Category: Sustainability

We struggle with the word biodiversity. While deeply insightful and meaningful it’s a whole system, a new word, a multifaceted problem and anything but ‘cute and cuddly’.

So it’s highly refreshing to see Futerra take up the challenge of communicating this and generating positive action:

Imagine the incredible complexity that makes up life on earth, bottled up for mass appeal. What if the word ‘biodiversity’ represented not just a set of scientific concepts, but emotions of awe and wonder? Could biodiversity communications then trigger worldwide action to protect it?

We believe so. We’ve explored the psychological evidence to find out what actually drives people to conserve nature. We’ve taken a critical look at today’s biodiversity messages to see whether they align with the emotions of the people they are aimed at. And we’ve combined these with the principles of branding, not simply logos and slogans, but a coherent set of values and promises which will trigger action. The results are both provocative and exciting. They challenge us to deliver a new nature message.

Branding Biodiversity argues we’ll take action out of love. More Love, Less Loss. Back this up with the reasons for action ($s) and there’s a story for change.

There’s a lot that back this up such as Fear Won’t do It, the gap between knowledge and action and Futerra’s earlier Climate Change work.

This blog has been very quiet while I’ve been reaching into the evidence. In my work at the Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, there are an array of outstanding scientists. The evidence produced by this work is transformational. However, at the same time we simply – individually and collectively – do not act in our own self interest or on evidence. That is don’t act on this evidence at anything like the rate that would make rational sense.

There are many obvious environment examples from climate change to species survival but, money is often cited as the answer for why such action does not occur. This is something of a paradox as we will also ignore risk free financial returns that is actions we can take that will make us a profit. These are often profits that also create positive environmental outcomes.

This paradox challenges the idea of humans acting “rationally“, to maximise profit. New economics writer Eric Beinhocker recently summarised this succinctly. He “does not accept the orthodox theory that has dominated economics for the past several decades that humans are perfectly rational, markets are perfectly efficient, institutions are optimally designed and economies are self-correcting equilibrium systems that invariably find a state that maximises social welfare. Social scientists working in the new economics tradition argue that this theory has failed empirically on many points and that the 2008 financial crisis is only the latest and most obvious example.”

If you accept that humans often don’t act in a rational financial manner it’s then a small step to also challenge the idea that we’re not acting on environmental evidence simply because of the cost. And to start looking for a decent map of what creates effective action from evidence.

Effective action from evidence, and the lack of it, is the focus of the next few blog posts.

Image: Earth from above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Climate Change will have a significant impact on many of the world’s plants and animals. While we intuitively think that the reverse is true, that is vegetation may slow the impacts of such change (in addition to its ability to sequester carbon), this World Bank report contains a great case study.

Hövsgöl National Park contains the ancient Lake Hövsgöl – known as “the blue pearl of Mongolia”. It is about 200 km southwest of Lake Baikal, in mountainous northern with long -40° winters. However the forest edge is retreating impacted by uncontrolled grazing by domestic animals – sheep, goats, and cattle – on the mountain slopes around the lake and the gathering of wood for fuel.

The loss of forest exposes the ground to sunlight and removes different plant covers that were insulating the permafrost. Preserving forest will slow the rate of permafrost melt and help to protect Mongolia’s water resources, biodiversity, and natural ecosystems.

The World Bank points out such lessons are relevant across Eastern Europe, Russia and the northern China mountains. Protecting these resources is not just for species but provides significant economic benefits.

Photo: ratschan – Hövsgöl West Shore. Read more in the report (pdf) on page 12.

Action on climate change continues to challenge everyone. As Australia inches closer to a price on carbon Annabel Crabb (ABC’s Chief Online Political Correspondent) asks six leading Australian’s if anyone really has the courage to act.

Senator Penny Wong takes on this challenge. She was Australia’s Climate Change minister through our first two attempts to introduce a carbon trading scheme. Now the finance minister, she talks about how climate change exposes the shortcomings in our political system. We need to cooperate for the long term. The facts about climate change are obvious… yet they’ve become irrelevant. Watch her short opening pitch.

The full line up is Niki Vincent (Leaders Institute) introducing the forum and talking about the adaptive leadership challenge we face. She highlights “climate change means giving up on some things . But in such a shift there are many opportunities for liberation and creativity”

Andrew Stock (Origin Energy) is the first panellist to take on the challenge. He has no doubt that our society can tackle climate change head on. Previously the Marshall Plan rebuilt whole countries. Imagine what we can do like this to address this problem.

David Klingberg (Centrex Metals) focuses, in part, on the need to fund adaptation. We urgently need to review our funding priorities. He’s followed by Senator Wong “hardest action for politician is to ask people to act now to make tomorrow better” (video above).

Professor Mike Young (Environment Institute) highlights how counter intuitive we are about climate change. “Why would any nation go out and subsidise the destruction of the planet?” he asks. And we perversely almost ignore more significant price impacts, e.g. from much larger currency exchange price movements.

David Knox (Santos) puts forward the numbers on change. Santos action demonstrates the potential as does his own. As the company CEO he is nevertheless in part motivated and challenged by his children to make a difference.

Stephen Yarwood (Lord Mayor Adelaide) finishes the 2 minute leadership summaries with a another personal perspective. Am I being authentic? Ask your children, ask your parents. That’s why he drives an electric car and supports a carbon tax.

The full panel dissuasion with audience questions is also online – watch to the end of question time for a most pertinent and apt pacific island summary. Climate change is already impacting the questioner’s islands. People are currently already losing their land and culture as a result.

I get the last say summarising some of our panels discussion and some of paradoxes – do we really have the leadership courage? While other countries talk about green growth and deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts in Australia we are fractured. We have a highly polarised and divisive community debate.

While other countries talk about green growth and deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts in Australia we are fractured. We have a highly polarised and divisive community debate.

Last night the Environment Institute and the Leaders Institute of South Australia took us beyond the division with a high profile team of panellists.

Our question – what leadership is needed to act on climate change?

The common thread on the night was vision – holding it, enabling it, moving our society to focus more on the future. However, the fact that we don’t currently have this is quite a paradox. It is manifestly in our common self-interest to act on this issue. Yet the fear and pain that people may feel seems quite out of proportion to the common explanation – financial costs.

Niki Vincent (Leaders Institute) put this succinctly introducing the forum and talking about adaptive leadership:

We are all going to have to give some stuff up. And I don’t mean the equivalent of the cost of a cup of tea in a café a day – or any of the other common economic measures about climate change.

The theme is picked up by Andrew Stock (Origin Energy). He highlights on climate change we experience news dominated by fear. At the same time we have 1,000 MW of solar installed by households across Australia. These are people acting from their hip pocket.

It’s a classic confusion. Stephen Yarwood (Lord Mayor Adelaide) illustrates it from the perspective of a business worried about action on climate change. The business person put to him that this means reducing car parking spaces and potentially trade (fewer shoppers). But, what the businesses really want is more people walking past shops, something you don’t necessarily get with more car parks and traffic.

Professor Mike Young (Environment Institute) also highlights this disproportionate fear. Changes in the Australian exchange rate, and costs caused by it for exporting industries, are massive compared to the very small (one to two per cent) climate price impact. But one is hot button topic and the exchange rate is almost disregarded.

This bizarre disjunction is mirrored with the business community and perspectives of big business attitudes. David Knox (Santos) talks about there being far more common ground between business and government than people are led to believe.

And all this is going on while we’re clearly feeling the impacts of climate change – now, as David Klingberg (Centrex Metals) points out.

But it is very hard to translate this knowledge and transcend the fears. As Senator Penny Wong explains:

It’s very hard for politicians to argue ‘people should act now for the benefit of the future’

Senator Wong also reminds us about the fragility of reform and consensus. It should never be underestimated how easy such consensus can fail. Annabel Crabb (ABC and the forum’s facilitator) ably illustrates this reflecting on how in just 4 years Australia has moved from both major political parties agreeing to, ‘a pile of political roadkill, a confused and hostile electorate’.

The common call from the whole group is to make time to dream, to vision, to talk about the future.

This work needs to be continuous to enable such change.

Download the full podcast of the event here.

In Australia, we struggle to get the climate change discussion past immediate hip-pocket lines. Our public debate isn’t about the sort of future we want. Rather it’s much more around the fear of change and potential pain.

Tonight (Thursday 29 September 2011) some leading voices from South Australia try to step out of the immediate, lead our thoughts to possible futures, engage our hopes and potentials and, help think through the leadership needed to answer this pressing challenge.

This is at a Leadership and Climate Change Forum. Annabel Crabb, it’s moderator, points out we’re living in a modern day tragedy:

On climate change, this nation [Australia] essentially had consensus in 2007; our politicians applied themselves diligently to the situation and four short years later we’ve got a pile of political roadkill, a confused and hostile electorate and two protagonists who nobody likes, shouting themselves hoarse while their offsiders go through each others’ bins…

So how do we get past this? Panelist Senator Penny Wong says:

We have to continue to talk to the Australian people, talk with the Australian people about why action on climate change is important, why we can’t just let this go, why we can’t just say, ‘Let’s leave this for someone else to deal with.’

For panelist David Klingberg some of this is a mix of government and personal leadership:

I resent the government typecasting emitters as polluters; if you want collaboration it is not the right way to go about it. … In some ways I’m providing leadership by supporting what the Commonwealth has done with some modifications, the problem is with the industry there are a lot of people with vested interests.

In these quotes – and the longer articles they come from – there are many paradoxes. Conflicting positions that seemingly defy logic. Niki Vincent from the Leaders Institute of SA (which is organising tonight’s forum along with the Environment Institute) helps us to step through some of these issues.

Climate change is an adaptive problem – not a technical problem. Adaptive problems are tangled, complex, and involve multiple systems. Solving them requires new learning, creativity, innovation and new patterns of behaviour – changes of hearts and minds. Painful adjustments.

Another paradox is we have compelling evidence that action is in our interests. But our society is seemingly cognitively avoiding connecting with this evidence. We would say that we want a better life. But we don’t act to create it at anything like the rate that makes rational sense.

These conflicts and contradictions are inherent to any complex problem. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t solve them even though we will make many mistakes while doing so.

There’s a high powered panel discussing this tonight.
The livestream is here at 6pm Adelaide time and these are the instructions if you need help. Panel is:

• Senator Penny Wong, Minister for Finance and Deregulation in the Gillard Labor Government,
• Andrew Stock, Director, Executive Projects, Origin Energy Ltd
• David Klingberg, Chairman of Centrex Metals and former chairman of the Premier’s Climate Change Council.
• The Right Honourable Stephen Yarwood, Lord Mayor of Adelaide
• Professor Mike Young, Executive Director of the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute
• David Knox, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Santos Ltd

All facilitated by Annabel Crabb – political commentator and the ABC’s chief online political writer.

When Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote the Death of Environmentalism, controversy raged. They argued – after interviewing more than 25 of the US environmental community’s top leaders, thinkers and funders – people need to search beneath symptoms, that appear to be causes, for deeper issues.

For example, the cause of global warming is too much greenhouse gas. Which leads to action; lets legislate to cut emissions.

So what’s stopping us and this solution? They asked us to consider obstacles like:

• Our failure to articulate an inspiring and positive vision.
• The radical right’s control of all three branches of the US government.
• Trade policies that undermine environmental protections.
• Overpopulation.
• The influence of money in American politics.
• The inability to craft legislative proposals that shape the debate around core American values.
• Poverty.

The point is not, just, that there are many barriers. But the solutions we seek to implement depend on how we frame the problem. That is, how deeply we look beneath, while still including, the initial causes like greenhouse emissions.

Death of Environmentalism was written in 2004. Fast forward to today and we want to be picking policy winners. The best solutions are those that we can implement now and for the future. Not the most perfect, ideal, cap and trade system (or other mechanism) if they never becomes law.

In today’s terms it also means standing in other’s shoes – people who don’t believe action on climate change is important. This could vitally avoid a schism like the USA abortion debate – a climate-action fracture Bryan Walsh outlines here.

Communicating science is vital, difficult and challenging. Just how do we effectively talk about probability and likelihood of increased impacts on humans with climate change? Science, communication and psychology has a big role to play.

Just one example to illustrate the point. The Fear Won’t Do It study looks at what we commonly see with climate issues – the risk of destruction to ice caps, the Barrier Reef, coral bleaching, increased severity of dangerous storms and, likelihood of more/longer heat waves etc. While this might grab people’s attention it is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement.

Research like this argues we should be engaging people’s personal concerns. And understanding environmental leadership.

Part of this leadership, in Australia, is National Science Week. And within this is a social media challenge to science communicators. See details – complete with free tickets to win to How I Ended This Summer – here…

Image from the film How I Ended This Summer. It’s shot at an Arctic research station.

While Japan struggles to shift mountains of debris and deal with human tragedy from the gargantuan tsunami, the ongoing Fukushima nuclear accident is seeing some significant mind shifts.

George Monbiot’s change of heart has the highest profile. A widely regarded environmental advocate, Fukushima has taught him to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power. He says:

On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power…

(But) there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power…

Not shifting is Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountains Institute. He finds nuclear so slow and costly that building plants reduces and retards climate protection.

Here’s how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy…

Who’s right? Barry Brook makes the base case for nuclear safety and why we need it here. Amory Lovins for efficiency, distributed power generation and why nuclear is out of date here.

Image: Fukushima Daiichi March 14 2011

Three quarters (76%) of Australians believe it is important to take action on climate change. This support, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean action and Australia is trying again to introduce a price on carbon.

So how important is the pitch? Here’s PM Julia Gillard on talkback radio (Feb 25 2011):

The government, in a methodical, careful, structured way is doing the right thing to create a clean-energy future for this country, to make sure we’ve got jobs in the future. I don’t want this country to be left behind.

The pitch mirrors what we know from climate change polling. Words and perspectives are important. This Stamford University study on USA attitudes illustrates just how important. The study asked the following questions with significant changes in results. And you’ll see some of the lessons mirrored in the statements above.

1. What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?
In this traditional question, about 49% answered economy or unemployment. Only 1% environment or global warming.

2. What do you think is the most important problem facing the world today?
This increases environmental issue responses to 7%. 32% say economy issues.

3. What do you think will be the most important problem facing the world in the future?
With the future, 14% chose environment/global warming. Economic down to 21%.

4. What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?
Now, 25% say environment issues. Only 10% pick economic.

Picture: Word cloud from Feb 24 PM press release.