The MEMO Project

As promised I want to tell you about my evening at Adjaye Associates which is related to the fabulous MEMO Project.

I first came across MEMO when I met Sebastian Brooke late last year.

Sebastian is the driving force behind MEMO, a monument to biodiversity which is being planned at Portland in Dorset. MEMO is fantastic- a one hundred and twenty metre high open structure, coiled like a titanic ammonite eroded from the Jurassic coast.

Visitors will be able to climb the monument using the spiral ramp, whilst admiring the thousands of carvings of plants and animals, designed by school children from across the UK.



This is a scale replica of the Hooke Bell

 At the heart of the monument will be the Hooke Bell a massive bronze bell (planned to be the largest in Europe), cast from bronze using a portland stone mold. The bell will be like the Lutine Bell in Lloyds of London and will be struck on Earth Day to celebrate biodiversity and commemorate species which have become extinct.  

Planning for the £20 million pound project is well underway. Dorset County Council have granted planning permission, and Adjaye Associates have drawn up detailed plans for the monument and the visitors centre, which will bring much needed economic development to this part of Dorset.

So what was I doing at Adjaye Associates? Well the City of London has a strong connection to Portland as many of the buildings in the City of London are built with Portland Stone. We also have a strong connection to biodiversity- not only do we manage a third of London's best loved open spaces, but Robert Hooke, the father of biodiversity was City Surveyor from 1666 to 1674 and oversaw the re-building of the City following the Great Fire in 1666.

Sebastian contacted me to see if I could help him spread the word on MEMO project in order to get support and sponsorship. I have been putting him in touch with various people in the City.

The event at Adjaye Associates was an opportunity to meet some of the other project supporters and hear about the latest developments. I was tremedously impressed by the callibre of people who were there Sir Tim Smit (who created the Eden Project),  Sir Ghillean Prance (former director of Kew) and a brace of other well know faces from the worlds of politics and the environment. The Duke of Edinburgh has also made a personal commitment to the project and will be hosting a fund raising dinner at Buckingham Palace.

I will let you know how the project develops.

Peak Stuff?

A busy evening yesterday- I had to do the introduction for Mark Lynas (Author of the very excellent "Six Degrees" and "The God Species") at a Just Share Event at St Mary Le Bow Church, following which I was dining in very august company at Adjay Associates. (I will tell you about the latter in a seperate post.)

Mark was charming, and the Just Share event was well attended- by an exceptionally well informed crowd. The first half of his talk was an engaging canter through the concept of environmental limits, the topic of his latest book. We certainly see eye to eye on many topics, such as nuclear energy and GM.

However, the second half of his talk focused on the "good news" on the environment and much of it was drawn from  Chris Goodall's work on "Peak Stuff".

Chris' work is a really insightful look at evidence that economic growth can be decoupled from unsustainable behaviour. He bases his hypothesis on the fact that the UK began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade, well before the economic slowdown that started in 2008.

Personally, I can see why the argument is an attractive one, but the figures Chris produces hide a wealth of complexity- one of the sets of data Mark picked up on was a drop in UK Total Material Requirement (TMR) which by 2009 had dropped to 81% of 2001 levels. On the face of it this is good news, as this drop coincided with a prolonged period of economic growth in the UK- so does this mean we can have continued growth without damaging the environment?

One problem I have with this figure is it is an aggregated number, which does not differentiate between "guns and butter" (or i-phones and cod if you prefer)- in other words, despite the drop in total TMR, you cannot determine whether it contains unsustainable consumption of rare earth metals and increased consumption of collapsing fish stocks.

If anything the drop in TMR is a validation of classical economics- "stuff" is getting more expensive to make because of rising resource costs, driven by reduced supply and increased demand. Manufacturers are using smart design to reduce the material requirements of their products- replacing metals with plastics and changing the composition of those plastics to make them lighter and stronger.

Don't get me wrong, this is to be welcomed, but I disagree with Mark that this is "good news", for me this is a sign that the environment is under increasing stress and the economy and society are being directly affected.

My problem with Mark and Chris' analysis is that whilst their work is  thoughtful and pertinent, the ill-informed (or mischievous) can cherry pick statements to support the weakening of environmental legislation and the continuation of environmentally damaging behaviour.

I am not, you probably won't be surprised to hear, a hair shirt wearing hippy, who thinks we should all go back to living in tepees, so I am not arguing that economic growth automatically results in environmental destruction. What I am saying is that we need to be a lot smarter about the way we measure growth so that the Government develop policies that deliver long term benefits..

This is why I am heartened current discussions around GDP plus. Check this website for further information http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/index.html

Run up to Rio



Admiralty House


I was at a pre-Rio event hosted by Nick Clegg yesterday evening, which pulled together the various contributors to the UK's Rio+20 submission.

I have been following the development of Paragraph 41 of the Zero Draft with interest- I hosted a business breakfast with Caroline Spellman back in February to help drum up support in the City.

(You can find a copy of the Rio+20 Earth summit draft text here- http://www.scribd.com/doc/96419644/Draft-of-UN-Rio-20-main-text)

The UK Government has asked Aviva to lead UK submissions on financial services at the Rio Summit and Aviva have established the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Coalition (CSRC), a group of organisations representing investors with assets of approximately $2 trillion under management, as well as civil society and international bodies.

The CSRC is asking the countries attending Rio +20 to develop national regulations requiring companies to report on sustainability issues. It is also asking for beefing up the ways in which investors can hold companies to account.

Why is this important- well if you don't know whether companies are managing sustainability risks effectively  (water, energy and raw material risks ), or are likely to be sued for exploiting or injuring workers or the local community, how can you work out whether your investment will pay off?

If you want to find out more about this, check out http://www.london-accord.co.uk/

Anyway UNEP have thrown their weight behind these efforts and a great deal of international diplomacy has gone on behind the scenes to pull countries behind the proposal. Needless to say there are still a few refuseniks, but with some tap-dancing around the wording it looks like there will be a positive move in this direction.