August 06, 2010

Toxic sludge machine

(Summer re-run: first published 11 October 2008)

I was critical last week of commentators who describe the financial crisis as "psychological".

Those who blame a "lack of transparency" are on stronger ground - although ignorance of the facts or the law is not a valid excuse in other domains of life.

The process chart above describes something called a Financial Products Markup Language which is said (on its website) to be "the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments". The idea is to "streamline the process supporting trading activities in the financial derivatives domain".

The chart looks neat and orderly - hygienic, even, with all that blue - but reflect a moment: The system has been programmed for deranged individuals who, as we now know, believe that exponential growth to eternity is a right and proper basis for the design of the world's financial system.

GIGO - or Garbage In, Garbage Out - is a phrase used by computer programmers to remind laypeople that computers "will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and spew out mountains of erroneous information in a short time".

Where we're at now is that systems designed to "streamline" the market have been spewing out financial derivatives which, insofar as anyone can count them, now amount to eight hundred times global GDP.

This mass of red stuff (the red wedge on the inverted pyramid above, also known in financial circles as "toxic sludge") has now started to leak out of the balloon. And that's why this crisis is not psychological.

For Dan Roberts in The Telegraph "the real mystery is how the negative feedback loop in the financial markets became so devastating. How could this domino effect happen so quickly? How could we lose control of something we designed to serve us?".

It's not a mystery. Think back to Three Mile island . (The photo above is of its mis-named control room.)

During that calamity, within a few seconds after the physical accident at the nuclear reactor began, more than a hundred warning lights were flashing in the control room.

"I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel," one of the duty operators, Craig Faust (sic) said later. "It wasn't giving us any useful information." Water pumps, the turbine and the reactor had all unexpectedly shut down. But none of the blinking lights told the operators what they needed to know.

Or wanted to know.

In today's financial discontinuity, the complexity of the information available (think of all those screens)

has been compounded by two further factors: a lot of the trading is driven by powerful semi-automated systems ; and a lot of people clearly have not wanted to know what the screens were telling them.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:46 PM

April 05, 2010

In place of a "less bad" economy

"A thief who tells a judge he is stealing less than before will receive no leniency. So why do companies get environmental awards for polluting less - even though they are still polluting?".

Gunther Pauli is scornful in his new book The Blue Economy of the "do less bad" school of environmentalism.

"It's an approach which sees billions of dollars invested in less toxic and longer lasting batteries - even though the 'less toxic batteries' still rely on mining, smelting and toxic chemistry, are not recycled, and are dumped into the environment to toxify our ecosystems and pose long term health hazards".

The most entrancing scenario for me is the idea of replacing mining with lichen. Mining, for Pauli, is "one of humanity's most aggressive interventions. Armed with dynamite, and consuming massive amounts of water and energy, we extract minute concentrations of gold from the depths of the earth"

He asks us to consider that lichens are great miners, capable of extracting specific inorganic molecules like magnesium from rocks and trees. I've loved looking at lichen all my life, but had not realised until now that they could be replacements for horrors like this:

Pauli's wants to build a new economy on the base one hundred of best nature-inspired technologies like lichen. His central principle is the idea of cascading nutrients and energy - the way ecosystems do.

"A cascade is a waterfall. It requires no power, it flows with the force of gravity. It transports nutrients between biological kingdoms - absorbed minerals feed microorganisms, microorganisms feed plants, plants feed other species, with the waste of one being nourishment for another".

Cascading energy and nutrients leads to sustainability, says Pauli, by reducing or eliminating inputs such as energy, and eliminating waste and its cost - not just as pollution but also as an inefficient use of materials. In ecosystems, there is no waste because the by products of one process are inputs to another process.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:03 AM

March 01, 2010

Balanced budgets?

A few weeks back I was talking to Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, a partner in the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta, when we were drowned out by the roar of a Eurofighter passing overhead. "One of those costs the same as a medium-sized opera house", Kjetl observed drily.

Kjetl should know: he designed this medium-sized opera house in Oslo:

Kjetl's throwaway comment prompted me to start looking for numbers comparing military versus cultural spending on a country-by-country basis.

Several hours later, I am suspending this project. I cannot find a neat comparison league table - and the numbers I *have* found look so insane that I repeat them here in the hope that someone will reassure me that I am not imagining things.

For example, an article in Counterpunch called Gargantua's Mouth: The Pentagon and the Suckers states that "44 cents of every taxpayer's dollar feeds the military budget - at a time when no nation has a military capable of challenging us." Saul Landau and Nelson P Valdes write that "since 1988, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, and no major power threatened, the military has ingested some $5.1 trillion. Every two years since 2001, the military budget has grown by approximately $100 billion".

OK, so Counterpunch is a radical magazine and they would say that. Looking for more impartial data, I found a chart in Aviation Week, which is almost a trade magazine of the military industrial complex, that included these numbers for per capita military spending:
U.S.: $545.3 billion, that's roughly $45,500 per head of the population.
U.K.: $63.2 billion, or $34,800 per head.
France: $60.3 billion, or $32,100 per head.
Germany: $41.8 billion, or $33,800 per head.

Then I found a study that concludes that the United States spent $1,780 per head on education in 2001 (France, The Netherlands and Canada each spent more than $1,200 per capita). Hmmm.

Turning to culture and the arts, the best I could find is a perplexing web database that appears to show that cultural expenditure per capita in Spain is euro 135, compared to Germany which, in 2007, spent 99 euros per capita.

In round numbers, then, Germany appears to spend 25,000 euros per person on defence, versus about 100 euros per head on culture. I have to assume that the gap in the US and UK, were the numbers to be available, would be a good deal wider.

As I said: insane numbers.

I distract you (and myself) with these numbers mainly because, in the years ahead, spending on the things that we do care about - education, culture, sustainability - looks certain to plummet.

In the UK, for example, commentators are talking gravely about public spending cuts of 10, 15, or 20 percent. Insiders tell me that cuts will be 40 percent or more, in real terms, over the coming few years.
Large cultural and educational institutions will suck in what little public funding is available. Government funding for small, grassroots activities will dry up almost completely.

Time to despair? Not necessarily. The future, for me, belongs to ultra-light culture and education. I'll write about light education at a later date - but for now, here are two cultural green shoots.

Located in the centre of Beijing on one of its old hutong alleyways, HomeShop [below] is a 25sqm store space turned sleeping-working-living studio.

HomeShop is "an open platform, working diversely via the realms of art, theory, community practice and urban research to explore the possibilities of the microaesthetic and the micropolitical". HomeShop "begins within a shrinking neighbourhood of steadfast Beijingers and reexamines that which is embedded within the everyday: emerging communities, daily routes, minor practices and the spectacular banal. All pass by our window front, and it is right here that we can begin to engage the certain potentialities in our very midst".

HomeShop reminds me of Galerie Zero in Berlin, which, at 20 square metres, is physically even smaller

But Galerie Zero's cultural footprint is hundreds of times larger. Galerie Zero has produced 100 pioneering art shows, installations and events in the Kreusberg area of Berlin over a six year period.

Each of these 100 events cost less to produce than the price of a single door in an "iconic" art museum. For the price of one eurofighter, I'm sure Galerie Zero, or HomeShop, could stage 25,000 events. And it's not just about quantity of output: their activities, being created in and by a community, have a quality that big ticket items can never equal. They are the future.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:09 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2009

In the Palace of the Popes

Is culture something that’s produced to be sold, or a description of the ways people live? It’s an old question, but last week’s Forum d’Avignon (see also my story below) put a new spin on it: could the culture industries lead the way out of the economic crisis?

The debate did not take place on neutral territory. The Forum’s 300 grandees of media, economy and culture met in the Palace of the Popes. The event felt more like a papal conclave than a business meeting.

But the Forum crowd was not to be diverted from earthly matters. The first day coincided with the leak of a dramatic missive from Société Générale warning its private clients to be ready for a possible global economic collapse over the next two years.

Against that background, a report presented by one of three big consulting firms present in force, Bain, seemed to amplify the already nervous disposition of the media titans. Bain talked about “value shifts” in the culture and media industries – but from the look of the charts, “disappearance of profits” would have been more fitting language.

Eric Scherer, strategy supremo at Agence France Presse, has coined the term mediapocalypse to describe the apparent vaporization of business models that have kept these media-cultural monoliths afloat until recent times.

The Forum came to life with an apostatic riff by Lawrence Lessig on “remix culture” For Lessig, originator of the Creative Commons license, the mainstream media’s crisis is not just about money, it’s about power. Remix - along with open source, the free software movement, and so on - is a powerful challenge to the 'read only’ or permission-based culture of mainstream media and culture.

Lessig’s talk was given added drama by the lowering presence on the podium of Pope Clement VII- played, on this occasion, by Dan Glickman, boss of the Motion Picture Association.

The Palace of the Popes is a resolutely read-only environment. It is also is also very old, a reminder that these cultural battles go back a long way. Ivan Illich traced the origins of read-only culture to the twelfth century; that was when reading changed from a a vocal - and therefore social - activity done in the monastery, to a predominantly silent activity performed by and for individuals.

I had the job of animating a panel on "Beyond GDP". I tried to provoke a reaction by describing GDP (in the words of the True Cost campaign) as a “doomsday machine”, and suggested that the wealth underlying the so-called leisure society (brought to us by the aforementioned culture industries) is illusory, because we are spending natural capital, not revenue.

Disappointingly, nobody seemed to find this controversial. Indeed one of our panelists, Pier Paolo Paduan, number 2 at the OECD, and therefore a Cardinal, at least, of economic statistics, stated that the important debate is about values, not about indicators. What we value, gets measured he said, pointedly.

So:could the culture industries lead the way out of the economic crisis? The Forum ended when a more interesting possibility began to emerge: that our problem is not a damaged economic system that can be fixed by a dosage of culture - it is a flawed economic system that needs to be replaced.

To understand what could replace the ecocidal economy we have now, we need to focus on a different kind of culture - culture as a description of the ways people live - and can live differently.

Whether the Palace of the Popes is ready to host a Forum devoted to that agenda, only time will tell.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:08 AM

November 18, 2009

Post-GDP: metrics, aesthetics, or ethics?

So on Friday I'm immoderating a panel discussion about "After GDP" at the Forum d'Avignon, a uniquely French event which brings the worlds of culture, economy and media together in the Palais des Papes. By way of throwing an advance stone into the pond, I wrote this short background article for Les Echos. The French version comes first (thanks, Emilie!); scroll down for the English version.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:05 PM

October 06, 2009

Do true cost economics spell finito for the Milan design scene?

Few artefacts embody so much mental, but also material energy, as a high design furniture from Milan. Will this sector be viable when the true social and environmental costs of industrial production start to be charged, rather than hidden?

Well maybe, and maybe not: my lecture is followed by a debate. Thursday 8 October, Design Library, via Savona 11, Milan. The event is for members of Design Library but we have a few tickets available: email roberto.boncio@designpartners.it

Posted by John Thackara at 06:19 PM

July 05, 2009

Metrics and Aesthetics (cont.)

I can understand why Enrico Giovannini, Chief Statistician of the OECD, is so pleased with with his new visualzation tool, the OECD Factbook Explorer. Few people on the planet can be responsible for a larger volume of statistics than he is - or so aware that the more data proliferate, the harder it is to extract meaning from them.

The new tool has been developed by Mikael Jern and his group at the National Center for Visual Analytics at Linköping University in Sweden. Four large research funds are jointly supporting Sweden's national focus on the creation of advanced and interactive visualisation tools for complex and multidimensional amounts of data.

The Factbook Explorer clearly meets a pressing need. When Professor Giovannini showed me the tool in Paris last week, more than 60,000 people had visited the BBC website within a day of the story being posted.

The OECD's tool is impressive as eye candy. But making numbers look interesting is not its main point. Its longer-term potential is as a tool to help change the ways we perceive and measure economic progress.

(See at this point my earlier piece on Metrics and Aesthetics )

Ever since we organised Doors of Perception 3 on the theme "info-eco" in 1995, we've been preoccupied by the question: how might information technology and design help us live more lightly on the planet?

Doors 3 was one of the first events to bring 'info' and 'eco' people together, and some readers of this blog may well remember the sharp differences in character and outlook of the two camps.

A core difference between the info and eco crowds concerned the degree to which digital monitoring tools were to be trusted and relied on. Eco critics worried that mesmerising visualizations might make things worse by providing us with engaging images of the wrong kinds of data.

(This suspicion by eco people has not modifed much in the intervening 14 years, as is indicated in my post below on The Internet Things. )

What matters is less how information is presented, than what is being counted - and how the numbers are used.

Despite the global economic crisis, the trajectory of “the Dow” still shapes how many people, especially in the North, perceive the economy in particular, and progress in general: Up is good, down is bad.

The flaw with the Dow is that its "up" describes increases in energy and resource flows that are devastating the biosphere.

Notoriously, traditional economics describes water, minerals, biodiversity - and the biosphere as a whole - as costs that are ”external” to economic activity. And because these vital resources don’t get counted, they don’t get looked after.

In the words of Janine Benyus nature, in traditional economic thinking, is treated "like a warehouse, when it should be seen as our mentor".

The good news is that a raft of alternative systems of economic measurement are now emerging that take into account a more complete measure of human and ecosystem wellbeing.

The OECD, for example, has been running a series of international conferences on Measuring and Fostering the Progress of Societies. The next in the series is a big conference in Korea in October.

In parallel with the OECD Global Project, as it's called, in 2008 French President Nicolas Sarkozy recruited two Nobel economists, Amartya Sen of India and Joseph Stiglitz of the US, to advise him on changing the way French economic growth is calculated. “We must change the way we measure growth,” said Sarkozy - calling (somewhat implausibly) for a “moralization of capitalism”. President Sarkozy's 24-member commission (of which Enrico Giovannini is also a member) is expected to publish its final report conclusions within a few weeks. Its provisional conclusions were published last week.

Given the myriad indicators and measurement frameworks about the the biosphere that are out there, the holy grail of these projects for a long time was to aggregate these various metrics into a single number - a “Dow for the biosphere" as a whole. It seemed obvious that a single number would be best-placed to compete for attention with the Dow, and hence change behaviour and policy.

Latterly, faced with a remorceless acceleration in the production of composite indicators (their number grew by 50% in 2008 alone) the emphasis seems to be evolving - from the search for a single number, to a discussion of how best new indicators should be designed and used - and by whom.

As new indicators emerge, and as new tools (like OECD Explorer) to 'read' them are developed, the most important issue becomes one of ownership and use. How might citizens take ownership and control of evidence-based discussions about new ways to set priorities?

And here, things could get really interesting. The OECD's current newsletter contains a text by Richard Eckersley that asks, "Is the West really the best?" New measures of progress need to reflect a broader reality, Eckerlsey argues, than an individual's happiness.

The West comes out top of many happiness surveys, and yet many of its citizens, especially younger ones, admit to feeling "lonely, very stressed, recently hopeless and depressed, and frequently angry."

A better indication is perhaps given by the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index in which Latin American nations top index ranking countries by ecological footprint and happiness of their citizens. This year, Costa Rica emerges as number one.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:28 AM | Comments (2)

April 04, 2009

Are toxic assets a reprieve for the biosphere?

Last October I first saw this splendid inverted pyramid chart (this version has been smartened up) and put it next to another diagramme about programmed trading. I nicknamed the combination image a "Toxic Sludge Machine". "Where we're at now" (I wrote then) "is that systems designed to "streamline" the market have been spewing out financial derivatives which, insofar as anyone can count them, now amount to eight hundred times global GDP".

But the financial crisis is not just the result of technology running amok. For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street, and the City in London, have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." Bill Black, who wrote a book by that title, says the numbers, as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud. (There's a really terrific interview with Black by Bill Moyers, here. )

Virulent critics like Black (and Illargi & Stoneleigh at Automatic Earth ) don't actually accuse the politicians of criminality. They suggest, rather, that the Obamas and Geithners, Browns and Darlings, are scared that the whole global financial edifice would collapse if the truth (that the banks are all insolvent) were to be widely known. Therefore they (the pols) participate in a cover-up of the truth to keep the system afloat.

As I said yesterday (see below), most leading politicians are lawyers and economists for whom the known world more or less begins and ends with the financial-legal one. It literally would not occur to them that letting the whole system collapse might be a positive option.

But consider the following. The inverted pyramid above describes a speculative/virtual cloud of money hundreds of times bigger than the planet itself (the small sphere at the bottom). But not all of this cloud stays virtual. The planet is groaning under the weight of cities and highways - and landfills filled with discarded products - most of which were paid for with borrowed money. That's to say, money from the toxic sludge machine.

Last year, a new product was launched somewhere in the world every three minutes. In China, new skyscrapers were built almost as fast. The vast majority of these materialised investments involved the in-efficient use of energy, water, and natural resources. Each artefact or building thereby contributed to the 70 million tonnes of C02 that is emitted into the earth’s atmosphere, every 24 hours, as a result of human activity.

Two years ago the Stern Review stated that the global cost of averting dangerous climate change (if we acted at once) would be $440 billion a year. In 2005, the US government alone spent $480 billion on wars and preparation for wars; the total military expenses of the 15 biggest military spending counties was $840 billion.

At the G20 summit last week, even bigger numbers were bandied around as politicians promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the financial system.

Help me out here. If the climate, upon which all life depends, has been damaged by human activity. If it is true, as climate scientists say, that global emissions need to fall by 70% or 85% by 2050. Then is it not a good thing, for the biosphere, if the financial machine which drives all this damaging activity is killed by its own toxic by-products?

[So endeth my 600th sermon/post here].

Posted by John Thackara at 06:52 PM | Comments (1)

April 03, 2009

Sins of emission (2)

The Guardian says today [Friday] that the (G20) summit's biggest loser may have been the fight against climate change. "Hundreds of billions were found for the IMF and World Bank, but for making the transition to a green economy there is no money on the table".

The Guardian quotes diplomatic sources to the effect that "China led the opposition to green language in the final communique". I don't buy this for a second - that China is to blame. On the contrary: the G20 was always going to be about a rescue of the ecocidal economic model that has led us to this situation. If they thought about it all, I'm sure most of the political leaders in London told each other they would "deal with climate change later, in Copenhagen".

It's tempting, on days like this, to rage and scream at these ignorant bastards. But do you know what? They won't hear - because they can't hear. There's nothing in the lived experience of a senior politician (think of that grim conference centre yesterday) to help him or her understand the world differently. Most of them are lawyers and economists: their known world is, by training and socialization, abstract and disconnected from the biosphere.

Besides, is it a good use of one's life energy to scream at the captain of the Titanic? The economic model the G20-ers hope to have 'rescued' is dying anyway.

That's why I don't agree that yesterday was a "lost opportunity". The G20 was never going to be where a "green economy" would be made - or even thought about. The green economy is being made elsewhere.

And that reminds me: I have a meeting to go to about rainwater capture in our town.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:25 AM | Comments (1)

April 02, 2009

Sins of emission

An unlikley climate change alliance has emerged: China and Christian Aid. Both argue that countries should take responsibility for their aggregate greenhouse gas emissions to ensure fair play as nations strive to halve global emissions by 2050.

He Jiankun, a professor from Tsinghua University, says today that developed countries, which are home to just 20 percent of the world's population, have contributed 75 percent of all global emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, because cumulative carbon dioxide emissions hang around in the atmosphere for 50-100 years, every nation should take responsibility for its aggregate contribution to climate change.

Conservative commentators this week charge that China is looking for ways to obscure the fact that it now tops the list in annual carbon dioxide emissions and that that the country is "backing out of global efforts to address climate change".

This sort of argument will no longer wash.

The truth is that rich countries have been exporting their emissions to countries like China and India, and it's that that has got to stop.

This point was forcibly made two years ago by the UK-based NGO Christian Aid. In a report called Coming Clean: Revealing the UK’s true carbon footprint , the charity stated firmly that "it is indisputably the rich, industrialised, northern countries that caused this problem in the first place" and went on: "Given that the UK arguably began the whole process of polluting the planet by leading the industrial revolution, this sidestepping of our moral culpability for climate change is unworthy and will do little to inspire developing countries to curb their own emissions".

The Chinese scientists' proposition is tricky, to put it mildly, for rich countries like Britain. Its former prime minister, Tony Blair, liked to tell the world that his country was only responsible for two per cent of global emissions. "[If] we shut down all of Britain's emissions tomorrow, growth in China will make up the difference within two years. So we've got to be realistic about how much obligation we've got to put on ourselves" he said 2006 (on returning from a Caribbean holiday).

Christian Aid point out in 'Coming Clean' that although CO2 emissions based physically in the UK may comprise just two per cent of today's global total, the activity of UK companies worldwide raises that share to 12-15 per cent. Christian Aid did not say this at the time, but if you add in UK aggregate emissions since 1900, as the Chinese scientists want us to do, then the UK is responsible for one fifth of all global emissions.

Which is startling, but not the important point. Rather than divide the world up into innocent and guilty nations, the priority now is to understand the global economy as a totality, determine, with numbers, which economic flows of stuff are unsustainable, and design their replacements. This is not a small ask. But, as I've pointed out here on several occasions, the elements of a completely new economic order are not far from being ready to be put into place.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:01 AM

March 22, 2009

Look at the big numbers, not at the small numbers

I'm waiting eagerly for my copy of a new book to arrive, recommended to me by Patrick Beeker: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Its author, David McKay, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge University, has responded to an urgent global challenge: how to make sense of the conflicting claims and information bandied about on all matters eco.

I ordered the book having read this one short piece on the book's website: "Leaving mobile phone chargers plugged in is often held up as an example of a behavioural eco-crime. The truth is that the amount of energy saved by switching off a phone charger is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for *one second*".

Sometimes, it's true, people use numbers to cloud issues intentionally. This week's manufactured outrage about AIG bonuses seems to be a case in point. Leo Kolivakis wants us to follow the big money, not the small money. "Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1 per cent – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a “pass-through” to its counterparties. This sum is over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters".

Now, next time you read about the necessity to bail out the car industry, think about that phone charger...

Posted by John Thackara at 09:13 AM | Comments (3)

March 08, 2009

"Metrics and Aesthetics"

I contributed this text to an event called Green Platform at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

] Introduction: measuring what matters

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others”. Groucho Marx could also have been talking about environmental standards. Our world is awash in eco information, but starved of meaning. Hundreds of organisations churn out a flood of reports, graphs, studies, punditry – and lists.

So many lists! I'm supposed to be an expert on sustainability, but it still gives me a headache trying to keep track of the Triple Bottom Line; the Three Main Components (and Four System Conditions) of The Natural Step; One Planet Living's Ten Guiding Principles; the World Wildlife Fund's Three Forms of Solidarity; the Copenhagen Agenda's Ten Principles for Sustainable City Governance; the Framework of Eight Doorways of the Sustainable Schools Network; the 12 Indicators To Follow of the Earth Policy Institute; the 11 Indicators of a Sustainable City (developed by Montreal); and the Ten Hannover Principles promulgated by Bill McDonough.

Each list is the result of deep thought by smart and dedicated people - and there are doubtless other important to-do lists out there that I've missed. But can we please agree: enough already?

The pervasive tendency of polticians to dissemble adds to the uncertainty. Vague promises to use "as few natural resources as possible," "reduce waste to a minimum" or deliver the "greenest Olympics planned so far" amplifies our feelings of anxiety that not enough is being done - and that what is being done, is not being done fast enough.

How do we measure "sustainable"? What is the benchmark? How far is it from here, to there? And how long do we have to get there?

In the transition towards a more balanced economy and society, we probably do have to take numbers and metrics seriously. And if a well-engineered new economic system is needed, we probably need it to be more like a German car than an Italian one.

But this is not to say that numbers are all that matters. On the contrary, we a new synthesis of metrics and aesthetics. The what *and* the why are equally important.

] Beyond GDP

Numbers on their own are not meaningful unless we measure what matters.

For generations, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the dominant measure of economic performance. Economic growth, productivity, and jobs were assumed to be the best way to measure well-being and happiness.

The fatal flaw with GDP as a measure of progress is that it does not take account of natural resources and ecosystems, nor of social and human capital. B oth forms lof capital - natural and social - are assumed in GDP to be free, and effectively limitless. Locked as it is into economic models and institutions, the GDP mindset guarantees that our economy is not sustainable.

But researchers and progressive economists have not been idle since Limits To Growth was published in 1972. After long periods of low-profile gestation, alternative systems of economic measurement are now emerging.

Thanks to today’s calamatous financial situation, the timing of their emergence may well be perfect.: As one system implodes, the architecture of a new one is ready to put in its place.

These new frameworks take into account a more complete measure of human and ecosystem wellbeing. With names like Ecological Footprint, Human Development Index, Happy Planet Index, and Genuine Savings Approach, they provide the elements of a post-GDP way of seeing, measuring and acting in the world.

] Climate Change Economics

The first major initiatve was the publication late in 2006 of the Stern Review of Climate Change Economics by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist. This long, dry but remarkable document marked a step change in government perceptions of climate change.

It was not just that Stern's conclusions correspond broadly to what environmentalists had been saying for 35 years. The fact that the report was commissioned by The Treasury, which control’s Britain’s taxation and money - was also key. Money is at stake: Something must be done!

Stern paves the way for so-called “external” costs to be counted properly in national acounts for the first time. Notoriously, economists describe as”external” costs resources - such as water, minerals, and the biosphere as a whole - that, until now, have not been properly counted. Traditional economics count some of the energy used to exploit resources – but do not pay the full price of the energy or the resources.

Governments can use fiscal regulations and taxation to make these so-called “external” costs internal costs, payable by the producer. Matter and energy flowing through the economic system would then have to be paid for at full price - rather than taken for granted as a freebie.

These profound structural changes have not yet been implemented, but the Stern review provides an economic framework for dramatic changes to be introduced.

] The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity

Two years after the Stern Review, a report called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), by Pavan Sukhdev, was published by Deutschebank and the European Commission. Setting out a "comprehensive and compelling economic case for the conservation of biodiversity", TEEB promotes a better understanding of the true economic value of the benefits we receive from nature.

"Nature provides human society with a vast diversity of benefits such as food, fibres fuel, clean water, healthy soil, protection from floods, protection from soil erosion, medicines, storing carbon (important in the fight against climate change) and many more” begins the TEEB report. Though our wellbeing is totally dependent upon these ecosystem services, they are predominantly ‘public goods’ with no markets and no prices, “they often are not detected by our current economic compass".

TEEB comes just in time. The world is witnessing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity in ecosystems. Some 10-30% of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are threatened with extinction. A major cause of this loss is the destruction of natural habitats by economic ‘development’ based on the expansion of the agriculture, forestry, oil and gas, mining, transport, and construction sectors.

According to TEEB, the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the banking crisis. The report puts the cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion per year.The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

As forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free. So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available. Or we have to do without them. Either way, there is a financial cost.

This terrifying rate of loss is due to pressures from population growth, changing diets, urbanisation and also climate change. Biodiversity is declining, our ecosystems are being continuously degraded and we, in turn, are suffering the consequences. As Sukhdev explains it, "we are trying to navigate uncharted and turbulent waters with an old and defective economic compass and that this was affecting our ability to forge a sustainable economy in harmony with nature."

TEEB has the potential to be the trigger that transforms how business measures, and therefore looks after, these life-critical assets.

After all, the drinks industry depends on ecosystems to supply fresh water; agribusiness relies on grasslands for insect pollinators, nutrient cycling, and erosion control; the insurance industry benefits from the fact that coastal marshes reduce the damage caused by hurricanes and that wetlands absorb water from floods.
http://idw-online.de/pages/en/news?id=262707 http://www.wri.org/stories/2008/03/companies-respond-ecosystem-degradation
http://www.bmu.de/english/nature/un_conference_on_biological_diversity_2008/papers/doc/41608.php

] Biodiversity banking

The Stern Review, and TEEB, provide new ways to measure the ecological impacts of economic activity on a large scale.

New tools are also nearly ready to help individual companies measure the impact of their day-to-day operations on ecosystems.
These tools are likely to be used, because companies anticipate increasing and more precise monitoring - not only of any pollution they might cause, but, more broadly, for positive or negative impacts on ecosystems in areas where they operate, or obtain resources.

Companies face not just regulation but indirect pressure, too, from investors, insurers, activists, employees or neighbourhood communities.

One of these new tools is Biodiversity Banking. This is a framework which allows biodiversity to be reliably measured, and for market-based solutions to place a monetary value on ecosystem services affected. The first practical aplications have been used in property development. Because biodiversity values are reduced through land clearing and building development, developers are being required to offset biodiversity loss.

In the United States, for example, a "wetland banking" process requires developers to avoid harm to wetlands - but if harm is agreed to be unavoidable, then similar wetlands of similar functions and values must be protected, enhanced or restored in compensation for those that will be damaged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_banking

Some conservation organizations caution strongly that biodiversity offsets could be used by developers and government authorities to allow inappropriate developments. A business platform called Business and Biodoversity Offsets Program (BBOP) responds that biodiversity offsets do not only rehabilitate sites but also,“address a company's full impact on biodiversity at the landscape scale”. The debate is ongoing.
http://www.forest-trends.org/biodiversityoffsetprogram/offsets.php

A variety of other tools is evaluated in "Measuring Corporate Impact on Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Review of New Tools", a December 2008 report from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR).

In its introduction, BSR points out that one hundred years ago, we didn’t have the dozens of macroeconomic measures in use today. “The Great Depression presented circumstances that couldn’t be addressed without new tools and metrics. Today is an equivalent era for environmental issues”

The fascinating range of tools examined by BSR include ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES); Ecosystem Services Review (ESR) ; Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI); Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT); Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services (MIMES); the Natural Value Initiative (NVI); and so on – there are 30 in all.
http://www.bsr.org/reports/BSR_EMI_Tools_Application.pdf

] Countering greenwash

These new measurement systems and tools described are important at the macro-economic and company-wide level. But it is unrealistic to expect the individual citizen to earn about and use these new systems. On the contrary, citizens are already deluged by a mass of confusing data.

Any supermarket these days contains hundreds of labels and displays that make claims about the environmental attributes of different products. Organic, Fairtrade, FSC Certified, "sustainable". This blizzard of assertions is confusing – in some cases, intentionally so. Some companies advertise products and services with environmental claims that are false, unsubstantiated or unethical.

The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) spend more money asserting their green credentials than they do changing what they do in practice.In consumer markets, greenwashing often involves changes to the brand name and/or label.

Early warning signs of greenwashing are the appearance of trees, birds, or dew drops on product packaging and communications. If all three are on the box, the product will probably make your skin peel off in seconds.

Measures to deal with the greenwashing problem are in development. In the UK, for example, the Carbon Trust and the government are working with BSI British Standards to co-sponsor the development of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS). This will be a standard method for measuring the embodied green house gas (GHG) emissions in products and services across a wide range of product categories and their supply chains.

The aim is to enable companies to measure the GHG related impacts of their products, understand the life-cycle climate change impacts of their products, and highlight significant emissions reduction opportunities.

The UK government has also unveiled a kitemark for carbon offsetting schemes, which – like the Biodiversity Offsetting shemes mentioned above, have come under fire for offering wildly varying levels of service. Some offset emissions by buying up carbon credits from globally recognised schemes, but others are vague about how the money will be spent. http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/How-we-can-help-you/Professional-Standards-Service/PAS-2050/

] The happiness economy

At the core of the sustainability challenge is the replacement of resource-intensive growth, in the ways we measure economic progress, with happiness and wellbeing .

In 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy recruited two Nobel economists, Amartya Sen of India and Joseph Stiglitz of the US, to advise him on changing the way French economic growth is calculated. “We must change the way we measure growth,” said Sarkozy calling (somewhat implausibly) for a “moralization of capitalism”. He went on to add that "the way gross national product is calculated should take into account the quality of life in France".

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development 20 years ago (with Pakistan's Mahbubul Haq) of the the widely used Human Development Index.

As another reformer, "anti-economist" Hazel Henderson, has explained, "in our economy, everything has a price - but nothing, it seems, has a value. The yardsticks we have chosen to measure "progress" are economic ones: margin, GNP, jobs, the Dow Jones, the prime rate. Everything else -- the health of our children, clean air, the safety of our communities, the feeling of belonging, a sense of meaning -- has to compete on the same grounds. Environmental damage, or stress on workers, don't get counted at all in such economic measures"

Now call me cynical, but I suspect that what the French president has in mind is to add France's wellbeing score to its GDP, not to substitute one for the other. But Sarkozy's move is nonetheless a signiicant step in the the fight to change the way we measure economic success.

In an adjacent development, a methodology for evaluating social capital is also being developed. The notion of a Social Return on Investment (SROI) has been developed to help social enterprises put a monetary value on the future social benefits of their activities. It allows discussion of how (and where) they create social value with their stakeholders in a more compelling way than saying 'invest in us - we're a good thing'.
http://www.sroi-uk.org/
http://www.socialcapitalpartnerships.com/pdf/Kroger_Presentation_051707.pdf
http://www.hbs.edu/centennial/conversation/futureofsocialenterprise/

Hazel Henderson, a leading promoter of alternative economic measures over three decades, recently attended a European Parliament conference called “Beyond GDP” that was organised by the European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, WWF and OECD. “Hundreds of new and more inclusive indicators of national progress were represented”, she recounts. They included “the ISEW (Indicators of Social and Economic Welfare), the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), the Genuine Progress Index (GPI), the Happy Planet Index (HPI), and the Gross National Happiness (GHI) of Bhutan”. Other regions and cities have gone ahead and produced their own indicators, she reported,including Seattle, Jacksonville, Florida, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/csp/v23s4/04.pdf

“The dam has burst” reported Henderson. “Public pressure has finally forced this long-overdue ‘Beyond GDP’ debate into the open”. She is confident that broader measures of progress will now steer countries toward sustainable forms of true wealth and progress.
http://chelseagreen.com/blogs/hazelhenderson/2009/02/19/“worldwide-support-found-for-measuring-true-wealth-of-nations”/

] Metrics, or aesthetics?

In his book Collapse, Jarred Diamond explains that societies fail when their elites are insulated from the negative impact of their own actions. Diamond focuses on Easter Island, where the overuse of wood products eventually destroyed its inhabitants' survival prospects.

The lesson applies equally to us, today. We are bewitched, as a culture, by a high entropy concept of quality and performance that drives us to waste astronomical amounts of energy and material resources. We lust for speed, perfection, control - but are blind to their true cost.

Big D economic development tends to view human, cultural and territorial assets - the people and ways of life that are already there - as impediments to progress and modernisation. A huge development industry measures progress in terms of economic growth, and increased consumption, and assumes without question that urbanisation and transport intensity are signs of progress. Development tends to devalue human agency and replace people with technology automation and “self service.”

One reason for our collective blindness is that so many of our collectively wasteful behaviours are hidden from view. Many heavy actions in daily life seem trivial in themselves: leaving the light on, printing out an e-mail, eating a plate of Kenyan beans. Our double-bind, until now, is that most of these wasteful behaviours have been counted as positives in the econometrics of consumption.

Our perceptions of change through time are especially weak. Our way of life is threatened by changes to our support system taking place over years and decades—but we tend not to notice changes over a few years or decades. We need new ways of looking at - and acting in - the world - a new aesthetics of sustainability so that, when we look at something like an airport we won't just perceive shapes, or performance, - but also embodied enegy, or embergy.

Ever since this writer organised Doors of Perception 3 on "info eco" in 1995, our conference has repeatedly asked what would it take to monitor and measure our planet’s true condition – its vital signs - in real time. Over the years since then, we've been shown a variety of sometimes beautiful perceptual aids designed to help us understand the conditon of the invisible natural systems that surround us. http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/doors3index.html

Then, in Dott 07,a festival of sustainability projets in England, we ran a project called Vital Signs. It asked, “What would it mean to monitor the region’s vital signs in real time? How can we design indicators to look at ecological footprints, energy use of buildings, food miles, transport intensity, and housing density alongside traditional economic indicators? What technologies can we use to design means of benchmarking and communicating our progress?".

Our conclusion, after these and other experiences, is that we need metrics *and* aesthetics. Tomorrow’s literacies need to be process and systems literacies. Using this new sensibility, we need to design new perceptual aids to understand the state of our natural, human, and industrial systems. New kinds of sights, sounds, symbols, and experiences could tell us about how these systems work, what stimulates them, and how and why they change through time. We need to perceive the total embodied energy in everyday products. We need to sensitise ourselves whole systems and their behaviour, and to develop a positive appeciation of closed-and-coupled systems.

Aesthetics creates the need. Metrics provides the measure of change required. Design provides the means.

The transiton to sustainability is not about messages, it's about activity. Most professional designers are in the representation business, so their first response has been to design a poster about sustainability, or launch a media campaign.

But emitting messages. however clever or evocative they may be, is not the same as helping real people, in real places, change an aspect of their everyday material reality.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:26 PM | Comments (6)

October 23, 2008

It's mad, but it's not complicated

I imagine you're having the same experience that I am? All around me, people are figuring out that the money situation may be mad, but it's not complicated.

As the Big Dipper of financial bloggers, Ilargi, writes today, for example: "Stocks are plummeting once more all around the world, and if you think that trend will stop anytime soon, then you haven’t been paying attention. As long as there is maybe $1 of real money for every $25 dollars (or $100, or $200) of funny virtual money, stocks have a long way left to fall. Especially since what little real money is left tends to stay away from the crap tables. And that is what the exchanges - or make that the entire economy - have become".

Illargi wonders, surely wisely, whether we properly understand what this means. "The funny money will disappear, no matter how hard its creators - the banks and governments operating in our societies - try to prevent that from happening. Nobody with assets that have some real value left will be willing to risk them in trades with what they know to be largely worthless counterparties. The only players staying at the table are the ones who are already broke. The only money left is the funny sort".

This sounds depressing until you realise that you don't need funny money to be active in the world. On the contrary, as countless social innovators already understand, the Law of Locality describes a near-infinity of opportunities to improve practical aspects of daily life. True, these opportunities exist outside the formal economy - but that's more a problem for the formal economy than it is for human beings. Acting locally corresponds to laws of nature that don't admit to action at a distance.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:16 PM | Comments (1)

October 21, 2008

Stuff-o-meter

So what exactly, I wondered, is the Baltic Dry Index? And is it a good thing, or a bad thing, that it is plunging downwards at the fastest rate since records began etc etc?

These turn out to be two good questions.

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI), I discover, measures the freight rates of raw materials around the world. It's therefore an important measure of material and energy intensity in the global economy.

We hardly ever see bulk carriers like the monster above, or this one below

- still less think about them. And yet we should: Shipping’s CO2 emissions, and energy intensity, are in the same order of magnitude as those of road and rail - which move much smaller cargoes over much shorter distances.

These high levels of resource intensity place a big question mark over the long term viability of bulk trade in food and raw materials.

A briefing by Global Dashboard recently commented on the shipping industry's own numbers including the graphs below.

"One of the bits of data posted " says GD, "compares the CO2 emissions from moving a ton of cargo 1 kilometre with the emissions that would result from moving it instead by rail, road or air. For shipping, the figure is 12.97 grammes of CO2 - as opposed to 17 grammes for rail, 50 for road and 552 for air.

"Presumably, the shipping companies involved think this constitutes a good argument in shipping’s favour. But in fact, the surprise is that shipping’s emissions are so high relative to the other three transport modes, rather than so low".

This brings us to the Baltic Dry Index and its impressively plunging graphs....

BDI rates have plunged 50 percent this year - in large part, apparently, because iron ore demand from China is plummeting.

Do we want the Baltic Dry Index to recover and shoot upwards again?

If the Berge Stahl stays dockside, and empty, it's good for the planet - but bad for the global economy in its present form.

Clear?

Posted by John Thackara at 09:54 AM | Comments (1)

October 14, 2008

When red is green and up is down

George Monbiot, in today's Guardian, also links the financial crisis and the ecological crisis."The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires", writes Monbiot. "The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences.The rules are the same in both cases. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows (but) if you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse". Monbiot concludes, "Now we must learn to live in the real word."

This is a good cue for me to head back to St Etienne head back to St Etienne for the coming days. I'm more convinced than ever that working at the level of the region - as we are doing there - is a better use of one's life energies (which are also finite) than making demands of national politicians that they are in no position to meet - nor even, for the most part, to understand. As Jonathon Porritt puts it in his new book Globalism and Regionalism at least two of the basic foundations of civilised life – energy, and food – are readily and satisfyingly available at a regional level. "A watchword of sustainable economics is self-reliance. This entails combining judicious and necessary trade with other countries with an unapologetic emphasis on each country maintaining security of supply in terms of energy, food, and even manufacturing".

Posted by John Thackara at 07:26 AM | Comments (1)

October 13, 2008

Measuring what matters

Totally lost amongst the financial news last week was discussion of a new report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb).

According to this EU-commissioned study, the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis. The report puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

According to Pavan Sukhdev, lead author of the report, "whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."

Strictly speaking, Mr Sukhdev, we are not "losing" natural capital, we are consuming it. And the superhuman efforts of politicians these days are all fixing the system so that we can carry on consuming a lot more.

As Illargiputs it today, "the intention of all these daily federal interventions is to keep the credit spigots open so Americans can go even deeper into debt to buy more stuff they can't actually afford". And he goes on to quote Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee: "We have to prop up consumption."

Key to understanding Sukhdev's conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free. So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available.

Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.

So I have a proposal. Let's pass a law compelling anyone in possession of an information screen describing the financial markets to split the screen, make the money chart half the size, and place it beside a real-time feed from a site opf ecosystem degradation.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:49 AM

October 11, 2008

Toxic sludge machine

I was critical last week of commentators who describe the financial crisis as "psychological".

Those who blame a "lack of transparency" are on stronger ground - although ignorance of the facts or the law is not a valid excuse in other domains of life.

The process chart above describes something called a Financial Products Markup Language which is said (on its website) to be "the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments". The idea is to "streamline the process supporting trading activities in the financial derivatives domain".

The chart looks neat and orderly - hygienic, even, with all that blue - but reflect a moment: The system has been programmed for deranged individuals who, as we now know, believe that exponential growth to eternity is a right and proper basis for the design of the world's financial system.

GIGO - or Garbage In, Garbage Out - is a phrase used by computer programmers to remind laypeople that computers "will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and spew out mountains of erroneous information in a short time".

Where we're at now is that systems designed to "streamline" the market have been spewing out financial derivatives which, insofar as anyone can count them, now amount to eight hundred times global GDP.

This mass of red stuff (the red wedge on the inverted pyramid above, also known in financial circles as "toxic sludge") has now started to leak out of the balloon. And that's why this crisis is not psychological.

For Dan Roberts in The Telegraph "the real mystery is how the negative feedback loop in the financial markets became so devastating. How could this domino effect happen so quickly? How could we lose control of something we designed to serve us?".

It's not a mystery. Think back to Three Mile island . (The photo above is of its mis-named control room.) During that calamity, within a few seconds after the physical accident at the nuclear reactor began, more than a hundred warning lights were flashing in the control room.

"I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel," one of the duty operators, Craig Faust, said later. "It wasn't giving us any useful information." Water pumps, the turbine and the reactor had all unexpectedly shut down. But none of the blinking lights told the operators what they needed to know.

Or wanted to know.

In today's financial discontinuity, the complexity of the information available (think of all those screens) has been compounded by two further factors: a lot of the trading is driven by powerful semi-automated systems ; and a lot of people clearly have not wanted to know what the screens were telling them.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:58 AM

September 25, 2008

Tribal currencies

According to Illargi over at Automatic Earth, although today's contested $700 billion+ plan will probably get the go-ahead, it does not even begin to address the true scale of the global problem."Far more money than that will be needed to keep the present financial structure standing", he writes, adding surreally - but plausibly - that "the global shadow banking system, the source of perhaps $800 trillion in outstanding derivatives, with $62 trillion in credit default swaps alone, is shaking on its foundations, and will inevitably tumble."

(and added today, 30/09: "$700 billion is just one tenth of one percent of the estimated $700 trillion in outstanding derivatives. It's like owing $100, and offering a dime as full and final payment".

Reading blogs like Automatic Earth is both necessary and enlightening. But it's also a bit like watching one of those reality car chase programmes in which you wait, guiltily, for the felon - or in this case, the global financial system - to crash.

A healthier response, surely, is to get out of the house and look for positive things to do. As I've often mentioned here, there's an awful lot of activity out there below the radar, and we would do well to check that out rather than spend out whole time watching disaster blogvision.

A good example is the speed with which a lot of people are deploying so-called complementary currencies. The rate of growth is well shown on the chart above, which I found at a fascinating database called ComplementaryCurrency.org .

For a concise analysis of why we need complementary currencies so badly, read the Open Money Manifesto. And whilst you're at it, do re-read Margrit Kennedy's paper to Doors of Perception 8 in Delhi. That one lecture (it was in Delhi in Spring 2005) was when most of the readers of this blog, including its writer, first realised that the money system was going to run off the rails in the major way that's happening now.

For my part, I plan to become an active user of complementary currencies starting on 7 October. I'm giving a talk that day at the University of Brighton - and I hope to be paid my speaking fee in Lewes Pounds.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:33 PM

September 01, 2008

Green noise: expert meeting

The biggest challenge we face in City Eco Lab (see below) is the explosion of public events, media channels, reports, platforms, trade shows, and government initiatives, at all levels, to do with sustainability. Paul Hawken's WiserEarth web portal, alone, alone lists over 100,000 non-profit projects and organisations. In the UK, the Transition Towns movement is growing virally. Across Europe, thousands of other initiatives are bubbling away beneath the radar of mainstream media and education. This explosion of energy and diversity is great, but does beg the question: are any more new initiatives needed? if so, what kind? and who will pay for them? Doors of Perception will host a discussion among city managers, policy makers and design producers during the design biennial in St Etienne. If you think might want to join this meeting, plan to be there for Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 November.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:18 PM | Comments (1)

May 31, 2008

Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity

"Nature provides human society with a vast diversity of benefits such as food, fibres fuel, clean water, healthy soil, protection from floods, protection from soil erosion, medicines, storing carbon (important in the fight against climate change) and many more. Though our wellbeing is totally dependent upon these ecosystem services they are predominantly public goods with no markets and no prices, so they often are not detected by our current economic compass". So begins an important new report on the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Crucially, this document begins to develop an economic yardstick that is more effective than GDP for assessing the performance of an economy. "We are consuming the world's biodiverse ecosystem at an unsustainable rate and this is starting to have serious socio-economic impacts", say the authors, led by Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev. He went on, "we are trying to navigate uncharted and turbulent waters with an old and defective economic compass and that this was affecting our ability to forge a sustainable economy in harmony with nature." The TEEB review is modelled on the UK government's Stern review of climate change which in 2006 warned that the global economy would effectively collapse if countries did not address greenhouse gases, and that countries could not afford not to act.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:02 AM

May 29, 2008

Eco 'standards' blitz

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others”. Groucho Marx could have been talking about environmental standards. Visit any supermarket and you'll encounter hundreds of labels and displays making claims about the environmental attributes of different products. Organic, Fairtrade, FSC Certified, "sustainable".

This blizzard of assertions is confusing – in some cases, one suspects, intentionally so. It's tough for consumers to know who's telling the truth and who's greenwashing. At the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, 85 per cent of respondents agreed that "some companies are advertising products and services with environmental claims that could be considered false, unsubstantiated or unethical". Greenwashing Index allows users to post, rate and comment on "green" advertisements.

Sites like Greenwashing can help police the worst excesses, but how otherwise are we are to decide which issues are most important, and which labels we are supposed to trust? Similar questions confront those companies – a growing number - that genuinely wish to communicate the environmental attributes of their products and services transparently. All UK registered companies will have to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions publicly under legislation passed by the House of Lords as part of the Climate Change Bill. Campaigners for the introduction of such measures believe it will make them more accountable to consumers and investors, and drive emission reductions.

What issues should they highlight? How can they best communicate with citizens?

Forum for the Future and Business for Social Responsibility address these questions in a report called Eco-promising. Ryan Schuchard, BSR’s partner in the project, concludes that consumer-facing labels are just one aspect of this complex story. "Doing this is challenging, because environmental standards are emergent, and companies often lack meaningful supply chain data. Leaders are investing in better information systems internally and among their peers and suppliers."

Companies have several schemes to help them.The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), for example, is the most widely used international accounting tool for government and business leaders to understand and manage greenhouse gas emissions. The GHG Protocol, a decade-long partnership between the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, is working with businesses, governments, and environmental groups around the world to build a new generation of credible and effective programs for tackling climate change.

In a similar space, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), started by Paul Dickinson eight years ago, gets companies to act by working with institutional investors; CDP’s connections have combined assets of over $57 trillion under management. On their behalf, CDP seeks information from3,000 of the world's largest companies on the business risks and opportunities presented by climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.CDP says it has become “the gold standard for carbon disclosure methodology and process”, and that its website is “the largest repository of corporate greenhouse gas emissions data in the world

Then there’s the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). This large multi-stakeholder network boasts thousands of experts in dozens of countries. GRI has pioneered the development of “the world’s most widely-used sustainability reporting framework” which is used “to benchmark organizational performance with respect to laws, norms, codes, performance standards and voluntary initiatives; demonstrate organizational commitment to sustainable development; and compare organizational performance over time”.

Another specification for the assessment of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions in products and services is being developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI), at the request of the Carbon Trust and Defra, sponsors of the UK-based project. The result will be a Publicly Available Specification (PAS 2050) to improve measurement and communication of the GHG performance of products and services. A Product-related Emissions Reduction Framework (a PERF) is also being developed by the Carbon Trust, this time with the help of consultants Arup, OneWorldStandards, the Pacific Institute and E4Tech.

Some global companies are also beginning to measure the value of ecosystems they rely on. For example, the drinks industry depends on ecosystems to supply fresh water; agribusiness relies on grasslands for insect pollinators, nutrient cycling, and erosion control; and the insurance industry benefits from the fact that coastal marshes reduce the damage caused by hurricanes and that wetlands absorb water from floods. A host of other industries rely on forests for benefits ranging from wood to genetic resources, carbon sequestration, and tourism. Based on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, World Resources Institute has developed the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review to help managers take more explicit account of their company’s dependence and impact on ecosystems.

Given this plethora of similar-sounding initiatives, I was surprised to discover that there already exists an international standard on environmental reporting.This gives guidance to an organization on “general principles, policy, strategy and activities relating to both internal and external environmental communication”. It is applicable to all organizations regardless of their size, type, location, structure, activities, products and services, and whether or not they have an environmental management system in place.

We need standards to ensure that companies measure what matters – and that they do so within frameworks that enable independent monitoring and comparison against meaningful targets. But there’s a real danger right now that, if we end up with too many standards, they’ll cancel each other out.

Is there a role for design in tackling this conundrum?

It is not for designers alone to decide what gets measured, and against what targets. But if global environmental standards are indeed ‘emergent’, then designers should make themselves part of a broad discussion about the kind of standards we end up with. Stated more bluntly: let’s hear no more designers complain that “we only design with the information we are given.”

When it comes to displaying information in clear and meaningful ways, designers have a huge role to play – not just in the specialized domain of information systems design but also, more broadly, in shaping the contexts in which information is presented and used.

Crucially, designers can also help deploy peer-to-peer ratings and review systems to counter-act the disingenuous greenwashing which is not about to disappear.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:39 PM

May 19, 2008

Pssst: how much do you weigh?

California's strategy for sustainable mobility is to run sixteen lane traffic jams on ethanol. In Sweden, Volvo have launched this hybrid-drive trash truck which I saw in Goteborg yesterday. It's silent at low speeds when it's collecting bins: the all-electric drive is for moving off from standstill and for acceleration up to 20 kph (12 mph); at higher speeds, the diesel engine kicks in. Both the machine that lifts the bins and the trash compactor are powered by liquid hydraulic rams - so it's pretty near silent in operation, which is boon comnfort-wise. But, being a boring killjoy, I can't help but wonder what the embergy of this chunky vehicle must be: a million pounds weight equivalent? More? The Pssst is a small silent step in the right direction; the step-change will come when we design away the need for it to exist.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:13 AM

March 25, 2008

From food miles to fabric miles

Killjoy environmentalists would have us stop shopping to save the planet. What a relief, then, to find a website, shopmodify.com, that teaches us how to shop and save the planet at the same time. I especially like their green shopping tips for Spring: "buy a hot eco-friendly outfit, or choose not to take an ATM slip". The ATM-slip idea is too profound for me to grasp right now, so my thoughts turn to t-shirts: They're made of natural materials so you can't have too many of them, right?

Well, yes you can. According to Kate Fletcher's fascinating book Sustainable Fashion and Textiles the cultivation of just one kilo of cotton draws on as much as 8,000 litres of water- much of which ends up saturated with a shedload of pesticides. Waste is also a problem: UK citizens alone generate nearly 40kg each of textile waste every year. Only a quarter of these kilos are reclaimed; the rest go to landfill. Transport costs are also a big issue: the average T-shirt, I learn from the book, travels the equivalent distance of once round the globe during its production.

So now we have to watch fabric miles as well as food miles.

Global food and textile systems are inter-linked to a surprising degree. For example, a lot of people buy t-shirts at Primark, a discount chain famous for ultra-low prices and celebrity customers. Usually described as an Irish retailer (it was started by a family called Ryan - but not the same Ryan who runs the discount airline) Primark is in fact owned by Associated British Foods (ABF), a multinational food, ingredients and retail group.

ABF, to its credit, publishes data about its activities on the Carbon Disclosure Project website. Here, among the largest repository of corporate greenhouse gas emissions data in the world, ABF states that it provides "wholesome and nutritious foods, food ingredients, animal feedstuffs, and quality affordable clothing...and (makes) sure that these are produced efficiently and to a high quality".

The words "efficiently and to a high quality" may be true, but they do not mean "sustainably" - either in production terms alone, or in their impact on the bigger textile system. As Fletcher points out, cheap cotton in Primark takes just as long to grow, and uses just as many resources per unit of weight, as the cotton used in a $200 t-shirt. Also, the price of cheap virgin fibres in Primark is so low that it has become uneconomic for anyone to collect, sort, distribute and resell the clothes we discard. In discount systems like Primark's, over 90 per cent of resources employed become waste within three months of purchase.

But ABF/Primark's global system is only part of the story. Even if Primark were to use only bamboo and soyabean fibres, grow 100% organically, and produce only locally, its t-shirts woud still not be sustainable because of what happens when we get a garment home. The average piece of clothing is washed and dried 20 times in its life: 82 percent of its lifetime energy use, and over half the solid waste, emissions to air, and water effluents it generates, occur during laundering.

Among many quirks in the fashion and textile system is the fact that a $200 t-shirt has a heavier enviromental impact than a Primark one - because it gets washed, rather than chucked away. Buying a "hot eco-outfit", it turns out, is easier said than done.

One of the many strengths of Fletcher's book is the clarity of its analysis of the textile system as a whole. For all the air-head antics of celebrity designers, fashion and textiles is one of the most complex in today's massively inter-linked economy. It involves raw materials, chemicals, emissions, recyclability, and biodegradability - at each of many steps in the chain. Each step is itself a complex process: Growing plants; extracting yarns from them; spinning, weaving and knitting; bleaching; dyeing; fabric finishing; printing, trimming, packaging - and so on.

A product policy based only on "reuse, and recycle", warns Fletcher, might optimise one part of this complex system - but not the whole.

Technical scenarios also suffer from too-limited horizons. One of the more intriguing prospects mentioned in the book is that of self-cleaning, no-wash textiles. But even if no hidden energy or pollution costs in their manuafacture emerge (a big 'if') other re-bound effects, that are impossible to predict, are inevitable. The same goes for the idea of biodegradable textiles designed to be fully absorbed by the earth; we simply can't know for certain what the consequences of "green" landfill on such a scale might be.

The answer is not exclude these, or any other, potential solutions. But it would also be a mistake to focus on particular sub-routines in isolation. What's needed is a simple but radical definition of where we need to be - a zero-waste, zero-emissions system. This would give all actors in the supply chain - farmers, brokers, chemists, designers, producers, retailers, and consumers - something to work towards, together.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:28 PM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2008

Ecocidal hen parties eating chocolate-covered waffles

The USA is usually vilified as the arch despoiler of the biosphere, but is little Britain actually the number one bad guy?

Tony Blair used to assert that Britain is reponsible for only two per cent of global emissions - but it depends which numbers you add up. The chart above, for example, plots the accumulation through time of anthropogenic (ie man-made) emissions. As founder and longtime powerhouse of carboniferous capitalism, Britain probably 'owns' a good chunk of the early post-1850 emissions, plotted here, that are still with us.

Next, consider (as Christian Aid did in a report last year) that, if account is taken of the UK's overseas investments, the country is responsible for as much as 15 per cent of current global emissions of CO2. The UK's integration into the global economy means that money raised in the UK - which comes from its pension funds, insurance companies and banks - is lent and spent all over the world, much of it without any questions asked as to whether or not it is contributing to the proliferation of greenhouse gases.

Now add the fact that Britons produce more carbon emissions from air travel a head than any other country. The average carbon emission for each British flyer was 603kg (1329lb) a year, more than a third higher than Ireland in second place with 434kg and more than double that of the US at 275kg, in third place. Britain's lead looks likely to grow: Nearly five million British tourists plan to take long-haul mini-breaks during 2008, according to another survey A desire for increasingly exotic stag-night, hen-night and wedding locations was reason enough for 17 per cent to spend seven or more hours in the air.

Britain's new prime minister has promised to keep these stag and hen parties flying by committing to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport. This one project will enable an additional 473,000 flights per year. Some of these are needed for the import of 14,000 tonnes of chocolate-covered waffles.

Mr Brown will no doubt continue to claim that Britain is only responsible for two percent of global emissions: the impacts of its international air travel flows - including those planeloads of waffles - are simply left out of UK emissions accounting.

Will Britain worry if starts being denounced as the Worst Polluting Country In the World? Probably not: I've been called by two journalists just this week who are writing pieces on "green fatigue".

Posted by John Thackara at 07:53 AM

January 22, 2008

Measuring what matters in France

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recruited two Nobel economists, Amartya Sen of India and Joseph Stiglitz of the US, to advise him on changing the way French economic growth is calculated. “We must change the way we measure growth,” said Sarkozy, adding that "the way gross national product is calculated should take into account the quality of life in France".

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development 20 years ago (with Pakistan's Mahbubul Haq) of the the widely used Human Development Index. As another reformer, "anti-economist" Hazel Henderson, has explained, "in our economy, everything has a price - but nothing, it seems, has a value. The yardsticks we have chosen to measure "progress" are economic ones: margin, GNP, jobs, the Dow Jones, the prime rate. Everything else -- the health of our children, clean air, the safety of our communities, the feeling of belonging, a sense of meaning -- has to compete on the same grounds. Environmental damage, or stress on workers, don't get counted at all in such economic measures"

Now call me cynical, but I suspect that what the French president has in mind is to *add* France's wellbeing score to its GDP, not to substitute one for the other. But Sarkozy's move is nonetheless a breakthrough in the the fight to change the way we measure economic success.

Ever since we organised Doors of Perception 3 on "info eco" in 1995, our conferences have repeatedly asked what would it take to monitor our planet’s true condition in real time. We've been shown a variety of sometimes beautiful perceptual aids designed to help us understand the conditon of the invisible natural systems that surround us. (Inspired by these proposals, I then wrote in my book about systems literacy).

In Dott 07, we ran a project over two years called Vital Signs. It asked: "What would it mean to monitor the region’s vital signs in real time? How can we design indicators to look at ecological footprints, energy use of buildings, food miles, transport intensity, and housing density alongside traditional economic indicators? What technologies can we use to design means of benchmarking and communicating our progress?". One outcome of the Dott project was that Lone Twin challenged us to move away from an over-concentraton on information artefacts (such as urban screens, or mobile phone displays) to human activity with their project Town Crier.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:33 AM

January 09, 2008

Wikinomics vs Getting Real

Don Tapscott's new book Wikinomcs gallops along at a heady pace. "The knowledge, resources, and computing power of billions of people are self-organising into a massive new collective force", it gushes. This marvelous news is tempered by the suspicion that either I, or the Web 2.0 world, is afflicted by a severe reality deficit. Wikinomics promises us an internet-powered business utopia, but the words climate change, peak oil, and catabolic collapse, are notable for their utter absence from the book. Tapscott is the finest tech booster of our age, but I can't help feeling the name of his company, New Paradigm, is a misnomer. Although, as Bruce Nussbaum comments this week, companies are demanding that their managers be more creative , surely they should be creative with their eyes open? For me, a better text than Wiknomics for CEOs is John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia . "The pursuit of utopia must be replaced by an attempt to cope with reality" writes Gray. Warning that "an irrational faith in the future is encrypted into contemporary life", the laugh-a-minute philosopher recommends a diet of Spinoza and Tao-ism for those whose new year resolution is: Get Real.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:11 PM

July 24, 2007

How to counter greenwash: measure what matters - and make it visible

The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) spend more money or time advertising being green, than on investing in environmentally sound practices.

In business, greenwashing often means changing the name and/or label. Early warning signs that a product is probably toxic include images of trees, birds, or dew drops. If all three are on the box, the product will probably make your skin peel off in seconds.

London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, complained recently that government rather than commerce is holding up progress on climate change. He described the UK energy review as "dishonest spin" and the latest G8 meeting as a "carnival of debate".

But the UK government is also taking important steps that, in the medium term, will be a powerful deterrent against greenwash.

The Carbon Trust and UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have announced that they will work with BSI British Standards to co-sponsor the development of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS). This will be a standard method for measuring the embodied green house gas (GHG) emissions in products and services across a wide range of product and service categories and their supply chains. The aim is to enable companies to measure the GHG related impacts of their products, understand the life-cycle climate change impacts of their products, and highlight significant emissions reduction opportunities. The intention is that this is the first step in moving towards an internationally agreed standard for measuring embodied GHG emissions.

Also this week in the UK, it was announced that a new offsetting code will be launched by the Government later this year. Offsetting is a complex subject (well explained here) and George Monbiot, in a celebrated text, described offsetting as an excuse for business as usual. There are indeed cowboy firms out there, but the whole industry has suffered because there is no way reliably to measure the claims of those offering to offset carbon emissions.

Some will complain that both the PAS and the offsetting code will be voluntary. Companies will be able to choose whether or not to seek accreditation for some or all of their products and services. The PAS scheme, in particular, is aimed explicitly at companies, and is not designed to empower citizens to make critical purchasing decisions.

But these are early days. As governments and international institutions, responding to political pressure, impose order on environmental reporting systems, we designers can reveal and repurpose the data in creative ways.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:41 AM

April 26, 2007

Environmental mapping

Along, I suspect, with some of you, I failed to get into Ecologic studio's blog (story below) but I did find this intriguing project for them by Slider Studio to "automate the process of mapping data from an environmental analysis software package to a three-dimensional grid." This is part of a larger ambition to "insert environmental analysis seamlessly into the design process....to find a balance between a building’s environmental performance and appearance". I wish them every success in this worthwhile if ambitious project, and would only comment that if they use as much Flash in their software for buildings as EcoLogic do in their website, the biosphere will burn while we wait for the solution to load....

Posted by John Thackara at 08:22 AM

October 26, 2006

Stuff-O-Meter

I've had a couple of requests for help from design schools who have entered the competition to design a stuff-o-meter. (Designs of the time (Dott07) has teamed up with Design and Art Direction (D&AD) in a challenge to design students to come up with a stuff-o-meter that would lift the veil on the hidden history of the everyday products we take for granted). One unifying way to look at the issue is through the concept of embodied energy (EE). There are userful bar charts on EE at the website of CSIRO and a clearly written piece here. Check out this somewhat scolding story in Treehugger and this school syllabus on EE

Posted by John Thackara at 10:04 AM

October 10, 2006

Design us a Stuff-O-Meter

The amount of matter and energy wasted during the manufacture of a single laptop computer (like the one your're using now, perhaps) is close to a thousand times its weight on your lap. But this vast ecological rucksack remains invisible - out of sight and out of mind. Designs of the time (Dott07) has teamed up with Design and Art Direction (D&AD) in a challenge to design students to come up with a stuff-o-meter that would lift the veil on the hidden history of the everyday products we take for granted.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:30 AM

October 05, 2006

Stuff-o-Meter

Yesterday's Doors of Perception Report pointed you to an out-of-date url. The Call for the D&AD stuff-o-metre competition is here

Posted by John Thackara at 12:34 PM