War footing needed if we are to avoid climate chaos

The clock is ticking yet we still do not have an integrated framework for ensuring climate sustainability, writes JOHN REYNOLDS

CONSIDER THE global financial crisis and the consequent recession, the failure of the Copenhagen summit, increased scepticism about climate science and the credibility of the UN International Panel on Climate Change in the wake of “Climategate”, and it starts to seem as if making a business greener is no longer as sensible and profitable as it was when oil prices were at an all-time high in 2008.

That’s not the opinion of Dr Karl Henrik Robert, however. A former cancer researcher and clinician from Sweden, he founded a sustainability consultancy, The Natural Step, almost 20 years ago, bringing together scientific, social and economic strands of environmentalism with the aim of achieving concrete results in businesses and organisations.

In Dublin recently to speak at the annual Irish forum of social entrepreneurship organisation Ashoka, he is helping Dublin City Council implement a sustainability framework that unifies these disparate strands. Among his clients are global corporations as large as Nike and Panasonic, and local authorities across Italy, Canada, Sweden and North America.

Wider public interest in all things green goes in cycles, according to Dr Robert. It peaked recently in the period when oil prices were at their highest in mid-2008, right up to the run-up to the IPCC negotiations in Copenhagen last December.

The failure of Copenhagen, coupled with the “Climategate” controversy that recently emerged from the University of East Anglia, provided a tipping point and saw this interest dip dramatically.

The most effective way of climbing out of this trough again, according to Dr Robert, is for every business or state organisation to use a proper systematic framework.

“Unsustainability is like a cancer,” Dr Robert says, and it needs to be cured in an effective, systematic and targeted way that involves continuously refining it, so that an organisation doesn’t take a step back towards unsustainability.

Before delving into how to administer his tough medicine, however, Dr Robert and two other social entrepreneurs who also spoke at the Ashoka forum – Rob Hopkins and Johannes Hengstenberg – inject some realism into where we are at the moment in terms of sustainability.

“Very, very few of the people negotiating at Copenhagen on our behalf had a vision of what a post-carbon world would look like,” Hopkins said.

Dr Robert is more emphatic. “The leaders don’t understand the issue properly. They don’t have a clear vision on sustainability. They do not understand the challenge, so they cannot inform us about the appropriate measures that need to be taken. Nor do they understand the selfish benefits to their own country of becoming more sustainable.

“At the moment, they’re stuck in their own flawed assumptions and in their political programmes, which don’t allow them to go further than they did. How could anyone expect anything more than the failure we saw at Copenhagen?”

The fallout of Climategate should not derail progress either, he argues. “It’s a question of risk – look at the impact on smoking when it was clear that there was a much greater risk of it causing lung cancer. It’s all in our mind, but that’s the way we are. Our capability of dealing with time and imagining the future and the possibilities of climate disasters is very poor.”

Hopkins agrees with James Lovelock, the well-known environmentalist, scientist and Gaia theorist, who recently said the world needs to be put on a warlike footing in order to mobilise the necessary action to avoid climate catastrophe.

“If you look at how the US turned its industry around during the second World War, it was done in an incredibly short period of time, and we need a similar response. But it needs to be based on realistic assumptions. It’s about cutting carbon and it’s about building resilience, but it needs to go a lot deeper than making cars more fuel-efficient, for example,” he says.

If a business or organisation were to mobilise action in this way, at its simplest Dr Robert’s Natural Step framework provides a good starting point.

Nike’s adherence to his framework saw the sportswear company cut its carbon footprint to 1.53 million tonnes last year, down from 1.6 million tonnes in 2008, and having reduced it from a peak of 7.5 million tonnes in 1997.

Included in this cut is a 15 per cent drop in CO2 emissions at its factories since 2007, despite a 41 per cent growth in their size by square footage, and a 9 per cent cut in CO2 emissions from its inbound logistics since 2007. In a world where carbon tax is on the table, such cuts will make a significant difference to the bottom line.

A more visible result of Nike’s sustainability drive will be Robinho and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Nike jerseys worn at this year’s World Cup in South Africa.

So what is the framework? The first step is about awareness of what the organisation will look like in a sustainable future.

Then it’s about realising where the organisation is starting from, and how its activities are running counter to the agreed sustainability principles.

The third and fourth steps involve coming up with creative solutions and then deciding on what the organisation will prioritise from those solutions.

Initially, this involves saving and changing over and over again, so initially you save energy, then materials, then waste and so on, adapting your business processes or operations as you go along.

Choosing the low-hanging fruit – savings on electricity, water and heating, for example – means you use the financial benefit made to invest in necessary measures to make further savings, and so the process continues.

Each time the organisation does something new, creates a new product or service, for example, the framework is then applied in the context of suppliers and clients, and how the organisation can co-operate to achieve sustainability goals.

As Dr Robert continues his work with Dublin City Council (DCC), and prepares to advise Intel in Leixlip in the near future, what would a truly sustainable Dublin look like?

At a basic level, developments such as the controversial Poolbeg incinerator would only go ahead on the condition that it provided a platform from which full sustainability could be achieved – something that doesn’t appear to be the case at the moment – “otherwise complexity makes it impossible to assess”, Dr Robert says.

Any development of the €412 million Irish Glass Bottle site would only be allowed to go ahead on the same basis, so it would have to be the setting for an ultra-green city suburb, business park or piece of leisure, social or transport infrastructure, he adds.

“The end vision is a city that is an attractive and sustainable model for the world. In terms of the council, it involves changing it from being an uninformed talking shop working with flawed assumptions,” he says.