Terra sapiens – are we fit to be a planetary species?

Posted on 08/04/2013 by Joss Tantram

Humans were being overwhelmed….because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than needed to survive it.

Stephen Baxter

Is humanity in office but not power?

As a species, humanity has global ambitions and global impacts. There is scarcely a corner of our planet untouched by human activity, either directly or through our influences on weather, water and biological systems.

However the mere ability to create planetary scale impacts does not make us fit stewards of the Earth. Our current approach to planetary management leaves much to be desired. Wise human stewardship requires a significant evolution of our understanding and behaviour.

It is time we evolved from Homo sapiens to Terra sapiens. This would not be a genetic evolution, but one of intelligence, organisation and action.

The limits of human sapience?

“The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit, but it thinks in connected sequence. It associates one thing with another. It reasons logically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises from which to arrive at further conclusions. It groups associations together, and generalizes.”

H Beam Piper

Human sapience has been vital in getting us where we are today, but appears to fall short in dealing with the challenges it has created for our long-term wellbeing. There is a major dissonance between sapience at an individual and species levels; it appears that the mass-effect of a lot of clever people can sometimes result in a rather dumb crowd.

We are running down finite natural resources and degrading our life support systems at a time when we need them to support more of us. Our societal and organisational structures are failing to deliver the species-level outcomes we require just as we need them most.

The survival imperative

Any species unable to adapt to changing conditions is likely to die out – a truism that applies to both sapient and non-sapient organisms.

On an increasingly pressured planet, the ability of our species to act with global intelligence becomes more pressing as each year passes. Relying upon the thinking of the past to solve the problems of the future will become ever more problematic.

Building the infrastructure for an intelligent planet

We must provide humanity not just with the motivation to act, but also the means. Our ability to act sustainably is strongly mediated by the infra/structural choices that we are presented with and the technological options available.

We need to develop an economic reality that allows people to behave sustainably as a matter of course. Moving from production processes, technologies and economic dependencies that cause problems to those that solve them.

Delivering such a change relies upon a number of characteristics; the knowledge, technology and science that provides us with a reasonably accurate and reliable picture of the state of the planet, the deployable resources and intelligence that would enable us to either fix problems we can see or arrest the continuing injury we give rise to and a reasonable degree of social stability and democratic organization that would allow coordinated and concerted effort should we choose to.

Towards Terra sapiens – a species with planetary intelligence?

The sapient being can imagine. He (sic) can conceive of something which has no existence whatever in the sense-available world of reality, and then he can work and plan toward making it a part of reality. He can not only imagine, but he can also create.

H Beam Piper

Transcending our unfit approaches to managing vital resources for the good of all species is the defining challenge of our evolutionary history.

To become globally sapient we need to imagine a future that overcomes this challenge and plan for its creation. This lies in our ability to:

Recognise that humanity is in a shared endeavour – to act with shared, strategic intent.
Make use effective use of the time we have – our species lives more than 19,000,000 years every day-night cycle.
Compound rather than discount future value – so that a sustainable future is more valuable than an unsustainable present.
Align common and self interest – over sufficiently large periods of time, private interest should be indistinguishable from the common interest.
Evolve rejuvenative technology – which utilises, borrows from or harnesses natural production processes.
Develop planetary enterprise resource management – to use our science and technology to monitor and manage strategic resources and for the good of a vastly expanded market of 9 billion.
Collect, store and distribute plentiful renewable energy as a birthright and for free – competition for energy undermines freedom of choice, action and ingenuity.
Balance common and private ownership – such that one does not automatically undermine the other.

The Golden Hour for humanity?

The challenges we face are not about the future of the Earth (it will abide) or our species (it will likely persist) but for the current form of interdependent, consumption orientated societies that have developed in recent centuries.

We are currently dwelling in the golden hour for humanity (the period following injury where medical intervention stands the best chance of preventing death).

If we wish to preserve the aspects of modern democratic capitalism that we find attractive we must act now to evolve a globally sustainable future for our species.

This post was originally published with a less illuminating title by Guardian Sustainable Business on 2/03/2013

The Rights of Future Trade

Posted on 06/03/2013 by Joss Tantram

But our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was….that the course of trade once turned away from us…might never return.

George Tomkyns Chesney

Should we protect the rights of future trade?

The right to trade, though perhaps not at the top of the list when considering the innate rights of humanity, is nevertheless comprehensively represented and defended.

The World Trade Organisation influences and shapes the economic and enterprise policies of its signatory countries which represent the vast majority of the Earth’s population.

Laws governing the conduct of policy and practice in enterprise and competition could be said to be the most comprehensively and consistently enforced regulations on the planet. They have lead to the dissolution of monopolies such as Standard Oil and “Ma” Bell and the levying of huge fines for breaches of competition law.

This implies that the rights of enterprise, private trade and market activity are important and worth protecting. However, given the environmental and social challenges of the next few decades, how likely is it that such rights can be protected in the future?

The right to trade on a declining planet?

Trade as we have known it is endangered. Clear trends in demographics, urbanisation, water quality and availability, climate stability, resource scarcity and ecosystem health represent risks to the continuation of trade as usual.

There is no point preserving the rights of private enterprise when the very viability of the market itself is threatened by risks that are being largely ignored by trade law, economic rules and governmental policy.

Enterprise can see the challenges of business as usual…

…look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow.

From Thomas Hobbes’ 7^th Law

A growing number of companies have made commitments to ambitious sustainability goals which derive from a clear eyed and rational interpretation of observable environmental and social trends.

Unilever, Nike and GE, recognising that their longevity relies upon the health and vitality of natural capital and the continuing stable functioning of natural systems, have developed plans to transform their production activities to become sustainable.

A restraint of future trade?

Transition pathways to a sustainable future have also been developed by groupings of progressive business, yet the success of such plans are existentially imperilled by an economic and political consensus which seems to be more concerned with protecting and valuing the enterprise of the past than building the enterprise of the future.

Economic and political frameworks have so far failed to present a cogent and consistent pathway for sustaining global enterprise in the face of predicted disruption.

This failure represents a restraint of future trade.

A declaration of the rights of future trade

Thus such a people reap jointly the whole advantages of their country, or neighbourhood, without having their right in so doing called in question by any.

Thomas Spence

In the eighteenth century Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence coined the phrase “The Rights of Man” – establishing the idea that humans are born with what should be inalienable rights. Such rights were integrated into the foundations of the French Declaration of Human and Civic Rights and the US Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps it is time for a parallel declaration to enshrine and protect the birthright of all humans to partake in activity which brings them reward, security and the use of their physical and cognitive abilities in perpetuity (or until the end of their world).

Just as commercial entities have a right to trade now, they should also have a right to trade over the long term.
Just as people all across the world wish to earn money for themselves and their families, so they should have the right and ability to do this over time.
Just as the graduates of today seek to apply commercial and technical skills to careers in enterprise, so they should have the rights to do so without massive structural instability and market failure.
Just as those living today have had the opportunity to use the rules of trade and enterprise for personal and common gain, so those as yet unborn deserve the rights to do the same, without being born into a bankrupted, broken system on a declining planet.

It is time for trade law, policy and regulation to protect the rights of future trade, identify and remove barriers which represent a restraint on future trade and to allow all current and future members of our species to thrive and share in the enterprise which sustains us all.

A short version of this piece was published by FastCoExist on 5/03/13.

Sustainable futures and the status quo bias

Posted on 18/02/2013 by Joss Tantram

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

Dr Pangloss, “Candide”, Voltaire

Winning the battle but losing the war?

Sustainability has become a concept that, by certain measures, has gone mainstream. It has become an expectation, rather than an exception, that companies of global (and smaller) significance have staff and effort expended towards some form of sustainable, responsible or citizenship related endeavour.

However, this does not mean that the “war” for the protection and enhancement of the global environment has been won. To the contrary, all the scientific evidence tells us that the overwhelming global trends in environmental quality are downwards (with the odd little piece of less-bad news).

The reasons for this are many, varied and complex. It is perhaps easiest just to say that sustainability was never a design consideration of economics, and therefore, by extension, of capitalism.

However, from a psychological and neurological perspective, there are also some other, very interesting, factors at work.

The forces of reaction and the forces of protection

Beyond the forces of reaction – those who believe that environmentalists are wrong, are wrongheaded, or who have wilfully or naively misinterpreted data; and beyond the forces of protectionism – those who may privately agree that environmentalists have a point but are having far too good a time to want to change, there is a further challenge we face in building a sustainable world – status quo bias.

Status quo bias – the best of all possible worlds?

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

David Hume

Status quo bias is the phenomenon (backed up by some significant evidence) that humans have an objectively non-rational preference for the status quo. A 2009 paper published by the US National Academy of Sciences found that, when faced with difficult choices, people are more likely to choose the status quo. In addition the study also noted that these choices were frequently not the “best ones” but that the difficulty of making the decision was a factor in driving people to stick with the familiar.

A common example is that presented by an over abundance of choice, for instance when faced with too many varieties of cereal in the supermarket, we often find ourselves buying either what we always buy, or refusing to make any choice at all.

Status quo bias implies that, than rather than setting us free, choice may actually imprison us.

This phenomena presents a huge challenge for building a sustainable world, even though that world might be demonstrably more likely to benefit us all. It also calls in to question the idea that a sustainable world can or should be achieved through presenting people with a greater variety of sustainable choices when perhaps such a change would make little or no difference.

Change and the fear of change

Change alone is unchanging.

Heraclitus

To an extent, status quo bias can also be attributed to a natural fear of change. As a man, this is something I am of course familiar with; move the contents of kitchen cupboards around and I become lost, listless and existentially challenged until my brain eventually gets used to opening the correct door.

In contrast however, humans actively embrace certain types of change, notably those we label as progress. In the last 20 years technologies have transformed our access to knowledge and learning – a change we have embraced as undoubted progress, and our ability to travel and explore has expanded also.

Fundamental, radical, change happens all the time and humans are quite capable of adapting. My grandmother, for instance, was born into a world which was in many ways indistinguishable from that of two or even three hundred years before. Yet when she died the world had convulsed, tens of millions had been killed deliberately and died preventably. Technology had boomed and mass material production and consumption had become a core mode of good citizenship, as had universal healthcare and the chance for many of not dying from dirty water and many communicable diseases.

Yet, while we are living it change appears not to be something called change, just life, which may or may not have new features from one day to the next. Our lives are defined by change, however small – so why does real sustainable change seem like such a challenge to achieve?

It is perhaps not change which presents the problem for building a sustainable world, but the fear of change. It is also the fact that, whether we like it or not, we tend to assume that the status quo, the now, is somehow right and natural; an instinct which prompts us to instinctively reject visions of the future as containing more design and value judgements than our present reality.

The argument goes like this – “You may consider that the environment is important, and want it to be protected or valued differently, but doesn’t the valuation or protection you propose require value judgements as to what is important? Who are you (or anyone) to make judgements which may not be shared by all?”

This is of course a fair point – any environmentalist seeking to assign or champion value or behaviour without some logical and empirical framework underpinning their thinking should be ashamed of themselves.

Value judgements are a fact of life so let’s get on with it

Any vision for change from the status quo will involve value judgements, but aren’t we already wrestling with a set of value judgements that tell us that economic activity (i.e. a developed wetland) is more valuable than none (an undeveloped wetland), regardless of the consequences for the system as a whole?

We live in a world of value judgements; therefore to suggest that some value judgements may produce better outcomes for common-self interest than the current set of value judgements doesn’t really seem to me to be imposing anything.

Towards common value (judgements)

Visions of a sustainable future are by their nature based upon judgements as to what is valuable. At a species level, I would suggest that most of us would probably agree on what is valuable: water, food, air, shelter, warmth, security, equitable income, education, communication and representation.

Equally, in terms of what is valuable in nature, it is fairly clearly understood that qualities of diversity, resilience and productive capacity are critical for thriving ecosystems and we also have a pretty good idea of how to support and encourage these characteristics.

Given the possibility of consensus we mustn’t confuse the way we happen to do things now with the “right way to do things”.

We must not let our comfortable attachment to the norms of today prevent us from embracing the change that a sustainable human future demands. Yet we must also understand that there are good reasons why we tend to associate what is familiar with what is “best”.

This post was originally published in a marginally more sober form by Guardian Sustainable Business on 15/02/2013

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Sensational! Against the tide of shallow value (Part 2)

Posted on 29/01/2013 by Joss Tantram

This post is the 2nd of 2, click here for Part 1 (which gets hot under the collar about an obsession with shallow value).

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Benjamin Franklin

The calculated sensationalism of price

The grand champions of sensation over meaning are not peddlers of sex or even of products but those in financial markets who have mistranslated the real, underlying sources of social, ecological and economic value into abstracted price.

Price is not value itself, it is a signifier of value. However, it is one which largely omits the value of externalities.

In sustainability terms this is a problem because the major means of determining behaviour in our capitalist world is the price signal. We continue to knowingly explore and exploit dwindling and dangerous sources of non renewable fuel because price perversely pushes us to, telling us that the use of free energy from the wind and the sun is somehow more expensive overall. Renewables are often currently more economically expensive, but the price of such fuels is not the same as their value to us.

Ceteris non paribus – all things are not equal

Efforts to define the price and value of natural capital can equally fall prey to confusion between price and value. We are easily lulled into the notion that if we price something we can make a rational decision to trade it and that it is somehow fungible (capable of mutual substitution) – that the money we receive in return for a trade can be used to obtain a substitute which is functionally useful in the same way as the property traded in the first place.

Yet there are some areas where such fungibility just does not apply. If you could achieve a price that you were happy to receive in order to sell your mother, could you use that money to buy yourself another?

Trading the stuff of life

…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

H. G. Wells

Financial markets have become obsessed with shallow value and too remote from anything that resembles real life for too long. Recent years have shown us just a fraction of the dangers of exotic financial instruments, of bundling up a range of debts, and labelling them as risk free investments for trading long after we have forgotten the underlying value of the asset (or absence of asset) upon which they were originally based.

Such abstraction goes far beyond the re-packaging of potentially bad debts. Financial markets have, in recent years, undertaken trading in food – the fundamental components of human survival for purposes far removed from the allocation and distribution of those assets to those in need of them. This trade has become a sensational distortion of the purpose of markets in food stuffs, focussed merely around the idea that the thing traded can give rise to profit, rather than that the thing traded can give rise to adequate nutrition.

Can life arise from poisoned markets?

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

John Maynard Keynes

In such a fetishised market, can the trading of environmental and natural value, through Carbon Credits, Conservation Banking Credits, Transferable Development Rights and other such theoretically “sustainable finance instruments” possibly give rise to the sort of long term, strategic outcomes that our planet needs or will they merely become just another means by which common value can be turned into private profit?

Surely if we are to truly use the mechanisms of capital markets and international trading to deliver environmental and social good then those markets need to be fundamentally reformed, such that they are capable of truly valuing a common future as more valuable than a private present.

Such markets must have both the incentive and capability to deliver the required strategic outcomes. They must rise to the challenge of valuing activities and behavior which pay off over the long term, to compound rather than discount the value of a more sustainable future and to start to value decisions that allow the growth and stability of ecosystems and societies as an outcome of value to the market as a whole. Allowing sustainable decisions and behaviors to be inherently valued and prioritised rather than considered as an afterthought.

Truly sustainable markets, those dedicated to the discovery, trading and distribution of real value would therefore, naturally:

Value abundance: consider the longevity and safety of supply of the resources they depend upon;
Preserve & grow vitality: act to value and enhance the quality and diversity of the natural capital upon which human life depends, and:
Value & balance interdependence: prioritise mutual equity in relationships with suppliers, customers and other stakeholders.

It is time for real value. It is time to value the abundance, vitality and interdependence of all that exists on this precious, irreplaceable planet. To move beyond the surface, sensational value of current market price and start to define and trade the real value which sustains us all.

Part 1 of this post gets all excited about market hysteria and the fetishism of financial markets.

This post was originally published (with the odd minor difference) by Green Conduct on 25/1/2013.

Sensational! Against the tide of shallow value (Part 1)

Posted on 29/01/2013 by Joss Tantram

What does the world weigh? Its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labor in the balance against silver and gold. That will never balance, it spills a lot of life that way.

Walter M. Miller Jnr “A Canticle for Liebowitz”

We need to campaign for real value

Real value refers to those things which have meaning in sustaining and supporting life, whether human or otherwise.

Shallow value refers to value priced beyond its worth; where value is the product of hype, glitter and market hysteria rather than of human and ecological need or meaning.

It is time to value what is precious to us all. The water, food and air that give us life, the shelter and warmth that allow comfort, the security of place, equitable income, education and communication that allow us to plan for our and our children’s future and the ability to develop, share, discuss and distribute ideas about the world and our existence.

Swamped by shallow value

Shallow value dominates our media, our discourse and our markets.

Shallow value is the triumph of sensation over meaning, surface over depth and gratification over satisfaction. It is by no means restricted to the obvious and literal elevation of image over substance in the media but has increasingly pervaded the everyday, becoming the base currency of capitalism itself and influencing the very core of how we understand and value what is worthwhile.

Capitalism has come to depend upon sensation to sell its products; brand has become the medium for translating a set of corporate behaviours, undertaken to maximise private profit, into a set of implied emotions and sensations. Buying a product or wearing a brand, capitalism implies, will help us to be who we want to be, to be happier, more beautiful, better and more fulfilled people.

Of course this is nothing new, sensational bubbles have been a feature of markets for many hundreds of years. More explicitly, the foundations of modern advertising consciously used and adapted the then emergent science of psychology for the purposes of linking products to a buyer’s sense of self and self-worth.

Alastair McIntosh, the scholar and activist, has written extensively on the issue, related to tobacco marketing and the pornography of consumerism. In his logical and emotional tour de force “Hell and High Water” (2008) McIntosh summarises consumerism’s deliberate “hacking” of psychological circuitry as follows “Could this be the core dynamic by which consumerism sustains itself? Addictions are powerful precisely because they taunt us with our heart’s longing. But they fake it. They short-circuit and actually block off the real thing – the focus of our ultimate concern.”

Building upon McIntosh’s thesis, I would argue that this sensationalist agenda has gone far further than merely representing the (now) unspoken design principles of advertising and marketing, it has also become unconsciously embedded within the very DNA of every facet of economic and financial activity, warping our conceptions of what is valuable, mistaking shallow economic price for real value.

The fetishisation of financial markets

One of the main reasons financial markets struggle with real value is due to the problem of economic externalities. These are the environmental, social and economic costs and benefits which either take place “outside” institutional accounts or occur across the balance sheets of multiple actors, stakeholders or proxies. The reconciliation and adequate pricing of economic externalities has become a major source of activity for environmentalists and economists seeking to address systemic and unpriced risks and market failures.

The problem of externalities becomes much, much more problematic when we consider the active disinterest of modern financial markets in their original, fundamental purpose. Financial markets first grew as a way of providing financial resources to agricultural and mercantile enterprise, allowing endeavours to be undertaken in expectation of future reward. For instance, to allow a farmer to buy next year’s seed on the promise of this years’ crop or a merchant to invest in stock for the next sea voyage in the expectation that the current one would land and its cargo be sold.

Financiers supporting such endeavours would of course need to make an assessment as to whether the investee in question was likely to be able to make good on the debt – and the way that they organised and conducted their business was therefore a key area of judgement for investors.

Today’s markets in listed companies are theoretically no different – representing a set of companies seeking investment and requiring a judgement on behalf of investors as to whether those companies have the strategy, risk management and staff capabilities to execute that strategy and deliver a return on investment.

It may therefore be presumed that an interest in, and analysis of, the fundamental viability, utility and longevity of those companies would be an essential area of interest for investors. While this is certainly the case for a wide range of individual investors, it is not necessarily true for the market as a whole. Market movement and the behaviours and inferred intentions of other market actors have become more important than the analysis of company fundamentals.

Market movement has become king, coupled with the rise of automatic, sub-second trading technologies, investors have become more interested in making sure they are not left stranded by market hysteria than acting as financiers and stewards of companies.

The UK economist John Kay entertainingly explores this fetishised market in his Parable of the Ox, which describes the perverse development of a market focussed solely upon market actors (experts in the art of Ox weighing) rather than upon its original purpose (weighing an actual Ox).

I would additionally argue that beyond the pornography of marketing and advertising, beyond the mistaken belief that price equals value, beyond a focus upon the market rather than the investee, there is one further perversion of real value that we have allowed to take place, the belief that just because a thing can be traded, that it should be.

Part 2 of this post explores the sensationalism of price and describes a market capable of defining and trading the real value which sustains us all.

This post was originally published (with the odd minor difference) by Green Conduct on 25/1/2013.

Looking forward and facing back – can standards deliver a sustainable world?

Posted on 17/12/2012 by Joss Tantram

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My firm (Terrafiniti) has recently had the pleasure of supporting Corporate Register’s CRRA 13 Awards, a unique, user generated sustainability and corporate responsibility reporting awards scheme.

This has given us a concentrated snap-shot of sustainability and corporate responsibility reports from companies of all sizes and sectors from around the world. It also provided us with an insight into the systems, standards and best practice approaches these companies are using to guide their activities or demonstrate their responsibility.

In addition to judging sustainability reports, I have also had the vast and eternal pleasure over the years to be involved in a number of best practice approaches and more formal management and guidance systems. These have included the SIGMA project – still one of the best sustainability management approaches in existence, the little known UK Standards BS8900 (Guidance for Managing Sustainable Development) and BS8901 (Sustainable Events Management) and the battle-scarred and possibly flawed ISO26000 Social Responsibility Guidance Standard.

A question which often arises, when discussing these and other best practice approaches such as the UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), is whether they give rise to more sustainable practice and, if not, why not?

Leading and following standards – how do standards arise?

Standards are developed for two main reasons:

1. Because something is already happening and it is considered mainstream enough to be codified into standard practice, and;

2. Because something is not happening that people think ought to happen and therefore a standard is developed to encourage it.

These two circumstances give rise to two types of standards; following standards and leading standards.

In sustainability terms an example of a following standard is ISO 14001, which codifies generally accepted practice, whilst a leading standard would be ISO 26000. Other leading standards would be the AA1000 series – which seeks to stimulate leading practice in areas of activity that are new to many organisations.

It can be argued that such leading standards arise not from established practice, but a recognition of the gap between what is currently happening and what is required to happen in order to avoid undesired outcomes (e.g. rising social inequity, systemic economic instability or the total destruction of ecosystems and societies as we know and love them – little things like that).

For many sustainability practitioners, who believe that transformative change is required in relation to the scale of the sustainability challenges we face, leading standards are those we are most interested in, whilst following standards are those most widely employed in the marketplace.

Procedures for a sustainable world?

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

Immanuel Kant

A common challenge in organisations is the substitution of procedures for devolved trust and decision making. When they get to a certain size, or have a bureaucratically minded leadership or culture, it is often supposed that strict procedures, permissions or systems will guarantee correct decision making.

This may be so where every aspect of a process is well established and known and there can be no possible utility in innovation or change. However, such organisations and processes are rare; most organisations can stand to improve their approach by encouraging and supporting creativity of thought and innovation in process but such behaviours cannot be mandated by top-down dictats.

An apposite example comes from was a project I was involved in a decade ago considering what a sustainable bank would be like. We heard from a small, ethical bank alongside a global financial institution. They both had approaches for assessing environmental and social risk in lending decisions. The small organisation’s process was shockingly simple – the happiness or otherwise of its staff – they discussed the potential decision and decided whether they were happy to accept or decline the lending. The big organisation had an extensive checklist approach designed to provide an entirely procedural solution.

Since that time one has quietly gone on to grow slowly with no fuss or scandals, the other has had more spectacular growth and become globally recognised as somewhat ethically challenged.

Principles based standards

If procedures encourage rote behaviour a solution can be to develop standards which do not prescribe specific activities but which articulate sets of principles to guide and shape actions. Conversely, with a very detailed approach such as that of the GRI, it is theoretically possible to look at the GRI index in an organisation’s report and to judge the level and quality of embedding.

For principles based approaches such a judgement can be much harder, it can be difficult to tell whether something has happened (or not happened) because of a set of principles because it is much harder to tell how individuals make decisions.

Proliferation – guidance for all?

In my previous life in the NGO world we often found that organisations were keen to respond positively to sustainability but just wanted to be told where to look to find out what to do. This is a seductive but problematic thing to achieve and has given rise to both a proliferation in the number of tailored approaches to support every possible combination of organisational sector and size and the exponential growth of more generic approaches.

For example, the GRI has expanded in both directions. Their core indicators for all companies have expanded through the lifetime of the initiative as has the production of sector specific supplements (now numbering 10 and counting).

Finding our way in the dark

Here is where we encounter a deep and fundamental challenge with sustainability – it is substantially unmapped territory, therefore it is difficult to say exactly what it will look like, and indeed how to get there. This is especially the case when the specific expertise and knowledge required in many areas to develop sustainable solutions lies with those currently involved in unsustainable ones. A standard cannot mandate such innovation and perhaps should not try to.

Stakeholder standards – do successful solutions really need consensus?

Consensus is very big in sustainability right now, and there are some good reasons for this. The AA1000 series, the GRI and ISO26000 all developed through huge, multi-stakeholder approaches which were based in consensus and which required that consensus for legitimacy.

Yet in the fast moving world of commercial products, consensus and stakeholder based development is not a success criterion. It could be argued that the same should go for sustainability standards.

Truly disruptive and commercially successful products are not the outcome of extensive stakeholder processes and consensual development. They are the products of creative activity, often from single individuals or flexible, capable small teams. Dyson’s cleaners and Apple’s iPods were just such products – successful because they redefined a market effectively, cleverly and elegantly.

Why should standards really be any different? Why is it not possible to develop sustainability approaches which are able to drive sustainable change, deliver viable long term decisions and are communicable to the wider world but which do not need the best part of a decade and the involvement of thousands to do so?

Massively detailed stakeholder derived consensus based standards and guidance, unimpeachable though they may be in giving everyone involved their voice, are really, really unlikely to stimulate the innovation, creativity and swiftness of action required to tackle fast moving environmental and social problems.

The innovation we depend upon for a sustainable future may be rooted in established practice but may be as different from that practice as night is from day. While standards clearly have a role in such a transition, they are unlikely to be our salvation.

This post was originally published on Green Conduct on 14/12/2012.

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Which straw broke the camel’s back; how useful are planetary boundaries?

Posted on 26/11/2012 by Joss Tantram

The promise and problems of planetary boundaries

`Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

David Hume

Which straw did break the camel’s back? It was, of course, the final one.

Retrospectively, this is obvious, but is it so obvious that
the breaking point could have been predicted?
In theory the answer is clear, it is logically inevitable that if you keep piling increasing burden on an ungulate or any other load bearing creature then at some point the equilibrium of its spine will rapidly transit from one metastable state (unbroken) to another (broken).

Once that happens the whole camel being useful to carry stuff paradigm goes out of the window.

So, if it is obvious that ever more straw on said dromedary is a bad idea then why is it so difficult to stop adding to the load and would it help if we knew precisely which straw was going to be the problem?

An operating space for humanity

This is a question that environmentalists must start to grasp in the context of environmental limits and their translation into fixed system and condition boundaries.

A clear offspring of the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits To Growth, the Nine Planetary Boundaries were developed by Johan Rockström et al in a 2011 paper in Nature and are being used as the basis for campaigns and policy work by NGOs such as Forum For the Future and WWF. They are also at the heart of the popular Doughnut model developed by Kate Raworth of Oxfam, an analysis of the space (between the limits of the planet to support complex human activity and the needs of humanity) within which a sustainable world might operate.

Boundaries: useful in theory but in practice?

The concept of planetary boundaries is a powerful and seductive one, but also one that may have limited utility for driving a sustainable world for a mix of illogical and logical reasons.

Humans aren’t all that rational, especially en masse…

Normal human behaviours tend to explore and test limits. When we are told that it is unsafe to go beyond a particular point close to the edge of a cliff or a canyon, what do most of us do? We go right up to the point and peer over the edge. If we all did that at once many of us would fall. So, telling us that there is a boundary we should not cross is a pretty sure-fire way of giving us the message that it is absolutely safe to go up close, even though it might be death to cross. Humans are bloody-mindedly binary in that way.

Knowing boundaries exist doesn’t really help in a massively plural world

On a global scale, environmental and social impacts arise through the actions of billions of actors undertaking trillions of actions, each with varying implications. They are not all coordinated and not all directable. They take place within a general framework of economic and capitalist behaviour, mediated by varying legal codes and social mores.

There is no single or homogenous audience to warn about crossing boundaries. Instead different actors, be they individuals making consumption choices, governments setting legislation or corporations making production choices will tend to make these choices in isolation even if they have cumulative common impacts.

Boundaries frame the territory but don’t provide a solution

The best plan, of course, is to reconsider the whole camel/straw equation. Are there other ways the two could interact that would avoid inevitable systemic breakdowns (a cart perhaps)?

Knowing the limits to (current models of) growth is very useful but in the long term, not as useful as finding and valuing other ways to grow that do not add further burden to the Planet’s overloaded systems.

We could remove the threat posed by approaching or crossing boundaries by developing sustainable industrial and production systems and technologies that innately respect and reinforce the boundaries rather than pushing against them.

Beyond rationing unsustainable behaviour…

Rather than focusing upon rationing the amount of unsustainable behaviour that we are allowed to undertake, we would be better putting our time and ingenuity into developing modes of production and consumption that have inherently positive, restorative, ecological and social implications.

The vast majority of humanity, whilst they may or may not actively admit it, tends to share an interest in sustaining complex and interdependent modes of economics, trade, business and quality of life.

If this desire is to be met there are clearly some changes that need to be made which allow an alignment between individual choices and collective outcomes. Ecological and social problems are not actually often conscious or deliberate choices but the side effects of other (consumption) actions. It is the side effects which stand to threaten the continuing operations of global capitalism, not the natural individual intentions of citizens to buy and use things that they want or need.

Recognising the breaking points of environmental systems should spur human ingenuity and creativity; stimulating science and technologies that push at the limits of what is possible, not at the limits of what is sustainable.

This post was originally published (with a lower camel quotient) in Guardian Sustainable Business on 19/11/2012

How much is your Mother (Earth) worth?

Posted on 24/10/2012 by Joss Tantram

All human things of dearest value hang on slender strings.

Edmund Waller

Like pricing the Earth, getting the right price for your Mother might be harder than you think

So you want to sell your Mother. It’s a free market, most other things are bought and sold these days and all sorts of exotic items are priced and traded every second.

In addition, you reckon she must be worth a decent amount. I mean, she is your Mum after all!

How to figure out the asking price though? That’s where it starts to get tricky…

Assuming you like her, you may feel that she is worth more than a simple calculation of what you might fetch with the sale of her possessions, the change and notes in her purse and the sum of flogging off any decent clothes or shoes she owns.

Similarly, selling her house, car and jewellery (if she has them) may well not come close to telling you how much she ought to fetch. It is possible that you may be able to calculate what her actions are worth. For instance; to multiply the number of meals she has cooked you at the going rate, then add a cook or chef’s salary, likewise with laundry and sundry other services…

The trouble is that if you take this approach you may be left with a nagging feeling that you have sold yourself (and perhaps your dear old Mum) rather short.

The Earth presents a pretty similar challenge for pricing. You can price its results, its productivity, but that price comes nowhere near a true reflection of the value of its capacity to continue to sustain us and everything else in (pretty much) perpetuity.

This is why the seductive notion of pricing ecosystems as a route to sustainability must be seen clearly for what it is and what it is not.

As I have said elsewhere, factoring the Earth’s ability to sustain us into economic value is a little more complex than just finding a price that we would be prepared to pay or forgo to preserve or develop parts of the environment.

To flog the metaphor one last time – ecosystem prices tell us what it would be worth if we sold all of our Mum’s stuff but it wouldn’t buy us a new Mother (Earth).

The Green Investment Bank – is it a bank and will it be green?

Posted on 17/10/2012 by Dominic Tantram

The Aldersgate event Banking for Sustainable Growth explored the role the Green Investment Bank (GIB) could play in driving the economic recovery.

Vince Cable MP Secretary of State for BIS opens the debate

Hosted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the event attracted nearly 400 people from industry, finance and policy backgrounds.

Vince Cable MP, Secretary of State for BIS, opened the debate talking about the GIB and the Government’s plan to make an initial investment of £3 billion and the plan to bring in £15 billion of private money.

To borrow or not to borrow – that is the question

Echoing the unusual level of cross party support in the House of Commons, the panel tended to agree with each other over the purpose and value of the GIB as an institution.

Aldersgate Group panel for the GIB

However, disagreement starts to emerge over the ambition of the bank and the current question mark over its borrowing powers.

Lend me a quid till Tuesday…
At the time of writing the bank has just cleared EU state aid rules but still needs to attain UK legislative approval and royal assent in Spring 2013. However, it is still unclear whether it will have the ability to undertake what is a considered a basic function of banking – the power to borrow funds.

Representing the BT pension fund (the largest in the UK) Helene Winch emphasised the importance of borrowing powers for GIB to avoid becoming simply another unneeded fund, a position that was reinforced by Ed Matthew from Transform UK which has lobbied for the establishment of the GIB.

Dr Cable stated that borrowing was a clear aspiration and he was still optimistic for all party support. However, as so often in issues of accelerating a green and sustainable economy, apparently the Treasury still needs convincing; it is concerned that if the GIB had the ability to borrow, the debt would show up on government balance sheets.

Conversely, others argue that allowing the GIB to borrow would unlock the doors to significantly more private sector money. German owned KfW has been running for many years and manages to leverage equity at a ratio of 1:26 – far beyond the modest 1:6 envisaged for the early stages of GIB.

Certainty and stability are good for investors and business

Helene Winch stressed that pension funds need to consider an investment context at least 30 years forward and therefore called for policy stability because the asset pricing models the industry uses cope poorly with rapid or dramatic policy changes.

Mike Turnbull (Bank of America Merrill Lynch) saw a key role for GIB to assist with the riskier initial investments needed in developments such as offshore wind – a sector estimated to require £200 billion by 2020. Such a bridge is needed, Turnbull argued, because pension funds will only invest in later operational stages where the risk profile is lower and Basel III liquidity requirements are likely to curb the long term ability of banks to invest.

Is green really green?

The ‘green’ remit for the GIB is currently unclear, blogging on the Guardian Caroline Lucas MP (Panel Chair) highlighted the lack of specific investment criteria.

Peter Young (Aldersgate Group) expressed the need for investment criteria linked to carbon reduction targets and that industrial strategies are targeted where we have competitive advantage.

It is worth noting that the criteria for sustainable technologies are pretty firmly established and embedded into the investment policies and criteria of a number of leading responsible and sustainable investors and the government might do well to avoid reinventing the wheel when it comes to establishing such details.

There is a big job ahead

There is huge demand for investment in ‘green economy’ projects that will support jobs and growth while tackling a range of environmental issues, including offshore electricity generation, energy efficiency programmes and infrastructure development.

The panel seemed to be in agreement that there was a huge and growing need to invest in these green technologies of the future. There was also consensus on the scale of environment challenges which lie ahead; one question from the floor asked if climate change or collapse of the international monetary system was the greatest threat with the panel responding that it was the former which presents the greatest threat (presumably working from the entirely logical notion that it is better to be poor than to be dead).

Ken Smith from Memset, a fast growing SME, asked how the GIB might help support SMEs as the engine for growth and employment and in the economy. The panel acknowledged that there are gaps in support to smaller companies and reflected that long term institutional change was required together with changes in outlook. Dr Cable acknowledged the role of SMEs in the economy and thought the GIB should reflect this in supply chain initiatives.

There is a clear demand for investment support for green innovation and drive and support growth in the wider economy.

Should the GIB be able to effectively support this it will provide valuable assistance to a struggling economy – if it is allowed to grow, ideally to a scale rivalling the subsidies and tax breaks available to other sectors.

Out of the ghetto…

It’s curious that members of the panel felt the need to stress the lack of conflict between green and conventional economic growth (a mantra that, ironically, environmentalists have spent many years teaching politicians and that politicians now feel the need to teach them back) – perhaps reflective of recent remarks from the Chancellor.

…from a part of the system to the system itself

While it’s clear that a bank dedicated to supporting green investment is sorely needed, we need to look beyond sustainability as a niche activity and embed it as a priority in mainstream economics.

As (environmental) sustainability is fundamentally about long term survival and wellbeing, over the long-term there should be no conflict with (economic) sustainability – the economy requires a workforce, consumers and raw materials to operate. The problem – and hence the biggest opportunity – lies in the transition to a green economy where we can remove the damage from continued growth.

A sustainable world before the end of our world?

Posted on 17/09/2012 by Joss Tantram

“Life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish!”

Karel Čapek

The possibility of death in the mind of someone living

Many years ago when I was studying Human Ecology in sunny West Yorkshire we learned about Deep Ecology; which sought to place the human species in the wider context of the Earth’s history and its other inhabitants. Viewed via this perspective the infinitesimal instant in the planet’s history in which we have been around is a mere blink of the Earth’s eye, we are newcomers when compared with almost any of our companion species on this planet.

This planetary perspective gave me, as a callow youth, great comfort. I had grown up lucky enough to have the free run of countryside and had always felt an empathy with the eternal changing of the seasons and cycles of life and death. To feel that, in time, my life would conform to these natural cycles felt natural and right and that life on this planet, in whatever form, would persist long after the passing of our species felt equally right.

Of course, with age, the naive bravery of idealistic youth gives way to elements of fear, for ourselves and for the next generation. This warm comfort, whilst I still feel it, is mixed with a desire and hope for the end of our species and civilisation to perhaps be further away in our future than charging ever faster around time’s corner towards us.

Why all this talk of death? Because a subject that seems to be emerging in sustainability circles is that of remaining optimistic in the face of overwhelming odds. The past decade or so has seen massive progress in the acknowledgement of the need for sustainable change by international institutions, visionary businesses and governments, yet the actual practice of modern life is still dreadfully unsustainable.

Given this lag or dissonance between rhetoric and practice, the extent to which sustainability professionals can remain optimistic has been the recent focus of a number of bloggers, activitists and writers.

Some are arguing for optimism, such as Hunter Lovins, and some, such as Osbert Lancaster, calling for a recognition that the possibility of achieving a sustainable world is slipping further from our grasp with every passing day. This latter call for realism makes the point that professional optimism – focussing on sustainable hope for a possible future rather than unsustainable likelihood – is disingenuous at best, and that truly acknowledging the likelihood of failure is a pre-requisite for re-imagining our possible futures.

Such an approach is an interesting one, acknowledging not just the possibility but the likelihood of failure does not come easily to those of us who have dedicated our lives and our hopes to making some contribution to a sustainable world.

Of course, in planetary and universal terms – what we do with our lives matters not one jot…

Eschatalogically speaking – we really are all doomed

Of course, we are, as individuals, societies and likely as a species, all doomed. Death is the inevitable reciprocal of life, so as individuals we have to get our heads around this at some point.

Human history, short though it is planetary terms, has seen the rise and fall of many civilisations and societies- there is, after all, no certainty but more uncertainty.

In a cosmic context, the long term outlook is not too rosy. Eschatology (religious or philosophic studies of the end of the world/ the end of the universe) presents many, many physically certain ends for our planet (e.g. when the sun burns all its hydrogen in about 4.8 billion years) or the slow heat death of the universe (likely to come at a time in the future with so many noughts attached that its best if you just look here).

Is wilfully blind optimism dishonest?

Many people involved in sustainability and CSR are professional optimists, celebrating relative gains in company performance or highlighting the positive possibilities for a sustainable world. Great swathes of the internet are dedicated to CSR and sustainability news sites trumpeting the most minimal changes in the environmental and social impact profiles of companies. They ignore the overwhelming trajectory of our species’ consumption habits and trends and instead try to link these tiny changes to a wider (possible) trend towards different, more sustainable, industrial models.

I have often called myself a (wilfully) blind optimist – an optimist by inclination rather than faith. The trouble with acknowledging that we are all doomed is having to find something to do with the rest of your life – I would rather my life was dedicated to trying to make positive change happen than to spend the rest of my years buying an isolated property on the top of a hill, laying down the tins of soup and long life milk and building a high wall.

OK, we are all doomed, what shall we do now?

Optimism for a sustainable future might be pointless in cosmic terms but then so is pretty much anything when viewed in this light. I would rather feel that I were a soldier in a thousand year war – unlikely to see victory but pretty sure of the rightness of my cause – than give up trying to achieve a sustainable and equitable future.

Of course it is unlikely that we are going to seamlessly achieve the transition of economic, industrial and social models, but the question that we need to ask ourselves is not whether it is logically possible, but whether it is impossibly logical? If we value what we have now then surely it makes no sense not to strive to sustain it.

I believe that, whilst unlikely, a sustainable world remains within our species’ grasp.

“There’s a 50/50 chance of achieving a sustainable world, though there’s only a 10 percent chance of that.”

(after) Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) in The Naked Gun

This post was originally published (with fewer jokes) in Guardian Sustainable Business on 14/09/2012