Forum for the Future recently asked a selection of top business and branding folk to give us the lowdown on the recent trend toward sustainable business. The gurus included Rita Clifton of Interbrand, Stuart Hart of Cornell University, William Kramer of the World Resources Institute, and Jonathon Porritt of Forum for the Future. I have distilled their wisdom into six insights.

1. A real sea change is underway. Looking at the current trends and recent announcements, there are signs of real progress and positive signals of change. In an arena that was once confined to the Body Shop and hippies, we’re now seeing a major shift in more mainstream businesses. In the U.K., Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Topshop are all in on the act.

2. Progress is partial. Despite the advances, the size of the challenges we face in building a sustainable future means there is still a long way to go. Even the more progressive strategies, such as General Electric’s “Ecomagination,” do not fully acknowledge — or live up to — the scale of change required. Fundamental questions regarding unsustainable business models need to be addressed before strategies can be fully credible.

3. Business is in the driving seat, not consumers. Although consumer interest is increasing, it’s not yet strong enough to drive these trends on its own or make up the entire business case. Business strategy can’t completely rely on consumer insight or market research. Bold action and leadership is needed from business to drive this change through to the consumer.

4. There’s a green opportunity agenda. Numerous recent high-profile cases link sustainability more to the opportunity agenda of business growth and new market development, rather than the traditional territory of risk, reputation, and compliance. Marks & Spencer’s Plan A and GE’s Ecomagination are the strongest examples of companies doing this.

5. We need a new marketing ethic. Sustainable business practices will require new approaches to marketing. Our gurus commented, for instance, on the perception that agencies lack awareness and need to shift to see more CSR people being involved in strategic marketing and planning. Some felt that more fundamental changes will require a more ideological and strategic shift — such as the rise of a new marketing ethic. (See the recent — and very good — The Green Marketing Manifesto for more on this.)

6. Delivery and performance is everything. Sustainable business needs to be built on real actions, activities, and results. The most convincing examples of sustainable business are built on tangible improvements, product or service performance, and delivery. Consumers are increasingly savvy about greenwash, and companies making environmental claims will face intense public scrutiny. Green products and services also have to match their competitors, or be better.

Overall, General Electric and M&S were the most mentioned by our gurus for best practice and leadership. They also suggested that HSBC and Unilever are the ones to watch. Wal-Mart and Tesco were frequently mentioned, though opinions were split on the green reality of the agenda, and some asked for more evidence of real results. People agreed, however, that they certainly have the big business buying power potential to really make a difference.

Our green gurus concluded that a sea change is happening — they saw a real shift in business awareness, attitude, and buy-in to the green agenda. Are they right?

Every year more and more people live in cities. Globally, we became a majority urban world for the first time last year, while here in the U.K., nine out of 10 of us live in towns and cities.

Cities are clearly important for sustainability. Although the romantic green notion of us all living on small holdings with a goat, a vineyard, and a vegetable patch is seductive, the future is much more likely to be dominated by megacities such as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo. We will have to learn to make such cities liveable and sustainable.

Concentrating people in urban centers does make it easier to provide some social and environmental services. But the big cities also have a huge environmental footprint. London, for example, has an ecological footprint 293 times its geographical area.

Cities are also important as centres of dynamism. They are where social, cultural, and economic innovation and change happens. Yet despite the undoubted importance of cities, most of the environment movement in the U.K. is still predominantly rural- and wildlife-oriented. They defend and protect stuff most ordinary people will never see. The greens haven’t been very good at doing green cities.

Our big cities, on the other hand, haven’t done a very good job of being sustainable either. Lots of our leading cities are making green claims. Manchester is determined to become “the Greenest City in Britain by 2010,” Leicester calls itself “the environment city,” Bristol wants to become a “Green Capital,” and London is aiming for nothing less than the status of “most sustainable city in the world.” But behind such claims there is very little objective measurement of what it means to be sustainable. We certainly don’t have anywhere that really stands out as an example of overall good practice.

So, we at Forum for the Future decided to get stuck into the debate on sustainable urbanism. We researched and published a table ranking our 20 biggest cities.

Our first question was what to measure. Some researchers have looked at ecological footprint, with no sense of what the city is actually like for its citizens. Others focused on quality of life, but ignored the wider environmental impact. So we used thirteen indicators grouped in three sets of criteria:

• Environmental Impact of the city — the impact of the city on the wider environment in terms of resource use and pollution;
• Quality of Life for residents — what the city is like to live in for all its citizens; and
• Future Proofing — how well the city is preparing itself for a sustainable future. We added the last category specifically to recognize those cities that are starting from a difficult base in terms of their social or industrial legacy, but are moving in the right direction.

So, who won? For those of you who know the U.K., Brighton and Hove came on top, with Edinburgh second. Liverpool, unfortunately was at the bottom. (The full report is available here [PDF].)

There were a couple of clear messages from the study. Unsurprisingly, the wealthier cities tend to do better in the index. These cities may have more resources to devote to sustainability issues. And affluence might explain why voters here are more concerned about green issues: the average vote for the Green Party in the 2005 General Election was 7 percent across the top three cities, and only 1 percent across the bottom three.

Service-based cities also do well. Again, this is not surprising. The top cities tend to be ones which are building their future in the service industries, and do not have to deal with such a difficult industrial legacy. Of these service industries, tourism would appear to be particularly influential. Both Brighton (a seaside resort) and Edinburgh earn a lot of their income from tourism, and it makes sense therefore for them to invest in a high-quality physical and green environment.

I think that the strongest message was that, overall, our cities still have a long way to go on the journey to sustainability. For example, while we can congratulate Brighton and Hove on coming first, it still has a very high environmental footprint in terms of its impact across the wider world.

We will be running this index every year as part of a new program of work on green cities. We hope that it will make our cities better places to live, with a lower overall impact on the environment. We also hope it will encourage some healthy competition amongst our big cities to see who is greenest.

In some ways, the United States is ahead of us on the green cities agenda. This is partly to do with the fact that you have more power devolved down to the state and city level than we do. It may also be because under the Bush administration, cities got on and did things for themselves. I was in San Francisco recently, and was very impressed with what they are doing on recycling, public transportation, and green buildings.

I suspect, however, that your cities would score less well on their overall environmental footprint. But I may be wrong. If any of you can point to strong examples of sustainable urbanism, we would love to hear about them.

There has been much discussion lately of the need to turn the green agenda from a negative to a positive one. I think that an important part of this is developing some more positive visions of what living in a sustainable future might be like. My organization, Forum for the Future, has set itself this task. Partly because we think the green movement needs more credible and aspirational stories of the future if we are to take people with us. And partly because we become the future that we imagine — it is to an extent a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, we are trying to take different parts of the future and imagine what they might look like. We now have a series of projects looking at different aspects of future living.

Our recent report, "Low Carbon Living 2022," asks how might our lives be better if we get the response to climate change right. A low-carbon Britain doesn’t have to mean cutbacks and sacrifice. Low Carbon Living 2022 looks forward 15 years and shows ways in which a low-carbon future could deliver: stronger communities, a cleaner local environment, more money, better transport, a healthier lifestyle, and a thriving economy.

The project sets out nine products and services — from "virtual windows," allowing meetings with people anywhere in the world, to luxury airships — which would be doing well in a low-carbon future. The adverts for these products of the future can be seen here.

Another recent project, Retail Futures, offers a glimpse of what the shopping experience of 2022 might involve. Through four radically different visions of the future, “Retail Futures 2022” explores many of the issues the retail sector will have to face in the years to come.

Taken together, the scenarios provide valuable tools to help the retail sector develop robust, future-proof strategies that will deliver more sustainable retail in a time of radical change.

In one of the scenarios, a bright glass building shimmers in the setting sun, crowned with wind turbines and coated in solar panels. No one lives there; it used to be a car park. Now it’s a vertical farm, a shining example of the new urban agriculture — climate controlled, filled with fruit and vegetables, and even a few pigs. It generates all its own energy, harvests water from the rooftop, and markets produce on the ground floor to local businesses and residents.

In another, communities are increasingly turning to bartering and other peer-to-peer exchange schemes to cope with an economic slowdown. Many consumers have become traders in their own rights, making a living through selling goods and services online directly to others.

Then again, in a different scenario, people have stopped shopping altogether — at least for everyday staples. Instead, customers receive milk, bread, pasta, washing powder, and toilet tissue whenever they are needed, triggered by messages sent automatically to the retailer direct from their cupboards and fridges.

These scenarios aren’t science fiction: the future could contain elements from all of them.

None of these pieces of work are predictions of what will actually happen. Predicting the future is a perilous affair. Remember back to when you were a kid and what you thought the future would be like. So, who today is wearing rocket boots, eating meals in tablet form, or living on the moon?

We do, however, try to describe possible futures, so that we start to see the opportunities. And we are working with the strategy and product-development parts of major companies like BP, Cadbury Schweppes, First Choice, and Unilever to start innovating the products and services that will be successful in such futures. We hope that by bringing such products to market, the companies will help create the kind of future we want.

Between now and 2022, there’s not much time. But there’s time enough for a metamorphic shift. Just think of the mushrooming of the internet in the 15 years since 1992.

Over the coming year, we intend to look at the future of holidays, commuting, city living, and, in another soon-to-be-published project, we have asked what following a low-carbon economic strategy might mean for one of the U.K.’s regions.

So, what do you think the products of the future will be? Who will be making money out of what? And where would you invest?

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We have just published the American paperback version of Capitalism As If the World Matters. The book is written by Jonathon Porritt, one of the foremost environmentalists of his generation and cofounder of my organization, Forum for the Future. The foreword is by Amory Lovins. As well as working with us, Jonathon is chair of the U.K. Government’s Sustainable Development Commission. Previously, he was director of Friends of the Earth.

In the book, he tackles the most pressing question of the 21st century: Can capitalism, as the dominant economic system, be reshaped to deliver a sustainable future? He argues that it can be and it must be. He then lays out the framework for a more “sustainable capitalism.”

At the heart of the book are two theses: that capitalism is basically the only game in town, with the vast majority of the world’s people content for it to remain so for the foreseeable future; and that learning to live sustainably on the planet is a non-negotiable imperative.

Jonathon asks why, when the science is now so clear and compelling, we haven’t seen more radical responses from government and business. He lays some of the blame at the door of “conventional environmentalism,” which he says has so far failed to win over the hearts and minds of the general public or the political elites because its message is too doom-laden. The necessary changes, he argues, have instead to be seen as desirable changes, good for people, their health, their quality of life today — and not just good for the prospects of future generations.

That means working with the grain of markets and free choice. Logically, it also means embracing capitalism as the only overarching system capable of achieving any kind of reconciliation between ecological sustainability on the one hand and the pursuit of prosperity and personal well-being on the other.

I think this conclusion is difficult to argue with, though some greens in the U.K. still see the capitalist system itself as the problem, and fundamentally irredeemable. That said, Jonathon rightly believes that today’s particular model of capitalism is incapable of delivering the kind of reconciliation we need because it is dependent on systematically destroying the natural capital on which we depend, and on worsening the divides between the rich and the poor.

Capitalism as if the World Matters sets out in detail the response to the challenge that Forum for the Future has been wrestling with for the past decade: can we conceptualize and then operationalize an alternative model of capitalism, a model that delivers a sustainable future?

For that to happen, the case for sustainable development must be reframed. It has to be as much about new opportunities for responsible wealth creation as about outlawing irresponsible wealth creation; it must draw on a core of ideas and values that speaks directly to people’s desire for a higher quality of life, emphasizing enlightened self-interest and new kinds of personal well-being.

We must also redefine what we mean by “growth.” The book highlights the need to distinguish between different kinds of growth. It argues that current economic growth does not bring us happiness. It suggests that we must not only reduce the material intensity of economic activities, but that we must change how we measure growth and progress.

Sustainable development as an organizing principle could help us to simultaneously live within natural limits, provide unprecedented opportunities for responsible and innovative wealth creators, and offer people a more balanced and more rewarding way of life.

The book is also an excellent primer on the current state of knowledge on sustainable development. Jonathon draws heavily on his work with Forum for the Future. He sets out the “Five Capitals” framework, which we have used with major businesses and public bodies. He draws on our experience of helping major companies like BP, Marks & Spencer, and Unilever. And he also writes engagingly about the importance of spirituality in sustainability.

However, when Capitalism as if the World Matters was published in the U.K., much of the press attention centered around the criticisms of the environmental movement. Jonathon challenges the positioning of the movement, and in particular, the fact that even though reconciling sustainable development with capitalism is today’s most fundamental intellectual challenge, the green movement devotes “a miniscule” amount of time and money to resolving it.

The book is challenging, passionate and, ultimately, optimistic. Jonathon concludes, “It seems unarguable that the bipolar challenges of, on the one hand, the biophysical limits to growth and, on the other, the terrible damage being done to the human spirit through the pursuit of unbridled materialism, will compel a profound transformation of contemporary capitalism.” Let’s hope he is right.

Are we too obsessed by climate change? Over here, climate change is coming to completely dominate the sustainability agenda. This is true in politics, business, the media, and civil society.

I was talking to our new secretary of state for the environment, Hilary Benn, the other day, about his department’s strategy. He argued that all the other issues — such as air quality, waste, water, and so on — could all be dealt with under the climate change umbrella; government action on climate change would deliver for the other issues, and vice versa.

When we talk to companies or public authorities, it is the same. All they want is advice on going low-carbon. And since this is where the money and political attention are going, the NGO activity seems to follow, reinforcing the trend.

Of course, this is a good thing in many ways. Climate change is the major challenge we face. Sir David King, the U.K. Government’s chief scientific advisor, was right when he reminded his government colleagues that “climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism.”

For those of us who want to see green thinking integrated into other areas of life, climate change works well. It can’t be thought of as peripheral. It will affect everything, including how we run the economy and how we live our lives.

I worry, however, that we risk missing other important stuff too. Twenty-five years ago we hardly knew about climate change, which was then mostly the preserve of a few scientists. Pollution, biodiversity loss, waste, resource use, and protection of special habitats were the things that obsessed us; and they should be still.

Of course, climate change will touch everything. If the earth warms as predicted, we may not have tropical forests or the special habitats we are trying to protect. On this basis, many argue that we should focus solely on climate change. There is some merit in this argument. But I also think that an overemphasis on climate change does bring some risks.

Climate change does not touch people in the heart. It is a very complicated concept to get across. This is fine for people who deal well with graphs, and projections, and abstract concepts. But we all need to relate to real-life experiences, too. Very few of the public are motivated and changed by rational abstractions, or by things that won’t happen for decades.

The environment most of us experience is the one we meet when we step outside our front doors. We need to respect and tap into more immediate motivations for people. This is a lesson the green movement in the U.K. learned back in the early 1990s. The major environmental groups were so focused on big, faraway issues that ordinary people switched off. Instead, there was a flowering of local protest groups concerned with their own backyards.

Is there also a danger that policy-makers can use the long-term nature of climate change as an excuse not to take action on other issues today? By talking up targets for 2020 and 2050, we might miss urgent problems that are with us now, such as overfishing, deforestation, and the loss of species.

There certainly are trade-offs between tackling different environmental issues. And with a limited pot of money, other important areas can suffer. Policies can be in conflict, too. Remember the catalytic converter in the 1980s: good for tackling pollution, but bad for fuel efficiency. And bad for biofuels today, which may be good news for tackling climate change; but if poorly sourced, is very bad news for orangutans.

This is a difficult one to call. Climate change is a huge problem, and maybe we should give it priority over everything else. Or maybe we could do a better job of remembering that there are other important environmental issues out there.

We have a problem, we greens. It has to do with the way that we talk about the future. We do need to have a more plausible account of what the kind of world we are recommending would be like.

However, our main narrative about the future talks of apocalypse and doom and gloom: the earth is dying; species are disappearing; the planet is overheating.

If people want to do something about it, too often they’re told they’ll have to lead a life of sacrifice and constraint. And if they won’t, we’ll guilt-trip and scare them ’til they repent.

And even if they do as we say, they also worry that it probably won’t make much difference anyway because the Chinese, Indians, and North Americans are all busy ignoring the issues.

I’m painting a caricature, of course, but you get my point. Our story isn’t very attractive to lots of people: it is too grounded in fear and negatives. We need to stop peddling what one recent report called “climate porn.”

The majority of people want positive things they can aspire to. We need to paint more attractive visions. This, however, is easier to say than to do.

Recently in my organization, senior staff were sharing the first five minutes of the presentations we give externally, the bit where we explain sustainable development, climate change, and so on to a skeptical audience. The idea was to compare notes on our best presentation techniques. But guess what? We all started off on the negatives. We opened with different variants of “We’re in real trouble, guys.” We then mostly had some graphs, facts, and predictions showing how “we are going to be in even more trouble soon.” Sounds familiar?

I’m not saying we should go too much in the other direction. If we are too optimistic and cheery, we can come across as all Panglossian, implying that we can solve the world’s challenges by some easy “green consumer” choices or the development of new technology.

Of course we still need to scare people a bit, to grab the attention. But we risk paralyzing and de-motivating people if that is all we dwell on.

When greens do paint visions of the future, they are often utopian, hippie, bucolic, and frankly unbelievable. They either seem to think that everyone will live in some variation of rural France, on a small-holding complete with small vineyard, goat, and squeaky bicycle. Or they describe the kind of world that most normal people would run a mile from. I certainly don’t want to live in a future where I have to hold hands with strangers and wear flowers in my hair.

At Forum for the Future, we are trying to play a small part to change the way we talk about the future. We always try to tell the good news in our magazine, Green Futures. We have recently set up a futures program that is running some interesting projects. For example, we are doing a “positive futures” project on climate change. This is of course a scary subject; but we are trying to paint a picture of all the ways our lives will genuinely be better if we get the responses to climate change right — through healthier lifestyles, more time, better functioning communities, a cleaner local environment, and so on. We want people to look at a more sustainable future and think: “I want that!” Over the coming years, we intend to pick off some of the key sustainable development challenges, and try to tell aspirational stories of what the future might hold.

I know that people in the U.S. have been thinking along the same lines. I remember that a couple of years ago the authors of “The Death of Environmentalism” argued for a positive, transformative vision of the future as a necessary part of renewing the movement. I would agree with this, though I think it would be wrong to try and fashion a single story for the environmental movement. That would probably be too constraining and too easy to attack. It would risk alienating as many people as it attracted. Our stories of the future should be multiple and competing, but positive.

How are you guys handling this need for attractive and believable visions of a sustainable future? Have you got some good stories to tell? And if you shared these down at the local pub, do you think that ordinary people would listen to them, and then want to be part of them?

Britain has a new prime minister. After leading the country for 10 years, Tony Blair has stepped down. Gordon Brown, Blair’s number two for the past decade, takes up the reins.

Brown is viewed as solid and dependable, if a little dour. He is slightly to the left of Blair on most issues, though he has also pushed through a lot of business-friendly policies.

Gordon Brown is notoriously difficult to read; he gives very little of himself away. So what can we expect on the environment from a Brown premiership?

I, along with some other environmentalists, spent an afternoon with the prime-minister-in-waiting last week examining what he should do on climate change. From this and discussions with his advisers, I am beginning to get a sense of where he will put his energy.

Like Blair, Brown will spend a lot of time on international climate change diplomacy. He knows that this is a global problem needing a widely supported international framework. He realizes that the prospect of a much more engaged and positive approach in the U.S. could help to deliver a much more ambitious and meaningful global deal. And he believes that the U.K. is well placed to be a bridge between Europe and the U.S. By putting David Miliband, the youthful former environment minister, in charge of foreign affairs, he will have a knowledgeable and energetic negotiator on climate change at his side.

Brown has long been passionate about international development issues. He has worked tirelessly on providing debt relief for Africa and increasing aid flows. It seems like he will start to focus much more seriously on the impacts that climate change will have on developing countries. Oxfam, the aid agency, estimates that adaptation will cost developing countries at least $50 billion each year. Brown will work to mobilize the international political will and the funds to help poorer countries adapt.

Climate change will also dominate Brown’s domestic environmental priorities. He is likely to focus a lot on technology. Like Blair, he has a strong belief in the ability of technology and ingenuity to solve problems. We can expect him to work with and encourage business leaders who want to invest in solutions. And he is likely to provide tax breaks and other support for green R&D.

It is on housing and buildings that he will really direct his efforts. More than half of our CO2 emissions come from buildings. Britain is suffering a housing shortage, and we are about to build a whole lot more houses. We will have to squeeze millions of new homes into an already crowded island over the coming years.

Brown has made an ambitious pledge that “within ten years all new homes would have to be zero carbon.” This is a huge challenge for the house-building sector and should lead to a lot of innovation.

He also announced a clutch of five new “eco-towns,” with a combined total of 100,000 zero-carbon homes. It is not just the houses that will meet zero-carbon standards and run only on renewable power. The towns will also have zero-carbon schools and health centers, as well as lots of cycle lanes and public transport.

In the U.K., our existing housing stock is not very energy efficient, and this is where the big gains are to be made. Brown recently recognized this: “[N]ew homes are only a small percentage of the total. So today I want to extend our ambition to all homes. Over the next decade my aim is that every home for which it is practically possible will become low carbon.”

What about the other big environmental issues? Here the signs are less positive. Brown has shown little attention to wildlife and biodiversity issues. It is not clear how he will tackle wider resource-use issues. And he has already made it clear that on land-use planning issues he wants to put the needs of business productivity first.

Under the new prime minister, I suspect that the dominant theme will be continuity in environmental policy. Brown will stick to most of the priorities of his predecessor. However, he will also want to put his own stamp on things. Environmentalists in the U.K. are waiting to see what he has up his sleeve.

Can a bag of potato chips point the way to saving the planet?

In the U.K., we have started down the path of putting “carbon labels” on products. Tesco, our biggest supermarket chain, has said they will label every product they sell. The Carbon Trust, a government agency, has already produced a prototype label and is trying it out on shampoo, a fruit juice, and a bag of potato chips.

Clearly we do need to measure and manage carbon. A lot has been done to calculate and reduce the direct climate impacts of companies. Now attention is shifting to the wider climate-change footprint; businesses are looking up and down the supply chain.

Labeling is a great idea in principle. We have seen labels like fair-trade, organic, energy-rating, and marine stewardship engage consumers, change production, and move markets. And on climate change, consumers tell us they want simple, straightforward choices that are guaranteed to make a difference.

The environmental community here is very excited about the prospect of carbon labeling. However, we have already realized that it is going to be much more difficult than we first thought.

What exactly should we measure? Where do we start and stop? The Carbon Trust trials have looked at the “embedded” carbon in a product by the time it reaches the shelves in the shop. So, for example, the potato chips have a little label saying that they have taken 78 grams of carbon to produce. This is complicated enough, because the label has to reflect all the CO2 emitted while growing the potatoes and vegetable oil (pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel, etc.) as well as manufacturing, packaging, and transporting the chips.

But if we just measure this “embedded carbon” up to the point where the product is sold, what about the carbon dioxide generated in use? For many items, such as computers, washing machines, or cars, the CO2 produced while the product is being used is way more important than the CO2 in its manufacture. If we just measure embedded carbon, then an old-style incandescent light bulb would score better than an energy-efficient one. This would clearly be ludicrous. However, doing a full life-cycle assessment of every product before it gets a label is also going to be a huge — and expensive — undertaking. You can imagine all the consultants rubbing their hands in anticipation.

Of all the thousands of products out there, where should we start? Do we focus on the top sellers? The easiest to measure? Those that are most intelligible to consumers? Or, as I favor, those products with the biggest carbon impact?

This raises a fundamental question about what we are trying to do with a label. How useful is it to a shopper to be able to compare the climate-change impact of one tin of baked beans over another? And if a bag of potato chips represents 76 grams of carbon, is that a good or bad thing?

I certainly don’t want people thinking that by buying one type of chips rather than another, they have done something meaningful on climate change. It would probably be a million times more effective for them to buy a fuel-efficient car instead of a gas guzzler or to change the way they heat their home.

When the final version of the label starts appearing in our shops, we will also have to get the communication right. Shoppers are likely to be left pretty confused by “grams of carbon dioxide.” You can imagine them asking: “How does a gas weigh grams?” and “What is carbon doing in my chips?”

At the moment in the U.K., we are working hard to hold all the NGOs and big food companies together on this. We want to agree on a single methodology that everyone can follow. This should be simple and cheap enough to do in the real world, but robust enough to be credible. Ideally, we also want to see one universal label for shoppers, one that is independently guaranteed.

In the last big green consumer wave, people lost confidence because of the competing, confusing, and sometimes counterfeit claims made for “environment-friendly” products. This time ’round we have the chance to get it right.

"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.

On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry — also known as the Brundtland Commission — was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.

I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.

The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."

So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?

The thinking in the Brundtland Report laid the groundwork for the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where the nations of the world, accompanied by thousands of NGOs and businesses, came together to address sustainability issues. This spawned a series of international processes and frameworks, such as that on climate change.

Since then, sustainable development — the idea that we should simultaneously advance social, environmental, and economic progress — has become a central organizing concept for many organizations. There are ministries of sustainable development, national plans, and international summits to measure progress. Leading businesses, too, have embraced the concept of looking at the "triple bottom line." As individuals, many of us try to live sustainably.

The U.K. government has taken sustainable development very seriously. It published a national sustainable development strategy in 2000, with a set of "headline indicators" to measure progress. These indicators were spread across social, environmental, and economic issues, with the idea that we should start using more than economic growth to measure progress. Wales, when it gained devolved power from the U.K., also became the first country in the world with a constitutional duty to promote sustainable development.

Five years ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair set up a Sustainable Development Commission, chaired by leading environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, to encourage and monitor progress. And in 2005, the U.K. published a second U.K. Sustainable Development Strategy called "Securing the Future." This had a tighter definition of sustainability, which included the principle of "living within environmental limits."

On paper, and in policy terms, a lot has happened. But there have been criticisms, too, of the concept.

Some argue that sustainable development, by implying a balance across social, economic, and environmental objectives, can mean we do not confront difficult choices. It can sometimes be an excuse to pretend there are no trade-offs and that everything can be win-win. And it is not clear enough about overall limits.

Others say that the term is so loose and difficult to measure as to be meaningless. How will we ever know that we have arrived there? Today the word sustainable seems to be lazily added to everything that our government does. In the U.K., we have "sustainable economic growth" (which just means growth without boom and bust), "sustainable aviation" (which means a doubling in passenger numbers), and "sustainable communities" (which is about building as many new houses as possible). These are oxymora: they will actually deliver the opposite of what they claim in their titles.

There have been attempts to add a "fourth pillar" covering politics to sustainable development, since governance issues are the key to development in many parts of the world.

Finally, sustainable development, as a concept, can be difficult to communicate. It is an abstraction made up of three other abstract concepts — the economy, society, and the environment. Once you walk people through the idea, they usually get it pretty quickly. But it can seem like jargon.

Most of these criticisms can be dealt with. I think that as an organizing principle, it retains a lot of power. And I suspect that, in the future, we’ll need it more than ever. Some of the big emerging challenges for the world will have sustainability at their heart. How do we reconcile the desire for growth in the big developing countries — such as India and China — with environmental limits? How do we ensure that the overwhelming focus on climate change does not make us miss a wider set of sustainability issues? And how do we ensure that tough environmental measures in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. do not hit poorer sections of society harder?

Things are hotting-up over here on climate change. And I’m not talking about the fact that we’re set to have the warmest year on record. The political temperature is rising, too.

The European Union has agreed to a joint CO2 target for its 27 member countries and their 490 million citizens. The leaders committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. But this is just a starter. The E.U. says that if other countries — such as the U.S. — agree to do more, we will up our target to 30 percent. So, we have 20 percent on the table unilaterally, with a chunk more if you guys step up to the plate.

Then, the U.K. government published a draft climate-change bill, which will make us the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon targets.

The bill will set U.K.’s targets — for a 60 percent reduction by 2050 and around a 30 percent reduction by 2020 — in statute. It will also bring in a new system of legally binding five-year "carbon budgets." These will provide clarity on whether the U.K. is on the right path to meet its commitments. There will be a new independent advisory and scrutiny body, the Committee on Climate Change, annually reporting to Parliament on progress.

The proposed bill was launched by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Chancellor Gordon Brown, and the Environment Minister David Miliband. Miliband, one of the rising stars of British politics, also announced the initiative via a jargon-heavy YouTube webcast.

Most commentators welcomed the package. Friends of the Earth said, "We are delighted that the government has recognized the need for a new law to tackle climate change. The U.K. will be the first country in the world to introduce a legal framework for reducing carbon emissions." And investors should also be pleased with the certainty it gives.

The combination of long- and short-term targets is important. We need the long-term signals to give direction to business and society. But we also need to start acting now, and make sure we are going in the right direction. Without short-term targets, we will see the NIMTO effect (not in my term of office) where governments duck difficult decisions and leave them to future administrations.

Of course there are things to quibble about. Many NGOs want annual targets rather than five-yearly ones. And international aviation is not currently included in the measures. However, this bill is evidence of a real appetite to get things done. It is being backed up by a whole series of policy initiatives.

The Chancellor Gordon Brown, who will be prime minister from June, had already decreed that within 10 years all new homes would have to be zero carbon. He now wants to tackle existing housing stock and has also promised that "every home for which it is practically possible will become low carbon by 2016."

The current prime minister, Tony Blair, is backing a new U.K. trading scheme which is in addition to the European one. Known as the Energy Performance Commitment, it will cover large commercial and public-sector organizations such as universities, supermarkets, and hotel chains. Part of the rationale for this scheme is a feeling that the European trading scheme is not going far and fast enough.

Perhaps most radically, the environment minister, David Miliband, has been floating the idea of personal carbon allowances.

Much of this is still in the realm of targets and policies. And if there were a prize for setting targets, our current government would surely be the winner. But I do sense a real desire to do what is right and show leadership on climate change.

Why is this happening? It is partly because of ever-increasing clarity in the science. It is partly because big companies are suddenly getting serious about carbon. It is also, as I explained in Brit’s Eye View back in September, because there is now serious competition between the political parties as to who is the greenest.

The weekend before the launch of the draft climate-change bill, the leader of the Conservatives — David Cameron — proposed new "frequent flyer" taxes to restrict the growth of aviation. In order not to hit the ordinary family holiday, his proposal is to allow everybody one tax-free flight a year, and then to escalate up the charges so that those taking lots of flights pay more. This has proved rather unpopular with Cameron’s own party with their low-tax instincts, but has resonated very well with the green lobby. The very fact that a right-of-center political leader is now proposing such publicly unpopular green taxes shows just how far we have come in the climate-change debate here in the U.K.