United Kingdom
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British supermarket expands bike-trailer program
Bike to store. Pick up free bike trailer. Fill trailer with groceries. Hitch it up and ride home. Return trailer within three days. That’s the dreamy concept at the Waitrose supermarket chain in Jolly Olde Englande, where the free-trailer scheme is being tried out at a handful of stores. Says a department manager, “There are […]
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Six insights on the business trend toward sustainability
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
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.
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An influx of jellies in strange places is not so hard to explain
Over Thanksgiving, I came across a news story that may represent the perfect storm of issues plaguing the oceans. A salmon farm in Northern Ireland was wiped out by a huge swarm of mauve stingers (Pelagia noctiluca), a jelly usually found in the warm Mediterranean sea.In a 35-foot-deep, 10-square-mile swath, the jellies stung and killed 100,000 salmon before workers could reach the pens. It must have been quite a sight. The jelly's scientific name means "light of the sea," and the creatures give off an eerie, purple-red glow. I can only imagine that, at that scale, the sea looked possessed.
The incident may seem strange and isolated, but it touches on three major issues facing the oceans.
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How do U.K. cities stack up in terms of sustainability?
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
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.
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A little weekend humor
In case you missed this hilarious letter that made the email rounds early this year poking fun at bizarre agricultural subsidies ... it gets to carbon credits midway through, naturally:
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Tony Blair downplays the importance of political will in the U.S.
Tony Blair, oddly, just downplayed the importance of political will in the United States, and then, in an aside, said he thinks "the political will is there."
I think he's been talking to George Bush too much. Building American political will is the key challenge facing us if we want to see a global mitigation regime emerge.
Still, the topic of the plenary is "Economic Growth in the Face of Resource Scarcity and Climate Change," and on that point, Blair pointed out that the U.K.'s economy has grown en route to meeting its Kyoto goals. Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, explained how such growth has also happened in her own country. Both encouraged government action in the United States and worldwide. So there is good news to report.
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Strict safety guidelines cause construction delays at nuclear plants in Finland and Taiwan
Bloomberg has a very long article on the troubles plaguing Finland's Olkiluoto-3, "the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster."The plant has been delayed two years thanks to "flawed welds for the reactor's steel liner, unusable water-coolant pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation." It is also more than 25 percent over its 3 billion euro ($4 billion) budget. The article notes:
If Finland's experience is any guide, the "nuclear renaissance" touted by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors cost investors billions of dollars.
The U.K.'s Sizewell-B plant, which took nearly 15 years from the application to build it to completion, opened in 1995 and cost about 2.5 billion pounds ($5.1 billion), up from a 1987 estimate of 1.7 billion pounds.
Nuclear power's costs balloon partly because plants must be built to more exacting safety standards and stand up to more stringent oversight, leading to lost time and extra expense.Indeed, the oversight is needed because so many plants have safety-related construction problems:
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Other enviro issues are getting less attention
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
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.
