Forum For The Future & Green Futures

Food industry leads on water

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:55:11 +0000

Without water, there’s no food. So it’s time the food industry led the way in conserving its most vital raw material, says Julian Hunt.

“We all need to change the way we consume this precious resource, if supplies are to remain constant, safe and clean in the years to come.”

It might surprise some to see such sentiments expressed about... water.

But clean water for all remains a huge unmet basic need, while violent conflict over inadequate supplies is a real and present danger across our water-stressed world. In temperate Britain that threat may seem remote, yet even here periodic shortages have become a pressing issue. Every drop has a price – and a carbon impact. We’re coming to recognise that measuring and managing the ‘water footprint’ of our products and processes, our industries and our communities, is one of our most crucial sustainability challenges. And not before time.

The UK food and drink industry has a key role in bringing home this message. The 430,000 cubic metres it takes each day from the public water supply amount to about 10% of all industrial use in this country. It also takes about a tenth of all water abstracted from rivers and other water courses – another 260,000 cubic metres a day. So a 20% saving in the industry’s water use, across all the processes of preparation, manufacturing and cleaning, would relieve a lot of pressure – and could cut businesses’ bills by a cool £60 million.

Achieving that level of saving is a key target for 2020 in Defra’s Food Industry Sustainability Strategy. So can the sector deliver? The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) has responded with its ‘Federation House Commitment’, drawn up in collaboration with sustainability experts Envirowise. It was launched in January 2008, when 21 FDF member companies with a combined turnover of £15 billion agreed on the following measures:

to develop a 2007 baseline for water use
to assess where the water comes from, and where it’s going for each manufacturing site
to implement site-specific action plans embracing anything from alternative sourcing (including rainwater harvesting), efficiency savings and waste reduction to improved effluent management and water recovery for re-use
to report annual water and cost savings.

By mid-2009, the Commitment had gained a futher 15 signatories, with the result that there are now almost 200 manufacturing sites across the UK working systematically on saving water. If adopted by the entire industry, it could save about 140,000 cubic metres per day – the equivalent of 56 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The first annual progress report, published this July, records a collective 1.7% reduction in water use compared with 2007. It’s a small start, but there are already some significant achievements [see box below].

The report reckons that 20%-30% savings can be achieved through simple, low-cost steps, and much more via investment in longer-term projects and technology. There are also knock-on benefits to be gained, such as lower energy costs and carbon emissions, especially with every litre of hot water saved. In his foreword to the report, Secretary of State for the Environment Hilary Benn underscored both the business case and the environmental significance of the FDF’s water-saving drive – in the words with which this article begins.

Water misers
Leading food companies who have signed up to the FDF’s Commitment have already made substantial cuts in water use.

Dairy Crest managed an 8% year-on-year reduction. Its focus on benchmarking between sites saw one back-marker location turn in a 16% improvement.

United Biscuits, aiming for a 25% cut by 2020, achieved 17% in 2008 alone. Employees compete between sites on this and other green goals, backed by everyday measures like bags in toilet cisterns and spray nozzles on taps.

Engineering solutions can make a big difference. R&R Ice Cream, producers for a string of brands and supermarkets, has a new effluent treatment plant coming into operation this year that will cut its disposal costs by £100,000. It will also return a stream of recycled water for wash-down and cleaning processes that will wipe £19,000 off the mains supply bill.

PepsiCo’s Walkers Crisps plant in Leicester, something of a star performer, had already cut its use by 42% between 2000 and 2007 thanks to keen monitoring, engineering improvements and improved staff awareness. The crisp manufacturers are now targeting a further 45% cut within three years, and zero water intake within ten.

Julian Hunt is Director of Communications, Food and Drink Federation. Additional material by Roger East.

Food and Drink Federation is a Forum for the Future partner.

M2M innovations to cut carbon and costs

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:54:36 +0000

Remote monitoring technology to save energy and costs

Mobile phone technology could help to cut carbon emissions in industries as diverse as logistics, manufacturing and utilities, according to a new report published by Vodafone.

In Carbon Connections: Quantifying mobile’s role in tackling climate change, the international communications company claims that 113 million tonnes a year of carbon emissions could be avoided through mobile technology. A combination of machine to machine (M2M) technology and ‘dematerialisation’ – the rise of virtual services, such as videoconferencing – could cut Europe’s annual energy bill by €43 billion, according to the report.

M2M services – or wireless telecom – could be used remotely to monitor and improve the efficiency of operations, leading to cost savings. The technology is already being used by supermarket chain Asda, which has saved 28,000 tonnes in carbon emissions over the last three years by remotely monitoring how efficiently its vehicles were being driven – and then embarking on driver education to change habits.

Other potential M2M applications include traffic management systems to improve vehicle flow, and smarter electricity grids that can respond promptly to changes in demand. M2M devices could also be embedded within high value manufactured products, which would communicate when maintenance is required.

James Taplin, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, welcomed the report. “Information and communication technology (ICT) has a crucial role to play in radically decarbonising society… enabling us to live and operate in entirely new ways.”

But the techno vision comes at a price. Significant investment is needed for one billion new mobile connections, and to improve international compatibility across networks.
– Sarah Roe

NHS could pioneer low-carbon future, says new report

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:01:15 +0000

Forum for the Future sets out a vision for sustainable health care

“I saw the doctor today, and he prescribed me some loft insulation…”

It’s 2025 and GPs are as likely to prescribe exercise, healthy-eating vouchers and home improvement regimes as curative treatments. Green gyms are all the rage, everyone has an electronic health passport, and citizen scientists take a key role in disseminating public health information to their communities.

That’s part of the vision of The Health System in 2025, a new report by Forum for the Future for the Sustainable Development Commission. Produced in response to the Government’s Marmot Review into health inequalities, it shows how the NHS can pioneer a low-carbon future that promotes greater health while creating a better quality of life.

There could be cost-savings, too. The World Health Organisation says that “misdirected care” whereby “resource allocation clusters around curative services at a great cost, [neglects] the potential of primary prevention and health promotion to prevent up to 70% of the disease burden”. By taking a common sense, holistic perspective, health budgets could be redirected to such ‘early interventions’, so tackling the inequalities that lead to ill health at their root.

Forum’s vision brings this to life. It describes how shorter working hours, more contact with the environment, growing localisation of production and consumption, redistribution of wealth towards the poor, and greater service accessibility are all accepted as key drivers of health and wellbeing, and investment is targeted accordingly.

This implies some fairly radical changes to today’s health system – reaching beyond the traditional remit of the NHS. Those responsible for making these changes will need a long-term view, and a willingness to make policy decisions now whose benefits may only become apparent years down the line. If the Marmot Review turns out to be the first step along a road paved with tangible action, then it will have done a good job.

Twenty years on
Helping the NHS plan for the future is increasingly at the heart of Forum’s work on health. You can’t plan unless you know what the future might hold, of course – and that’s the focus of Fit for the Future – four scenarios for low-carbon healthcare in 2030, developed for the NHS’s Sustainable Development Unit. The report unveils different ways in which we might seek healthcare in the future, from a reliance on the latest technological fix, to one in which health advice from our local supermarket is the norm. And it considers the potential for backlashes against an endless diet of ‘nannying’ health advice...

The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government

Jonathon Porritt — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:35 +0000

When I was still Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I was hoping to produce a snapshot of just how deep sustainable development had penetrated into the workings of government – since the election of the Labour Government in 1997, the establishment of the Sustainable Development Commission in 2000, and the issuing of the Sustainable Development Strategy, ‘Securing the Future’. As it happens, it didn’t get done. Which has allowed me a few extra months to reflect in less frenetic circumstances.

And that’s been helpful! I have to admit, I was feeling a bit grumpy back in July. There’s only so much head banging one can do before brain damage sets in! And so much of what the Sustainable Development Commission does is going on behind the scenes – received and acted on, for example, by bodies like the Environmental Audit Committee, the Office of Government Commerce, individual departments and so on.

And if one gets really disciplined about both sides of the balance sheet (the pluses and the minuses), the overall picture on the standing of sustainable development question is actually “not half bad” – and I’m constantly struck by just how impressed people from other countries are at the ‘sustainable development architecture’ that’s been created here in the UK, including the Sustainable Development Commission itself.

But there still remains something of a mystery here, despite all the good things, it’s demonstrably clear to me that not enough has changed on the ground. Plenty of good process but not enough good outcomes (and quite a few really bad outcomes!)

That’s the mystery I’ve tried to unravel in this new Report, unimaginatively entitled The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government. Not an all-singing, all-dancing retrospective, and certainly not a completely dispassionate study. But useful for all that, I hope.

View full report

What does the future hold for Pepsico?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:35:08 +0000

Will PepsiCo top the pops in 2030?

Remember taking the Pepsi Challenge, the fizzy drinks taste test to see who you thought was ‘top of the pops’?

Well, it’s time to take the blindfolds off. Some of tomorrow’s challenges are already upon us. That’s what PepsiCo – which also owns brands such as Tropicana, Walkers, Quakers and Lays – found when it commissioned Forum for the Future to help it look ahead to 2030.

This wasn’t just idle navel-gazing. PepsiCo wants to make sure its strategy will be robust enough for what lies ahead. Senior leaders from across the business used specially developed scenarios as a tool to help identify the major sustainability risks and opportunities that the company will face in 2030, and to work out what it needs to do about these right now. PepsiCo has been feeding the results into its new environmental sustainability and health and wellness strategies.

So what will 2030 look like? Our research suggested that two-thirds of people will live in water-stressed countries. Climate change impacts will be keenly felt. We will need 50% more food than we currently have. Obesity and under-nutrition will sit uncomfortably (and paradoxically) side by side. For food companies, costs of ingredients and of energy will almost certainly be higher. Security of supply will be much more of a challenge, in part driven by climate change-related disruption.
The companies that will prosper in 2030 will be those which, in the words of Indra Nooyi, Chief Executive of PepsiCo, “recognise the possible outcomes of the global crises we face, and [are] nimble and tenacious enough to embed this into their strategy”.

I’m not going to argue with someone recently voted the most powerful woman in US business for the fourth year in a row. Credit to PepsiCo for taking on the 2030 version of the Pepsi Challenge. Will the rewards be sweet, with a dash of savoury perhaps?

Dan Crossley is Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future.

Four trends that are reshaping America

Martin Wright — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:07:33 +0000

For over 30 years, Lester Brown has been tracking emerging trends in energy and environment – and working out what they might mean for the future. Now he tells Martin Wright why coal is dying, wind is king – and America is falling out of love with the automobile.

1. “State-by-state, renewables are taking over”

Across America, coal plants are closing. They’re being replaced by natural gas and – increasingly – renewables. It’s all being driven by some demanding goals from state governments.

New York is shooting for 24% renewables by 2020; California for 33%. Maine is the most ambitious, at no less than 40% - most of which will come from wind. Thirty-five states in all have now set these ‘renewable portfolio’ standards.

Texas in particular is thinking really big. If you add up all the wind plants currently under construction or in development in the state, the total comes to around 50,000 MW. That’s equivalent to 50 coal-fired plants. It’s huge stuff – that’s more than the state’s 24 million people can consume! So Texas will actually become a net exporter of renewable power! [Republican Governor] Rick Perry’s really got behind it; he’s backing the creation of new transmission lines to help provide the capacity needed. It helps that Texas has its own grid. There are three in the country: eastern, western and Texas! So that makes it easy for them.

If you look at the US as a whole, we brought 102 new wind farms online last year (2008), with a capacity of over 8,000 MW. OK, it’s dropped a little this year [as the recession takes its toll], but I think it should rise again next. New wind capacity far exceeds that in coal. And there are virtually no limiting factors. There’s a team at Stanford University who’ve modelled US wind resources and electricity consumption. They concluded that, because America’s so big, there’s really no major problem with intermittency. If the winds aren’t blowing on the east coast, they will be on the Great Plains, or the mountain passes, or offshore in the Great Lakes…

It’s not just wind. Solar thermal [concentrating solar power – CSP] is taking off, too. One thing I’m really excited about is the new molten salt technology. This uses the sun’s heat to melt salt, and as it cools it continues to drive the turbines for another six hours, taking them through from sunset to midnight – a peak period of electricity demand.

Then there’s geothermal energy, and biomass, fired by woodchips. All of this has continued through the recession. Investment levels have held up pretty well. The rate of growth slowed a bit, but the growth itself did not. They’re still surging ahead at a hefty rate.

Meanwhile, 22 coal plants are slated for closure or conversion [to other fuel sources]. This is partly because they’ve come to the end of their life, and partly because they’re simply not meeting tough new pollution standards set by the states or by the Environmental Protection Agency. I doubt very much there will be any licenses issued for new ones.

2. Government is getting tough

All the attention at the moment is focused on the cap-and-trade debate - but there are a lot of other things going on behind the scenes. For example - and this is not widely known - for many years now, the Department of Energy did not translate congressional legislation on industrial plant efficiency standards into actual regulations that industry can use. They were basically stonewalling with the implicit approval of the Bush Administration. So, within days of taking office, Obama sent a directive to the department saying, in effect: “You guys had better get cracking!”. So now, every few weeks, there’s another standard released – on lightbulbs, on air conditioners, and so on. There’s a huge backlog there, and it’s all going to come at once…

Then there’s [EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson’s order that every US business above a certain size must calculate and publish its carbon footprint on an annual basis. (This followed the landmark Supreme Court decision which officially classed carbon dioxide as a pollutant.) This will do two things: first, it will focus attention on the company’s environmental performance; and second, it will provide ammunition for campaigners, both local and national.

If you look at the policy pipeline, it’s surprising how much is there.

3. America’s falling out of love with the car

Car sales have slumped, from around 17 million annually in the mid-90s to about 10 million this year – when the total US automobile fleet is expected to shrink by about 2%. It’s not just the recession: I believe there’s a major rethinking under way, which is changing the place of the car in American culture.

For my generation, getting a driver’s license and a car was a rite of passage: everyone did it. A car was a means of socialising: all those kids driving around, checking each other out. That’s changing. For kids today, socialising isn’t centered around cars – it’s around the internet, and that’s a very different world. Young people just aren’t aspiring to own a car in the same way my generation did. I first picked up this trend in Japan – now you’re seeing it in the US.

Car sales are falling, but car clubs are becoming more common. People are realising that owning a car full time becomes a nuisance – finding parking, doing repairs, insurance, payments, gasoline price uncertainties…. I think the automobile industry realise that they are in the early stages of a really major restructuring of the transport system.

4. Local food from local farms

The number of farms in the US has been declining ever since the Civil War. At least, it had until very recently. However, between the censuses of 2002 and 2007, farm numbers started to rise. We’re seeing more small farms – of 20, 30 or 40 acres – producing food for local consumption. A disproportionate share of the new farmers are women. And these aren’t ‘hobby farmers’. They are making a living from it; it’s their prime source of income.

This is part of a trend that will see food production become more localised. This will partly be driven by the high price of oil and agricultural imports, but also through a growing desire on the part of people to have fresh food – whether it’s from urban farming or farmers’ markets…

The bottom line for me is that there are huge changes coming to America, and I don’t think we realise how substantial they are going to be - and how much the economy and society will be restructured as a result.

Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, is now President of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute. His latest book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is published by W.W. Norton & Co. He has been described by The Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers.”

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.

Florida and Vegas – green makeover

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:34:32 +0000

Major eco developments create homes and jobs

Newbuild idylls designed with green energy, transport and space in mind are changing the face of major US tourism destinations.

In the ‘sunshine state’ of Florida, there are plans to build the world’s first solar-powered city. The state utility, Florida Power & Light, has partnered Washington-based property developer Kitson & Partners to build a 75MW solar plant on the outskirts of Fort Meyers. The $350 million project will power the new 17,000 acre city of Babcock Ranch.

The city will include some 20,000 homes, six million square feet of retail and light industrial space, and 8,000 acres of green space. The entire design is intended to promote a healthy, sustainable lifestyle, where people walk or cycle to and from work, and exercise in local parks and the Wellness and Fitness centre, a key feature of the downtown area. A study by consultancy Fishkind & Associates estimates the city will generate 20,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, a couple of thousand miles west, the Las Vegas Strip is getting a facelift in the form of an 18 million-square-foot sustainable development centre. The ‘CityCenter’ will be powered in part by an 8.5MW natural gas generation plant, and will employ new water conservation technology estimated to save up to 40% within the buildings and 60% in outdoor landscaping.

In keeping with the feel of ‘The Strip’, the development will also have a fleet of stretch limos on hand, powered by compressed natural gas.

While these initiatives are laudable, Martin Hunt, Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future, thinks the effort may be misplaced. With 80% of existing building stock expected to be standing come 2050, “the priority for any city should be retrofitting existing communities to low carbon standards, rather than building new ones”. – Tricia Holly Davis

The cleantech revolution sweeps through America

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:20:48 +0000

The wind of change is sweeping America – literally. Take Texas. Synonymous with the nation’s oil boom era, for the past century its wealth has been powered by gushing geysers and giant oil companies. But green gold is now competing with black, as Texas establishes itself as a powerhouse of wind energy.

“From heartland Minnesota to the crowded northeast seaboard, giant wind farms are part of the landscape”

And the Lone Star State is not alone. During 2008, the US wind industry almost doubled in size, reaching 25,369MW, and passing Germany as the world leader. Across 30 states, from heartland Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas to the crowded northeast seaboard, giant wind farms are becoming an accepted part of the landscape.

Nor does this clean energy revolution end with wind. America’s solar power sector has tripled in size since 2000. And with a dozen large concentrating solar power (CSP) plants under construction around the country, the industry aims to provide half of all new electricity generation by 2025.

Investors, meanwhile, are betting on a cleantech future. Bucking the recession, venture capital investments in cleantech soared to a record $7.6 billion in 2008, double the 2007 tally, with solar and algae-based biofuels among the big winners. “Only a few years ago, cleantech was barely a sector at all,” says Joel Makower, Editor of GreenBiz.com, in The State of Green Business 2009 report. “Now it represents 20% of the entire venture capital asset class.”

It’s not just start-ups and VCs. Some of the country’s household name corporations are also jumping on the bandwagon. General Electric is now the biggest wind turbine manufacturer in the US, and the fifth biggest worldwide. Duke Energy, a Fortune 500 coal company which has not exactly been the darling of the green movement in the past, has built nine wind farms around the country and is planning more. And the likes of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are racing to produce the first mass market electric cars [see ‘Spark plug’]. All of a sudden, corporate America seems to be surging towards a new frontier of innovation.

So just what is generating all this enthusiasm? Can it reach critical mass? And does President Obama’s outspoken advocacy of clean energy and climate action really mean America is poised to lead the world down the sunrise path?

The first question is easiest to answer. The relentless rise of concerns over energy security, peak oil and looming carbon curbs, means cleantech is both smart business and smart policy.

Many of America’s leading corporations now see a clean energy future as inevitable – and they want to be sure to have a share in it. Take the list of companies supporting a ‘cap and trade’ approach to regulating carbon. It reads like a litany of corporate America: GE, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Shell, BP America, Ford, General Motors… They have lined up alongside the green lobby in a titanic PR battle with the coal industry and the Republican Party, who claim a carbon cap will cost jobs and raise energy bills.

A second ingredient feeding green industry growth has been the steady trickle of action at state level. In the absence of federal leadership under President Bush, many states quietly took steps to facilitate cleantech development, drawn by its potential to generate jobs and reduce fossil fuel dependence. They typically did so through a mix of carrots (tax breaks, and grants for energy efficiency and clean energy projects) and sticks (mandatory targets for renewable generation, and regional cap and trade programmes). Now such efforts are starting to bear fruit.

In Massachusetts, for example. Here, a solar rebate programme launched a year ago is pouring $22 million into 539 new photovoltaic projects. Combined with a Green Jobs Act, which provides taxpayer funding for R&D, business start-ups and workforce development, this has spurred a quadrupling in statewide solar installation contractors – from less than 50 a year ago to nearly 200 today. One company, Evergreen Solar, has taken on 700 new staff alone. Massachusetts has now set itself a target of becoming a green industries hub, with 250MW of solar generation by 2017 and 2,000MW of installed wind power capacity by 2020 – up from a mere 7MW at present.

Philip Giudice, Commissioner for the state’s Department of Energy Resources, makes it all sound very simple. “We created market opportunities, and companies responded. Some are regular electrical contractors who expanded their business model [to include solar or wind]. Others are contractors that used to build people’s porches and now also install solar panels. It’s the natural evolution of emerging markets, and it’s very exciting.”

“It’s not a choice between our environment and our economy; it’s a choice between prosperity and decline”

A third key factor powering America’s green enthusiasm is long overdue federal action, boosted by Obama’s characteristic clarion call to action. “The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy”, he said. “It’s a choice between prosperity and decline. The nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.”

Fighting talk, which prodded Congress into allocating $112 billion of economic stimulus spending to green programmes (compared with a meagre $2 billion spent by Britain). By 2017, nearly $20 billion in tax incentives will be poured into the wind and solar industries, along with $54 billion into direct support for energy technology schemes. A large chunk of the latter will be spent improving the country’s ageing electricity grid to support renewable energy transmission and electric cars.

Investors have particularly welcomed the rollout of federal loan guarantees for green energy projects. “These should provide a real starting gun to get renewable schemes, which have been stalled by the credit crisis, off the ground all over the country,” said Jennifer von Bismarck, President of renewables financier Towpath Partners.

Introduced with less fanfare – and less cost – a second presidential initiative may prove almost as effective. By 2016, national fuel economy standards will be raised significantly to 35.5 miles a gallon, forcing the car industry further down the road to leaner, cleaner vehicles. According to the White House, the greenhouse gas savings will be equivalent to taking 177 million cars off the road.

So what does all this amount to? The US economic juggernaut is undoubtedly greening – but how far and how fast?

Short term, the news is good. Thanks mainly to the dramatic economic slowdown, but also to state and federal green stimuli, US carbon emissions fell by 3% last year and are predicted to fall a further 5% in 2009. This should present an enormous opportunity for the world’s richest country to start the transition toward a low carbon economy.

But hold on. The bulk of the American economy remains resolutely ‘grey’. Almost 90% of US electricity is still supplied by fossil fuels, primarily coal-burning power plants. And while clean energy companies are finally receiving sizeable federal subsidies, so too are the coal plants and other smokestack industries. Unlike the European Union, the US has no carbon cap and trade programme, however flimsy, in place to stimulate green investment. Unlike China, which has set a target of 15% renewable generation by 2020, the US has no national Renewable Energy Standard. Only one of the world’s five largest wind turbine manufacturers is American (General Electric), and only one of the top ten solar panel makers.

“The US is in danger of being left behind”

“The US is in danger of being left behind in the new global economy,” concludes Jennifer Morgan, Climate and Energy Director at the World Resources Institute (WRI), and she lays the blame squarely on Washington. “Business hates uncertainty, and the Federal Government’s failure to act is holding back US business innovation and leadership.” Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, agrees. “Right now, the US has no long-term market signal to tell companies and consumers that it values low carbon energy. But good policy can flip this dynamic.”

But what form will or should such “good policy” take? The American Clean Energy and Security Act, narrowly approved by the US House of Representatives in June, would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020, and 80% by 2050. Based around a cap and trade programme similar to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the bill would regulate utilities, coal plants and other outlets accounting for 85% of US greenhouse gases. By putting a price on carbon, says WRI President Jonathan Lash, this would send “a clear market signal… The President’s signature on a cap and trade bill would unleash a flood of investment in, and deployment of, clean energy technologies across the United States”. Or as one seasoned observer put it, could “transform the steady stream of clean energy funding and R&D into a tsunami”.

But prospects for the next steps required to make such a bill law – Senate passage of sister legislation, reconciliation with the House bill and the President’s signature on the dotted line – are looking uncertain at best. A Senate vote may be postponed until 2010.

“The President has a trump card in his back pocket”

Should Congress ultimately reject cap and trade, however, the President has a trump card in his back pocket. The Environmental Protection Agency has already laid the groundwork to regulate and cap greenhouse gas emissions as an air pollutant, under the Clean Air Act. While such a move would raise furious cries of foul from Republicans and the coal industry, environmentalists are confident the President will order the EPA to act if he has to.

A critical complement to an emissions cap – and politically easier for either the President or Congress to implement – would be a national Renewable Energy Standard, setting a baseline for the proportion of electricity to be generated renewably. According to the Sierra Club, sourcing 20% of US energy from renewables by 2020 would create 820,000 jobs and generate a whopping $66.7 billion in capital investment.

So will America “lead or lag in the world’s next great global industry, green technology?”, as Jeff Immelt put it in a recent New York Times editorial. Certainly, the groundwork has been laid for US leadership. But will industry and, especially, Government demonstrate the steely political will required to follow through? Will black gold win or green? The jury is still out.

Billions ventured

Leading cleantech recipients of venture capital (VC) investment, 2008:

•    concentrating solar power
•    ‘thin film’ solar photovoltaics
•    next generation biofuels (especially algae-based technologies)
•    geothermal and tidal energy
•    fuel cell applications.

Atlantic divides

The British have the policies and commitments, says Peter Madden, but the Americans are stealing a march with the action

On this side of the pond, there is also great excitement about the benefits of moving to a low-carbon economy. The Government recently launched its ambitious and interventionist ‘Low Carbon Industrial Strategy’, while Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just promised that “we will create over a quarter of a million new green British jobs”.

Britain has a much firmer policy framework in place than the US. As well as the European Emissions Trading Scheme, the UK has a ‘Low Carbon Transition Plan’ and a Climate Change Act setting firm carbon budgets for the economy as a whole and for individual Government departments. However, despite the blizzard of policy initiatives, rather less is happening on the ground. The credit crunch has turned off the financing tap for many big projects, and this has not been offset by the kind of sizeable green fiscal stimulus package seen in the US. And planning difficulties and delays have stymied major projects and led to big investors putting their money instead into the US and continental Europe. The UK will really have to raise its game to turn the fine words into deeds – and give some substance to Gordon Brown’s recent claim that “we are already global leaders in wind power, green cars, clean coal and carbon capture”.

Peter Madden is CEO of Forum for the Future.

Polly Ghazi is US correspondent for Green Futures and writer/editor for the World Resources Institute.

Leaders must be shocked into climate action

Jonathon Porritt — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:52:33 +0000

Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).

These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible. And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.

Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon. It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.

But Australia provides an even more compelling story. Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks. Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C. This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed. The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002. Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average. As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline! The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.

So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics? The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change. But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.

The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets. It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.

Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.

What to look forward to in the Low Carbon Transition

Roger East — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:19:35 +0000

UK government sets out transition plan to meet 2020 carbon target

The UK has published details of its Low Carbon Transition Plan, setting a mandatory carbon budget to limit each Government department in their use of both carbon and cash.

When it comes to Britain’s future energy mix, Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband is standing by his ‘trinity’ of renewables, nuclear and coal with carbon capture. These three together are supposed to provide 40% of UK electricity by 2020. Renewables will be the biggest element in this, with a target of 30% of electricity (and 15% of all energy), compared with just 5.5% of electricity at present. The Renewable Energy Strategy White Paper, announced alongside the transition plan, spells out the key measures:

a new Office for Renewable Energy Deployment within the Department of Energy and Climate Change
a new regime for grid access, with government funding for ‘smart grid’ development
major promotion of wind and tidal power, with funding for up to 3,000 offshore turbines, and creation of a special marine technologies economic area in the south-west
consultation on the details of a 'clean energy cashback' scheme, a feed-in tariff incentive for small-scale generation
1.2 million green jobs.

At Forum for the Future, energy and climate expert Iain Watt describes the proposals as “suitably ambitious”. He’s only too aware that “we’ve got the best Government in the world for setting targets”, but he does see “some real substance” in there too. One good example is the ‘clean energy cash-back’ scheme for small-scale generation, starting next year for electricity and the following year for heat. The uptake of this kind of feed-in tariff incentive, in countries such as Spain and Germany, has produced an impressive surge in renewable microgeneration, and Watt is pleased that the UK is now following suit with “proper rapidity”. – Roger East

A place for PVC in a sustainable world?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:23:14 +0000

When it comes to greening the bad girl of plastics, consensus is key

It’s cheap, durable and so versatile you’ll find it in your clothes, your garden hose, your raincoats and your Barbie dolls. It wraps electric cables and it roofs your garden shed. No wonder global demand for polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, is over 35 million tonnes a year.

But it’s also the bad girl of the Barbie world. Its long life has traditionally depended on heavy metal stabilisers, such as lead, that do not degrade in the environment and so become global pollutants. And it owes its flexibility to phthalates – plastic softeners which are linked to a range of health concerns, including asthma, allergies, developmental difficulties and cancer.

But the chemical industry has set out to prove that this particular leopard can, indeed, change its spots. “There are no sustainable materials, just as there are no non-sustainable materials,” says Karl Henrik-Robèrt, one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists and founder of The Natural Step (TNS), a non-profit environmental education agency. “There are only sustainable and non-sustainable management practices.” Now TNS has joined up with the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) to run a course entitled ‘Leading Change for a Sustainable Chemical Industry’ – and the PVC dilemma is at its heart.

It’s not the first time that TNS has wrestled with the issue. It originally grappled with the stuff in 2000, when, with the support of the UK Environment Agency, it investigated whether PVC could have any place in a sustainable society. The answer was a cautious ‘yes’ – providing the industry addressed some of its most pressing challenges. In the same year, Vinyl 2010 was launched: a sector-wide commitment to cut energy consumption, improve waste management, and minimise the environmental impact of resin and stabilisers. The collaboration has grown to include all 27 EU countries, the European Commission, trade unions, consumer organisations and industry representatives.

Such a broad approach sounds unwieldy, but it’s essential for any chance of progress, says TNS Chief Executive, David Cook. “PVC is a very complicated material with a complicated supply chain and customer base,” he says. “We analysed it at a time when it was being attacked by Greenpeace and the like, and found that there is no one person responsible for [any particular] problem. You need to talk to the whole system.”

Creating change in an industry of this size is no mean task. It employs over half a million people in Europe alone, working in 15 companies dedicated to resin production, 11 specialising in stabilisers, eight in plasticisers, and a mammoth 21,000 converting PVC into consumer products.

“It is not possible to make just one company out of a whole supply chain ‘sustainable’,” says Fiona Wright of BTH. “Ultimately a lot of cross-company collaboration is needed. [You have to] build relationships and trust between the individuals working within those companies. It’s all too easy to forget the time and effort this takes.”

The relationships may be hard to chart, but the results aren’t. Amongst the original EU-15 signatories, the use of lead has been cut by 50% in favour of calcium-based stabilisers, and it’s set to be phased out completely in all EU-27 countries by 2015. Post-consumer recycling has reached nearly 195,000 tonnes, largely due to financial incentives offered by Recovinyl – whose establishment was one of the outcomes of the Vinyl 2010 exercise. PVC is 100% recyclable, and can be broken down mechanically (ground into small pieces that can be reprocessed) or chemically.

As for phthalates, risk assessments have now identified two key areas for attention: their use in medical equipment, and the effect of emissions on ecosystems and populations located near PVC conversion plants.

But do all these results make PVC all right? For Cook, the next step is to look beyond the material itself to the products and services in which it’s used, and how they can be changed to drive down energy use and unnecessary waste. “Innovation for unsustainable products is a complete waste of time, and a tragedy,” he says. What he wants to see is “deep transformation” across the plastics industry – which will require consensus on a much greater scale. – Iain Aitch

The Natural Step is a Forum for the Future partner.

Click here to learn more about distance courses for the chemical industry.

Solar ship takes to the seas

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:01:40 +0000

World’s first PV-powered container ship launched

When the car container ship Auriga Leader chugged into the Californian port of Long Beach, it was greeted with a torrent of positive press reports – as the first freighter to be partially powered by the sun.

The Auriga, which can carry 6,400 vehicles and makes bi-weekly trips from Japan to California, has an impressive array of 328 photovoltaic (PV) panels stationed on its top deck. The panels – connected to the 440V onboard electricity grid – represent an investment of around $1.7 million for ship owners Nippon Yusen Kaisha and Nippon Oil.

The panels are touted to have a peak capacity of 40kW, when conditions are optimum (think sunny days at high noon) and the ship is docked. This will cover about 0.3% of the engine’s energy requirements, and 7% of other power appliances, such as pumps and lighting. It is estimated that the PV system will save a total of 13 tonnes of fuel over one year – reducing CO2 emissions by up to 40 tonnes.

Surprisingly, the panels have generated 1.4 times more electricity at sea than on land, leading to suggestions that the cool sea breeze improves efficiency.

With the sector’s fuel costs and carbon emissions increasingly under the spotlight, there has been a flurry of activity investigating alternative power systems for shipping. They include the cargo ship MS Beluga’s Sky Sail – a kite towing-system – and Solar Sailor’s hybrid solar/wind power solutions, as well as simple solar arrays as on the Auriga. But none comes cheap. The ‘small bang, big bucks’ is hard to justify in an era when fuel prices are not quite high enough, and the economy not quite strong enough, to make a solid business case for investment.

But Christer Ågren at Sweden’s Air Pollution & Climate Secretariat, who has much experience in the maritime industry, is loathe to pour cold water on any renewable technologies that reduce the fuel consumption of ships: “Solar cells, kites… all these are good – and the more popular they become, the more they’ll be used,” he says. However, Ågren adds that the most cost-effective, money and pollution-saving measure container ships can take is simply to slow down.

“It is incredible, but a 10% reduction in speed equals about a 20% reduction in fuel use,” says Ågren. It’s an approach already adopted by shipping lines such as Maersk when fuel prices are high. But the complexities of docking systems means most ship owners still want their cargo to reach port as quickly as possible.

As yet, shipping has managed to stay outside international emissions reduction frameworks, although research by BP and the Institute for Physics and Atmosphere suggests that the sector’s annual emissions make up 5% of the global total – around twice that of aviation. And according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), a business-as-usual scenario would see these more than double by 2050.

Responding to growing pressure from the EU, the IMO advocates a range of what it terms ‘cost-effective’ measures including speed reductions, Beluga-style towing kites, upgrades to hulls, engines and propellers, and policy instruments such as emissions trading and a fuel tax. Taken together, says the IMO, ships could cut their emissions by 75% by 2050. – April Streeter

Disruptive Innovation – competition now open

Chris Sherwin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:11:55 +0000

At Forum we’re always looking for innovative new ways to approach sustainability. We’ve just produced a tool to help innovators come up with game-changing, disruptive ideas, and are offering you the chance to win one too.

Our Disruptive Innovation cards each capture a different method of thinking ‘out of the box’ to inspire real change. You can win a set by telling us what you would do with them to disrupt for sustainability. The top five ideas will be featured here on our website and in Green Futures magazine.

I’ve been very lucky to oversee Forum’s team of innovators, working to help develop next generation of sustainable products and services with our partners. We’ve helped Dulux launch Ecosure, a high-quality paint with a greatly reduced carbon footprint, the launch of GreenHeart, the lower-impact phone range from Sony Ericsson and our i-team project used cutting-edge innovation techniques to help three UK local authorities develop low-carbon services.

The scale and pace of our emerging sustainability challenges has really ratcheted up in recent years. UK climate change targets alone have gone from 60% to 80% by 2050 with many calling for a 90% reduction in that same time frame. As a result, we’ve concluded that we no longer need ‘just innovation’ for sustainability, but disruption.

Innovation guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology or innovation, as “that which improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect” usually by new entrants overtaking incumbents. Examples include compact fluorescent’s overtaking incandescent light bulbs, the PC replacing typewriters, and digital overtaking print photography. They can also be innovative new partnerships like food conglomerate Danone teaming up with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to produce a low-cost, eco-dairy product, or companies gate-crashing another market like Google entering the energy sector.

The sustainable economy of the future depends on just such disruptions to move us away from current unsustainable technologies and business models at the pace we need.

Here at Forum, we’re keen to catalyse these disruptions for sustainability and we’re putting together plans for Disruptive Innovation in 2010 and beyond, and our set of 12 cards is a first step. We’ve started to use these internally, with our partners and for larger projects, and initial feedback suggests we’ve hit on something rather exciting! To continue to catalyse these disruptions we’ve decided to open a competition to encourage innovative sustainable thinking.

Competition entry details
Send 50 word max entries telling us what you would do with our Disruptive Innovation cards to disrupt for sustainability, to: h.knowles@forumforthefuture.org.uk by 30 November, 2009. We will select the 5 top entries that use our cards to create the most change and publish the winning entries in the next edition of Green Futures magazine and here on Forum’s website.

Forum wins green procurement award

John Bishop — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:27:32 +0000

At Forum for the Future we like to think we know a bit about sustainable procurement, and our guide Buying a Better World is a buyer’s manual in many organisations.

It’s a simple concept, spending your money on goods which improve people’s quality of life and enhance the environment, but putting it into practice has its challenges, even for an organisation like us. So we were delighted to win an award for green procurement this week.

The Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code awards showcase the achievements of London businesses that have reduced carbon emissions, saved energy and diverted waste from landfill through their procurement activities. Forum took the title of best performing small or medium enterprise.

Our work is all about embedding the principles of sustainability in businesses and the public sector. On procurement, we offer support at both the strategic and operational level. Our Buying a Better World report explains the benefits of sustainable procurement and details practical steps to take. Our Sustainable Procurement toolkit is recommended by the UK Audit Commission and the National Health Service and has been requested by public and private sector organisations around the world including the UN.

That’s why it is so important for Forum to be seen to practice what it preaches and understand the practical challenges of developing more sustainable business practices.

Time for a retail revolution

Dan Crossley — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:12:10 +0000

When you see the chief executives of five world-famous companies debating how to make the broader retail sector more sustainable, you realise a quiet revolution is underway.

The senior figures in question were the bosses of Tesco, Coca Cola, Unilever, SC Johnson and Reckitt Benckiser, responsible for combined sales of well in excess of £100 billion. The stage was the Sustainable Consumption Institute event –‘Consumers: the key to a low carbon world’ – held at the Royal Society in London this month.

These leaders acknowledged the major role their companies can play in helping their customers to lead more sustainable lives. They also talked about their responsibility to lead and to educate consumers – quite a change from the “we only do what consumers tell us” rhetoric that we might have heard in the past.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s chief executive, used the event to announce bold new climate change ambitions for the world’s third largest retailer.

Three commitments particularly caught my eye.

Firstly, Tesco will become a zero carbon business by 2050 (at the latest) – an aspiration that we would encourage others to strive for (obviously the earlier the better).

Secondly, it will reduce the carbon impact of the products in its supply chain by 30% by 2020 – meaning it will have to collaborate much more closely with key suppliers.

And thirdly, the retailer will work with consumers to help them move towards zero carbon homes – a big potential prize.

We have to rewind to early 2007 to see Tesco’s first big announcements on climate change – at the ‘Green Grocer’ event, hosted by Forum for the Future. It was there that Sir Terry first talked about the need for a new revolution in green consumption and pledged to set up the Sustainable Consumption Institute.

It was one of a flurry of bold retailer announcements on sustainability at the time, including Marks & Spencer’s Plan A and Wal-Mart’s Sustainability 360.

Since then many of our leading retailers, including Tesco, have taken some fantastic steps, particularly on climate change. In the grand scheme of things though, it’s been more of a rumble, than the revolution we really need.

Sir Terry reiterated the rationale for a revolution in green consumption at the recent event: “For Tesco [it]… is a fantastic opportunity: once and for all to break the link between consumption and emissions, and in doing so to satisfy a new consumer need, and grow our business.”

Tesco deserves praise for raising the bar, as the need for action is growing ever more urgent. That’s why we’ll be pushing our retail and branded manufacturing partners hard next year on enabling, informing and encouraging consumers to make sustainable purchasing decisions. We need more bold ambitions and – critically - we need to see them realised, in order to achieve a real green retail revolution.

Algae biofuels race hots up

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:55:08 +0000

Cape Cod refinery could produce one million gallons per year
The race for algae-based biofuels is heating up across America, with new biorefineries planned across the country. In the largest announced so far, Plankton Power of Massachusetts has formed a public-private consortium to build a new plant in Cape Cod that could eventually produce one million gallons of biofuel per annum – or 5% of the state’s diesel and domestic fuel demands.

It’s part of a strategy which has seen it team up with the Regional Technology Development Corporation, the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Cape Cod Commission with the aim of developing an industry that will be cost-competitive with petroleum and with vegetable-based biofuels.

Algae have been hailed as an important source of ‘third generation’ biofuel: one that would not otherwise be cultivated for food or other commodities, such as timber. Nor do they compete for space with food crops on arable land or in freshwater. Thought to be the most efficient organisms on earth in terms of growth, algae can produce over 2,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year of production – compared to just 50 gallons for soy, according to research by ExxonMobil.

For algae to flourish, all that’s required is a constant optimum temperature, water and plenty of concentrated CO2. The cost of equipment for large-scale production is the key limiting factor.

With global biofuel use to double by 2015, according to Hart Energy Consulting, Massachusetts could be well placed to lead the game. – Ed Gould

Major transport alliance backs buses

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:36:51 +0000

Fancy knocking a billion car rides off Britain’s roads? Then get on board Greener Journeys.

Private cars puff out 60% of all the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions from domestic transport. Improved efficiency, and a switch to hybrid or electric models, can help to shrink that figure – but if we’re to see a real shift, we need to tempt people out of their cars and onto the bus.

That’s the mission of Greener Journeys, an alliance of Arriva, First, Go-Ahead, National Express and Stagecoach, in partnership with Forum for the Future. It has the modest sounding goal of switching people from car to bus for just one journey in 25. Even making such a minor shift would mean one billion fewer car journeys – and a two billion tonne reduction in carbon dioxide over three years. If successful, the project will deliver an additional 50% more savings in transport CO2 than is planned under existing government policies.

But will people make the switch? It’s no secret that there is still a stigma attached to bus travel – famously summed up by the saying (wrongly attributed to Margaret Thatcher) that “any man over the age of 26 still riding the bus can count themselves a failure”.

More positively, a recent YouGov poll found that people see using public transport as one of the main things they can do to help the environment. Other research shows that a fifth of motorists now find driving increasingly stressful and would prefer to reduce their car use. They’re a prime target for Greener Journeys. Or, as Forum for the Future’s Rupert Fausset puts it: “We’re trying to reach those willing to change. We’re not trying to get Jeremy Clarkson onto the bus”.

There’s some promising signs. Easy-to-use Oyster cards and shorter waiting times have helped drive a 58% increase in bus patronage in London over the past decade. Ever rising ticket prices remain a challenge, however. Fausset hopes getting people onto existing buses will drive down fares, adding that awareness of the true cost of car travel is quite low. “People are not terribly rational when going on a car journey. If they’re not filling up with petrol, they assume that particular journey is free. [And yet] its share of overall car costs can easily exceed the price of a bus ticket.”

Meanwhile, particularly when it comes to pricing, there’s only so much the industry can do alone. As Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, puts it: “The industry is showing real leadership with Greener Journeys. Now it’s time for the Government to act”. – Anna May Shamoon

Can finance save forests?

Martin Wright — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:08:24 +0000

If rainforests are so valuable, why can’t we make them pay? For years, that was a rhetorical question. Not any more. Martin Wright on our last, best hope of saving forests – and the climate.

It’s a gorgeous June day, 2040, deep in the Amazon rainforest. Peering through the clouds, you can see your pension plan – the vibrant greens of the canopy, reassuringly intact. Panning left, you can just make out the line of the last logging road, long swallowed up by the jungle. To the south, at the forest’s edge, the new growth springing up, high-yield plantations buffering the jewel…

As you watch, a bubble appears out of the trees: a few lines of text summarising the latest carbon / hydro cycle stats. It’s good to know that the Forest Monitors are out and about – two Kayapo elders in this case, uploading new data before retiring back to the longhouse in time for the football. Sometimes you envy their simple life – and their subsidised satellite sports.

Then you switch off the screen and head out into the London streets, secure in the knowledge that your investments are safe, that the rain will keep falling, the climate will carry on settling down…

It’s the same story across the Atlantic, in Cameroon, Congo, even Indonesia … Around much of the tropical belt, in the mid-21st century, rainforests are recovering, even expanding. Why? Because an awful lot of people are making money, serious money, from the simple fact that forests left standing are worth more, much more, than forests cut down.

Standing forests are soaking up carbon, stabilising the climate, smoothing out the water cycle. They’re providing a steady, sustainable harvest of medicines, even a little high value timber. All vital, and so all immensely valuable services. And thanks to some sophisticated financial products, these services are yielding an income to everyone from forest tribes to governments north and south to … you. It’s mammon and morality hand in hand, under one canopy.

Markets not philanthropy

It may seem a long way from today’s reality, but it’s entirely plausible. And there’s a ferment of activity under way now trying to bring it about. Ever since the 1980s, campaigners have been insisting that it’s economic madness to liquidate irreplaceable rainforest ‘capital’ in return for the relatively paltry revenue from logging or cattle ranching. The alternative – cash for conservation, or so-called ‘payments for ecological services’ – is not a new idea. It’s been tried before, on a relatively small-scale [see ‘How much do you want this forest (in millions)?’], with mixed results. But now there’s an urgency and an excitement around it, driven by everything from the looming climate negotiations, to financiers’ endless appetite for coming up with new ways to make money. And you can add to that the widespread acceptance that pretty much everything else we’ve tried – new laws, protected areas, ‘extractive reserves’, pious international declarations – has failed to even slow the pace of destruction.

The loss of tropical forests is by far the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions after energy, contributing up to ten times as much as aviation. Indeed, burning forests – the commonest form of destruction – produces a particularly nasty double whammy of warming. As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up the carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars, power plants. The Stern Review, no less, warned that rainforest loss alone would, in the next four years, release more carbon into the atmosphere than every flight from the dawn of aviation until 2025.

Faced with this, many are increasingly convinced that only money will talk. Among them is Andrew Mitchell, founder of the Global Canopy Programme and now an adviser to the Prince’s Rainforest Project (PRP). “At the moment”, he says, “you can only make money out of forests when you convert them to something else – timber or beef, soy or palm oil... So in global markets, forests are worth more dead than alive. This is what we need to turn around. Philanthropy and governments won’t do it. You have to look to markets to overturn what is in fact a market failure… What we’ve got for free, we don’t pay for.”

Carbon as currency

Meanwhile, unless you pay people not to do something, they’ll carry on doing it, says Tasso Azavedo, Director General of Brazil’s Forest Service. “Say you want to close down an illegal logging site. You can do so in 15 minutes. You just send in the police or the army and lock everything down. But 50 people will lose their jobs.” And unless you create better-paid alternatives, they’ll soon be back cutting trees, there or elsewhere. “We have to put something else in place to keep the money flowing. We have to create a new economy.”

“We spend more on binge drinking than the amount needed to save the rainforests”

And the most obvious currency to fuel that new economy, given forests’ role as climate stabilisers, is carbon. Cutting forest destruction by half, says the Stern Review, would cost around $10 billion-$15 billion a year. “That’s about the same amount that we in Britain spend on wine, beer and champagne”, Mitchell exclaims. “We’re spending more on binge drinking than we the total amount we need to save rainforests!” Others put the bill a lot higher, but the benefits still hugely outweigh the costs. Johan Eliasch, who led a review on the subject for the UK Government, has put a number on it. Compared to taking no action at all, he says, “the mean global net benefit of halving forest emissions is estimated to be $3.7 trillion”.

It sounds like the mother of no-brainers. “In effect”, says Tony Juniper, former Director of Friends of the Earth, who now works with the PRP, “it comes down to paying countries for either reducing their rate of deforestation, or not starting it in the first place”. In practice, that means providing cash as compensation to loggers, ranchers, farmers and so on, in return for them laying off the forest; and paying others – from enforcement agencies to tribal communities – to ensure existing forest remains intact.

That principle is provided for, to an extent, in global climate agreements, and is expected to be firmed up at Copenhagen in December 2009. It’s covered under the arcane sounding REDD (‘reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation’) and REDD+ (which covers new planting and the management of existing forests). The devil is in the detail – and there is no shortage of that. To the uninitiated, it seems easier to plot a path through impenetrable jungle than pick your way through that little lot. But in very broad terms, it works like this.

Virtual tree huggers

Forests store carbon. If you’re a rich world government, you’re facing some challenging carbon reduction targets. One of the most cost-effective ways of meeting those could be to pay upfront money to keep forests in being, so soaking up ‘your’ carbon and preventing further emissions that would be caused by their destruction. And as and when the world finally has a functioning carbon market, investments made now could prove lucrative in the future. Hence the appeal of raising billions of dollars through ‘rainforest bonds’ and similar instruments.

“Satellite mapping can zero in on tiny sections of forest”

Technological advances play their part, too. Until recently, you couldn’t be sure just what was happening in a remote corner of a rainforest. But now satellite mapping can zero in on tiny sections of forest, almost down to the scale of individual trees; radar can ‘see’ through clouds. (You can log, but you can’t hide.) Sophisticated software can calculate the carbon storage capacity of any given area. It is, as one observer put it, like having a combination of global CCTV and a high-tech sniffer dog. On the ground, meanwhile, local people wielding ruggedised icon-based touchscreen gizmos – like a sort of chunky iPhone - can map and monitor the health of their surrounding forest literally tree-by-tree. Microchips inserted into selected trunks can report instantly if they’re felled – and then track the timber as it’s transported, electronically fingering everyone involved.

But before we all get carried away with optimistic talk of shiny new technology and billion dollar bonds, perhaps we need a reality check. Simon Counsell, Executive Director of the Rainforest Foundation, is ready with one: “It’s completely unclear how the forest carbon is going to be measured or monitored, it’s not clear who owns it, what role the government would have, how funding payments would be distributed… These are deeply political and, as yet, highly intractable problems. The evidence so far has been that if you throw something as potentially lucrative and uncontrollable as these vast markets for forest carbon into the very unstable governance mix in most of these countries, it’s going to make things worse”.

“Before lunch, the Minister wanted $1 billion to save his forest; after lunch, it had gone up to $2 billion”

Counsell has first hand experience of inflated expectations. “I witnessed this very closely with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Minister of Forests said (to paraphrase): ‘We are going to cut all our forests down unless you give us a billion dollars to protect the carbon in them’. Later on, after lunch with the World Bank, he said: ‘We are going to cut all our forests down unless you give us two billion dollars’. I believe it’s now gone up to three or four billion…”

Other reports speak of ‘carbon cowboys’ descending on unsuspecting tribal communities in Papua New Guinea, waving bogus carbon certificates and persuading landowners to sign away their rights. Even without corruption, a sudden surge of ‘forest carbon’ could in effect flood the market. Result? The price would collapse, making any mitigating action outside forests uneconomic, so putting the decarbonising of the industrial world’s economy back years, if not decades.

Billion dollar bonds

Maybe, but meanwhile, the world’s most effective carbon sinks are going up in smoke, and we’re throwing money at unproven alternatives which may not, to stretch a metaphor, even hold water. Like carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Mention of which has Andrew Mitchell spitting with indignation. “Forests are an incredibly effective free machine [to absorb carbon]. And what are we doing to that machine? We are tearing it down and trying to build a new one – CCS – in 15 years with technology no-one has tried before and which will cost us at least $150 per tonne [of carbon stored]!”

Talk of carbon markets may in any case be a red herring, says Alice Chapple, who co-ordinates Forum for the Future’s work on forest investments. Under global climate agreements, governments will be committed to carbon reductions. “Say you’re a bond issuer in the London market, you can see these cash flows that are completely committed over a period of time, you know the Government is absolutely on the dotted line for doing this, so you say, ‘OK, well I’ll issue a billion dollar bond because I know that I’m going to get repaid on an annual basis by the government over a long period of time.”

And forests do more than store carbon. They have a host of other benefits, not least rainfall. Much of Latin America’s agriculture depends on rainfall generated by the Amazon forest. There’s billions of dollars in commodity earnings dependent on those trees staying put – and that means there’s potential for bond-style investment there, too.

It’s heady stuff – but meanwhile, there’s consensus we need to ensure that the essential basics of good governance and capacity building are in place, and that needs developed world funding. We need to act now, because any deal reached at Copenhagen won’t kick in till 2013, and will need time to have an effect. As Juniper says: “It may or may not involve markets, it may involve some kind of fund mechanism, it probably will be a hybrid of the two. It may or may not be linked into global carbon markets, fungible with industrial carbon markets in the North. All of that is controversial and complex and will take time to sort it out. But the money needs to be stumped up now through a very simple, straightforward arrangement, where countries are paid for the hectares of forest that they don’t cut down”.

“The one thing you have to keep in your head”, says Mitchell, “is that doing nothing is not an option. If we stand back and do nothing for another decade, we will lose half our rainforests, and we will lose the fight against climate change.”

Further reading Forum for the Future’s report, ‘Forest Investment Review’, contains in-depth analysis of the debate around rainforest financing, with detailed recommendations for the ways forward. Download a copy here. Green Futures will be publishing a series of articles on the latest breakthroughs in forest financing and conservation during 2010.
Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.

Long-range solar flight planned

Shelley Hannan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:02:11 +0000

Round-the-world ambition for prototype green plane

If efficiency savings and biofuels are the step-by-step path to greener aviation, the Solar Impulse project is a leap of faith. It’s “a paradox, almost a provocation”, in the words of its pilot, Swiss adventurer and round-the-world balloonist Betrand Piccard.

Piccard has set himself the goal of flying a solar powered plane, with back-up batteries, around the globe – and he recently unveiled the prototype machine to make the trip. Lightweight composite materials and super-efficient cells give it the best of both worlds: a huge 61 metre wingspan and a weight of just 1,500kg.

The biggest design challenge is generating and storing enough power for night flight, which Piccard plans to put to the test on an Atlantic crossing in 2012. But green aviation isn’t actually what he’s aiming at. Real success, he said at the unveiling near Zürich, would be “to have millions of people following the project, being enthusiastic about it, and saying ‘if they managed to fly around the world with renewable energy, then we should be able to make energy savings in our daily lives’”. – Roger East

US position on Copenhagen may be treaty-wrecking

Jonathon Porritt — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:05:26 +0000

You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference. Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.

Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board. And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.

That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago. The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on.

And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.

Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach. That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.

I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part. As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.

US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility. They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now. They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.

For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this. It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.