Forum For The Future & Green Futures

The wood for the trees

Zoe Le Grand — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:21:52 +0000

It can be easy to forget the intended outcomes of a project, when you’re focussed on delivering it within a short time table to a tight budget. Construction projects in particular see budgets getting more and more squeezed, and time tables can be thrown out by anything from a snowy day to a great crested-newt.

Those working in the built environment industry know these pressures all too well, and yet it is the outcomes of their projects specifically that offer a unique opportunity to deliver real change. The buildings we live in and the infrastructure that we use have a huge impact on the way in which we live our lives. If you look at the bigger picture, it's clear that the people working in the industry are not just providing a hospital or school (on time and to budget). In fact, they’re contributing to improved patient recovery rates, higher educational attainment, a more mobile population and, ultimately enabling more sustainable living.

What a resource-constrained economy means for cleantech

David Bent — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:10:49 +0000

Below is the text of a talk I gave at the Rushlight Clean Technologies Show, a gathering place for, guess what, cleantech companies, their advisors and funders. I was asked to talk for 15 minutes on a resource-constrained economy. My key point was that there are business opportunities in overcoming the constraints, especially through resource productivity and business model innovation.

Let me start by asking, ‘What resources constrain the economy?’ In the 20th century the McKinsey Global Institute Commodity Price Index fell by half. This is despite population going up fourfold, and the global economy growing by 20 times (For this and other McKinsey references below see their excellent report on Resource Revolution). Malthus was proved wrong; we didn’t live in a resource-constrained world.

Helping leaders go further – 3 years of working with O2

David Bent — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:23:08 +0000

Today Telefonica UK – probably better known to you as O2 – launch the Think Big Blueprint O2, their ambitious plan for people and planet. It’s a big step for O2, the latest in a journey which I’ve been involved with for over 3 years. I’m often asked ‘what does Forum do with its partners?’. The launch is a good moment to lift the curtain a little on how we work with them to create change.

The Think Big Blueprint has some bold commitments for 2015: helping 1m young people develop skills; help 10m people live in easier and more sustainable ways; and to help deliver carbon benefits to customers that are 10 times the impact of their network.

Unpicking the financial system: The customer

Alice Chapple — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:05:20 +0000

Alice Chapple explores the motivations and behaviours of customers within the financial system

I have been with the same bank since I was 16. I'm not the sort of person who reads the 'Money' pages of the papers to find the best deals on bank accounts or mortgages. I reckon that there are enough people out there who are keeping an eye on the options to keep my bank on its toes. And if my bank was doing something really bad, I'm sure I'd hear about it.

Each month, I pay a bit of my salary into my pension. I want to make sure that I can afford a decent standard of living when I retire. I don't know who manages my pension; it's done through my employer. I know we use one of the big, well-known investment managers, so I'm in good company.

Dear Energy Secretary...

Will Dawson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:17:49 +0000

Dear Secretary of State Davey,

I am pleased that you have been appointed as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. It is great that your strong views on the environment led you into politics, and you have been rightly praised for your approach to championing consumers in your last post as Consumer Affairs Minister.

Green business in the US

Peter Madden — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:15:50 +0000

How is the US faring on sustainability? Speaking at the excellent Greenbiz conference this week, in San Francisco, I had an opportunity to take the temperature.

The folks at Greenbiz launched their ‘State of Green Business’ 2012 report. Their overall message was, that after years of upward progress, environmental issues had reached a plateau. This levelling-off was partly due to the economic gloom, and partly to the lack of progress in Washington. The bright points are clean-tech, green-power and information technology. But action has stalled in many other areas, and with legislative gridlock, climate change is sliding down the corporate agenda.

Civil society leaders call for a new energy future

Justin Woolford — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Justin Woolford of The Change Co., on behalf of The Co-operative, introduces the inaugural meeting of a new group of civil society champions who today launch their vision for community energy in the UK with Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The group has been brought together by The Co-operative, Forum for the Future and Carbon Leapfrog and coincides with The Co-operative's launch of their new Community Energy Challenge.

Resolutions for 2012, Forum style

Carol Edwards — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Got the new year blues? Wondering how to make all your best-laid resolutions a reality? If you, or someone you know, has graduated recently and is interested in sustainable development, we might just be able to help, through a Masters with Forum for the Future.

1. Learn Something New
Alongside the exciting projects that Forum delivers with many well-known organisations, we share our learning through a Masters programme in Leadership for Sustainable Development. Through it, we skill up future leaders so that they have the expertise and confidence to create change in any organisational setting.

Unpicking the financial system

Alice Chapple — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:08:22 +0000

Alice Chapple introduces a blog series which unpicks the motivations and behaviours of a range of key players from across the financial system

We all know the big picture. Enormous amounts of public money are poured into the banking system to prevent its collapse. The resulting massive public debts trigger a squeeze on public services that hits the poorest hardest and results in job losses and reduced opportunities.

Of course we have to find a villain of the piece. And we point the finger at "bankers", an amorphous group of arrogant, overpaid men in sharp suits who couldn't care less about the impact of their activities, took our money, paid themselves big bonuses, and laughed.

Time for the fringe to be back in fashion

Dan Crossley — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:24:13 +0000

A crisp winter day in the city of dreaming spires in early January. The next generation of ideas. But there were no mortar boards in sight. This wasn’t a bunch of bright young Oxford undergraduates. It was organic farmers, agroecologists, ‘real food’ lovers, activists, the odd academic - and me.

This was the Oxford Real Farming Conference – the fringe to the ‘mainstream’ farming event that took place earlier that week. It couldn’t fail to inspire you. Leading players from the world of real food and farming were there bringing new ideas and urging greater action. This year’s theme was “A Cross-the-board Re-think”. As Colin Tudge – the founder of the Campaign for Real Farming - put it, “If we truly want agriculture that provides everyone in the world with good food without wrecking the rest, we need to re-think farming itself”.

Flawed system needs to be fixed to prevent future crises

Alice Chapple — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:45:48 +0000

Conventional sustainability analysis would not have prevented the credit crunch. Rather, a fundamental change in the way investment works is needed.

There is some consensus on the causes of the financial crisis, which has emerged from the findings of a number of enquiries including the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Levin-Coburn report. However, opinions differ sharply on the type and depth of change required to prevent it happening again.

Dear Davos...

Sally Uren — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:18:31 +0000

Dear Davos,

The start of a new year, but an old set of problems. Capitalism creaking at the seams, so much so that even national governments are now calling for a ‘more responsible capitalism’. The world getting warmer, and now wetter, 2011 and 2012 have been the wettest years ever. And there’s the debt - economic, societal and environmental. A triple-debt whammy.

'Committed to improving the state of the world'; photo courtesy of Davos on Flickr.

Food Riots or Food Sovereignty

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Guest blog by Nick Newsom, former futures intern at Forum for the Future

It’s easy to imagine the cold-productivity-driven face of the industrial farmer winning out against the straw-chewing, small-farmer. But that doesn’t need to be the case. Given the flaws in our current food system, we need to abandon such stereotypes and to take smaller-scale sustainable farming more seriously.

Image courtesy of Dag Endresen via Flickr

A new way to keep hopes high

Katie Shaw — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:20:19 +0000

How often do we hear people talk about the need to make sustainability ‘sexy’; no more hemp clothes and greasy hair, boring talk of household retrofits or technical energy-saving measures thanks very much. It’s pretty commonly accepted now that if we really want to engage people with sustainability, we need to make it aspirational. People are far more likely to embrace change if it’s packaged in an appealing way, right?

With Blue Monday just around the corner, this issue of hope and aspiration is a pertinent one. Whilst the solutions to many of today’s compelling climate problems already exist – and more are being developed on a daily basis – even the most optimistic amongst us need a snappy reminder of what’s out there.

Two steps forward, one step back…

Ben Ross — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:36:14 +0000

So how did 2011 stack up in the world of energy policy?

On Thursday this week we are running an event on Energy Policy 2012, in Bristol. So I thought I’d cast my mind back over the last 12 months to see how far we’ve come. We’ve got a long way to travel to a low carbon economy and we’re running out of time to break our carbon addiction.

Green solutions in just 15 tweets

Anna Simpson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As an editor, I often take up my shears to prune a text of any superfluous words. More often than not, the message comes across more clearly with fewer letters scrambling for space on the page.

I like haikus. I’m a fan of Twitter. I’m always impressed by writers who approach word limits with the ambition of a poet. Of course, the web means you can throw in a link to a longer piece, and pray that it’s written well enough to capture our butterfly minds for more than a minute or two.

Or, you can make a craft of tight, powerful little messages, and add them together when you want to say something more complex. Yes, you can even clog up your followers’ feeds with a whole string of tweets – a 21st-century take on the serial story or epic verse...

Finding the heartbeat in energy – 5 tips for getting community energy projects off the ground

Madeleine Lewis — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:32:27 +0000

Celia became known as the ‘Gingerbread lady’, not the ‘Low Carbon lady’. It seems that Gingerbread sticks in the minds of the Wallington community better than energy efficiency and low carbon living. In this small rural village, memories run long, relationships take time to build, and gingerbread is more tempting than free loft insulation.

Tommy Middlemiss outside his cottage in Wallington

Energy isn’t sexy; it doesn’t get people excited. It’s largely invisible in our everyday lives, manifesting itself now and then in the form of a tedious bill (always going up) or dressed up in strange language (kilowatt hours, anyone?). And yet we know that behaviour change can have a far greater effect on energy use and bills than installing new technology alone – and given the Government’s target to reduce our carbon emissions by 50% by 2025, it’s pretty important we learn how to do it better.

The 100 Club – Bristol businesses are getting serious about climate change

Simon Billing — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:07:36 +0000

Our membership includes some of Bristol’s biggest businesses, including Capgemini, the Environment Agency, Yeo Valley, and the University of the West of England; we collectively represent nearly a quarter of the region’s workforce (a whopping 80,000), and we’ve just signed up our 100th and 101st members!

Together we are the West of England Climate Challenge – WECC, for short. This week we signed up UNITE, the largest student housing provider, and HQ-ed in Bristol, so we’ve got something to celebrate.

Back to a non-resilient future?

Sara Parkin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:26:32 +0000

I am writing this from Islay, the most southern island of the Inner Hebrides. It is where my 91 year old mother lives and as usual we’ve spent most of the holiday here. At this time of year storms are normal, but last week’s gale force winds broke records and much else. Buildings did not fare too badly though as most were constructed over 150 years ago with big-weather resistance a specification.

Image courtesy of Ruari Reynier's blog

No, it was the infrastructure of modern life that suffered massive damage - the electricity supply and communications systems went down for 3 ½ and 5 days respectively in our village, with many people further down the coast out for even longer. Mobile masts failed, digital signals to TV and radios stopped, petrol could not be pumped.

Three must-have apps for a sustainable 2012

Sally Uren — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

2012 is not going to be easy. Against a backdrop of economic stagnation in the west, civil society unrest in all sorts of places, and continued volatility in commodity markets, the going will be tough for business. It's also possible that progress towards sustainability might falter.

Image courtesy of the Patagonia website

But not if you download these apps, designed to do two things: Help any forward-thinking sustainability practitioner respond positively to three key trends for 2012, which in turn will help navigate the likely turbulence of the next 12 months.