Resources for Climate Change

At the recent Sustainable City Awards I refered to climate change as the topic that dare not speak its name.

The unfortunate fact is, the issue has been turned into a politcal football by swivel eyed libertarians on one side and soap-dodging lentil-munchers on the other. 

Any attempt at rational discourse is drowned out by trolling rent-a-post bloggists for whom the truth is a non-renewable resource.

Needless to say this is extremely unfortuanate at a time when resilience is becoming an increasingly important issue for cities.

I get to talk to senior people in the emergency planning and utility supply field. It is not common knowledge, but London was only a gnats whisker away from drought related disaster last year. In case you think I am talking this up, being a City boy my definition of disaster is not having your hebaceous borders die, it is having the supply to the water-cooled blade servers which run trading floors in the City interrupted.   

The hard of thinking, will blame all our problems on an antiquated distribution network, and that is certainly a contributing factor. But unlike electricity, you can't just generate more water- if it doesn't rain you are stuffed regardless of how shiny your pipes are.

Thinking about these issues and developing appropriate infrastructure investment responses is crucial if London is to remain competitive. Muddying the waters by obfuscation on whether climate change is happening (it is) or whether cosmic rays are to blame (they are not) is not helpful, but the forces of ignorance are fighting an increasingly political campaign which may affect the way in which long term infrastructure decision are made.

I can hold my head up and say that the City of London recognised the risks associated with a changing climate quite a while ago- which is why I was lucky enough to put together the world's first climate change adaptation strategy back in 2006. Communicating the risk clearly is the key so for those who like their data in graphical form I can heartily recommend this infographic http://www.learnstuff.com/climate-change/

If you like your facts as articles and discussions then http://www.skepticalscience.com/ is the place for you!

Celebrating Success

19 March marked the Awards Ceremony for the Sustainable City Awards and representative of over 250 organisations attended Mansion House to see this years winner recieve their gongs from ethical consumer champion Liva Firth (who was delightful to work with).

A video of the event can be found here

Despite the economic downturn there were some really inspirational entries this year and I believe that this is representative of a fundamental truth- during tough economic times, it is the organisations which focus on resource efficiency, supply chain value and innovation which will best weather the storm.

Sustainable Cities

Nobody knows exactly when the City of London was first founded; though Godfrey of Monmouth made a fanciful stab in the middle ages-

 

“I

n the year 1108 bc Brute, lineally descended from the demi-god Encas, the sonne of Venus, daughter of Jupiter, builded this city upon the river now called Thames, and named it New Troy”.

 

More reliably, we know that following the destruction of Londinium by Queen Boadicea in AD 61, the Roman Town Planning Department set about rebuilding the City on a comprehensive scale, including public buildings, customs houses and an advanced water supply. Archaeological evidence on display at the museum of London suggests that then, as now, the City was founded on trade.

Following a brief dip in London’s fortunes in the dark ages, the City’s prime location and first class communications began to tell, London began its inexorable rise to prominence as a global trading powerhouse, and for the last eight hundred years, the Guildhall and the Corporation of London have been protecting the City’s interests.

Sustainable development and environmental protection have only really entered common parlance in the last few years, but the issues associated with them have placed limits on the growth of the City since its foundation.

The Corporation has long been aware that a clean environment, quality of life and economic prosperity go hand in hand. the problems facing Mayor and alderman in medieval times have a peculiar resonance today- water supply, adulteration of food, building regulations, refuse removal and the suppression of nuisance including smoke and noise.

In the past these issues only constrained the City for as long as it took for technical solutions to be thought up to solve them. This is what led to the great municipal revolutions of the last century when London became the world’s first Megacity thanks to its development of an effective sewage system, a clean water supply, street lighting and underground railways. Others soon copied London’s example.

Megacities continued to grow fuelled by their ability to exploit what was seen as the boundless wealth of the Earth’s natural resources;

·        Problems of waste were dealt with by exporting it to other locations to be put in holes in the ground;

·        Problems of pollution were dealt with by building ever higher chimneys;

·        and problems of supply were dealt with by importing food and raw materials from further and further afield.

However, we are now entering a new era when cities such as London are once again facing challenges and unlike the problems faced by cities in the past, these impracticalities are complex, interdependent and far reaching in time and space;
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How do we plan Cities for a planet which will contain 10 Billion people? How will these people be fed, receive water and energy, be transported and have their waste disposed of?

Meeting these challenges will not be an easy task as unlike the problems faced by the engineering geniuses of the 19^th Century, the solutions will require dealing with the terrible synergy between consumption and waste, convenience and consequence.

What is required is little less than a revolution in the way that cities are planned and run and core to this must be a new contract between the communities who make up cities (individuals, businesses, voluntary groups and the public sector) and the democratic bodies who serve them. This contract must balance the rights and responsibilities of those communities- The right to a clean environment, a sound economy and a good quality of life, balanced by; the responsibility to take ownership of their actions and the consequences of those actions.

To some extent this revolution is beginning to take place, the retreat of the public sector combined with globalisation means that increasingly it is cities rather than nations which are competing directly against each other.

This is leading to a fundamental re-assessment of the importance of quality of life factors in determining competitive advantage, and searching questions are being asked about how services and infrastructure can be planned for funded and delivered over the long term.

Our new clarion call for the 21^st century is sustainability, and it will take just as much effort and cunning as that shown by our Victorian forebears if we are to succeed.

Quality of life, the new global battlefield

I attended the launch of London's Quality of Life Indicators 2012 report on Wednesday evening.

The report itself makes for very interesting reading. However, what I found even more interesting than the content was the context in which the report was set.

The event was intensely politicised and the presentations were very on message with respect to London's performance. I don't propose to comment on the basket of indicators chosen or the methodology used in displaying them- read the report for yourself.

Matthew Pencharz, the Mayors Environmental and Political adviser was on hand to set the scene and his fundamental message was simple- In a globalised world, London has to compete directly with other cities in order to attract investment and talent, Quality of life is one of the fundamental weapons in its armoury.

This ties in neatly with a major research initiative the City has planned for a little later this year.

The concept is fairly simple-

In 2050 the planet will have around 10 billion people living on it. The majority of those people will live in cities.   

Those people will need feeding, housing and transportation. They will require water to drink, their waste will need to be disposed of and they will need energy. 

How are these challenges going to be met, and with the retrenchment of the public sector where is investment in this infrastructure going to come from?

I will let you know more about how we intend to answer these questions in due course.

  

Stealing Africa's Heritage? The Global Trade in Agricultural Land

One of the great pleasures of running the Sustainable City Awards is judging the "Farsight" category for financial research.

The candidate papers are gleaned from the London Accord, which means they are always of high quality and cover a fascinating range of topics. This year was no exception.

The winner was a paper by CA Cheuvreux on the sustainability risks associated with luxury brands- human rights, conflict minerals, child labour, pollution, habitat destruction endangered species etc. It made for fascinating reading and demonstrated the soap bubble fragility of brand reputation.

However, I must confess the paper that got me thinking most was one from Deutsche Bank on the global trade in farmland. 

This is a brilliantly written and accessible report which discusses the global land rush that is taking place for agricultural land. Much of this trade is driven by sovereign wealth funds (though some hedge funds are investing too) and concerns significant purchases of land in some of the poorest parts of Africa.

The Deutsche Bank report contains some startling numbers- for example over the last 12 years some 83 million hectares of land in developing countries – that is 1.7% of the world's agricultural area has been bought by foreign investors- notably from China, Brasil and India and by state owned companies from the middle-east. 

Whilst it could be argued that foreign investment in African agriculture will bring much needed improvements in skills and infrastructure. This raises a number of troubling questions, especially when, according to Deutsche bank investment intended to enhance food exports are taking place in countries where malnutrition is common and there are issues with corruption and dysfunctional land registries.

This raises the very real prospect of destabilisation of the region driven by conflict arising from a failure of investors to respect the economic and social rights of local populations, to preserve environmental sustainability and to avoid one-sided agricultural development.  This is especially apposite given that research points to a global rising in food prices being the trigger of the Arab Spring.

When one considers that this report has been produced, not by an NGO or aid organisation, but by a major international banking corporation, it makes me wonder whether we are sleep walking into a crisis.

Interesting Times

Living in Interesting Times

I organised a breakfast meeting last week for a group of leading environmentalists and financial services practitioners. The objective was use their input to shape the agenda for the Lord Mayor in 2013/14, who will make sustainability the core theme of the Mayoralty. 

The discussion was very lively and a couple of points that were raised really resonated. In particular the importance of cities as political and economic entities was highlighted, and it was suggested that this had increased in the wake of the economic crisis.

The pragmatic approach is for city governments to work directly with corporates to drive progress which circumvents blockages within national administrations.

This is the logical conclusion of the perceived abrogation of responsibility by national governments for leadership in the field of sustainability.

In the UK  despite the fact that a third of current economic growth is coming from the green sector (which employs 940,000 people), government support for this sector is patchy. By corporates have come to understand the risks and opportunities associated with resource scarcity and sustainable business practices, and are becoming frustrated by a lack of engagement by policy makers with these issues.

Personally, I found all this rather alarming as it does rather circumventing the democratic process! But on the upside the issue of climate change has not “gone away”, climate change adaptation-  coping with water stress, heatwaves and flooding is under the microscope following hurricane Sandy.

As (somewhat depressingly) the rest of world takes its cues from the US when it comes to environmental issues, I am hopeful that the damage done to American crops livestock and buildings by drought and hurricane will spur a re-engagement with the issue of climate change.

Ultimately money talks, and the green agenda is getting too expensive to ignore.

 

Attended the launch of National Ethical Investment Week at the House of Commons yesterday evening. A great evening catching up with a lot of old friends from the Socially Responsible Investment world, but what really struck me was the buzz that has been generated around the ethical and sustainable investment field of late.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, here are three of them-
 

Firstly, the low-carbon clean-tech field is the only sector of the UK economy that has seen significant growth of late- taken as a whole the CBI believe that over a third of the UK’s economic growth in 2011/12 is likely to have come from green business, (If you want to know more read "The Colour of Growth

" which the CBI brought out in July). The UK is going to need £1 trillion in investment to meet its 2030 Climate Change Bill agreements-  this means that an investment of £50bn every year. Fundamentally there's gold in them thar hills!

Secondly, with the retreat of the state, alternative methods of supplying public goods and services are being sought. Social Impact Investment and Social Enterprise Funding are beginning to attract serious attention. Plans are now well advanced to set up a Social Stock Exchange which will allow individuals and institutions to invest in social businesses from around the world.

Finally, bankers are people too! Being told constantly that you are an evil parasite who loves grinding the faces of the poor in the mud must sting, so I think there is a general desire to look beyond casino capitalism and reconnect with the fundamental purpose of financial services- providing the goods and services society wants.