Dr Tom Crompton

By Bhavani Prakash

Dr. Tom Crompton is a Change Strategist at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and if you’re intrigued by his job description, suffice it to say he has been involved in some cutting-edge research on going to the heart of what should be the approach of communication campaigns – of environmental organisations and those of the non-profit sector in general.

Dr. Crompton stresses the importance of engaging people’s intrinsic or non-materialistic values, versus extrinsic or materialistic ones, to achieve lasting and positive behaviour change. He is one the people behind the project called Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values.  Much of his work can be found on the thought-provoking website called Values and Frames.org

EWTT: How did your interest in human psychology and environmentalism evolve?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I have worked at WWF-UK for ten years .The first five years, I worked on international trade and investment policy – for example, World Trade Organisation (WTO) law. I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the international trade regime is crucially important from the sustainability perspective to ensure that we are producing and trading in more sustainable products with lower carbon footprints. Several senior negotiators were themselves deeply convinced for the need for more fundamental change to the trade regime on a sustainability basis but they’d say, “look, our hands are tied, we don’t enjoy the political space, we don’t experience public political pressure for more proportional change” and as a result the change that we saw was small.

I think that forced us really to reflect on what is it that creates  political space and pressure for more proportional change, what is it that motivates people to engage with the political process, whether it is to lobby with members of parliament or to demonstrate on the streets or however else they may express their political frustration. Some social psychologists came back to us and said that one of the things they see as missing at the moment from environmental campaigning or indeed third sector campaigning generally, is an understanding of values and the importance of values in underpinning people’s commitment to engage in political process and to express concern about social and environmental issues.

EWTT: In this context can you introduce the work you do with the Common Cause Project? 

Dr. Tom Crompton: We’re working to open debate with a wide range of third sector organizations – not just environmental organizations but also development and disability organizations, children’s charities and animal welfare charities – about the cultural values that seem to consistently underpin expression of concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues.

One implication of this work is that we should be designing or shaping our campaigns and communications, and indeed our entire external engagement, in a way which helps to engage and strengthen those values. These are values which almost everybody seems to hold already. It’s a question of bringing them to the fore, because they underpin not just our concern about environmental issues,  but also the concern about a wide range of other social issues.

It seems that when we activate what psychologists call extrinsic values -which are concerns about things like wealth or social status or image, those values tend to suppress the importance that  people attach to intrinsic values, or values associated with social and environmental concerns.

So there is an antagonistic relationship between these two sets of values.  From that we suggest it is important that NGOs think carefully about the occasions in which they may be drawn to appeal to extrinsic values in the course of pursuing a particular campaign outcome. For example, drawing attention to the money that might be saved through increased energy conservation measures like turning down the central heating thermostat or drawing attention to the social image or status that might be achieved through buying a luxury hybrid car. These are messages that may be effective in encouraging uptake of that particular behavior but are likely to have collateral damages.

This work also points to the possibility of beginning to work across a wide range of NGOs in new coalitions, with groups which hitherto have not really collaborated. Many NGOs can find common cause to engage those more intrinsic values and begin to tackle and remove those things which tend to engage and strengthen extrinsic values.

For example, we might find common cause in tackling an influence which currently serves to strengthen unhelpful extrinsic values at a cultural level, namely, the impact of advertising. We have begun to build a coalition of NGOs working again on a very wide set of issues to ask what’s the role of advertising in potentially frustrating emergence of greater public engagements and more  stronger expressions of public concern on all of our issues. But we might also work to help strengthen intrinsic values – for example, working with those who set the standards for teacher-training to introduce work to help children reflect on the importance of kindness in their lives.

Image Courtesy: ValuesandFrames.org

EWTT: Our society has become so materialistic. Is there a danger that there may be no common ground if we don’t address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ Are people going to listen to messages for less materialistic values?

Dr. Tom Crompton: There are several dimensions to that question and it is a very critical question.  You wouldn’t embark on what we are suggesting unless you are convinced that the problems we confront are really quite immense and will require really fundamental changes in terms of the level of ambition we show to respond to those problems.

If you really believed that a few behavioural changes in the private sphere in terms of domestic energy efficiency savings or a bit of green consumption were going to be sufficient to tackle a problem like climate change, or if you believe that increasing people’s willingness to donate to development charities was really going to be sufficient to tackle the problem of global poverty, then you probably look at what we are proposing and suggest that it is too ambitious.

So the first thing to say is that the scale of challenge that we are confronting at the moment would require an ambitious response and at the moment we are not seeing that level of ambition.

The second thing to say is that whilst it’s true that on some indicators, it seems that some cultures are becoming more materialistic, and are holding those extrinsic values to be more important, in most nations, people still hold intrinsic values to be more important. In the UK, if you ask people what’s important to them they first and foremost mention those intrinsic values. They voice the importance of the connection to friends and family, they talk about self- direction, the importance of self -determination and creativity, they talk about sense of social justice and the sense of environmental concern. Extrinsic values such as wealth or power rate less importantly.  The evidence also seems very clear that these intrinsic values are there in everybody to be engaged.

We recently conducted a study with psychologists from University of Cardiff where we took 750 ordinary citizens from the Cardiff community, and asked them what values were important to them, we gave them a value survey and we picked the top 10% for whom the extrinsic or materialistic values were most important.

We then asked half of these people to reflect for a few minutes on the importance of affiliation to friends and family, the importance of  broad-mindedness. We made no mention of the environment. We asked the other half to reflect on the importance of wealth or popularity. Then we interviewed each participant about climate change, amongst other things.  We transcribed the interviews and sent them a linguist who analysed the interviews without knowing whether a participant had been asked to think about intrinsic or extrinsic values.

We found  that even though these people were by disposition more inclined towards extrinsic values, simply asking them to pause for a few minutes  to reflect on the importance of affiliation towards  friends and family or broadmindedness led to a statistically significant increase in the extent to which they saw climate change as being something that they felt they had some personal responsibility to address and something that they wanted to see addressed because of its importance for a wider society and not just for their own self- interest.

What we take from an experiment like that, and it corroborates several other lines of evidence, is that those intrinsic values matter for a lot for people and that it’s possible to engage them even in the short term. We are not necessarily talking here about changing in values. It’s more about thinking carefully about which values people already hold, which of these underpin a greater commitment to express social or environmental concern, and engaging with these in the course of our campaigns or communications.

EWTT:  Companies often say they are bound by short-term results, such as sales targets or increasing shareholder returns, which relate to the extrinsic values you talk about. They tend to initiate sustainability initiatives only if it makes financial sense. How do you convince them to undertake them because it’s the right thing to do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: It is a challenge certainly. What we are suggesting goes beyond the business case for sustainability. It goes beyond simply pointing to those things that it’s in a business’s short-term economic interests  to do, for example increasing energy efficiency or supply chain efficiency in a way which will simultaneously save money. We need to move to a situation where the responsibility that companies have to the societies in which they operate is seen to extend beyond simply making money.

Many companies are already demonstrating willingness to go beyond the business case for sustainable development and are taking unilateral action. It is of course easier for family owned companies or cooperatives to do that than it is for publicly owned companies, but even in the case of publically owned companies there are examples where at the very least they come together and demand a regulatory intervention or legislative intervention in order to shift the level of the playing field.  In the UK, The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change calls of government to enact new and longer-term policies to tackle climate change. Members of this group recognise that some steps to tackle climate change incur economic costs. But if together they can change the level of the playing field then these competitive costs could be equally shared across the competitors.

The other thing is to widen our concept of what corporate social responsibility means, to recognize that companies have a responsibility not just with immediate material foot prints of their activities –  how much carbon do they produce, how much tropical rainforest is cut down in the course of them sourcing their raw materials – but also with what you might call mindprint. Mindprint includes impacts on cultural values, and that’s affected in a whole range of ways: the way in which a company advertises, the values that are activated in the course of using the products it manufactures, or how a company manages decision making processes. These include their HR practices and internally recognizing that many people work for business and that it is an important part of their lives. When you spend 40 hours a week in a business, the culture of that business is likely to impact your values as an individual. So there is a whole range of ways in which we are arguing businesses have a responsibility to look at not only their footprints but also their mindprint, which may be even greater than the impact that they have through their direct environment impacts – their footprint.

EWTT: Can businesses exploit intrinsic values in their advertising, and can this cause harm?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Many businesses are well aware of the importance of intrinsic values in building a loyal customer base and clearly those intrinsic values are the ones often reflected in terms of a company’s brand or its advertising. A lot of advertising appeals to intrinsic values in terms of strength of family relationships or connection to nature. The report we produced last year called ‘Think of Me as Evil’ was an attempt to open some of these ethical debates as they relate to advertising. Nobody knows for sure what the cultural or social impact of advertising that appeals to intrinsic values are, but some of the social psychologists we have worked with constructed quite persuasive arguments that actually such ads may be unhelpful. What these ads may actually serve to do is to increase people’s cynicism about intrinsic values or to create the impression that those values, when they come from elsewhere, are being deployed manipulatively in order to get them to do something; whether that’s to buy a product or to show some act of kindness.  So it seems that there are dangers in deploying intrinsic values in pursuit of commercial interest.

EWTT: What about the behaviour or governments? How do you convince governments to look for alternative indicators of growth outside of GDP or overcome their fear of losing competitive advantage?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I agree with you fully on this. Those were precisely the constraints we hear from senior policy makers or decision makers in the trade regime. We would be arguing that at least for us in the UK we should be taking a unilateral stand in multilateral negotiations in order to help change the regime. What we hear constantly is that, “Oh well, we don’t have the political capital”,  or “there would be competitiveness costs to the industry”: exactly the arguments which you have just been advancing. I suppose I just come back again to our starting point. One of our responses to that degree of political paralysis is that the change we need isn’t going to occur without far more vocal and powerful citizen engagement. It isn’t going to happen unless more people are writing to their MPs, or unless more people are out in the streets demonstrating; unless it is made clear to the political leaders that their own political future depends upon being more ambitious in responding to these things – even though there are economic costs. So our question at the outset was: What is it that underpins increased citizen engagement? What is it that underpins citizen concern? And this brings us back to values.  If a diversity of third sector organizations come together to ask how it is that our cultural values influence our collective responses to social and environmental problems, they could have a profound impact on public debate.

Policy makers don’t enjoy the political space and public pressure for more ambitious change. So this whole work from the outset has been premised on the grounds that we need to find ways to increase public engagement on these issues. I don’t think governments are ready to embrace the scale of response that is necessary to respond to the challenges. But that said, there are certainly opportunities for governments within this and we have been engaging several governments on precisely this agenda.

The Welsh government is, for example, currently asking what are the narratives they have set down nationally within Wales around sustainable development?  They have recognized that they have adopted a series of environmental policies in a piecemeal fashion, so we have a charge on plastic bags, for example, but they recognize as  well that there are some fundamental limitations to what you can achieve by picking individual actions which are often quite modest in terms of their environmental impacts. They see the need for some sort of national narrative around sustainable development. Should this be constructed around the economic opportunities early investment in green technologies such as wind provides, that might give a country a competitive edge? Or should it be built around a sense that Wales has something important to contribute to the world as a small country that is light on its feet and has a strong sense of community and social justice? Clearly, I would argue for the latter.

In the case of the UK government, we are hearing that they too are frustrated by the limitations of a piecemeal approach to reducing individual’s carbon footprint for example. So they are confronting the fact that whilst they may urge people to insulate their loft on the basis that they will save money, they are finding at the same time that if people are insulating their loft solely to save money, there is no particular reason why the money that they save shouldn’t be spent in turning the central heating thermostat up and enjoying a warmer house or flying off to enjoy a weekend break: all of which are more carbon intensive activities. We have to look carefully at the values we are appealing to in trying to change private-sphere behaviours.

EWTT: What do you have to say about the way one should engage on social media?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Social media is only one way in which third sector organizations impact on cultural values, albeit an important one, and the most easily changed. I think that there are many others, including policies that they are campaigning for, the way in which they campaign, the way in which they organize their own organizations and their own internal policies.

Online groups might begin to look at the values that they appeal to in the course of constructing their online requests for people to sign petitions: what’s the impact of these values on the longevity of people’s engagement, and the success with which they encourage people to actually sign the petition?

My expectation would be that they would be likely to build a more loyal relationship with their supporters when that relationship is premised on connecting with people’s intrinsic rather than their extrinsic values. There may be instances where you can successfully encourage large numbers of people to sign a petition on the basis of their self- interest, but I would argue that those supporters are likely to express a less general, or less systemic concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues,  particularly where those depart from their immediate self- interest, and they are likely to make for less durable relationships. They are likely to be more fickle.

EWTT: How do you intend to take your studies forward? What’s the broader vision for the kind of work you do?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Our aim is to engage in the first instance a wider swathe of NGOs in this debate. In the UK at least, there is a huge appetite for this at the moment. We have already run over 60 workshops for different NGOs in UK from a very wide range of different issue groups and interest groups. That work will continue in terms of engaging third sector organizations in this conversation. It’s increasingly becoming an international conversation. We recently ran a series of workshops in a number of Scandinavian countries as there is an appetite there to begin to put together hubs of NGOs who are working on these issues and building a conversation in those countries. We are going to be running workshops soon in Australia; we have got workshops in Brussels, possibly in Canada so there is an increasing international interest which we haven’t really gone out to court, this is interest which has come to us really.

Part of what we are doing is deepening our already extensive relationship with academics on the evidence. Hitherto that evidence base has been drawn largely from social psychology but we are aware that social psychology represents only one route into this discussion. So we want to increasingly work with people from other disciplines, political science, psychotherapy, anthropology, and neurosciences and we are beginning that process. We are doing more research ourselves in terms of taking real NGO communications and asking what the impacts of those are. For example, we have put together a consortium of all the main UK conservation groups and we will be working with a psychologist and a linguist to analyse our entire external communication over a 6 month period to ask “what are the values that we are activating at the moment in the course of those communications”.

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About the Interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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Further links you may be interested in:

WWF: Common Cause Report

Values and Frames.org 

Video link here

EWTT: Joe Brewer: An Interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues

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Michelle Desilets

Michelle Desilets is Founder and Executive Director of Orangutan Land Trust, a UK-based NGO which supports sustainable solutions for the long-term survival of the orangutan in the wild.  She is also Founder of Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation UK, and Member of the Board of Borneo Orangutan Survival Germany, which supports the largest primate rescue and protection project in the world.

She was in Singapore recently when she talked to us about the threats to orangutans, especially from the palm oil industry. Orangutan Land Trust is a key player in the campaign for sustainable palm oil, and Desilets shares some of the nuances in the debate about sustainable palm oil, the challenges in the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) process, and what would be more effective to save the rainforests – boycotting palm oil, or more direct action through petitions which influence industry and government behaviour.

Watch the interview with Michelle Desilets here:

Video link here

Desilets aim to secure at least 1 million hectares of rainforest for the continued and long term survival of the orangutan. Support Orangutan Land Trust’s efforts here

Please support the campaign to save Tripa Peat Swamps.

Join the Facebook page : Save the Tripa Peat Swamps, and sign petitions via Avaaz, Change.org or Care2

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: The fight for Borneo’s soul

EWTT: Nestle buckles to Greenpeace pressure on unsustainable palm oil

EWTT: How to find Hidden Palm Oil in Supermarkets

EWTT: Engaging local communities in S.E.Asian Peat Swamp Regeneratio

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Joe Brewer

Seattle based JOE BREWER is one amongst a rare and emerging breed of interdisciplinary experts around the world. In an era of specialisations, what’s missing is a holistic view that cuts across various discipines, whether it comes to addressing climate change or societal change.  Brewer steps in with his unique perspectives on ‘cognitive policy.’ As Founder and Director of Cognitive Policy Works, he paints a sweeping and fascinating canvas covering the human mind, human behaviour, public policy, social media and societal change. 

EWTT: Tell us about how you came to be an interdisciplinary expert?

Joe Brewer: Even from a very young age I was fascinated by two things. One was patterns in the world, and the other was people.  As a people watcher, I was always interested in how the world works.  I was brought up on a farm in the country, so I didn’t have access to broad education, but when I went to college, I had a full right scholarship so I could study anything that I wanted.  Now, I actually have degrees in philosophy, physics and applied mathematics. While I was studying those things, I got very interested in complexity, which is basically the study of how unexpected things happen, and how they can arise from very simple inputs.

When I was starting to study complexity, I entered a collateral program in atmospheric sciences. I got exposed to global warming and what’s called anthropogenic climate change, which is changes in climate patterns caused by human activities. Somehow in the midst of it all, I realised that another physical scientist (I was working as a physicist at the time) studying climate change wasn’t really going to be the critical factor in helping us address our global ecological problems.

EWTT: What did you realise to be the critical factor?

Joe Brewer: I realised that the big problem was human behaviour that is prominent in culture, values and norms of society, the way our institutions are set up, our politics and economics – all the things that have to do with how people make decisions every day. When I left the university with a Masters degree in Atmospheric Sciences, and a strong interest in learning about human behaviour, I started taking in what is called cognitive science. It’s a cross-cutting set of approaches to understanding the human mind, human thought and behaviour. It includes psychology, brain research, linguistics, anthropology, computer science and several other fields.

Universities are mostly set up around disciplines, so you might be a professor or study a program in history or economics or political science, chemistry or biology – always within a field of knowledge. I wasn’t in academia. I was out in the world, trying to solve a very complex problem. My focus was on asking, ‘what do I need to solve this problem?’  This had me moving across many different disciplines to pull together insights, analytic techniques and tools toward explaining how human behaviour works, always with an eye towards sustainability.

EWTT:  What have we learnt about human beings in the last couple of decades about our mind and emotions, especially if we’re not the calculating, rational individuals that economic models assume?

Joe Brewer: We have learnt an incredible amount. Before the 1970s, every time a person made claims about the human mind, they were basing it more on philosophical assumptions than on observations and science. What happened from the 1970s onward is that we had got specific enough about different parts of the mind to be able to study them with rigour using scientific method, as a result of which a huge amount has been learnt about the mind and about human behaviour.

One of the basic things, if you’re familiar with the works of the philosopher in the late 1600s, Rene Descartes, is the problem he articulated that is now known as mind-body dualism. It’s a problem of saying that if our bodies are physical but our minds (related to the intellectual and mental) are not physical, how can the mind and body connect with each other?

One of the big realisations that has come out of many of the fields of research is that the minds that we have are not separate from our bodies, they actually emerge from the physical world, and are continuous within our planet. The general name for that is the philosophy of ‘embodiment’.  Embodiment means that our minds are part of our bodily experience. They arise from the kinds of bodies that we have and the kind of brains that we have, the kinds of physical and cultural environments that we have evolved in as well as develop in throughout our lifespans.

EWTT:  How do you link this understanding to something as large-scale as public policy, or what you call ‘cognitive policy?’

Joe Brewer: I call it ‘cognitive policy’ –  cognitive referring to the way people understand.  I was working a few years ago at a thinktank in Berkeley, California called the Rockridge Institute with a famous cognitive scientist called George Laykoff.  He and I were looking at the language that people use and the ways that people think about environmental policy and our goal was to improve the way in which climate legislation is developed.  We were working with members of Congress, members of environmental organisations and in the midst of our attempts to explain why the human mind is so important for policy, we found that the language people were using to talk about policy was too limited. We needed to distinguish between different parts of policy. The way that we ended up breaking it down was that we separated policy into the material component and what we call the cognitive component.

The material component is the nuts and bolts of how the policy works and the material consequences of the policy.  Let’s say we’re talking about healthcare policy. The nuts and bolts might be something like if a person makes a certain amount of money, he qualifies for a certain service, and there might be a policy mechanism that says what that is. The consequence may be that people who make less money are getting greater benefits because they can’t afford health care.

What we call the cognitive component of policy is the values, the moral perspective that motivated people to hear about the issue in the first place and the ways that they understand the situation, how they characterise what the issues and concerns are, and how that reflects a deeper set of assumptions about the problems and what the solutions should be.

The difference is that the cognitive component of policy has to do with how people think about the world, what their concerns are, what they are motivated toward, what they consider to be right and wrong and good or bad in any situation – so basically the deeper motivations for a particular policy context.

Let’s take another example of climate legislation. One of things that climate legislation needs to be is popular, by which the majority of citizens, at least in a democratic country, need to support it. They need to want the policy to stay in place. The reason for that is that dealing with climate change is a long term problem. So when the policy is put in place, it has to last not just for several years but several decades.  It needs to be popular enough that it can’t be dismantled by an uprising of citizens nodding in a different way that call for it to be repealed. For them to find it appealing it has to align with their values and concerns.

EWTT: What happens if the public perceives it as a short term sacrifice even though there may be a long term benefit? Let’s take for example a carbon tax, as in Australia. What if the public sees it as a burden?

Joe Brewer: An important discovery made by George Laykoff and Mark Johnson in the late 1970s, is when you look at the way human beings use language we don’t see the world in a literal way. We understand the world through metaphors.  So if you look at carbon tax, the important thing to think about is what metaphors are used to think about taxes.

I’ll give you two examples of metaphors that could shape whether a tax is popular or not. One would be that a tax is a burden, and you don’t want to be burdened. So a tax is something you want to minimise or get rid of.

Alternatively if you use the metaphor that taxes are an investment then it’s a different way of thinking of taxes. Then people might see that there are benefits that they get from society that only come about because everyone is investing in the infrastructure of society.  You may say you have an educated workforce if you invest in public education.  You may say you have public safety if you invest in medical science and hospitals.   You have a safe and fair society if citizens invest in courts, and law and contracts.

So thinking about what makes a policy popular is partly about which metaphor people understand the policies around.  Do they understand tax policy as a burden or do they understand it as an investment? In one sense it’s negative and in another sense it’s positive.   It’s an important way of thinking about the carbon tax in Australia , whether it’s popular or not will probably depend on whether the citizens of Australia are feeling that they are investing in their future to make their economy and environment more resilient and robust in a time of change and uncertainty, or do they see it as needing all the money they can get now. If they see the taxes as a burden to them now, then it is taking away their ability to get what they need.

You can imagine the significance now of media and of advocacy where there will be groups that will advocate for people to think about taxes as a burden , and another group for people to think about taxes as an investment.  An important thing to keep in mind is that taxes are simply not one or the other, but how people think about them shapes their appeal. The advocacy for one way of thinking versus the other will have significant impact on whether people support the policy or not.

EWTT:  Is it possible to make a tax or the removal of a subsidy, sound like an investment, especially in a developing country like India where there are huge inequalities of income and where there are millions of poor people can’t think beyond making both ends meet?

Joe Brewer:  There are two important observations that are helpful in addressing that issue. One observation is that people have a hierarchy of needs.  They are only going to be able to think of new wants and ideas and take time to build perspective if they have full bellies and safe environments. If someone is starving and is immersed in danger including the danger of sickness or the danger of violence, he or she is going to have a very hard time thinking about larger, more nuanced issues. So one challenge in addressing the tremendous social injustices that come about with sustainability is that many of the people, are also in a position that they are least capable of doing long term planning that is strategic, as their basic circumstances is about very hard survival.

Another challenge is that we are hardwired in a way that makes it easier for us to see simple relationships better than complex relationships, which are sometimes called systemic relationships. To be able to change fossil fuel systems and energy systems, as well as address tremendous inequities in society and deal with the political ramifications along the way, one of the big challenges is that we need to be able to see the nuances of the system and then redesign them so that they begin to work better.  That’s a difficult challenge – as human beings have a very hard time seeing systems.  We tend to simplify systems – in what is called a metonomy.

A metonomy is where a part of something stands for the whole thing. For example, if you’re at a restaurant where the waitress says, ‘the ham sandwich didn’t leave a tip’ it doesn’t literally mean a ham sandwich, but the person who ordered and ate it and left without leaving a tip. That’s just using the word, ‘ham sandwich’  to represents a person. Or when one says Delhi talks to Calcutta, it’s not the cities talking to each other but the leaders. In each case we use a simplification to represent something more complex. So when we’re dealing with these very complex problems, we have to basically counter our tendency to oversimplify. When we talk about poor people , who don’t have access to quality education, who don’t have the emotional resilience that comes with safe environments, they don’t know whether they’re going to sleep tomorrow, these are complicating questions if we are going to approach the kind of issues you raised.

EWTT: Politics and economics go hand in hand, and powerful interest groups and lobbies create resistance to change. What then is going to bring about change?

Joe Brewer: At first pass, changes in society are always lead by culture, so if you change the culture, you change the politics, you change the economics. It’s actually much harder to use politics to change culture.  One good example is how in 1865, all of the slaves were freed. It was a hundred years later that in 1965 that the Civil Rights Act was passed. There was a legal change, but the culture hadn’t changed yet. And then it took a hundred years to change the culture enough to accept a change in policy that would secure the rights, that would make it legally defensible to protect the rights of minority citizens. We only started dealing with racial inequalities in a systematic way since the 1960s onward, so the culture changed first then the politics followed.

So one thing that is very important for us to think about when we talk about changing behaviour is that ultimately yes, we have to change our politics, we have to change our economic systems because the way they are set up now cannot lead to sustainable outcomes, but to make those changes in political and economic systems we have to look at culture, we have to look at the stories that people tell themselves about where they come from, and what it means to lead a good life.

There has been a major global trend in the last century which has been the rise of global consumerism and consumer marketing.  Consumerism tells us stories of opulence and material success as measures of meaning and quality and happiness. So those stories are antithetical, they are the opposite of what we need to have to lead to a sustainable outcome. So we need to change consumer culture, that’s something that gets deep into the lives of people. When we talk on a global scale, it doesn’t mean we need one big monoculture that’s the same everywhere, but we can celebrate the unique features of different cultures that are resonant with sustainability.

India, I discovered during my visit, is an incredibly diverse country with so many different subcultures and languages and religions. Biodiversity is actually very healthy for sustainability because one thing we need is resilience. We need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances and if all of the cultures of the world are too similar to each other and if the way they all align is not healthy, then we are more at risk, and global civilisation could collapse completely.  When we talk about cultural change driving change in economics and politics, then we can find the strength of culture at different places and bring them together and drive innovation by plugging into places where cultures come into contact with each other.

We’re seeing that now in this global social movement, that firstly has been called the Arab Spring and then Occupy Wall Street, people from different cultures are describing it in a local way. Members of this movement in Spain are dealing with issues that have to do with Spanish culture, people in Greece are dealing with Greek culture, people in Lebanon are dealing with Lebanese culture, people in the US dealing with US culture. At a deep level, they are taking the paradigm of the global economy and they are suggesting a different way that people can come together to solve their problems, which means they’re suggesting an evolution of culture.

EWTT:  You enjoy studying deep history, and since you’ve mentioned Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, do you think change comes about in a disruptive way, or is it a gradual process that leads to a tipping point?  How do you think change is going to come about now when we most need it, in the face of the climate crisis?

Joe Brewer: Well, the way that big change always happens is there are periods when it doesn’t seem like things are changing very much, and then are short periods of time when things change very quickly. You could think of it as a ‘preparation’ stage and a ‘release’ stage.

Looking at globalisation as a process that goes back to the 1500s, and even the 1400s, there was global trade and then in the 1600s, we saw the global rise of corporations and in the 1600s and 1700s we had the creation of nation states. We had these big structural changes over several hundred years. And then we had the rise of market economies – they’ve only been around a few hundred years. There have been markets, there have been bazaars, the bazaar in Delhi has been around for much longer than a few hundred years, but the idea of a global market economy has been fairly new, it’s maybe only four hundred years old.

Given this deeper context, what we’re looking at now is a big change that has been coming for quite some time. I actually go deeper than that, and I like to think of it as three major periods of human cultural evolution. There was the period before agriculture, where we mostly lived in hunter-gatherer societies, and then we had the period where people learnt to domesticate plants and grow food, and that allowed human settlements to form and to grow. An interesting thing about human settlements is that if you have more food than you need, then you can grow your population. And if you can grow your population, you need more land, and that is the dynamics of empire and conquest. So empire emerged from agriculture.

About 10,000 years into the age of empire is coming to an end in one of two ways. Either it is going to end by collapse of human civilisation, that we basically wipe ourselves out and there will be an Easter Island kind of story. Or we change to a different paradigm that is not conquest. Now conquest and empire is now called ‘economic growth.’  It’s the same thing. We have an economic model that requires that the value of the currency for the economy must grow. And then if it doesn’t grow it becomes static and collapses just like when your heart – your heart has two dynamic modes – it’s either beating regularly or you’re dead, and there’s nothing in between.  Once your heart stops beating regularly it or it becomes rheumatic. You have a heart attack. Either it starts beating again or you’re dead. For a growth economy it’s the same thing, it keeps growing at an exponential rate, or it collapses.

So the changes that have to happen have to happen at a very deep level, at the level of a paradigm.  An interesting thing that can make us hopeful is that a paradigm level change happens very quicky. It’s like an earthquake. There’s a slow buildup and then an unpredictable release, and that change, that dynamic of slow build-up of pressure and release is how all physical systems change their state of matter. It’s just like when you start heating up water, the temperature continuously rises to a level  where it very quickly goes from a liquid to a gas and vaporises the water. That time of change happens over a very small change of temperature, in a short period of time.

So what we’re seeing now with these global social movements, is an acceleration of change that goes back at least 3 decades. In a global sense, we can see the rise of the environmental movement, which started about a hundred years ago and catapulted in the 1960s with Rachel Carson, and what’s called the modern environmental movement. We’ve seen the beginning of the collapse of the empire with post colonialism, from the independence of India, the rise of nation states, and social democracies. Going back 70 or 80 years, fairly quick and big changes have been happening. Now it’s much faster still.

Let’s take ‘Occupy Wall Street’ – it has been incredibly successful, in a short period of time. It has been only with us for a few months and it has already changed the way that people talk about the economy and social issues all around the world. Now maybe Occupy Wall Street won’t lead to the changes that we need, but the scale of impact would have been very difficult to predict. Imagine you were sitting and watching the world  in the beginning of August 2011, you probably wouldn’t have anticipated that something like Occupy Wall Street would have come into being and have such an effect in the last few months.

That is an indicator of how quickly change is coming and the fact that change is coming quickly tells us that we are in the middle of one of those phased transitions.  Change is happening very quickly because the entire system is reorienting itself. I think there’ll be a much bigger, deeper change in the next few years.

EWTT: Do you think that social media has played a role in this?

Brewer:  Absolutely, social media plays many roles. Even one step deeper than social media is the global digital communications system-  the internet, satellite communication systems, mobile phones – the whole system, and in all of that, the software that lets people in creative ways – facebook or twitter or email or whatever else you’re  thinking of in terms of technology.

What that digital communication system does is it democratises information. If you go back and look at what the printing press did to organised religion in the 1600s and 1700s, where prior to that the Catholic Church in Europe did everything in Latin. All the information was kept secret from people as they didn’t know Latin. They were only told what the leaders of the church wanted them to know. With the printing press it became possible for a lot of people to learn how to read, and share information. That automatically changed the way that organised religion worked.

A similar change is now happening with the digital communication system, social media and the internet. Information is now being democratised just as profoundly as the rise of the printing press. The fact that we can have instantaneous communication and that we can organise ourselves at effectively zero economic cost really helps –  it takes very little time, money and energy to send a tweet, or post a link on facebook, and people can organise themselves around what they are concerned or passionate about.  That ability changes the fundamentals of the economy, as now the economy is now driven by what is called pull marketing instead of push marketing. It means that people are able to seek out what they find desirable, rather than selecting amongst the choices that are presented to them.  It’s much easier to find like-minded people and we’re seeing that in social movements, that people are able to organise themselves very quickly, in real time, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of people organising themselves over small periods of time, like a few hours.  Social media is allowing that to happen, and the organised powers in the political and economic system are not that fast , they’re not able to keep up. The pace of change in that dynamic is faster than they can control, that is what is causing the breakdown of the systems under control  – it is allowing change to happen.

EWTT:  What are your suggestions to become more effective at a community level?

Joe Brewer: One of the frameworks that I was honoured to get to be a part of was “Identity Campaigning.”  The basic idea of identity campaigning is that people’s collective behaviour in society is shaped by their social identities. Social identities are in two forms. One form is the way that individuals see themselves as good or bad, and the other is at a community level, where there are shared identities, and where there are role models.

It is important to consider social identities, because they include emotions. Think about the social identity of what it means to be a good parent. It’s going to change from one culture to another, one community to another. But the social identity is understood collectively by the people in the community. So as you’re thinking about how to be an effective advocate, be mindful of the social identities that you select, that you want to highlight, and want to draw attention to, both in terms of the social identities that are positive , that people will resonate with, that you think people will want to be like, and also the identities that are negative, the ones that they don’t want to be, that they would be against. In order to be effective, you need to orient people around a different set of social identities than they had before.

With the “rational actor” theory in economics we are taught that being selfish is good,  because if you’re selfish you’re being productive, and as a trickle down effect, it brings wealth to other people.  Now we’ve figured out, that doesn’t actually work, but unfortunately that idea is still very common. When people aspire to serve themselves,  the social identities they are elevating is individualism, and suppressing identities that have to do with their communities.

One way that comes out is that they feel responsibility to themselves but they don’t feel responsibility to others. To get people to feel responsibility to others, we need to remind them that they have identities that they consider to be already a part of themselves, like being a good parent. A lot of people will recognise that as being a part of their identity, that has a social responsibility component, that is responsive to the needs of others around them.

I think in a deep way, it’s all about activating empathy and compassion in people. The more that they feel compassion and the responsibility to act in compassion towards others around them, the more they will work together to solve collective problems.  As you’re thinking about social identity, one way to answer yourself is, out of the identities that I am elevating in conversations, which ones are increasing compassion and responsibility toward others and which ones are decreasing the same? Just asking that question will orientate your thinking quite a lot, and help you become more effective.

EWTT:  People have good intentions but they seem to be too preoccupied. The general refrain is, “we’d love to do more for others and the world, but we’re too busy.”  How does one respond to that?

Joe Brewer: One thing is a lot of it has to do with design.  We’ve designed a global economic system that treats workers like gears in a machine. Machines tend to get faster with each passing generation. We’ve seen people find themselves working more and more, and find themselves engaged in activities more and more which keep them very busy. One thing to remember is that systems change on their own time scale, and one thing we’re seeing that a lot of people are busy working, doing all the things they’re doing in their lives, and they don’t have time for others.  It’s difficult to come out of those patterns.

They often have really good reasons to be busy. Someone might be working two jobs as he wants to send their child to college.  What we’re seeing with a lot of the global social movements that are successful right now like the Arab Spring, is that capable, educated people can’t find employment and there’s a telling observation that these are people who would be too busy to save the world, except that the economy is not serving them.

One thing we have to recognise is that change will happen when the systems are ready to change. Our economic systems at a very deep level have been poorly designed.  They perpetuate injustice. They make gaps between the wealthy and the poor larger with time.  They eventually come to a point when they become unstable and break down.

If we want to influence the behaviour of people, we need to engage people proactively when they are paying attention.  But they may not pay attention if they are overwhelmed with information and they’re already busy. Our strategies may not be able to operate at a system level scale to be able to change what their choices are, but when the system starts to stall and change, and the old dynamics are no longer stable and people are looking for different ways to be, then there will be tremendous opportunity to engage with them in meaningful conversations about deep change.

Joe Brewer can be contacted via info[at]cognitivepolicyworks.com.  Follow Brewer’s works through his website Cognitive Policy Works.

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About the Interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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This has been a week of climate pessimism.  First, The Guardian on Wednesday, 9 Nov 2011 quoted the International Energy Association (IEA)’s warning that the world is headed for irreversible climate change in only 5 years. The article says:

“If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.”

Prof Surya Sethi at ISEAS

The lecture at the Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS) yesterday by Professor Surya Sethi compounded the gloom.  Prof. Sethi served on the Indian Prime Minister’s Energy Coordination Committee and wrote the Integrated Policy of India (2006) and also assisted in the development of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYPP).

Prof. Sethi said that developments after the 2010 COP 16 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico do not give much hope that a comprehensive and binding agreement will be reached at COP17 in Durban, South Africa later this month.  He also pointed to several ‘inconvenient truths’.

Inconvenient Truth #1

Markets do not have the solution to climate change or to the mindless exploitation of the world’s finite capital of water, land, minerals, other resources, or to the global commons itself.  If all externalities are included, such as the environmental cost of rearing cattle, impact on water, carbon emissions associated with transportation, the cost of a hamburger, for example, would be between US$20 to US$25.   However, it is sold for only 99 cents in the US and for US$3 in the rest of the world. Markets are therefore grossly underpricing natural capital which inevitably leads to resource exploitation.

Yet paradoxically, we look to the same markets which failed to keep the books straight on asset backed securities and mortgages that led to the financial crises of 2008 and the European Debt crisis this year, to deliver solutions to climate change.

The world is facing potentially disruptive and irreversible climate change triggered through rising temperatures, and non-linear positive feedback. Markets driven by greed and mathematical judgement cannot solve these irreversible effects or substitute value based decisions, which are required for equitable solutions.

If one looks at energy intensity of OECD countries, it varies from country to country a factor of 2.3 times. Even though there are no market barriers, the market is not equalising energy intensity. The financial bailout shows that politics plays a key role in deciding where funds flow.

Markets may allocate scarce resources, but they are not distributors of equity and justice. If we want to limit how much natural capital is to be used, we need to make ethical choices, which requires strong value based leadership. This was emphasised time and again by Prof Sethi.

Inconvenient Truth #2

Global carbon emissions are not coming down, and continue to rise.

• Most global projections show fossil fuel consumption as growing till 2030. There was a slight dip in 2008 due to slower economic growth because of the financial crisis, but it has picked up again in 2010.  The total estimated  30.6 gigatonnes carbon (GtC) emitted in 2010 is estimated to grow to 54 to 58 GtC in the coming years. The 2 degree pathway requires a  reduction to 44 GtC per annum globally by 2020. There will be an overshoot of 10-14 GtC on an annual basis.
•  The absolute level of consumption of fossil fuels is still rising in developed world. If you exclude the 2008 blip, consumption of fossil fuels during the 8 years from 1999 to 2007 of OECD countries grew 2.6 times than the rate of fossil fuel consumption growth in India. The OCED has a population of 0.9 billion, only slightly less than that of India, and hence comparable in size. In China fossil fuel consumption during the 8 year period grew 7.1 times than that of India.

What this underscores, according to Prof Sethi, is that all the talk about lowering energy and emissions intensity, and delivering the next more efficient car or light bulb (which is definitely important) only means growing GDP by a larger amount with marginally less energy intensity. So even if the same barrel of oil goes longer and energy security is increased;  as long as we are consuming more fossil fuels in absolute terms, we are not addressing climate change.

•  If one examines the claim that Annexe 1 (developed) countries have reduced emissions from GDP over 1990 levels, this is largely because as economies in transition, they have outsourced some of their pollution overseas.If you look at emissions from consumption by Annexe 1 countries,  the figures are even worse. Take the 15 EU countries – on a consumption bass, emissions have gone up by 40% over 1990 with 33% of emissions coming from imports. Gross emissions of the EU 15 countries amount to 10-12 tons per capita in addition to 3 tons per capita from imported embedded emissions, which by itself is more than the total per capita emissions of India at 1.9 tons.  The 4 tons carbon emissions per capita embedded in US imports alone is more than 2 times of India total per capita emissions. China is often blamed for becoming the biggest polluter, yet 26% of all China’s emissions are in embedded emissions from exports.  Yet, nobody is addressing these unsustainable patterns of consumption.

•  Pledges made in Cancun by Annexe 1 countries are actually lower than pledges by non-Annexe 1 countries.  So far, all pledges of Annexe 1 countries add up to 5% to 17% below 1990 levels, which compares poorly to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects, i.e., at least between 25 to 40% emissions reductions below 1990 levels are required to keep within 2 degree C temperature rise.

The non-binding pledges in Cancun puts the world on an auto-pilot mode of 3.5 to 5 degree C temperature increase.

Inconvenient Truth #3

The lack of equity in talking about climate emissions reductions is the third issue.

• If the world has to remain bound to a 2 degree temperature rise, then going forward the Annexe 1 countries between 2010 to 2050 must have a negative carbon emissions of 1.5 GtC.  For the 350 GtC total carbon budget to be equitably distributed, richer nations have a climate debt owed to the developing world of  US$ 10 to 13 trillion, depending on the price of carbon.  The developed world does not accept historical responsibility of carbon emitted over the last century to fuel its economic growth. However the common and differentiated responsibility principle which underpins the UNFCCC negotiations is built upon the bedrock of historical responsibility.
• We live in a world with extreme inequality. The top 20% of the world, and some live in India and China too, are today responsible for 85% of private global consumption while the bottom 20% live on less than 1 dollar ppp(purchasing power parity) per day. 40% of the population is below the poverty line in India earning below the threshold of 70 nominal Singapore cents in cities and 55 Singapore cents in villages. This kind of inequality which will lead to greater instability in the world in terms of social and political unrest.

The huge transfer of international funds required to pay for climate debt is as much a question of equity for the bottom 20%.

Inconvenient Truth #4

The final inconvenient truth is that there is very little climate finance being made available to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation.

The scale of funding required is to the tune of more than a trillion dollars, but Cancun’s Green Climate Fund is only for $100 billion.*  The reality is that the developing world is spending a higher and higher portion of its GDP on adaptation and lowering energy intensity e.g., India is spending 2.3 to 2.4% of its GDP on adaptation, though it is doing it for gaining energy security than for climate change.

* At the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December 2009, the proposal was to mobilise US$10 billion per year between 2010 and 2012, and up to US$100 billion by 2020 annually – which represents only 0.8% to 8% of developed countries’ national defence budgets”

Climate finance requires massive resource transfers from the developed to the developing world. The existing multilateral agencies like the World Bank do not have the instruments or capacities for these. According to Prof. Sethi, the World Bank’s net disbursements between 2002 and 2008 were between minus 0.8 billion to minus 4.8 billion without IDA (International Development Association).  With IDA the disbursments were between to minus 2.9 bn to +5.4 bn US dollars. These agencies are at best equipped to do project lending, and not to deliver the scale of funds transfer required for climate finance.

According to Prof. Sethi, unless there is some disruptive technology in the coming decade, the climate change challenge cannot be tackled in time.

What will wake up the world to the climate reality? Prof Michael Quah, Deputy Director, Energy Office at the National University of Singapore who chaired the ISEAS event, quoted the former International Energy Agency director, Nobuo Tanaka who spoke in the CNBC energy opportunities brainstorming session held in Singapore recently. Tanaka had said, half jestingly, that perhaps we need another tsunami, another Katrina, and other similar disasters to rouse the world to action.  Stark as this may sound, it looks as if the world is headed that way, unless collection and drastic action is taken steered by strong global leadership.

The theoretical model and practical framework exists to create solutions with equity and justice, as Prof Sethi acknowledged after the event when I raised the Contraction & Convergence model  by the Global Commons Institute. It is a science based model to allocate emissions reductions to different countries, and also allow for compensation to nations which emit less than their allocations. As far back as 2003, Janos Pasztor (who is now with the Climate Change Task Force), had mentioned as a member of the UNFCCC Secretariat that “Stabilisation inevitably requires ‘Contraction and Convergence” .

The challenge as Prof Sethi pointed out is the lack of political will to agree to the scale of emissions reduction envisaged and large scale transfer of funds to the developing world to deal with mitigation and adaptation.

To conclude, a world that has US levels of consumption can only house 1.4 billion people and not 9 billion people as we are projecting by 2050. Prof Sethi came back to the profound wisdom of Gandhi for what we need for a truly sustainable world:

Gandhi's wisdom

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About the Writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. Despite the climate pessimism in this article, she believes individuals and communities can play an active role in changing behaviour, and also in influencing policy decisions as well as industry action required to tackle climate and biodiversity issues. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook,Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Contraction & Convergence: An Urgent Global Imperative to tackle Climate Change

EWTT: Whither Go Climate Refugees?

EWTT:  Pen Hadow: Melting Arctic Sea Ice and How It Will Affect Asia

EWTT:  Wikileaks: Carving Up the Arctic Sea

EWTT:  Everything you need to know about Climate Change from a Top Hedge Fund Manager

EWTT:  Who cares If Bangalesh drowns?

EWTT:  Climate Challenge: The Voices from Pakistan

EWTT:  Global Corruption Report: Climate Change

EWTT:  Climate Change in Southeast Asia And Why We Can’t Afford Not to Act

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Pavan Sukhdev, unlike most economists, has a strong passion to make Nature count. He’s on an important mission to enable governments, businesses and communities incorporate a sense of the true worth of nature’s services which historically has been taken for free.

Pavan Sukhdev

Pavan Sukhdev is Special Adviser to UNEP’s green economy initiative and lead author of the path-breaking study called The Economics of Ecosystem Biodiversity or TEEB. He is often called the ‘Nicholas Stern’ of biodiversity, striving as he does to put a value on it the way Stern did for climate change.  All this while he’s on a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank where he is a senior banker.

His efforts may well provide a very important solution to the deep socio-environmental crises facing the planet – which he attributes to the triple factors of “market failure, information failure and institutional failure”. These have been a result of the obsession with economic growth, and the concomitant political systems which have evolved as a response to the industrial revolution and that are clearly out of sync with current environmental realities.

Sukhdev is not the first ‘environmental economist’ to put a price tag on ecosystem services or say that economic activity or prices do not fully reflect ‘externalities’ such as the cost of air or water pollution, or loss of oceans, atmosphere and biodiversity. Robert Constanza et al for instance, estimated the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital at US$33 trillion in 1997.

However, Sukhdev is certainly behind a critical and visible momentum that is building up to operationalize this information and account for these ‘externalities’ in the National Income Accounting of countries as well as the balance sheet of companies, so that their true costs to society can be assessed and given weight.

This is also the first time a study the scale of TEEB has ever been done. Set up by UNEP in 2007 and steered by Pavan Sukhdev, the study was carried out with over 500 scientists and 225 co-authors. The report highlighted various dimensions to the issue of biodiversity, including the importance of investing in ecological infrastructure, and how critical biodiversity is to the poor of the world.

The Bank of Natural Capital is an advisory website that is part of the TEEB study. It shows how and why to value nature. The TEEB Synthesis Report , launched at the 10th meeting of the Convention of Biological Diversity, Nagoya (COP-10) , Japan illustrates how the various economic concepts and tools described in TEEB can assist society to incorporate the values of nature into decision-making at all levels.

So what is the world worth? Or rather why should we value nature and bring it into the balance sheet of a nation or of companies?

* We are operating beyond the carrying capacity of Nature, or the ability of nature to regenerate itself. For 2006, humanity’s total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.4 planet Earths – in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.4 times as fast as Earth can renew them. This is like drawing down our bank balance of natural resources – by living off our ‘natural capital’ instead of from the interest.

* What we don’t measure we can’t manage. This is the reason we are losing invaluable resources in the form of ecosystem services. Unless you put a price tag on nature – its forests, coral reefs and mangrove swamps, we are not going to be able to save it.   The idea is beginning to catch up.Last year for example, the World Bank’s 5-year study to incorporate the value of ecosystems into countries’ national income accounts, was an outcome of Nagoya COP-10, Japan. Colombia and India are to be the first countries to value their natural capital. Even businesses are slowly warming up to the idea.

The EU isn’t far behind. Its 2020 biodiversity strategy is going to account for nature. According to UK government’s National Ecosystem Assessment, looking after all the UK’s green spaces is worth the sum of £30bn a year to the economy.  Bob Watson, chief scienific adviser to DEFRA and co-author of the report, said the assessment should be used to shape government policy at the national and local level. “Putting a value on these natural services enables them to be incorporated into policy in the same way that other factors are. We can’t persist in thinking of these things as free.”

* The top 3,000 public companies in the world were responsible for $ 2.25 trillion worth of environmental damage, which represent 33% of the profits of these companies. This is private profit at the cost of public wealth. Some pioneering businesses are taking the cue to calculate these costs. PUMA is one of the world’s first companies to adopt environmental accounting to show the full impact of its use of ecosystem services.

* According to TRUCOST, global environmental damage caused by human activity as estimated by UNEP Finance Initiative and Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI)  in 2008 cost US$ 6.6 trillion/year (or 11% of 2008 GDP). Those global costs are 20% larger than the $ 5.4 trillion decline in the value of pension funds in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis in 2007/8.

The global environmental damage is estimated to be $28 trillion by 2050. Five sectors account for about 60% of environmental costs – electricity, oil and gas producers, industrial metals & mining, food producers, construction & materials.  Certainly these are numbers not to be taken lightly.

* Economics only measures manmade capital, while ignoring human and natural capital. If we do not assign economic values to nature, society as a whole will be making wrong trade-offs. Sometimes the issue goes beyond economics into the realm of ethical choices. Take coral reefs for example.  Sukhev says in the video below called, “What is the world worth”:
“The problem is that at today’s targeting in Copenhagen, or for that matter in the climate process, we are targeting a level of carbon dioxide which most scientists believe is too high for coral reefs to survive on an ongoing basis.  Scientists have given us numbers of 320 ppm, 350, 380 ppm – only one has given us a number of 480, which is higher than where we are targeting.  So there is an issue here that, you know, we are probably making a societal choice, as a community, to not have coral reefs.  Can economics save this?  No, we can’t.  The last coral reef is probably worthless because, you know, it just is too precious to put a price on. So we can’t actually apply the logic of economics and marginal value when you’re coming to the last unit of what’s left.  And that’s where you need to make an ethical choice.  So here we have it.  We have an ethical choice.  Sadly, this is an ethical choice which we are making kind of unconsciously, if you know what I mean.  We’ve sort of stepped into it and made that choice without necessarily having thought through the consequences.”

* Nature is very important for the most vulnerable sections of society – a point that Sukhdev often makes. In Sukhdev’s words,” We may dismiss ecosystem services as only ’10-20% of GDP’, but they are actually ‘50-90% of the GDP of the poor’. Preserving ecosystem services is critical for the livelihood of the poor.

For a detailed understanding of the issue, do watch the excellent and comprehensive talk by Pavan Sukdhev at the Sydney Opera House. It was organised by Centre for Policy Development (CPD), Australia.

What is the world worth? from teeb4me on Vimeo.

The full transcript of the speech has been generously made available by CPD here.

About the writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk.com, an economist in her previous avatar, who also strongly believes that nature should be made to count. She’s a sustainability writer, trainer and speaker and can be contacted at bhavani[at] ecowalkthetalk.com Join EWTT on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Challenges and Prospects for a Green Economy

Teeb(The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report, TEEB website,Facebook page, Bank of Natural Capital website , Pavan Sukhdev’s blog

YouTube: Pavan Sukhdev on the Invisible Economy

Video link here

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I was in Bangkok last month, and many people were talking about the recent floods. In the previous two months large parts of Thailand had experienced heavy rains.  More than 4 million people have been affected, with 165 sadly killed. Many areas along the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok were inundated – the capital is on average only a metre above sea level – and the city authorities had to use 4 million sandbags to keep the waters at bay.

Not surprisingly, this has had severe social impacts. Apparently the floods devastated 1.4 million hectares of agricultural land and destroyed over one million tonnes of rice. Thailand expects a 0.32% drop in economic growth this year as a result, valued at around £117 million.

Experts are linking the floods to climate change, with continued deforestation and  poor urban planning also seen as responsible. And other recent events highlight Thailand’s vulnerability to climatic impacts. Rice production suffered again earlier this year when the country experienced its most severe drought in 20 years.

While it is difficult to link individual events to climate change, these incidents are consistent with the findings of the Asian Development Bank report on “The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia” which concluded that the region  was extremely vulnerable to climate change. The report projected that droughts, floods and extreme weather events would become more intense and frequent, and that the region could see a reduction in GDP of 6.7% per annum by 2100 due to climate change.

Stress on Freshwater Resources

Inland waterways like the Chao Phraya in Thailand and the Red River in Vietnam provide a source of livelihood for many people. For example, about 60 million people live in the lower Mekong Basin, and most get their protein from the local rivers and lakes.

However climate change is putting great stress on these freshwater resources. The ADB report explains that during El Nino years, reduced water flows have caused damage to crops, shortages of drinking water and a drop in electricity production. For example, a drought in 1997/98 in the Philippines resulted in water rationing in the Metro Manila area and affected the operation of hydro electric plants that supplied energy to the urban areas. At the same time, we have seen more instances of heavy rains and associated flooding – in the Philippines alone, about 10,000 people died due to floods and landslides between 1991 and 2006.

This is likely to become a common occurrence. The ADB report projects that climate change will lead to more irregular precipitation patterns in the region – resulting in an increased risk of flooding during the wet season, and increased water shortages during the dry season. For example, the maximum monthly flow of the Mekong River is projected to increase between 35% and 41% – while the minimum monthly flow will fall by 26% to 29% in the Mekong Delta.

Stark statistics, especially when you consider that the region’s population and economic growth is already putting increased pressure on the existing water resources.

Why we can’t afford NOT to act on climate change

Should we take action to prevent dangerous climate change? A common argument is that it may be good to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, but this action will be too costly – and damage economic growth. However, I think the issue should be seen another way – if we don’t act soon, climate change will become so severe that economic growth will be unsustainable.

Most experts agree that if we don’t act to prevent climate change, the costs will be complex and serious. Climate change impacts can be thought of as “shocks” to the economic system, that will become more severe over time. We will see temperature increases, which will lead to droughts and floods. There will be direct costs to the economy, including from declining crop yields, reduced fish stocks and flooding of coastal zones. There will be further “hidden” costs to the economy, such as health costs from increased malnutrition and heat stress. And there could be  further impacts from increased conflict and migration, where climate change could become a ‘threat multiplier’.

For example – we may see high food and commodity prices due to a reduced supply of food and minerals. And storms and rising sea levels could destroy large amounts of infrastructure – it is estimated that $35 trillion of assets are at risk of flooding in port cities, even with a moderate sea level rise of 50cm.

Most experts agree that the global costs of climate change are likely to be large. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change estimated this at 5-20% of GDP every year. And a number of other studies have reached similar conclusions.

There is a clear conclusion to be drawn – current growth will not be sustainable if it accelerates climate change, and produces these huge costs. As Stern said in an article in the Guardian in November 2008: ‘Put simply, high-carbon growth will choke off growth’.

So the next time anybody suggests it is too expensive to take action on climate change, I think the answer should be obvious – on the contrary, the world can’t afford NOT to take action.

About our Guest Writer

John Pearson is Head of the British Government’s network on climate change in South East Asia. Based at the British High Commission in Singapore, he has held the position since September 2008. He works on climate change and “low carbon” issues in all ASEAN countries, working closely with local Governments, business and civil society.

His first degree was a BSc in Geography from the University of Nottingham, where he specialised in coastal environments and air pollutants. He also has an MA in International Peace and Security from King’s College, London, where he wrote his dissertation on ‘Climate Change and the Implications for International Peace and Security. He can be contacted at john.pearson[at]fco.gov.uk

Further links you may be interested in:

1. Slideshare: Cost of Action vs Inaction

See also Part 2 and Part 3

3. ADB Report: Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia

4. EWTT: The Impact of a Global Temperature Rise of 4 deg Celsius

5. Guardian UK: Nicholas Stern: Spend billions on green investments now to reverse economic downturn and halt climate change

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Olive Ridley Sea Turtle SOURCE: Wikipedia Commons

Though Olive Ridley Sea Turtles are found throughout the world, Orissa – an eastern coastline state of India, is the single largest rookery or breeding ground in the world for these turtles which migrate from the Indian Ocean through the Bay of Bengal every year for mating and nesting. Worshipped by most small fishermen as an incarnation of one of their gods and left alone, the turtles are nevertheless caught as by-catch in gillnets or by trawlers.  How is large scale industrialisation along the coasts going to affect the turtles and the other species in the unique mudflat ecology?  One of the ports, the controversial Dhamra Port, a tie-up between Indian corporate giants Larsen & Toubro and TATA has also been the target of a Greenpeace campaign.

by Basudev Mahapatra

Famous worldwide for three mass breeding habitats for Olive Ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys Olivacea), Orissa may soon have to lose these turtle nesting sites on its coastline. Because of massive industrialisation plans along its 480 km long coastal stretch, the rare turtles may abandon the sites for annual mating and nesting activities if they sense these areas as unsafe and disturbing for breeding.

Unique ecology of Orissa’s coastlines and turtle populations

Turtle laying eggs

Orissa’s coastlines are blessed with a unique ecological habitat due to its dynamic coastal systems and its network of large rivers with rich delta systems that pour into the oceans.   According to Dr. Chandra Sekhar Kar, Wildlife Scientist of Orissa Forest and Wildlife Department,

‘‘The turtles visit three places on Orissa Coast – the Dhamra River Mouth at Gahirmatha, Devi River Mouth at Astarang and the Rusikulya River Mouth.

It’s the sand grain size that enables the turtles dig a hole in the sands to lay eggs inside. The suitability of the  habitat which has a  variety of micro-organisms and thick mangroves to generate feed for lakhs (1 lakh = 1 hundred thousand) of adult turtles and millions of their hatchlings attracts Olive Ridley turtles in such large numbers to  visit the coasts of Orissa for mating and mass nesting. Orissa is quite fortunate to have three such places that have become mass nesting destinations for the marine turtles. However, of course, many of the turtles die while on their journey to the nesting sites or during the time of mating in the Sea.’

According to the US based National Marine Fisheries Service, “ In 1991, over 600, 000 turtles nested along the coast of Orissa in one week.”(Wikipedia) Currently, according to Michael Peter, the State Director of WWF, ‘The population that visit the coasts for mass nesting consisting of  female turtles is between 250 – 350 thousand every year. Adding the male population of the marine species that include the groups migrating to the coasts of Orissa as 60% of the female turtles, the number would go beyond five hundred thousand.”

Turtle Graveyard on Orissa beach

There is already so much apprehension among the international conservationists and wildlife activists who believe that the number of turtle deaths that occur every year in the Orissa coast make the beaches more like turtle graveyards. On an average, more than six thousand turtles die every year along Orissa coasts whereas non-government sources claim the toll to be at least one hundred thousand over the last decade.

While such a large number of deaths of Olive Ridley Sea Turtles across the coastline of Orissa bother wildlife lovers and organisations working for the protection of endangered species, unfortunately government departments and a few agencies working in the areas of nature conservation and wildlife protection in Orissa are not as bothered, saying that the toll is “hardly one to two percent of the total Olive Ridley population that visit the three nesting grounds on the coasts of Orissa.”

They fail to see that total numbers of the turtles which have been declared an endangered species have declined rapidly over the last two decades.

Effects of Trawler fishing on small fishermen

Whatever steps government has taken for the safety of turtles are definitely not sufficient as the dead shells are being washed ashore in huge numbers every season.

While the turtles are not safe in the sea, the fishing communities living around the nesting sites have ironically been the worst victims of the short term safety measures taken by the government. As fishing in the sea is banned during the peak fishing season in the name of turtle safety, thousands of fishermen families turn jobless for more than six months and face serious livelihood problems. So far, the government has not done any thing to resolve their livelihood related issues. Finding no other options to earn a livelihood for the families, many of the fishermen have committed suicide.

Traditional fishermen consider turtles as an incarnation of god and worship them. They neither consume turtle eggs nor its meat. In fact, it is the shrimp trawlers owned by large business houses and influential  politicians or those with political affiliations who are the major culprits, flouting the rules continuously.

More ports?

The Orissa Government’s plan for about thirteen new ports along the coast line in close proximity to the turtle nesting beaches could endanger the species further.

WWF State Director Michel Peter concurs “We are really concerned about so many of the ports are being permitted to up along the coast. There will be definitely some impacts on the Olive Ridley Sea Turtles. In order to minimise the impact we are discussing with the Government of Orissa and we hope for some kind of solution regarding this.”

The largest among all new ports planned in Orissa is the one on the Dhamra Mouth that is about to become operative soon. Built and to be managed by Dhamra Port Company Ltd (DPCL) – a subsidiary of TATA Group, Dhamra port is located at an aerial distance of about 15 km from the noted turtle nesting site at Gahirmatha.

As you can see in this Google Map below, the proposed port side is a unique ecological habitat with long stretches of inter-tidal mudflats from the site to the river mouth. This intertidal zone according to Greenpeace’s 2007 Biodiversity assessment report stretches as wide as 2 kilometers and are an important breeding ground for several marine creatures.

View Dhamra Port in a larger map

Even though Environmental Impact Assesssment (EIA) 1997  report said that the port is not going to deter the turtles from nesting at their usual site, local people and environment experts say that the river mouth that is to be used by the port as the main channel happens to be the route for turtle movement to and from Gahirmatha. They believe that once the port becomes operative, the underwater vibration during the ship movement which may detract or deter the turtles from coming to the nesting site. If that happens, Gahirmatha would be abandoned by the turtles for nesting activities. [Please see footnotes for the impact of other ports]

Biodiversity assessment:

Dhamra Port on Dhamra River Mouth

In terms of biodiversity, Orissa is one of India’s richest states, but according to Greenpeace’s 2007 Biodiversity assessment report, it’s also the least studied and catalogued.  According to the Greenpeace’s backgrounder , the Environment Impact Assessment study was undertaken in 1997, with L&T and Singapore based International Seaports Ltd as major stakeholders in the Dhamra port project. However the port site was on Kanika sands which is now on the mainland. The initial proposed capacity was 20 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) with a ship handling capacity of 120,000 deadweight tons (dwt) whereas the proposed capacity now is 83 mtpa, and 180,000 dwt respectively.

In July 2004, the Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee recommended, “The present site (Dhamra) will seriously impact Gahirmatha’s nesting turtles and could lead to the beach being abandoned by the marine creatures. It is therefore necessary that an alternative site is located for this port.”

Given that no comprehensive Environment Impact Analysis (EIA) has ever been done for the current project, and the major flaws in the 1997 EIA report which include “poor baseline ecological data, a complete omission of the impacts on turtles, impacts of noise and chemical pollution and a poor hazard analysis and emergency plan.”

Balancing Development, the Precautionary Principle and the Turtles

As a member of the UN’s Global Compact, TATA Steel is honour bound to abide by the Precautionary Principle, which according to the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992, Preamble is explained as: “Where there is a threat of significant reduction or loss of biological diversity, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimize such a threat.”

Several engineering options exist such as the more technologically advanced offshore ports. Are industries and the State prepared to pay a higher price for development to ensure the safety of the marine creatures?

Going ahead with the port construction regardless of the environmental impact would certainly help bring some revenue to the state and make a few corporate houses thrive on the coasts of Orissa, but the state is going to be blamed globally for being failed to protect the breeding habitats of the endangered marine turtle species. If the state wants to have the both, it must urgently rework its plan of development through the ports.

Otherwise, in a few years, the tradition of mass nesting by Olive Ridley Sea Turtles will become history for the state of Orissa.

About our Guest Writer

BASUDEV MAHAPATRA is a senior journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, India.  Basudev is the Editor of the news website  Hotnhitnews.com. With his vast experience in print, television as well as web media, he specializes in reporting and writing on politics, development and issues that have a close link with the life and livelihood of grassroot communities, in a socio-economic and political context.

Footnotes:

The other ports that would also affect the annual activities of the turtles are the ports planned at Astarang, Gopalpur and the other at Chudamani near Basudevpur. While Basudevpur Port is a minor port at a few Kilometers from the Dhamra Port, the other Port to be built at Astaranga is planned on the mouth of Devi River where lakhs of turtle visit every year to mate and nest. Devi River mouth is also known as the movement track of bottle-nose dolphins who often visit the mouth in groups.

The third mass nesting site at Rushikulya River mouth is going face the worst impacts of Gopalpur port and the green port planned at Palur. While the port would come up just before the turtle movement track, ‘the pollution and possible ecological impacts of the port would make the coast unsuitable for breeding. And, the worst impact would be that the port would accelerate the process of erosion of the coast’, says Biswajit Mohanty, leading wildlife activist and member of National Wildlife Board, India.

Coastal erosion is again another issue in Astarang where Bay of Bengal has already submerged over 5 km of human habitations in last 30 years. A port on Devi River mouth would help further and fast erosion.

Mass plantation near the ports along the coast to minimise the impact of pollution or recreate the mangrove destroyed during building of the port infrastructure will not work. In fact the impact would be more fatal to the turtles. “With extensive planting of Casuarinas trees all along the coast, there may not be suitable beaches for turtles to nest sporadically. The Devi rookery is reported to have lost prime turtle nesting beach due to plantation activities. There is an additional problem in case of the sporadic nests and that is related to predation. Nearly 95 % of the sporadic nests recorded along a 25 km coastline along the Rushikulya rookery in 2007 nesting season were observed predated by feral dogs and jackals. It is believed that the dense Casuarinas plantations support high predator numbers’, says the WII fact sheet on turtle behaviour and activities.

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Image source: BBC News

With the worst of the financial crisis behind us, the engines of economic growth have begun to hum again. From a carbon emissions point of view, we have much cause for concern as there is a direct correlation between GDP and GHG emissions. (See diagram on the right).

We have not yet made that shift to where economic growth comes with low carbon emissions. On the contrary, we are causing climate change at a faster rate than we are mitigating it. How can we manage future emissions in a way that economies, human societies and ecosystems are not blown apart due to the growth paradigm [1] to which we as an economy driven world are addicted – of infinite growth in a planet of finite resources?

CO2 concentrations from CO2now.org Click here for larger image

The world is facing a serious climate crisis [2a], with ever increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. Measured in parts per million (ppm), the current concentrations of CO2 as of April 2010 are 392 ppm. (See diagram on left based on figures released every month by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii).

We’re already past the safe limit of 350ppm[2b] – a level beyond which gives us an increasing probability of exceeding the overall 2 degree temperature rise [3]  as compared to global temperatures at the start of the industrial revolution when CO2 concentrations were about 280 ppm. The 2 degree temperature rise is the upper limit world leaders have committed to observing.

Just as we have a budget at home that we cannot exceed without negative consequences, we also now have a limited carbon budget [4], if overshot, will have catastrophic consequences – rising global temperatures, biodiversity and species loss impacting sustainability of ecosystems, melting polar glaciers and rising sea levels that may engender mass displacement of millions of people.[5]

We, as members of the public, have a moral responsibility to understand and engage in the climate change debate.  It is our responsibility to have a say, to demand a say,  in our children’s future – not only for the future of their education, finances and health, but critically for their ecological future on which everything else rests.

Important as they may be, we cannot leave the issue to politicians, businesses, NGOs and climate scientists alone, especially considering that various governments haven’t gone very far with the reduction of CO2 emissions since the Kyoto Protocol [6] that was signed in 1997.

Various climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change  [7] (UNFCCC) including the recent one at Copenhagen in December 2009, the COP15 [8], have failed to arrive at a “fair, ambitious and binding” climate deal that defines a clear future path for reduction of emissions.

Although it was recognised during the negotiations that tackling climate change is important, there was less clarity on how to share the “burden.” Certainly, many developing countries felt there was injustice in why they were being asked to share the burden of the problem of solving climate change, when they had little to do with its creation. 

What is the most equitable model to combat climate change?

Credit: EarthTrendsDelivered.org (Click for larger image)

Every human being should have equal rights on this planet and that extends to the amount of carbon emissions he or she is allowed. Our current global average use per person is about 1.3 Metric Tonnes Carbon [MTC]   (Carbon emissions refer to carbon atoms which weigh less than the CO2 molecule, so divide the per capita CO2 emissions shown in the diagram on the right by a factor of 3.667 if you want to get to per capita MTC)

The use of the global atmosphere is very unequal, with richer countries taking the lion’s share. About 33% of the global population have carbon emissions greater than the world average of 1.3MTC, with 67% below it.

According to Global Carbon Project.org  “From a historical perspective, developing countries with 80% of the world’s population still account for about 20% of the cumulative emissions since 1751; the poorest countries in the world, with 800 million people, have contributed less than 1% of these cumulative emissions.” 

For any climate deal to be successful, unequal future use of the air as a dump for carbon will never get majority support.  We have a better chance of avoiding disastrous climate change, if we reduce this world average to 0.9MTC by the next 20 years or so. All nations basically “converge” to this global average by around 2030.

Developed countries make steeper and swifter cuts or “contractions” to come down to the lower per capita average, while poorer nations which are below the average can increase their per capita emissions till all countries have converged to the same level.  After that, everyone transitions to null emissions.

This is the simple essence of the “Contraction & Convergence” (C&C) model put forth by the Global Commons Institute (GCI), a UK non-profit organisation set up in 1990 by Aubrey Meyer. C & C was proposed to the UNFCC in 1996, and though explicit mention of this model is not made often in the negotiations, it has been the underlying philosophy behind them since that time, the devil being in the details.

C & C is a simple, elegant and equitable carbon rationing framework for an international agreement on CO2 emissions.  To borrow from the GCI website:

‘Contraction’, refers to the ‘full-term event’ in which the future global total of greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions from human sources is shrunk over time in a measured way to near zero-emissions within a specified time-frame.   Each country starts with a certain entitlement level of CO2 emissions in line with present emission level.  Then the contraction is scheduled for each year until we get to compliance with the ‘objective’ of the UNFCCC – a safe and stable GHG concentration in the global atmopshere.

Having defined a global budget, the second step, ‘Convergence‘ refers to the full international sharing of the emissions contraction-event, where the ‘emissions-entitlements’ for all countries result from them converging on the declining global per capita average of emissions arising under the contraction rate chosen.  Each country is assigned annual allowances which starts for example from actuals in 2000 and converges to a common level of per-capita emissions in an agreed target year. While developed countries are receiving drastically reduced emissions entitlements, the emission entitlements of developing nations increase every year till we reach the date when they are all equal per capita. If they don’t use all their the entitlements, they can sell these to the rest of the world, and use it to fund their energy efficiency, green technology or adaptation investments.

This video clip from the climate change movie directed by Franny Armstrong, ”The Age of Stupid“ portrays the C & C concept in a simple manner:

C& C as a model provides clarity in terms of goals to achieve – the targets, the timeframe and the mechanism. It provides us the “shared language” to work together towards a workable solution to climate change.

It is an equitable model as in Aubrey Meyer’s words from the UNEP’s Climate Change Action Magazine 2008 (Pg 27)  [9]:

- Equity as collateral is the 100% entirety of the emissions contraction even necessary for concentration stability

- The social equity as the equal per person on the same 100%  throughout that event but softened by convergence

- The commercial equity is the shares pre-distributed this way sum to the same 100% and are tradable so as to accelerate the positive sum game for the emissions-free economy that must emerge if we are to prosper in the future. 

Integrated and implemented this way, we have a chance of accelerating the positive sum game for the emissions-free economy that must emerge if we are to prosper globally in the future. 

Climate Justice without Vengeance

C & C is a non-prescriptive model. It can calculate any rate of global emissions contraction required to meet UNFCCC goal for safe and stable concentrations of GHG in the atmosphere and any rate of convergence to equal per capita emissions entitlements within any rate of contraction, to satisfy the UNFCCC equity rationale.

C & C doesn’t impose on any nation or groups of nations what the rate of convergence should be;  it is a model that can be used as an underlying basis for nations to sit together and negotiate this rate.  By modelling various scenarios it shows what timeframe is acceptable, and what is dangerous if we delay convergence.

Unfortunately, this did not happen at the COP15 meeting at Copenhagen last year.

The “leaked” Danish texts at the summit were the cause of much furore, because developed nations were “prescribing” the convergence rate rather than using the C & C model as a basis of negotiation. The reductions in the text proposed : to achieve equal per capita emissions globally by 2050 within which developed countries must contract by 80%  with a global convergence of per capita emissions by that date, which might give a 50:50 odds of remaining within a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius.  [ GCI had expressed concerns about the odds and the rates applied and the prescriptive nature of the proposal as you can see in this animation here]

It then became a political blame game that Aubrey Meyer and Terry O’Connell explain in this Business Green article.

The Danish texts were met with angry protests from the G-77 nations and China on two fronts:

1. It froze per capita emissions 2:1 in favour of developed nations (i.e., developed nations needed to cut down to 2.67 tonnes of carbon, whereas developing nations could not emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon)

2. The lion’s share of what was left going to developed countries.

While the first point was not true (the convergence would have been towards equal per capita shares), there was validity in the second point. As shown in this CGI animation in the section on “Compare Rates of Convergence for Pre-Distribution of Tradeable Equity,”  earlier the rate of convergence, the more advantageous it is for developing nations.

For example, if the date of convergence is 2020 instead of 2050,  developing nations would get an extra 40GTC of carbon entitlements, that would come out of developed countries accounts. At £100/tonne, equity of  £4 Trillion can accrue to developing nations, which is in effect the “rent” paid for unused entitlements to use the atmosphere. 

It would then be fair to the developing countries to be compensated for what they are underutilising. They would be able to use these funds for many purposes:  green technology, adaptations, external debt and so on. This is Climate Justice.

Instead of acrimonious debate brought about by pulling out numbers from a hat, the idea is to have an organised and harmonious international negotiation with a framework like the C & C that brings all nations together under the required contraction event, for the rightful sharing of entitlements based on a mutally agreed convergence date. This is Climate Justice without Vengeance.

Why are Copenhagen targets simply not enough?

A recent report by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Change Research (PIK) and published in Nature[10]  has warned that Copenhagen targets will not slow down global warming [11].

* As part of the Copenhagen Accord, 76 countries (which between them are responsible for about 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions) submitted pledges to limit their emissions by 2020.

* The US submitted a target  for a reduction of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This equates to only 3% below 1990 levels, even though it is estimated that 25%-40% reductions are necessary in developed countries. China’s goals are basically a business-as-usual scenario, while the European Union’s targets are more towards a 20%-30% emissions cut. The only two countries that made pledges in line with the 2°C target are Japan and Norway.

* Global emissions in 2020 could actually end up being 20% higher than today. Many countries will raise annual emissions of greenhouse gases 10%-20% above the current levels, reaching a high of 47.9 to 53.6 Gt CO2 (gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) by 2020.

* Current pledges mean a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 3°C by 2100.  This would put the odds of global warming levels exceeding the 2°C limit by the end of this century at 50%.  However, if nations agree to halve emissions by 2050, there is still a 50% chance that warming will exceed 2°C and will almost certainly exceed 1.5°C

The sum and substance is that climate negotiations are nowhere near the kind of carbon emission reductions that will contain global temperature rise to within the safe 2°C target.

Another worrying factor as pointed out by GCI and incorporated in the C & C framework is the sink efficiency of oceans and forests –  or the ability of these ecosystems to go on absorbing extra human generated generated CO2.

So far the evidence as reported by the IPCC for the last 15 years, is that the Constant Airborne Fraction (CAF) [12] (or the fraction of anthropogenic carbon emissions that accumulates in the atmosphere) has been constant at around 50%, but now this is gradually increasing as sink efficiency decreases with rising temperature.

Carbon Bathtub: Click image for larger picture

Think of the atmosphere loosely as a bath tub – a tub with a tap running and a drain open. If we put in carbon at a faster rate than natural ecosystems can drain it out (roughly 50% of human induced CO2 emissions), then we get rising concentrations and a warmer world.  Cumulatively, oceans are increasingly saturated with old GHG absorptions causing increased acidification which causes carbon-consuming life-forms in the oceans to die-off. With this and with temperatures rising, oceans are not able to absorb as efficiently as before. So we need to rework our model to factor in the new and declining sink efficiency,  to make sure the tub doesn’t overflow.  

[The carbon tub analogy is illustrated in the diagram on the left as it appeared in the National Geographic magazine. It assumes a lower Constant Airborne Fraction of 44% which means 56% can be absorbed by our natural sinks. The IPCC studies [13](Pg 14-17) over 15 years show a CAF of 50% which means sinks can absorb only 50% and even that ability is declining]

As mentioned before, the level of CO2 in the tub is 392 parts per million (ppm) and rising by 2 or 3 ppm each year. To stop it at 450 ppm, a level many scientists consider dangerously high, John Sterman [14] MIT Sloan School of Management’s Director of Systems Dynamics Group, said  the world would have to cut emissions by around 80 percent by 2050.  A partner in ClimateInteractive.org, he helped create the C-ROADS climate policy simulation model and Climate Scoreboard  [15] that measure the long-term effects of various proposals for emissions reductions.

The C & C model proposes [16] similar targets, mentioning the maximum convergence date that is acceptable to stay within safe limits:

“to keep within 2 degrees (with a greater than 50:50 chance), a global contraction budget no more than 350- 400 GTC, with a minimum 80% cut all emissions globally by 2050 and negotiating a convergence to equal per capita shares (of 0.9 MTC) of this globally within one third of the timeline for contraction, i.e., no later than 2030.” 

Here is one example of the C & C model showing the scenario of per capita emissions converging to 0.9 MTC per person by 2030 and contraction of total emissions by 50% by 2050 and 90%  by 2100:
 

Contraction & Convergence Model: Global Commons Institute

For a better understanding of the model, please view the various scenarios in the GCI animation” Climate Justice without Vengeance” here.  [17]

Separate Development is not Sustainable Development

Aubrey Meyer [18] is a British born musician turned climate campaigner. He co-founded the Global Commons Institute [19], a non-profit organisation for the protection of global commons [20]in 1990. The elegant C & C framework that he created was first proposed to the UNFCC in 1996. Having schooled in South Africa during the Apartheid era, he understood the injustices of the system.  As a climate change activist, he was quick to recognise the “global apartheid” of carbon emissions which favours the rich over poorer nations. In his model, are embedded notions of justice and equity, in a well defined, scientific and stuctured framework for charting the path of carbon emissions reduction – a structure that he likens to that of music.  He was nominated in 2008 by the UK All Parliamentary Group on Climate Change for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Guardian UK in 2008 named Aubrey Meyer among “the top 50 people who could save the planet“[21]   and earlier in 2005, New Statesman called him one of “10 people most likely to change the world.” [22]

Here’s a 11 minute video where Aubrey Meyer talks about C & C with contributions from Tim Smit (CEO, Eden Project, UK), Bill McGuire (Director, UCL Hazard Research Centre) and Dr. Rajendra Pachuari (IPCC chairman) and Lord Adair Turner (Lord Adair Turner (Chair, UK  Climate Change Committee)

What is the call to action? 

Here is a message from Aubrey Meyer: 

May 30th 2010

Please will you support and co-sign this letter from Colin Challen to Chris Huhne?   

Below is the text of a letter that is being sent soon to the Rt Hon Chris Huhne MP, the UK’s new Liberal Democrat Minister of Energy and Climate Change.

The letter will be sent by Colin Challen, the former Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change.

“It appreciates the pro-Contraction-and-Convergence [C&C] record of Chris and his party and requests him to convene a public meeting to address the way ahead in terms of this “UNFCCC-compliant Global Climate Change Framework”.

Before sending it, Colin is circulating the letter widely with an open invitation to anyone in agreement with its message to become a co-signatory to it.

If you would like to be, please will you email your agreement along with your name, title and position to me asap at: -

aubrey[dot]meyer[at]btinternet[dot]com

With thanks

Aubrey Meyer

 

Here is the chance to lend your weight behind the C & C framework, by supporting this signature campaign to call the UK Government for a public meeting. Please send your email as above to Aubrey Meyer. If you have any comments or questions about the model or any related climate change issues, please do leave your note here at the end of this blog for him to answer or send him an email at aubrey[dot]meyer[at]btinternet[dot]com

Why should we in Asia or anywhere outside the UK support an initiative in the UK?

This is not an initiative for the UK. C & C is a just and workable solution meant for solving the climate change issue for the entire planet. Climate change is not a national, or regional issue, but a collective issue for all of humanity.  By supporting this letter right now, we are as world citizens telling the new UK government, that this is a solution that matters to all of us.  If the UK and other developed nations adopt this as a standard for negotiations, those in the developing world are likely to benefit most, as this is an equitable model to reduce carbon emissions. We are all looking for a win-win solution, and C & C is it. However to avoid dangerous climate change, we have to act now, act quickly and act together.

 As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri( IPCC Chairman) says in the video :

“ When one looks at the kinds of reductions that would be required globally, the only means for doing so is to ensure that there’s contraction and convergence, and I think there’s growing acceptance of this reality.

I don’t see how else we might be able to fit within the overall budget for emissions for the world as a whole by 2050. We need to start putting this principle into practice as early as possible, so that by the time we reach 2050, we’re not caught by surprise, we’re well on a track for every country in the world that would get us there.

On the matter of ‘historic responsibility’, there is no doubt that accelerating the rate of convergence relative to the rate of contraction is a way of answering that we really need to get agreement from Developed and Developing Countries to subscribe to this principle.”

Who supports C & C?

The GCI document called An International Conceptual Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change  [9] quotes several international personalities in support of the C & C model. These include Heads of State from Europe, Asia (Dr. Manmohan Singh and 7 other leaders of the Indian subcontinent), environmentalists like Sir David Attenborough and Sir Johnathon Porrit, climate scientist James Lovelock, economists Partha Dasgupta and Paul Erlich among other people.

A Report [23]of a Joint Inquiry by Bangladesh Parliament’s All Party Group on Climate Change and Environment and the UK All Party Parliament Climate Change Group shows how C & C can bring the developed and developing world closer.   To quote from the report:

” We believe that this lack of clarity and shared purpose is the greatest barrier to success in the UNFCCC negotiations.  We wish to demonstrate in our joint approach that parliamentarians from our two countries can help resolve the burden sharing riddle. 

Bangladesh is a country which is most often quoted as being one of the first that will suffer badly from the impacts of climate change; the UK is a country which since the industrial revolution has contributed most to the problem – and which now professes political leadership on the subject. 

We believe that if we as Parliamentarians from these two countries can bridge the differences, and develop a shared understanding of our respective burdens and challenges, we could propose a model for both the developed and developing worlds.”

What can I do to help with the Climate Change issue?

We can’t create change without taking action. Share the seriousness of the climate change issue and the importance of the C& C model with your family, friends and colleagues, offline and online through social media. Write and talk to your ministers, and members of  parliament. Write to various magazines and forums.  We can make ourselves heard by voicing our opinions and concerns about our shared future and those of the coming generations. 

As Sterman says, “In the end, it comes down to public support. We have to change the way we use energy and support policies that will enable those changes to occur. Science is no longer the bottleneck to action. We need to focus on social and political change.” 

Thank you! 

Many thanks to Aubrey Meyer for his answers to my queries regarding the C & C model.

The links that have been used in this article: 

[1] EWTT: The Impossible Hamster: Limits to Economic Growth
[2a] Huffington Post: The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse
[2b] James Hansen in the Huffington Post : Twenty Years Later : Tipping Points Near on Global Warming
[3] Real Climate: Hit the Brake hard  (Why 2 degrees as a threshold is important)
       Related : National Geographic Video: 2 Degrees Warmer  Also watch 3 Degrees Warmer,  4 Degrees Warmer, 5 Degrees Warmer and 6 Degrees Warmer
       Related:  EWTT: Impact of a Global Temperature rise of 4 Deg Celsius 
[4] New Scientist: Humanity’s Carbon Budget set at One Trillion Tonnes 
[5] EWTT: Climate Refugees
[6] Wikipedia : Kyoto Protocol
[7] Wikipedia: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
[8] Wikipedia: Copenhagen Accord
[9] Global Commons Institute GCI: An International Conceptual Framework for Preventing Dangerous Climate Change
[10] Nature: Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry
[11] Cordis Europa : Copenhagen targets will not slow down global warming
[12] Skeptical Science:  Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic Co2 emissions increasing 
[13] Global Commons Institute : IPCC Studies showing Constant Airborne Fraction at 50%
[14] John Sterman   MIT Sloan Professor finds Copenhagen Climate Summit agreement inadequate to reach global goal for greenhouse gas emissions 
[15] EWTT: Climate Scoreboard
[16] Global Commons Institute C & C proposal : Second Memo from GCI to the UK House of Commons “Environmental Audit Committee”  
[17] Global Commons Institute C & C animation : C & C is Climate Justice without Vengeance  
[18] Global Commons Institute : CV_Aubrey Meyer
[19]Global Commons Institute Home Page
[20] Wikipedia: Global Commons
[21] Guardian UK : The top 50 people who could change the planet
[22] New Statesman: Ten people who could change the world
[23] Report of a Joint Inquiry by Bangladesh Parliament’s All Party Group on Climate Change and Environment and the UK All Party Parliament Climate Change Group

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 For a clearer picture, click here at  Information is Beautiful.

Cliff Kuang, the blog writer points to an important caveat in the diagram:

The graph is dominated by $7.8 trillion supposedly spent by the U.S. government on bailouts in the present financial crisis. But that number isn’t like the others–as The New York Times reports, that massive figure is actually a hypothetical estimate of what the government might be on the hook for if the financial system actually collapses. The actual budgeted cost of the bailout program is around $2 trillion–which is obviously enormous, but is actually a trillion less than we’ve spent on the Iraq war.

Even so, the figures spent on the financial bailout (US$2 trillion) and the Iraq war (US$3 trillion) are mind-boggling.

Think of how little it costs, in comparison to solve important issues facing the world:

*  $515 billion to shift the entire world to solar power and renewable energies

*  $465 billion to feed and educate every child on earth for 5 years

*  $200 billion to write-off Africa’s entire debt to Western Nations

*  $ 21 billion to save the Amazon

As I mentioned in an earlier blog on Challenges and Prospects for a Green Economy, Pavan Sukhdev the lead author of the TEEB Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity report and the Global Green New Deal says:

“one third of the around $2.5 trillion-worth of planned stimulus packages should be invested on ‘greening’ the world economy. The estimated $750 billion of green investment, equal to about one per cent of current global GDP, could trigger significant, multiple and potentially transformational returns.”

The World People’s Conference of Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, that was held recently at Cochacomba, Bolivia stipulates that developed nations put forward 6% of their annual GDP for climate finance in developing countries.

Do you know how much is currently allocated to developing countries  for addressing climate change? At the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December 2009, the proposal was to mobilise US$10 billion per year between 2010 and 2012, and up to US$100 billion by 2020 annually – which represents only 0.8% to 8% of developed countries’ national defence budgets, respectively!

When it comes to our planet, there’s no dearth of billions.  It’s clear we’re pretty good at being penny wise and pound foolish!

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These were several of the stimulating questions answered by Pavan Sukhdev on December 1, 2009 in a seminar organised by the Singapore Environment Institute (SEI).  Andrew Tan, from Centre for Liveable Cities, Singapore which co-hosted the event, made the introduction.

Pavan, combines his expertise in the financial sector as Chairman of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets Centre Mumbai, as well as his deep understanding of environmental issues.  He leads the UNEP’s “Green Economy Initiative”, the G8+5 commissioned report on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) and the Green Indian States Trust (GIST)

 
The TEEB highlights the economic impact of biodiversity loss. It parallels what the Stern report does to highlight the economic impact of climate change.

 What is a green economy?

According to Pavan, it is easier to define a green economy by what it is not. A green economy does not consume natural capital or risk human survival.

World Footprint www.footprintnetwork.org

The ecological footprint of human activities as measured by the demand on the resources of Earth’s ecosystems, already exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by 40%.  Humanity is now demanding 1.4 Earths. In fact, we have been in “ecological debt” for the last 20 years, using up natural “capital” instead of living off the “interest”  it generates.

 With Global Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 42 GTCO2e (Gigatons) at 5 times higher than the Earth can absorb, the planet faces climate risk at a pace that can’t be sustained.

Watch Pavan Sukhdev talk about the consequences of the erosion of natural capital

Economies can adopt a more sustainable path, if they increase their investment in “green” sectors and the share of the GDP devoted to renewable energies, clean transportation, clean technologies, green buildings, waste management, water services, sustainable agriculture and forestries. Such investment will bring about an increase in quality and quantity of green jobs.

Concurrently, it is important to reduce the energy use per unit of production, as well as carbon emissions per unit of GDP, while minimizing wasteful consumption in various sectors of the economy.

Having said that, there is inertia in moving away from an unsustainable growth path, and this is because “we can’t manage what we can’t measure.”  An economy’s Gross Domestic Product or GDP is a linear measure of growth, capturing only value of goods and services produced within its boundaries for a given year. It is not reflective of human or societal wellbeing or the state of ecosystems.

If there is a tsunami or earthquake for example, the economy may continue to register a growth in GDP due to the related manufacturing and repair expenses. It does not indicate the human misery or suffering of the people.  We need a measure that captures the three-dimensional aspects of Human and Social Capital, Natural Capital as well as Financial and Physical Capital.

The environment provides the foundation upon which society can become healthy and wealthy. A severely deforested state of Haiti shows how losing natural capital has led to poverty, lack of economic development, increased child mortality and deterioration of maternal health.  All these are interdependent. A green economy is as much about society, human well-being, and the natural environment.

A study by Green Accounting for Indian States Project (GIST) shows that the connection between loss of ecosystem services and poverty can be stark.  In India, ecosystem services account for 7.3% of the GDP (based on 2002-2003 data). However, if you isolate the GDP of the poor, ecosystem services can constitute as much as 57% of the livelihoods they earn in small farming, small scale forestry, fisheries and animal husbandry. So degradation of the environment directly exacerbates poverty.

Which sectors should be given priority in a green economy?

The accumulation of risks resulting from the depletion of natural capital, can lead to various pressures such as a hike in food and oil prices. This directly affects the poor. A 1% loss in GDP could well translate into 20 million people going below the poverty line of US $1 a day.

A rule of thumb would be to allocate resources in sectors that create jobs. In the US, there are 2.3 million employed in the renewable energy sector, compared to 2 million in the oil refining sector.  If projected investments in the renewable energy sector of US $630 million pan out by 2030 globally,  there is potential for 20 million jobs to be created.

If the share of renewable energy in the total energy mix in the US were to increase from 5% as it is currently, to 25%, it would create a huge multiplier effect on employment without the contingent liabilities associated with carbon emissions.

In South Korea, the government has taken a leadership role in steering the economy towards green growth.   The investment of US $1.5 billion in the Four Rivers Project, to clean up the rivers has created 350 thousand jobs. Such a project builds the ecological infrastructure, and the nation’s productive natural capital which is vital for the future.

 There are big opportunities in increasing energy efficiency of buildings as the technology exists. It is estimated that in the US, an investment of US$100 billion over 4 years could generate 4 million new jobs. India could create 900,000 jobs by 2025 in biomass gasification.

There is considerable scope for bringing about efficiency in the agriculture sector as well.  According to a study by the UNEP,   when one accounts for various kinds of wastage in the food supply chain, from planting and harvesting in the fields, from the field to the table in the manufacturing process, discards in fisheries, and also the leakage that arises from using 1/3^rd of the world’s cereal grains to feed livestock instead of people directly, food wastage could be as high as 50%.  

How can we feed the rising population as well as preserve the biodiversity of the planet?  The answer lies not in “more agriculture” but efficient agriculture through reduced wastage, organic farming and proper land allocation.

Why don’t we have a Green Economy yet?

 A green economy is often easier said than done, because we can’t solve the problems with the same thinking that created them.  Often it’s a question of inertia amongst policy makers, businesses and the public, who have to be convinced about the ROI and benefits of green economic growth.

Pavan highlighted that there are two broad enabling conditions that need to be addressed. The first is the International Policy Architecture which includes development of global markets for carbon as well as ecosystem services. Policies are needed for development and transfer of technologies, and for international trade, aid, and co-ordination.

The second enabling condition is in the area of Domestic Policies. These include dismantling lopsided subsidies to fossil fuels, taxes and policies that promote renewable energies, environmental legislation, integrated management of fresh water, policies for proper land use for urban and agricultural areas, monitoring and accounting of ecosystem services.

According to the Global Green New Deal report by the UNEP  more than $300 billion are being spent on energy subsidies across developed and developing economies, the bulk of it on fossil fuels. Removing these subsidies would actually add 0.1% to global GDP and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.

Mitigating the effects of climate change: The different colours of carbon

Often enough, there is a lot of focus on “brown carbon” or emissions from energy use and industry.  Other types of carbon should be given weightage in mitigation efforts.  ”Blue carbon”  is the carbon stored in the oceans. In fact, they bind an estimated 55% of all carbon in living organisms. “Green carbon” refers to what is stored in the biomass of forests, agricultural lands and pastures. According to the IPCC 2007, by “halting the loss of ‘green’ and ‘blue’carbon, the world could mitigate as much as 25% of total GHG emissions, with co-benefits for biodiversity, food security and livelihoods”

“Black carbon“ is the soot generated by burning coal, biomass and biofuels, and can be reduced by adopting clean technologies.

 Adaptation

According to a TEEB study on the Estimates of Costs and Benefits of Restoration Projects in Different Biomes , economies should recognize the crucial role that ecosystems can play in climate change adaptation. Restoring ecosystem services will help deal with freshwater scarcity, natural hazards like cyclones and improve agriculture and fisheries productivity.

Mangrove planting increases productivity by 80% in the ecosystem, and brings benefits of risk management against natural disasters and resilience for farming communities. 

The study shows the incredible IRR range from 7% to 79%  on projects that rebuild Ecological Infrastructure. The associated Cost Benefit ratios that have been calculated by the GEI team are 3-75 times in different ecosystems from coral reefs to rainforests to grasslands, which is significantly more than any conventional industrial project.

 Global Green New Deal

 The Global Green New Deal is a report by the Green Economy Initiative, launched by the UNEP in 2008. It outlines a global plan for governments and businesses to build green economies using 3 main pillars.

Firstly, valuing and mainstreaming nature’s services into national and international accounts. Secondly, employment generation through green jobs and the laying out the policies and thirdly, encouraging instruments and market signals able to accelerate a transition to a Green Economy.

According to the Deal,  “one third of the around $2.5 trillion-worth of planned stimulus packages should be invested on ‘greening’ the world economy. The estimated $750 billion of green investment, equal to about one per cent of current global GDP, could trigger significant, multiple and potentially transformational returns.”

 Unfortunately as the September 2009 update to the report notes, ” The effectiveness of the green stimulus risks being compromised by delays in allocation of funds.  At the end of the first half of 2009, around only 3% of committed green funds had been disbursed.  Moreover, many G20 members have not included sufficient green investments in their overall stimulus packages.”

As the world emerges out of recession, we have a historical opportunity to transform economies into engines of green growth. Technologies exist. Solutions exist. As Pavan pointed out in the Q&A, what is needed is the behaviourial change to bring about the transition. Change has to come from policy-makers , businesses and enlightened citizens who all need to push actively for this transition based on the new paradigm and mindset. 

You may be interested in these:

“HIGH STAKES: a movie on the Economics of Climate Change in SE Asia”

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond

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