climate change. Yet every year we pump up that carbon bubble, to the tune of a staggering $624 billion of new investments in 2012. Bubbles always burst. Confronted with the increasingly traumatic consequences of a rapidly warming world (already a reality for many), politicians will be forced into panic policy responses. They will seek to do in a very short time what we should have been doing over the last 25 years, including putting a higher price on every tonne of CO2. When they do, all those oil, gas and coal assets will first become unviable and then completely stranded, destroying trillions of dollars of economic value in the process. It’s already too late to avoid that particular Hobson’s choice: either we burn the planet by crashing through the 2°C barrier and on to 4°C or even higher, or the bubble bursts, with very severe economic consequences. But we don’t have to go on making it worse – and we don’t have to further penalise the world’s poor in managing the outfall. The principal alternatives to fossil fuels (renewables and energy efficiency) are even more important in developing and emerging countries as they are in the rich world. If ever there was a preconditional imperative, this is surely it. Accelerating climate change, caused by the continuing emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, represents an existential threat to our species – by which I mean it threatens the stability and economic wellbeing of every society on Earth. This is the ‘inconvenient truth’ at the heart of the global economy today. It is recognised (although often set aside) by a minority of politicians. It remains totally unseen as far as the vast majority are concerned. But if we don’t move very rapidly indeed through programmes of radical decarbonisation in every sector of the economy, increased social justice will become a very distant dream. Indeed, the lives of billions of people will become too horrendous to contemplate. So can it still be done? I believe it can – which is the main thrust of my new book, ‘The World We Made’, to be published in October (see p35). But debates about whether social justice or biophysical sustainability ‘comes first’ are little more than a self-indulgent irrelevance. Some ‘issue’! Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. www.jonathonporritt.com
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Urban farming in Detroit, USA, 2050
Photo: Nick Woodford / Forum for the Future
The carbon bubble will burst. Bubbles always do
Whenever I see ‘sustainability’ included in a long list of issues to be addressed by a company or a local authority, I find it difficult to avoid exploding with rage. Whatever else it is (and readers of Green Futures will have their own views about that), it is not ‘an issue’. You can see this attitude reflected in the different shades of corporate sustainability we see today. For the vast majority of companies, sustainability is simply added on: only a minority are seriously intent on mainstreaming sustainability into everything they do. Sustainability as “the central organising principle of everything we do” (the rallying cry of the Sustainable Development Commission before this frighteningly retrogressive Coalition Government axed it in 2011) is as elusive a big idea as ever. There has always been some tension about the hierarchy of big ideas in this space, going right back to the Brundtland Report (‘Our Common Future’) in 1987. Its authors argued passionately for strict equivalence between biophysical sustainability on the one hand (maintaining the life support systems on which all life depends) and social justice on the other. That was fine, but it all got much more divisive when they went on to extol the virtues of high levels of economic growth as the only way of securing social justice. Then, the preconditionality debate broke loose: some argued that there is no hope of achieving social justice without first securing the environment, while others maintained that there’s no way of protecting natural resources without first eliminating social injustice. And protagonists on both sides felt – and still feel – very strongly about this! Now, this debate has taken on a tragic new urgency, thanks to the growing threat of the carbon bubble at the heart of the global economy. Back in April, an organisation called Carbon Tracker, supported by the Grantham Research Institute in London, updated its analysis of how global investors are responding to accelerating climate change. It’s not a pretty picture. Every year, financial regulators allow the big oil, gas and coal companies to declare some of their existing reserves as new assets on their balance sheets. The share price of the companies is heavily influenced by the hypothetical value of those assets, with investors working on the expectation that they will be fully developed and have a long, and presumably profitable, production lifetime.
The World We Made Alex McKay’s Story from 2050 A new book on our sustainable future from Jonathon Porritt. Available October 2013 www.greenfutures.org.uk
phaidon.com/theworldwemade
Green Futures July 2013
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